Welsh Castle Builders

The Edwardian castles of north Wales were built by a Savoyard master mason, but also by many other artisans from Savoy. What is more extraordinary, is that the constables of Flint, Rhuddlan, Conwy and Harlech were also Savoyards, the Justiciar and Deputy Justiciar at Caernarfon were Savoyards and the head of the English army leading the relief of the sieges of Flint and Rhuddlan was a future Count of Savoy. The explanatory story is fundamentally of two men, the builder of castles, Master James of St George and Justiciar Sir Othon de Grandson, and the relationship of these two men with King Edward I. But it is also the story of many others, a story that begins with the marriage of Alianor de Provence to Edward’s father, Henry III, and the influx of her kinsmen to England, such as Pierre de Savoie. It is impossible to understand the development of the castles in north Wales without an understanding of the Savoyards, where they came from and their impact on English and Welsh history. The defining work of Arnold Taylor in exploring the Savoyard history of Welsh castles is now many years past, and mostly out of print, it is time for the story to be revisited and expanded upon, in the light of new evidence.

James of St George has a reputation as one of the most significant castle builders of the Middle Ages. His origins and early career at the heart of Europe, and his subsequent masterminding of Edward I of England's castle-building programmes in Wales and Scotland, bestow upon him an international status afforded to few other master builders retained by the English crown. The works erected under his leadership represent what many consider to be the apogée of castle development in the British Isles, and Malcolm Hislop's absorbing new study of the architecture is the most important reassessment to be published in recent times.His book explores the evolution of the Edwardian castle and James of St George's contribution to it. He gives a fascinating insight into the design, construction and organisation of such large-scale building projects, and the structural, military and domestic characters of the castles themselves. James's work on castles in the medieval duchy of Savoy is revisited, as are the native and foreign influences on the design of those he built for Edward I.Some seventy years after A.J. Taylor began his pioneering research into James of St George and his connection with Wales, the time is ripe for this revaluation of James's impact and of the extent of his influence on the architectural character of the Edwardian castle.

While the Edwardian castles of Conwy, Beaumaris, Harlech and Caernarfon are rightly hailed as outstanding examples of castle architecture, the castles of the native Welsh princes are far more enigmatic. Where some dominate their surroundings as completely as any castle of Edward I, others are concealed in the depths of forests, or tucked away in the corners of valleys, their relationship with the landscape of which they are a part far more difficult to discern than their English counterparts. This ground-breaking book seeks to analyse the castle-building activities of the native princes of Wales in the thirteenth century. Whereas early castles were built to delimit territory and as an expression of Llywelyn I ab Iorwerth's will to power following his violent assumption of the throne of Gwynedd in the 1190s, by the time of his grandson Llywelyn II ap Gruffudd's later reign in the 1260s and 1270s, the castles' prestige value had been superseded in importance by an understanding of the need to make the polity he created - the Principality of Wales - defensible. Employing a probing analysis of the topographical settings and defensive dispositions of almost a dozen native Welsh masonry castles, Craig Owen Jones interrogates the long-held theory that the native princes' approach to castle-building in medieval Wales was characterised by ignorance of basic architectural principles, disregard for the castle's relationship to the landscape, and whimsy, in order to arrive at a new understanding of the castles' significance in Welsh society. Previous interpretations argue that the native Welsh castles were created as part of a single defensive policy, but close inspection of the documentary and architectural evidence reveals that this policy varied considerably from prince to prince, and even within a prince's reign. Taking advantage of recent ground-breaking archaeological investigations at several important castle sites, Jones offers a timely corrective to perceptions of these castles as poorly sited and weakly defended: theories of construction and siting appropriate to Anglo-Norman castles are not applicable to the native Welsh example without some major revisions.Princely Ambition also advances a timeline that synthesises various strands of evidence to arrive at a chronology of native Welsh castle-building. This exciting new account fills a crucial gap in scholarship on Wales' built heritage prior to the Edwardian conquest and establishes a nuanced understanding of important military sites in the context of native Welsh politics.

Arnold Taylor, the leading expert on the subject, provides an authoritative guide to the castles, begun between 1277 and 1295, in a short compass. He deals with their joint and individual features, dates, planning and construction.

The Impact of the Edwardian Castles in Wales publishes the proceedings of a conference held in 2007, a year that marked the seventh centenary of the death of King Edward I, which set out to review recent scholarship on castles that he built in north Wales after two wars, in 1277 and 1282-83 and a Welsh uprising in 1294-95, and to rethink the effect that their building had upon Wales in the past, present and future. Building upon the seminal work of Arnold Taylor, whose study of the buildings and documentary evidence has been pivotal to Edwardian castle studies for more than fifty years, the volume includes papers which call into question the role of Master James of St George as the architect of the kings new castles; the role of Richard the Engineer, the nature of royal accommodation in the thirteenth century and a detailed look at how households worked, especially in the kitchen and accounting departments. New approaches to castle studies are encouraging a more holistic understanding of the Edwardian castles and their context and to this end papers consider their impact on Welsh society and its princes in the thirteenth century, notably Llywelyn ab Iorwerth ( Fawr , the Great) and his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales. Their symbolism and meaning through the words of Welsh poets and the mythology behind Caernarfon Castle are also examined, so too is the role of Welshmen in Edward Is armies. The wider context is considered with papers on the Edwardian towns in Wales, the baronial castles in north Wales and Edward I in Scotland and Gascony. The castles still have powerful resonance and the Minister for Heritage in the Welsh Assembly Government considers their role and presentation in Wales today and in the future. Robert Liddiard concludes that the volume 'not only takes our knowledge of the Edwardian castles forward, but also informs the study of castles in the British Isles'.