The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles.

by Ella Sophia Armitage

The Norman Conqueror was not the man to slacken his hold on any territory which had been won by the Saxons. But there is no succinct history of his conquests in Wales; we have to make it out, in most cases, from notices that are scarcely more than allusive, and from the surer, though scanty, ground of documents. It is noteworthy that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is so hostile to the Norman kings that it discounts their successes in Wales. Thus we have only the briefest notice of William I.’s invasion of South Wales, which was very probably the beginning of the conquest of that region; and several expeditions of William II. are spoken of as entirely futile, though as we are told that the existing castles were still held by the Normans, or new ones were built, it is clear that this summing-up is not strictly correct.[832] Our Welsh authorities, the Annales Cambriæ and the Brut y Tywysogion,[833] seem to give a fairly candid account of the period, although the dates in the Brut are for the most part wrong (sometimes by three years), and they hardly ever give us a view of the situation as a whole. They tell us when the Welsh rushed down and burnt the castles built by the Normans in the conquered districts, but do not always tell when the Normans recovered and rebuilt them.

Fortunately we are not called upon here to trace the history of the cruel and barbarous warfare between Normans and Welsh. No one can turn that bloodstained page without wishing that the final conquest had come two hundred years earlier, to put an end to the tragedy of suffering which must have been so largely the portion of the dwellers in Wales and the Marches after the coming of the Normans.[834] Our business with both Welsh and Normans is purely archæological. We hold no brief for the Normans, nor does it matter to us whether they kept their hold on Wales or were driven out by the Welsh; our concern is with facts, and the solid facts with which we have to deal are the castles whose remains still exist in Wales, and whose significance we have to interpret.

“Wales was under his sway, and he built castles therein,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in summing up the reign of the Conqueror; a passage which is scarcely consistent with its previous almost complete silence about events in Wales. There can be little doubt that William aimed at a complete conquest of Wales, and that the policy he adopted was the creation of great earldoms along the Welsh border, endowed with special privileges, one of which was the right of conquering whatever they could from the Welsh.[835] To these earldoms he appointed some of his strongest men, men little troubled by scruples of justice or mercy, but capable leaders in war or diplomacy. It was an essential part of the plan that every conquest should be secured by the building of castles, just as had been done in England. And we have now to trace very briefly the outline of Norman conquest in Wales by the castles which they have left behind them.

We shall confine ourselves to those castles which are mentioned in the Brut y Tywysogion, the Pipe Rolls, or other trustworthy documents between 1066 and 1216, the end of King John’s reign. Of many of these castles only the earthworks remain; of many others the original plan, exactly similar to that of the early castles of Normandy and France, is still to be traced, though masked by the masonry of a later age. Grose remarked but could not explain the fact that we continually read of the castles of the Marches being burnt and utterly destroyed, and a few months later we find them again standing and in working order. This can only, but easily, be explained when we understand that they were wooden castles built on mottes, quickly restored after a complete destruction of the wooden buildings.

North Wales appears to have been the earliest conquest of the Normans, though not the most lasting. North Wales comprised the Welsh kingdoms of Gwynedd and Powys. Gwynedd covered the present shires of Anglesea, Carnarvon, and Merioneth, and the mountainous districts round Snowdon.[836] Powys stretched from the estuary of the Dee to the upper course of the Wye, and roughly included Flint, Denbigh, Montgomery, and Radnor shires. Hugh of Avranches, Earl of Chester, was the great instrument of Norman conquest in Gwynedd, and in the northern part of Powys, which lay so near his own dominions. He was evidently a man in whose ability William had great confidence, as he removed him from Tutbury to the more difficult and dangerous position of Chester, and gave his earldom palatine privileges; all the land in Cheshire was held under the earl, and he was a sort of little king in his county.

Hugh appears to have at once commenced the conquest of North Wales. As Professor Lloyd remarks, Domesday Book shows us Deganwy as the most advanced Norman post on the North Welsh coast, while on the Bristol Channel they had got no further than Caerleon.[837] In advancing to the valley of the Clwyd and building a castle at Rhuddlan, the Normans were only securing the district which had already been conquered by Harold in 1063, when he burnt the hall of King Griffith at Rhuddlan. Nearly the whole of Flintshire (its manors are enumerated by Domesday Book under Cheshire) was held by Earl Hugh in 1086, so that he commanded the entire road from Chester to Rhuddlan. His powerful vassal, Robert of Rhuddlan, who became the terror of North Wales, besides the lands which he held of Earl Hugh, held also directly of the King Rhos and Rhufeniog, districts which roughly correspond to the modern shire of Denbigh, and “Nort Wales” which Professor Lloyd takes to mean the remainder of the principality of Gwynedd, from which the rightful ruler, Griffith ap Cynan, had been driven as an exile to Ireland.

It does not appear that there was any fortification at Rhuddlan[838] before the “castle newly erected” by Earl Hugh and his vassal Robert. They shared between them the castle and the new borough which was built near it.[839] One word about this new borough, which will apply to the other boroughs planted by Norman castles. There were no towns in Wales of any importance before the Norman Conquest, and this civilising institution of the borough is the one great set-off to the cruelty and unrighteousness of the conquest. Mills, markets, and trade arose where castles were seated, and civilisation followed in their train.

The castle of Hugh and Robert was not the magnificent building which still stands at Rhuddlan, for that is entirely the work of Edward I., and there is documentary evidence that Edward made a purchase of new land for the site of his castle.[840] More probably Robert and Hugh had a wooden castle on the now reduced motte which may be seen to the south of Edward’s castle. In Gough’s time this motte was still “surrounded with a very deep ditch, including the abbey.” Nothing can be seen of this ditch now, except on the south side of the motte, where a deep ravine runs up from the river. As from Gough’s description the hillock (called Tut Hill)[841] was within the precincts of the priory of Black Friars, founded in the 13th century, it is extremely probable that Edward gave the site of the old castle to the Dominicans when he built his new one.[842]

Another of the castles of Robert of Rhuddlan was Deganwy, or Gannoc, which defended the mouth of the Conway.[843] Here it is said that there was an ancient seat of the kings of Gwynedd.[844] The two conical hills which rise here offer an excellent site for fortification, one of them being large enough on top for a considerable camp. The Norman Conqueror treated them as two mottes, and connected them by walls so as to form a bailey below them. The stone fortifications are probably the remains of the castle built by the Earl of Chester in 1211.[845] This castle was naturally a sorely contested point, and often passed from hand to hand; but it was in English possession in the reign of Henry III. It was abandoned when Edward I. built his great castle at Conway.

With its usual indifference, the Survey mentions no castle in Flintshire, but we may be sure that the castle of Mold, or Montalto ([Fig. 40]), was one of the earliest by which the Norman acquisitions in that region were defended,[846] though it is not mentioned in authentic history until 1147. The tradition that it was built by Robert de Monte Alto, one of the barons of the Earl of Chester, is no doubt correct, though the assumption of Welsh legend-makers that the Gwydd Grug, or great tumulus, from which this castle derives its Welsh name, existed before the castle, may be dismissed as baseless. The motte of Robert de Monte Alto still exists, and is uncommonly high and perfect; it has two baileys, separated by great ditches, and appears to have had a shell on top. [D. H. M.] The castle was regarded as specially strong, and its reduction by Owen Gwynedd in 1147 was one of the sweetest triumphs that the Welsh ever won.[847]