Castle (16 page)

Such drawbacks were not acknowledged by Henry III when he began to rebuild the castle in the mid 1240s. They soon became apparent, however, to the soldiers who were stationed there during
the
initial stages of construction. Writing home, one soldier in the king’s army described the terrible conditions that existed in the English camp.

‘We dwell here,’ he said, ‘in watchings and fastings, in prayer, in cold and nakedness. In watchings, for fear of the Welsh, with their sudden raids upon us by night. In fastings for lack of victuals, since the halfpenny loaf cannot be got for less than fivepence. In prayer, that we may quickly return safe and sound to our homes. In cold and nakedness, for we live in houses of linen and have no winter clothes.’

When supplies finally arrived, Deganwy’s disadvantages were all too apparent, for the English could not reach their own ships. A boat coming from Ireland was inexpertly steered into the Conway estuary, and became grounded on a sandbank. The English and the Welsh fought over the beached vessel for twenty-four hours, but eventually it was the Welsh who gained the upper hand and made off with its precious cargo. Such handicaps ultimately led to Deganwy’s destruction. In the autumn of 1263, the castle’s inadequacy was underlined for a final time when Llywelyn (then enjoying his glory days) captured the castle and razed it to the ground. The castle lies in ruins today largely because of the prince’s comprehensive demolition.

So, when Edward I marched into the area in 1283, he decided that there was absolutely no point in following the ancient tradition of fortifying Deganwy by rebuilding his father’s castle. Like Napoleon, Edward understood that his soldiers marched on their stomachs. As the letter written in 1245 testifies, they also needed warm clothes, strong tents, and plenty of ammunition. The English king had conducted a successful winter campaign in 1282 and 1283 precisely because he had managed to keep his armies supplied with such basic necessities. If he was going to hold on to his conquests, he knew he had to keep his supply lines open. Deganwy was therefore left to decay, and a new site was selected. Forgoing the superb defensive position on top of the hill, Edward opted for a location on
the
opposite bank of the river, right on the shoreline. The result was Conway – a castle whose walls are lapped by the sea, enabling Edward to bring his cargo ships right up to the gate.

Harlech
.

Edward sited all his castles in this manner so that they could be kept supplied at all times. Conway, Caernarfon and Flint all stand by the sea today. Harlech, although it now appears landlocked, was not always so isolated. The land below the castle has been reclaimed – the sea once ran right up to the base of the cliff. At Rhuddlan, we have already seen how the king canalized the river for exactly the same logistical reasons. By building castles where the water could lap at their walls, Edward made it impossible for the Welsh to deploy their
traditional
tactics. No longer could the king’s fortresses be blockaded and destroyed. From now on, the English would have a permanent foothold in Wales.

In certain cases, choosing the optimum strategic position for a castle also enabled Edward to make a political point. When it came to grandstanding, the king was a master showman, with a ruthless eye for detail. As is well known, when he later invaded Scotland, Edward seized all the symbols of native power, including, most famously, the Stone of Destiny. It is less widely appreciated, however (precisely because, in this instance, the king was more successful), that he did exactly the same thing a generation before in Wales. After the conquest of 1283, Edward seized all of Llywelyn’s regalia – his crown, orb and sceptre – and had them sent back to Westminster. Similarly, he confiscated the prince’s seal-matrices and had them melted down to make a silver chalice.

Conway
.

Caernarfon
.

But it is Edward’s castles that provide the most outstanding testimony to his determination to impose a new identity on Wales. Neither Caernarfon nor Conway were built on virgin sites; both, towns had been popular destinations for Llywelyn’s court. Edward flattened these settlements, removing or destroying the great halls of the Welsh princes, and building his new castles in their place. The old days of independence, the Welsh were to understand, were now over; a new and more powerful authority was rising in its place. At Conway, there had once stood a great Cistercian abbey, founded by Llywelyn’s grandfather and the last resting place of the prince’s ancestors. Edward levelled the building, and built Conway castle directly over their bones. With calculated callousness, the king literally erased the memory of Llywelyn’s family from the face of the earth.

