Cardiff and Caerphilly... Ancient Welsh Castles
The characteristic types of castles in the
twelfth century were the rectangular keep
and the shell keep; in the thirteenth the
concentric castle. The square
keep seems 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 defense; 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 organization 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.
CARDIFF CASTLE. (12th Century)
CAERPHILLY CASTLE. (13th Century)
Caerphilly has been described as the
grandest specimen of its class; it represents
the high-water mark of mediæval
military architecture in this country, and
was the model of Edward I.’s great castles
in the north. It illustrates the influence
of the Crusades on Western Europe,
being an instance of the “concentric”
system of defences, of which the walls
of Constantinople afford the most magnificent
example, and which the Crusaders
adopted in many of their great fortresses
in the East.
Caerphilly Castle consists of three lines
of defense, and the way in which these
supplement each other shows that the
work in all essentials was designed as
a great whole; it did not grow up bit by
bit. There are of course many evidences
of alterations and rebuilding at later times;
the buildings in the middle ward, on the
south side, seem to be later additions; the
hall appears to have been enlarged, and
the tracery of the windows suggests the fourteenth century; the state-rooms to the
west of the hall have been much altered;
but such alterations as appear are confined
to the habitable part of the castle, and do
not affect it as a military work. It has
been suggested that the castle may have
been greatly enlarged in the latter years
of Edward II., when it played an important
part in connection with the
division of the Gloucester inheritance
and the younger Despenser’s ambitions.
There are a number of notices of the
castle in the chronicles and public records
of that time, but apparently no references
to any building operations. And the
unity of plan is evidence that the whole
dated from the same time.
The castle is built on a tongue of gravel
nearly surrounded by low, marshy land,
forming a sort of peninsula; a stream
on the south running eastwards to the
Rhymny; and two springs on the north.
By damming these waters and cutting
through the tongue of gravel an artificial
island was secured for the site of the
castle. The inner ward, or central part
of the castle, consists of a quadrangle with a large round tower at each corner:
in the center of the east and west side
are massive gate-houses defended by
portcullises; from the projecting corner
towers all the intervening wall was commanded.
The gateways communicate
with the second line of defense or middle
ward. This completely encircles the
inner ward, on a much lower level; it is
a narrow space bounded by a wall, with
low, semi-circular bastions at the corners;
it is commanded at every point from the
inner ward; the narrowness of the space
would prevent the concentration of large
bodies of assailants or the use of
battering-rams, and communication is at
several points stopped by walls or buildings
jutting out from the inner ward. The
middle ward had strong gate-houses at the
east and west ends, and was completely
surrounded by water—east and west by
a moat, north and south the moat widens
into lakes: note how on the north a
narrow ridge of gravel has been used
to ensure a water moat on that side, in
case there was not enough water to flood
the whole lake. These lakes form part of the third line of defence or outer ward,
which includes also on the west the “horn-work”
and on the east the grand front. The
horn-work is about three acres in extent,
surrounded by a wall 15 feet high, which
is of the nature of an escarpment, the
ground rising above it. It is entirely surrounded
by a moat, and connected with
the middle ward on one side and the
mainland on the other by drawbridges.
It would probably be used for grazing
purposes, and thus would be of great
value to the garrison; but so far as the
actual defences of the castle are concerned,
a lake would have been much
more effective; the nature of the ground
would however have prevented this. The
horn-work was intended to cover the only
side upon which the castle was open to
an attack from level ground, and to occupy
what would otherwise have been a dangerous
platform.
The eastern side of the outer ward—the
grand front—is a most imposing structure.
It is a wall about 250 yards long, and in
some parts 60 feet high, furnished with
buttresses and projecting towers from
which the intervening spaces are easily
commanded, culminating in the great gate-house
near the centre, and terminating at
both ends in clusters of towers which
protect the sally-ports. On the outside
is a moat spanned by a double drawbridge.
The northern part of this front,
which was probably occupied by stables,
would in dry weather be the least defensible
part of the castle; but it was
cut off from the rest by an embattled wall
running from the gate-house to the inner
moat and pierced only by one small and
portcullised gate. The southern half
was more important and stronger. It
crossed the stream at the dam, the walls
being 15 feet thick where subjected to the
pressure of the water, and the strong
group of towers at the end—on the other
side of the stream—guarded the dam on
which the safety of the castle largely
depended; the wall and towers here form
a semicircle, curving back into the edge
of the lake, so as to avoid the danger of
being outflanked.
On the inside of the grand front were
various buildings, such as the mill. This
eastern line was divided from the middle
ward by a moat 45 feet wide—a space
which is too wide to be spanned by
a single drawbridge, and as there are no
signs of the foundations of a central pier,
it seems probable that the bridge rested
on a wooden support, which could be
removed when necessary, and the assailants
plunged into the moat below.
There are a large number of interesting
details connected with both the military
functions of the castle and its domestic
economy. There were at least four exits
(not counting the two water-gates); this
would give the garrison opportunities of
harassing assailants by sallies, and would
make a much larger army necessary in
order to blockade the castle; contrast the
single narrow entrance to the Norman
keep—high up in the wall and visible to
all outside. The water-gates are worth
studying, especially the methods of protecting
the eastern water-gate—two grates
with a shoot above and between them. One
should notice, too, the “splaying” of the
outer wall, by which missiles from the top
would be projected outwards; and also the
use of the mill-stream to carry away the
refuse of the garderobe tower. And there
are many other points, to which one would
like to call attention, if time allowed.
The history of Caerphilly in the
Middle Ages need not detain us long.
It was besieged by Llywelyn in 1271,
while it was being built. Llywelyn
declared he could have taken it in three
days if he had not been persuaded to
submit the dispute to the arbitration of
the king. It is clear that the castle was
not finished; shortly after this Gilbert de
Clare obtained license from the king to
“enditch” the castle: such license was
not, as a rule, required in the Marches
(as it was in England) and was only
necessary now because the king was acting
as arbitrator. The Earl of Gloucester
kept possession. We next hear of it in
1315, when it resisted the attack of
Llywelyn Bren. It was then in the
hands of the king, pending the division
of the Gloucester inheritance among the
three co-heiresses. In 1318 Caerphilly,
with the rest of Glamorgan, was granted
to the younger Despenser, who perhaps enlarged the hall and made the other
alterations referred to above. Edward II.
was there for a few days when flying for
his life; had he trusted to Caerphilly,
instead of fleeing further through South
Wales, he might have saved his head and
his crown; at any rate, there would have
been a great siege to add to the history
of mediæval warfare. The king’s adherents
held out in Caerphilly for months,
and only surrendered when, the king
being dead, there was nothing more to
fight for, and they were allowed to go
free. Happy is the castle which has no
history. The perfection of Caerphilly as a
fortress saved it from serious attacks.
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