Of all the accomplishments and legacies of the medieval world, few things capture the
popular imagination like Castles.
These stone-built cities in miniature at once reflect the staggeringly long history of warfare
as well as the splendor of royalty and the remarkable brightness of these cultures.
From kings and their knights to governing officials, visiting dignitaries, traveling
merchants and agricultural locals, medieval life at every level unfolded within their
towering walls, and these great citadels stand as a built record of that history.
And they’re the kind of multipurpose structures where functions overlap – a wide scenic
view is a strategic asset for spotting incoming armies, so most castles are smack in the middle
of the most beautiful vistas imaginable, and that aesthetic spiffiness in turn becomes
a point of prestige for the castle’s owner.
Power, peril, and more than a little prettiness are all wrapped up in these castles.
But perhaps the simplest reason they captivate us is because we just don’t make them anymore.
Old cities are gorgeous, but we still have cities, churches and temples are plenty impressive,
but those are everywhere, and even the grandest civic buildings have an air of normalness
to them because people go to the place for their jobs.
But castles are a relic of a time we do not live in, and that otherworldliness makes them
fascinating.
The reasons they were built, the shapes they took, the decorations they had, the ways they
fell into ruin, all these factors are so distant to us that we see castles more as strongholds
of fantasy than a living system where society and warfare converged.
And I likewise struggled to wrap my head around
these things until I came to Wales and saw a few for myself.
Welsh castles are so numerous compared to the modest size of the place that Wales is
the most castle-dense country on earth.
Given England is right next door, we can guess they weren’t built for fun.
Now most of these castles have survived, albeit in different states of functionality or completeness,
so to better understand how they worked and what they meant for the story of Wales, let’s
do some History.
The tale of Castles in Britain goes back to
Roman times and their abundant need of them to deal with those rowdy Celts.
At a minimum, most every town with -Chester or Caer- gets its name from the Latin Castrum,
and was originally built as a Roman military fort.
Roman Britain was a “forts first, towns later” kind of place.
But while the England-y bits were full of spiffy cities by the height of the empire,
Roman presence in Wales was one maybe two towns and forts for days.
Much like Hadrian’s Wall for Scotland, this amount of historical troublemaking is a dear
source of Welsh pride.
One millennium later, some of these spots got repurposed after the Norman Conquest for
a new age of castle-building.
See, in 1066 William the Conqueror won the entire kingdom after a single battle, but
he needed some new strategies in order to hold onto it.
What followed was the heftiest single wave
of castle-building in British history.
With a whole kingdom to pacify and not much time to do it, William and his nobles started
by locking down key cities and protecting lines of supply and communication along rivers
or old Roman roads – By the end of the century they’d built several hundred castles across
England and South Wales.
A small handful of these were made of stone, but the rest were built from wood as a Motte
and Bailey: an earthwork hill with a central keep on top and a fortified garrison below
with stables, storehouses, and anything else the castle-owner would like to have behind
a wall.
These first castles may not conjure all the Dramatic Medieval VibesTM, but they were quick
to build and plenty effective at stopping mass uprisings against the new Norman government
– even an architecture gremlin like myself can’t fault their definitely-correct priorities.
English castles transitioned to stone over the next century, with new and newly-refurbished
castles opting for a more permanent material than wood – In Wales, however, Norman rule
was substantially less established, so the ease and versatility of timber castles kept
them in use well into the 1200s.
But even from the Normans’ first arrival, the key difference from England is Wales did
not come pre-conquered, so castles were built offensively rather than defensively, and in
practice that meant they were built faster, far more often, much closer together, and
against an organized enemy also building castles.
Both the Norman lords in the southern borderlands – called the “Marches” – as well as
the Welsh princes themselves were castling seemingly every river and valley in Wales.
These offensive castles often skipped the motte completely and just built a fortified
earthwork bailey, what we sometimes call a Ringwork castle; and as the frontiers shifted
over the 10-to-1200s, old castles were abandoned while new ones were built to suit the current
strategic needs.