Construction at Harlech, Conway and Caernarfon started in the summer of 1283, in each case within days of the arrival of Edward’s army. The first task at all three locations was establishing the castle site and making it secure. At Harlech and Caernarfon, this meant cutting ditches around the perimeter; no mean feat at Harlech, since this involved hacking through solid rock. Such work, like the ‘sea-ditch’ at Rhuddlan, required armies of labourers, and they were drawn from all over the country. Like those who built castles in the
twelfth
century, these men were paid a daily wage, mostly at the rate of one or two pence a day. The work, however, was backbreaking and dangerous, and for this reason many men had to be forcibly persuaded to accept the king’s offer of a job. The belief that large numbers were pressed into service is borne out by an entry on one of the building accounts, which records three mounted sergeants who were paid to escort three hundred diggers from Yorkshire, ‘in case they should flee while on the road’.

With the ditches underway, a wooden palisade was put up around the castle site, and temporary wooden buildings were erected. These buildings were not just the medieval equivalent of Portakabins; they included suites of rooms for Edward and his household, evidently built to some standard of luxury. At both Conway and Caernarfon, separate chambers were built for Edward’s queen, Eleanor, and gardens were laid out for her enjoyment, the turf being shipped in specially. Although all the timber buildings would eventually be replaced by stone, the investment in wooden walls was nevertheless enormous – twenty shiploads of timber were sent from Liverpool to Caernarfon in the first few weeks of building.

But the essential commodity, of course, was not timber, but stone. As we saw in
Chapter Two
, it made good sense to source the bulk of the material as locally as possible, but the expensive stone needed for window frames and fireplaces had to come from further afield. In the case of Edward’s castle at Aberystwyth, built after the first Welsh war, high-quality stone was shipped all the way round the Pembrokeshire coast from Bristol. Other commodities had similarly long journeys. Lead for roofing and plumbing the castles was mined in the mountains of Snowdonia and brought overland to the construction sites. Iron and steel were ordered from Staffordshire, and ropes were sent from Lincolnshire.

Again, we know these kinds of details because the processes of construction are detailed clearly in surviving records. The same
records
also give us the precise number and kind of workmen on each site. Most of the labour force were of the unskilled variety, press-ganged in the counties. There were, however, scores of skilled artisans on every site, including carpenters and plumbers, and in the later stages, glaziers. When work at Harlech was at its height in the summer of 1286, in addition to the 546 general labourers, there were 115 quarriers, 30 blacksmiths, 22 carpenters and 227 stonemasons.

Stonemasons were the key to the whole operation. They were skilled workers, and paid at the accordingly high rate of three to four pence a day. They were sometimes known as freemasons, not because they dressed up in aprons and indulged in arcane ceremonies, but because they had the ability to carve the more expensive ‘freestone’, which could be chiselled in any direction without splitting. Working any kind of stone was a slow process, especially if the patron demanded that every inch of a building was finished to the same high standard. Typically working in teams, masons travelled the country from one project to the next, and worked mostly in the warmer months of the year.

The written records, for all their exhaustive detail, are rather inexpressive when it comes to the actual processes involved in the construction of a castle. To understand these, we have to turn to the illustrations in contemporary manuscripts. These provide a wealth of additional information: how scaffolding was erected, how stone was carved, and how blocks of stone were moved around the site. Heavy blocks were either dragged on sleds, or wheeled from place to place in carts. The method of lifting them off the ground and up to the level of the builders was particularly ingenious – at each site, carpenters constructed several windlass cranes, powered by men in a treadmill. One such crane survives at the top of the spire in Salisbury Cathedral.

The treadmill crane at Salisbury cathedral
.

Because the castles had to fulfil a vital military role, Edward drove construction on at lightning speed. Astounding as it seems, the records show that Conway Castle was substantially completed in just four years. Harlech scarcely took longer, and was finished by 1289. Only at Caernarfon did work drag on into the 1290s and beyond. The speed and scale of construction meant that these castles were not cheap. Harlech, with a price tag of £10,000, was the least expensive of the three. Conway, being larger and more sophisticated, cost something in the order of £15,000. When the builders finally put down their tools at Caernarfon, the project had absorbed at least £27,000.

So, from the summer of 1283, we have to imagine thousands of men being conscripted from all over England, marched to north-west Wales, and beginning to build Conway, Harlech and Caernarfon.
The
big question that remains is, who was in charge? Edward was of course the prime mover behind the project, but who masterminded the layout and design of the new castles, supervised the workforce, and ordered the materials? Today we would expect these jobs to be shared by a number of individuals – an architect would come up with the initial design, a surveyor would inspect and assess the site, a foreman would take charge of the labour force and so on. In the Middle Ages, however, all these tasks fell to one man. He was the master mason, a uniquely skilled and talented individual.