Why build so many castles
The Edward I reign was dominated by wars on the Welsh and Scottish frontiers, and Wales came first. Edward I of England fought two wars against the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the first in 1277 and the second from 1282. After the second, which ended with Llywelyn’s death and the fall of his brother Dafydd, Edward held the principality of Gwynedd by conquest. He did not trust paper arrangements alone to keep it. His answer was a chain of strong castles, many of them paired with fortified towns for English settlers, placed on the coast where they could be reached by ship.
These buildings were not only military. They housed officials, collected revenue, stored supplies and were symbols of royal power. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 reorganized government in the conquered lands along English lines, and the castles were the physical base for that administration.
Two phases of building
The work came in two main stages. After the first war, Edward began castles at Flint and Rhuddlan in the north-east, along with Builth and Aberystwyth in the center and west. After the second war, a more ambitious program started in the north-west, with Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech. The last of the great castles, Beaumaris on Anglesey, began in 1295, following a Welsh revolt led by Madog ap Llywelyn in 1294-95.
Their design owed something to wider castle architecture in Europe and to experience of siege warfare, including in the Holy Land. Together these are often called the Edwardian castles, and four of them (Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech) together with the town walls of Conwy and Caernarfon are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1986.
The designer
The king’s chief military architect was Master James of St George, a mason who came from the Savoy region, in what is now France and Switzerland. He had worked on castles in his homeland and was brought into Edward’s service. Records show that he was in charge of work at several Welsh sites, though he worked alongside many officials, local masons and laborers. Thousands of workers were gathered from across England for these projects, an enormous effort in labor and money for the crown. The castles also relied on the skills of medieval stonemasons organized in teams under a master.
What the castles looked like
The Welsh castles are not identical, but several features recur:
- Thick curtain walls with towers. These were the core of the castle defenses. Round or D-shaped towers allowed defenders to cover the walls and avoided blind spots.
- Strong gatehouses. Twin-towered gatehouses combined defense with living space for the constable.
- Concentric planning. Harlech and Beaumaris have an inner and an outer ring of walls, so attackers who got past the outer wall faced a second one that could be defended from above.
- Sea access. Most were built where supplies could come by water, so that a garrison could hold out even if the surrounding countryside rose in revolt. Harlech once had a water gate down to the shore.
Conwy is built on a rocky ridge with eight large towers and a long, narrow plan, tied to a town wall. Caernarfon, with its polygonal towers and bands of different colored stone, was apparently designed to look imposing and to carry a political message. Some scholars have suggested it echoed the walls of Constantinople, though this is a theory, not a certainty. Beaumaris was laid out on flat ground as a near-symmetrical design, and was never fully finished because money and attention went to the Scottish wars.
Towns as well as castles
Several castles were accompanied by new walled towns, or bastides, in which English settlers received privileges and Welsh residents were often restricted. Conwy, Caernarfon, Flint and Beaumaris all followed this pattern. The idea was to create loyal, commercial communities that would support the crown. In practice these towns could be small and struggled at first, and the exclusion of Welsh people from trading rights and office created resentment that surfaced in later revolts, notably around 1400.
Did they work?
In military terms they did their main job. Several were besieged in later revolts, and some, like Harlech, held out for long periods. Harlech was famously the last major stronghold to surrender in the Wars of the Roses, in 1468. Caernarfon was also the site of an investiture of the king’s heir as Prince of Wales in later centuries, though the medieval claim that Edward’s son was born there is traditional rather than certain.
The building was costly. Historians estimate that these projects took a large share of royal revenue over many years, and the cost was one reason Edward’s government faced financial strain. Some castles were left incomplete.
A lasting landscape
Today the castles are among the best-preserved medieval fortresses in Britain, and visitors see them as imposing but also somewhat silent monuments. For Welsh observers they were, and remain, a reminder of conquest. For historians they are the clearest case of a king using architecture as an instrument of rule. The design of a castle shows that the English crown saw conquest as a long project, backed by stone, towns and settlers, rather than a single military victory.