And that is exhausting to catalogue at scale,
so let’s zoom into Caerphilly Castle, one of the most consequential and best preserved
castles in the country.
Originally the site of a Roman fort, Caerphilly began construction all the way in 1268.
Cardiff castle, by contrast, was built just 7 miles south along the coast two centuries
earlier – Conquering Wales, clearly a fraught process.
Timetables notwithstanding, this castle was built by the noble de Clare family, who added
the Welsh county of Glamorgan to their already impressive portfolio of estates in 1217.
In the 1260s, the young Gilbert de Clare helped win a civil war between the King and his Barons,
and then turned his focus north to the alarming threat of the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.
To protect his inland holdings and defend Cardiff itself if things got really bad, Gilbert
de Clare began work on Caerphilly castle in 1268.
It was built entirely of stone, but seeing as that takes more time, it was still vulnerable
enough for Prince Llywelyn to attack and possibly even destroy the castle in 1270.
Construction resumed the next year in the new Concentric style with nestled layers of
fortifications; in this case, two rivers and three outer walls.
Thanks to a brief peace, the castle was finished in the mid 1270s, just in time for the new
English king Edward to launch a final campaign to conquer Wales.
And with the prince defeated in 1282, Wales was no longer a constant warzone, so Gilbert
swiftly reassessed the purpose of his castle, converting it into a fine country estate in
the following decades.
The fortifications on Caerphilly remain gorgeous
in their scope and complexity, and de Clare recognized the prestige to be had from a swanky
castle, as even though the Welsh threat had passed, he continued renovating and expanding
the defenses for seemingly aesthetic purposes alone.
There’s no strategic reason to make outermost walls symmetrical except matchy shapes make
happy brain go brr.
By his death, Caerphilly had turned from a wartime fortress into a palace fit for a minor
royal.
The castle’s story continues through decades of aristocratic escapades, but in the 1640s,
Caerphilly’s peaceful quiet turned to ruin during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, when
hundreds of castles across The Isles were battered by a new and very unsporting tactic
called “torrential canon-fire”, and many of the castles that survived were deliberately
wrecked after the war to render them useless.
Such was the case with Caerphilly, hence the dramatic lean on the southeast tower, and
so it remained until the 1920s and ‘30s when the Marquess of Bute launched a contentiously
thorough reconstruction project, one of several in Wales around this time.
Spectators in the historical community as well as the British government had and still
have deep misgivings about the scope of the transformation and the irreversible damage
to the original ruins, but man is it something else to be able to walk over a drawbridge,
through a gatehouse, out to the courtyard, into the great hall, and up along the walls
and towers.
It’s the rare chance to engage with a complete medieval castle.
It conflicts me, yet it compels me.
The history of Castles in Wales continues
up north, where king Edward cemented his victory by stuffing the place with more castles, just
like the first Normans had done after their conquest; and the royal castles of the north
are the grandest and most impressive in Wales on account of all that Crown Money.
Here too, they shifted to luxurious residences over time as royal power solidified and warfare
in Britain became the exception rather than the rule.
Wales got its last new castle at Raglan in the mid 1400s, and aside from a handful renovated
by the Tudor monarchs, Welsh castles retreated to the background – a legacy of conquests
and an older, distant era.
By the time Caerphilly was ruined, nobody knew who built it or when, with explanations
ranging from ancient Roman forts to a legendary pre-christian king of Britain.
Wildly off-base, but when an air of fantastical mystery winds through every hall and tower,
it’s hard to fight that reflex.
Wales is not defined by its castles, but they are the most potent physical relic of a winding,
lively history, and the simple act of walking into one rockets you back to a time when that
story was being written; river by river, valley by valley, castle by castle.
Thank you for watching.
I visited Caerphilly with my dad and a close family friend from Wales, and as soon as I
saw the outer walls of the Castle I knew it needed a video.
And of course, a massive thank you to all of our amazing patrons, whose names you can
see here.
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