Builth Castle

The site Edward I chose in 1277 already carried a castle: a motte ringed by two baileys, the whole enclosed by a further boundary wall. That older stronghold had changed hands several times as Normans and Welsh fought for supremacy in the district, and the small town of Builth had grown up beside it. In 1260 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd took the old castle and largely destroyed it, and it is not clear how much of the structure still stood when Edward began building in stone.

Builth was the first castle Edward I built in Wales. Construction started in May 1277 and ran until August 1282, when the work was abandoned unfinished for lack of money; this was probably because Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been killed and the King had shifted his priorities towards the invasion of Gwynedd. As at Flint, begun at the same time, the builders started by enclosing the site with a wooden palisade, at Builth some 270 yards long. The total cost came to £1,666, a comparatively modest sum because the earthworks were already there.

The castle was besieged in 1294 during the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn. On 7 February 1301 Edward I gave Builth to his son Edward, and between 1310 and 1315 a local magnate, Roger Mortimer, served that Edward as castellan. When the younger Edward succeeded his father as king he gifted the castle to his wife, Isabella, who with his consent rented it back to Mortimer for 170 marks per half-year, due at Michaelmas and Easter. Mortimer, whose hold over Isabella grew steadily stronger and who eventually became her lover, went on to secure an agreement that the castle would pass to him outright on her death.

Isabella and Mortimer mounted a coup against Edward II, which ended in the King's ignominious death. In 1330, on reaching adulthood, his son Edward III arranged for the pair to be captured and had Mortimer executed for treason. Mortimer's property was seized on the King's orders, and Buellt was taken by Gilbert Talbot, 1st Baron Talbot, the Justiciar of South Wales.

Edward III had been helped in his counter-coup against Mortimer by the prominent noblewoman Alice de Lacy and her second husband, Eubulus le Strange, and in reward he granted them Builth Castle for life. Eubulus died in 1335, and after Alice remarried her new husband, Hugh de Freyne, who had raped her, was acknowledged by the King as lord of Builth. Alice died childless in 1348.

The King granted Builth to his son, the Black Prince, who in 1359 re-established the rental arrangement with the Mortimer family, still at 170 marks per half-year, while keeping the right to garrison the castle in time of war. When Owain Glyndŵr's forces attacked it during his revolt in the early 15th century, the garrison was commanded by Sir John Oldcastle, the model for Shakespeare's Falstaff. The castle was repaired in 1409 at a cost of £400.

The rental arrangement was terminated during the Wars of the Roses, when Richard of York, heir of the Mortimer family, claimed the crown as heir of Philippa of Clarence; the hostilities ended when his heir, Elizabeth of York, married the man who became Henry VII. In November 1493 Buellt, Builth Castle included, was re-established as a Marcher Lordship for their son Arthur, who died childless in 1502.

During the reign of Arthur's younger brother, Henry VIII, the castle burnt down, and over the years that followed the local population raided the ruins for building material for their own houses. All the masonry has gone, and what survives is the mound the castle stood on, with its ditches and embankments; the site is a scheduled monument and a National Monument of Wales.