Caernarfon Castle

The Romans fortified the site first, at Segontium on the edge of the modern town, and the Welsh name keeps them: y gaer yn Arfon, the stronghold in the land over against Môn. The Domesday Survey of 1086 put the Norman Robert of Rhuddlan nominally in command of the whole of northern Wales; he was killed by the Welsh in 1088, and his cousin Hugh d'Avranches, Earl of Chester, reasserted control by building three castles, one of them at Caernarfon — a motte and bailey on the peninsula between the River Seiont and the Menai Strait, defended by timber palisade and earthworks. The Welsh recaptured Gwynedd in 1115, and documents written at the castle show that Llywelyn the Great and later Llywelyn ap Gruffudd stayed there from time to time.

War broke out again on 22 March 1282; Llywelyn ap Gruffudd died on 11 December, his brother Dafydd fought on, and the war closed in May 1283 with the fall of Dafydd's last castle at Dolbadarn. Edward began building at Harlech and Caernarfon soon after. The earliest record of work here is 24 June 1283, when a ditch had been dug separating the castle site from the town; timber came from as far as Liverpool, stone from Anglesey and around the town, and hundreds of men dug the moat and the foundations. Houses were cleared as the works spread, and their residents went uncompensated for three years. Timber-framed apartments were run up for Edward and Eleanor of Castile, who arrived in the second week of July 1283 and stayed over a month.

The Statute of Rhuddlan of 3 March 1284 made Caernarfon a borough and the administrative centre of Gwynedd, and by tradition Edward II was born here on 25 April that year — the tale of a prince born in Wales who spoke no word of English can be traced no further back than the 16th century and may well be apocryphal. The castle's standing showed in its garrison: forty men in 1284, against thirty apiece at Conwy and Harlech. Spending was negligible from 1289 and the accounts end in 1292, by which point £12,000 had gone into castle and town walls, the southern façade furthest along; the northern front was left until last, since the south wall and the town walls already closed a defensive circuit.

When Wales rose in 1294 under Madog ap Llywelyn, Caernarfon was an obvious target: the seat of administration in Gwynedd and a symbol of English power. Madog's forces took the town in September, heavily damaging its walls. The castle, still defended by nothing but a ditch and a temporary barricade, was quickly taken and everything flammable set alight; fire raged across Caernarfon. The English moved to retake it in the summer of 1295 and were refortifying the town by November, spending £1,195 — nearly half what the walls had first cost — to finish the job two months ahead of schedule.

Work then returned to the castle. James of Saint George, probably the master mason of the original design, left to oversee Edward's new castle at Beaumaris, and Walter of Hereford took over, though some historians hold that Walter had been responsible for the design from the outset. A further £4,500 went on the northern wall and towers by the end of 1301; the accounts to September 1304 are missing, possibly because labour had moved north for the war against Scotland. Walter died in 1309, Henry of Ellerton succeeded him, and building continued until 1330. Between £20,000 and £25,000 was spent from 1284, dwarfing the outlay on Dover or Château Gaillard — and still the rears of the King's Gate and Queen's Gate were left unfinished, with foundations inside marking buildings that were never raised.

Caernarfon was built to be looked at as well as held. Its banded coloured stone and polygonal towers set it apart from Edward's other Welsh castles, and Arnold Taylor argued that the design deliberately evoked the Walls of Constantinople — imperial imagery as an assertion of the king's authority, drawing on Breudwyt Macsen Wledig, the dream in which the Roman emperor Magnus Maximus saw a fort "the fairest that man ever saw" at a river mouth opposite an island. Edward took Segontium for the city of that dream; the reported discovery of Magnus Maximus's body during construction, which the king ordered reburied in a local church, and the eagles carved on the Eagle Tower may have been meant to reinforce the claim. Abigail Wheatley reads the same design instead as an appeal to Roman Britain and to Arthurian legitimacy.

The display did not come at the expense of firepower. Polygonal towers along the curtain wall gave flanking fire, and firing galleries ran along the southern face, which led the military historian Allen Brown to call the castle "one of the most formidable concentrations of fire-power to be found in the Middle Ages". Had the King's Gate been finished, an attacker would have crossed two drawbridges, passed five doors and six portcullises and turned a right angle under arrow loops and murder holes before reaching the lower ward.

Caernarfon was garrisoned constantly for two centuries after the conquest and served as the effective capital of north Wales, with the most important administrative posts in the country usually closed to Welsh people. The resentment broke out in the Glyndŵr Rising of 1400–1415: town and castle were besieged in 1401, and that November the Battle of Tuthill was fought nearby between the defenders and the besieging force. Welsh troops with French support besieged the place again in 1403 and 1404, when the garrison numbered around thirty. None of the attacks took it.

The Tudor accession in 1485 eased the hostilities the castle existed to contain, and it slid into neglect; by 1620, of seven towers and two gatehouses, only the Eagle Tower and the King's Gate still had roofs, and the domestic buildings had been stripped of glass and iron. The defences were sound enough, even so, for Royalists to hold Caernarfon through the Civil War, when it was besieged three times; the constable, John Byron, 1st Baron Byron, surrendered to Parliamentarian forces in 1646 — the last fighting the castle saw. An order of 1660 to dismantle castle and town walls was abandoned early and may never have begun. State-funded repairs started in the 1870s under the deputy-constable Llewellyn Turner, who rebuilt as much as he conserved, and in 1911 the castle staged the investiture of the Prince of Wales at the insistence of David Lloyd George, a Welshman raised in Caernarfonshire; the precedent was repeated for Charles in 1969.