IV

CASTLES

WALES is pre-eminently the land of castles. There are between thirty and forty in Glamorgan alone. The accompanying map, though it is by no means exhaustive, shows the general lie of the castles, which may be divided into three groups, having as their respective bases Chester, Shrewsbury, and Gloucester. But though there is some evidence of an organised plan for the conquest of Wales in the time of William Rufus, it is useless to look for any great and general system of offence or defence, because most of the castles were not built by a centralised government with any such object in view, but by individuals to guard their own territories and protect their independence against either their neighbours or the English king. The great age of castle-building was between 1100 and 1300. Castles play a very small part in the fighting in Wales till the end of the eleventh century. Before that time indeed there were few stone castles anywhere; the usual type, even of the early Norman castles, was a moated mound surrounded by wooden palisades. One hears for instance of a castle being built by William the Conqueror in eight days. An example of this early type of fortress was Pembroke Castle at the end of the eleventh century, “a slender fortress of stakes and turf,” which had the good fortune to be in charge of Gerald of Windsor, grandfather of Giraldus Cambrensis. It stood several sieges, which shows that the siege engines of the Welsh were of a very poor and primitive type. One of these sieges was turned into a blockade, and the garrison was nearly reduced by starvation. The constable had recourse to a time-honoured ruse. “With great prudence he caused four hogs which still remained to be cut into small pieces and thrown down among the enemy. The next day he had recourse to a more refined stratagem: he contrived that a letter from him should fall into the hands of the enemy stating that there was no need for assistance for the next four months.” The besiegers were taken in and dispersed to their homes.

The characteristic types of castles in the twelfth century were the rectangular keep and the shell keep; in the thirteenth the concentric castle. Of the two last we have splendid examples in Cardiff and Caerphilly. Of rectangular keeps there are very few in Wales—Chepstow is the only important one—though there are several on the borders, notably Ludlow. The square keep seems to us most characteristic of Norman military architecture; the Tower of London, Rochester, Newcastle, Castle Rising, are well-known examples, and there are many more in a good state of preservation; there are many more solid square keeps than shell keeps well preserved, but this is simply due to the greater solidity of the former; the shell keeps were far more numerous in the twelfth century; and the reasons for this are obvious—the rectangular keep was much more expensive to build, and it was too heavy to erect on the artificial mounds on which the Norman architects generally founded their castles.

The keep of Cardiff Castle is one of the most perfect shell keeps in existence. It is built on a round artificial mound, surrounded by a wide and deep moat—the mound and moat being, of course, complements of each other. Such mounds and moats are common in all parts of England, and in Normandy. They are not Roman, nor British, nor are they, as Mr. G. T. Clark maintained, characteristic of Anglo-Saxon work. They are essentially Norman, and a good representation of the making of such a mound may be seen in the Bayeux Tapestry, under the heading—‘He orders them to dig a castle.’ When was the Cardiff mound made? Perhaps the short entry in the Brut gives the answer: “1080, the building of Cardiff began.” It would then be surrounded by wooden palisades, and surmounted by a timber structure, as a newly made mound would not stand the masonry. The shell keep was probably built by Robert of Gloucester, and it was probably in the gate-house of this keep, that Robert of Normandy was imprisoned. A shell keep was a ring wall eight or ten feet thick, about thirty feet high, not covered in, and enclosing an open courtyard, round which were placed the buildings—light structures, often wooden sheds, abutting on the ring wall—such as one may see now in the courtyard of Castell Coch. The shell keep was the centre of Robert’s castle, but not the whole. From this time dated the great outer walls on the south and west—walls forty feet high and ten feet thick and solid throughout. The north and east and part of the south sides of the castle precincts are enclosed by banks of earth, beneath which, the walls of a Roman camp have recently been discovered. These banks were capped by a slight embattled wall. Outside along the north, south and east fronts was a moat, formerly fed by the Taff through the Mill leat stream which ran along the west front. The present lodgings, or habitable part of the castle built on either side of the great west wall, date mostly from the fifteenth century. The earlier lodgings were, perhaps, on the same site—though only inside the wall; a great lord did not as a rule live in the keep, except in times of danger.

The area of the enclosure is about ten acres—more suited to a Roman garrison than to a lord marcher of the twelfth century. That the castle was difficult to guard is shown by the success of Ivor Bach’s bold dash, c. 1153-1158. Ivor ap Meyric was Lord of Senghenydd, holding it of William of Gloucester, the Lord of Glamorgan, and, perhaps, had his headquarters in the fortress above the present Castell Coch. “He was,” says Giraldus Cambrensis, “after the manner of the Welsh, owner of a tract of mountain land, of which the earl was trying to deprive him. At that time the Castle of Cardiff was surrounded with high walls, guarded by 120 men at arms, a numerous body of archers and a strong watch. Yet in defiance of all this, Ivor, in the dead of night secretly scaled the walls, seized the earl and countess and their only son, and carried them off to the woods; and did not release them till he had recovered all that had been unjustly taken from him,” and a goodly ransom in addition. Perhaps the most permanent result of this episode was the building of a wall 30 feet high between the keep and the Black Tower—dividing the castle enclosure into two parts and forming an inner or middle ward of less extent, and less liable to danger from such sudden raids.

Cardiff Castle was much more than a place of defence; it was the seat of government. The bailiff of the Castle was ex officio mayor of the town in the Middle Ages. The Castle was also the head and centre of the Lordship of Glamorgan. This was divided into two parts—the shire fee or body, and the members. The shire fee was the southern part; under a sheriff appointed by the chief Lord: the chief landowners owed suit and service—i.e., they attended and were under the jurisdiction of the shire court held monthly in the castle enclosure, and each owed a fixed amount of military service—especially the duty of “castle-guard”—supplying the garrison and keeping the castle in repair. There are indications of the work of the shire court in some of the castle accounts published in the Cardiff Records, e.g., in 1316, an official accounts for 1d., the price of “a cord bought for the hanging of thieves adjudged in the county court: stipend of one man hanging those thieves 4d.” The “members” consisted of ten lordships (several of which were in the hands of Welsh nobles): these were much more independent; each had its own court (with powers of life and death), from which an appeal lay to the Lord’s court at Cardiff: generally they owed no definite service to the Lord (except homage, and sometimes a heriot at death), but on failure of heirs the estate lapsed to the chief Lord. At Cardiff Castle the Lord had his chancery, like the royal chancery on a small scale—issuing writs, recording services and grants of privileges, and legal decisions: practically the whole of these records have been lost—and our knowledge of the organisation of the Lordship is mainly derived from the royal records at times, when owing to minority or escheat, the Lordship was under royal administration. The Lord of Glamorgan owed homage, but no service to the king; and (though this was sometimes disputed by his tenants and the royal lawyers), no appeal lay from his courts to the king’s court. The machinery of government was probably more complete and elaborate in Glamorgan than in any other Marcher Lordship.

Caerphilly Castle had not the political importance of Cardiff, but far surpasses it as a fortress. By the strength and position of Caerphilly, one may measure the power of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd after the Barons’ War and before the accession of Edward I. The Prince of Wales had extended his sway down as far as Brecon, and Welshmen everywhere were looking to him as the restorer of their country’s independence. Among them was the Welsh Lord of Senghenydd, one of the chief “members” of Glamorgan, and his overlord probably saw reason to suspect his loyalty. An alliance between him and Llywelyn would open the lower Taff Valley to the Welsh prince and give him command of the hill country north of Cardiff. It was on the lands of the lord of Senghenydd that Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, built Castell Coch and Caerphilly.