A medieval building site was a raucous, dirty, smelly place; a cacophony of clatter. For seven months of every year – between April and November, when the hard earth softened and the weather allowed for unbroken outdoor work – the castle-building season entered full swing. Wherever a major fortress was erected, the landscape around it was sculpted and transformed. Woodland was felled and levelled, stone cut and dragged into place, furnaces roared. Endless streams of carts arrived bearing giant logs and pieces of timber hewn in faraway forests. New roads and routes were trodden by innumerable artisans and labourers, carpenters and masons. Great piles of earth rose against the horizon, thrown up out of the deep ditches that were dug as protection around the working site. Workers’ campsites hummed with the reek and warmth of human bodies, piled close together, creating mounds of rubbish and filth as they laboured beneath summer’s elements.
Master James of St George was the greatest castle-builder of his age, the man who knew more about building sites than any other. He had met Edward in Italy, during the returning king’s meandering journey back from Outremer to claim his Crown, and the king had not forgotten him. James came from a building dynasty: he had learned the art of masonry from his father, and spent his youth working on castles for the counts of Savoy. They had built towns and castles across the Alps, tailoring their magnificent projects to the tastes and security needs of the demanding and wealthy nobles of northern Italy. Master James was a mason and a military engineer, a specialist in organizing and managing building sites rather than an architect, but his ability to carry out ambitious projects to exacting standards made him an invaluable servant to the kings and princes who were his clients. He knew the best experts in Europe for specialist skills such as canal-digging, and he had long experience building castles in difficult and dangerous Alpine terrain.
In 1278, Edward hired Master James for one of the biggest commissions of the age: a massive ring of fortresses designed to brand Plantagenet power deep into the flesh of the principality of Wales, altering both the landscape and the political make-up of the nation so that it would for ever reflect English dominance.
Every Plantagenet king with the exception of Richard I had come to Wales, and all departed having barely left a footprint. Edward I ended that trend emphatically. His two invasions cost him immense amounts of cash and political capital, and right from the start it was clear that he meant to enforce a settlement that would prevent the Welsh from ever rising in rebellion as an independent nation again. He intended to build such an imposing ring of castles around the heart of Gwynedd that the Welsh could not physically remove the English, and would be confronted every time they looked to the horizon by a reminder of their subject status.
Edward and his advisers had a very clear vision of what they wanted from the castles. They were to be placed on strategically important sites and built to incorporate features of the best fortresses of north-west France and the southern Marches of Wales – two regions that had seen some of the heaviest and most prolonged warfare of the last century and which had, accordingly, developed the best defences. The king corresponded directly in person with Master James, instructing him on the positioning of towers and moats, the fine details of gate-posts, the type and colour of stone and timber to be used, and even where he wanted the latrines to be located. Most of the castles whose building was managed by Master James still stand. Some were extensive reworkings of castles already built. Others were new commissions. The earliest begun were at Flint and Rhuddlan on the northern border with England, Aberystwyth on the west coast and Builth, in the southern Marches. All of these were begun in 1277 as part of the limited settlement programme undertaken after Edward’s first Welsh invasion. The first three were attacked during the rebellion that prompted Edward’s second invasion, during which time the half-built structure at Aberystwyth was badly burned, and had to be started again once the war was over.
By the time Aberystwyth came to be reconstructed, however, the building programme had been extended in scope and ambition. Alongside Rhuddlan, Flint and Aberystwyth, further castles were commissioned at Denbigh, Harlech, Conwy and Caernarfon. (A final castle, perhaps the most magnificent of all, was begun on Anglesey, at Beaumaris, in 1295.)
The beauty and terrifying magnificence of Edward’s castles is hard to overstate. They were, like all castles, visible symbols of the wealth, military might and artistic sophistication of a conquering dynasty. But they also had Arthurian overtones. Edward was not simply constructing military outposts; he was wrenching at the national imagination of the Welsh, co-opting their legends and knitting them together with the Plantagenet myth.
The castles took many years to build and in some cases – as with Caernarfon – they were never completely finished. Some were pragmatic refortifications of existing structures, and thus worked within blueprints already set. But for the great fortresses of the north – the finest were Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris – Master James worked to a template of a keep surrounded by concentric walls, studded with towers and twin-towered gatehouses, and defended with a devilish innovation: the arrow-slit. It was nearly impossible for the enemy to aim an arrow into an arrow-slit, but a crossbow bolt could be quite easily fired out.
The architectural and historical influences brought to bear upon the Welsh castles were many and varied. Nowhere captured Edward’s imagination more than the building at Caernarfon which was the site of an ancient Roman fort, Segontium, said to have been built by the Emperor Magnus Maximus, whom legend held to be the father of Constantine. Caernarfon was built with multicoloured masonry and octagonal towers, rather than the round towers seen elsewhere in Wales. It took its cue from the angular walls of Constantinople, and was awarded even greater historical significance by the supposed discovery during the construction of Maximus’s remains, which were exhumed and interred in the town church.
In many cases Edward’s castles were accompanied by fortified new towns: planned settlements designed to deepen the grounding of the garrison in the locality and provide an income to offset the dazzling cost of building the castle. In an age of rapidly rising population, as the thirteenth century was, there was no shortage of English settlers and workers ready to head west for a new life in Wales, even if they had to contend with the hostility of the conquered locals.
And there was one settler more symbolic than any other. In the spring of 1284, during the early stages of work on Caernarfon castle, Queen Eleanor was brought to the town, where she went into labour for perhaps the sixteenth time of her life. The couple already had six surviving children: five girls, named Eleanor, Joan, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth; and a boy named Alfonso after his maternal grandfather. (At least eight other children, including the king’s first- and second-born sons, John and Henry, had died in infancy.) On 25 April the queen gave birth to another son, who was named Edward after his father. The birth missed St George’s feast day by a couple of days, but the symbolism was otherwise perfect. A prince who shared his father’s Saxon–Plantagenet name was delivered to the world at a town rich in ancient British history. The little boy, named Edward of Caernarfon, was a flag of conquest and a tool of propaganda. He was the fourth son that Eleanor had borne, and his birth wove yet more historicist legend into the Plantagenet story. His birth was part of a narrative that drew on Arthur, Maximus and the Britons of time immemorial. It was perhaps destiny that this child should ascend to his father’s throne. And so it would transpire when the ten-year-old Alfonso died at Windsor in August 1284. Suddenly, the four-month-old Edward became heir to the newly reimagined kingdom of Britain. With Wales conquered, myths created and a new heir born, Edward’s kingly vision was taking shape. All he had to do now was to pay for it.