Cardiff Castle

The Romans fortified the site in about AD 55 and held it until roughly AD 80, part of the southern border during the conquest of the Silures. A fourth fort followed in the mid-3rd century, raised against pirates along the coast. Nothing shows the site inhabited from the end of the 4th century until the 11th.

Normans pushed into South Wales from the late 1060s, often planting castles on old Roman sites. Cardiff's founding is told two ways: William the Conqueror may have built here as early as 1081, or Robert Fitzhamon around 1091, who used the castle to subdue southern Glamorgan. A 27-foot bank of earth went up over the collapsed Roman walls, with a timber keep on a 40-foot motte, the largest raised in Wales. Knights held Glamorgan lands on condition of garrisoning it, and the lordship ran as Marcher territory.

FitzHamon was fatally injured at Tinchebray in 1106, and in 1122 Henry I gave the castle to his illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester. Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, was brought here from Devizes in 1126 and died a prisoner in 1134. A shell keep 77 feet across rose on the motte around mid-century, possibly under Robert and probably in answer to the Welsh uprising of 1136. It settled nothing: in 1158 Ifor Bach raided the castle and carried off Robert's son William as a hostage, another attack came in 1183, and by 1184 the town itself had walls.

From 1217 the castle belonged to the de Clares and became the centre of their power in South Wales. Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester, built the Black Tower into the southern gateway late in the 13th century, perhaps against the threat from Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales.

Gilbert de Clare, the last male of the line, was killed at Bannockburn in 1314, and Cardiff passed to Hugh Despenser the Younger, Edward II's favourite. Harsh Despenser rule and poor harvests provoked a Welsh rising under Llywelyn Bren in 1316; it was crushed, and in 1318 Llywelyn was hanged, drawn and quartered inside the castle on Hugh's orders. War with the other Marcher lords followed, and the castle was sacked in 1321.

In 1404 Owain Glyndŵr's rebels took Cardiff and the castle, badly damaging the Black Tower and the southern gatehouse. The castle came to Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, by marriage in 1423; Caerphilly had not come with the settlement, so Warwick spent on Cardiff instead, adding a tower beside the Black Tower in 1430 and, between 1425 and 1439, a domestic range with a central octagonal tower 75 feet high. Under the Tudors the frontier role ended, and in 1495 Henry VII revoked the castle's Marcher status.

Civil war reached Cardiff in 1642. Parliament took the castle early on; the Royalist Marquess of Hertford retook it by surprise assault, and Parliamentary and local troops won it back after five hours of fighting. Charles I came in July 1645 to meet Welsh leaders and left to find a crowd of locals demanding the castle; the "Peaceable Army" they formed traded the royal garrison for a local Glamorgan force, and when the king reneged they changed sides and surrendered Cardiff to Parliament. A Royalist army of 8,000 marched to retake the town in 1648 and was heavily beaten at St Fagans. The castle escaped slighting and was garrisoned instead, probably against a Scottish invasion.

Cardiff came to the Scottish Marquesses of Bute by marriage in 1766, and from 1776 Capability Brown and Henry Holland remade it as a Georgian house, the wall between the baileys blown up with gunpowder. From 1825 the second marquess poured money into the Cardiff Docks, which transformed the value of the family's mines and land: by 1900 the Butes owned 22,000 acres of Glamorgan.

The 3rd Marquess inherited in 1848, before his first birthday, and grew up despising the castle as half-hearted Gothic. On his coming of age in 1868 he set William Burges to rebuild it, beginning with the 132-foot Clock Tower; Burges was still at work on the Arab Room when he died, and Bute set both men's initials and the date 1881 into its fireplace. Levelling the grounds destroyed much medieval archaeology, but in 1889 it uncovered the Roman fort for the first time since the 11th century.

The fourth marquess sold off the coal mines, docks and railways, the last land going in 1938. In the Second World War tunnels in the medieval walls held air-raid shelters for up to 1,800 people. Facing heavy death duties in 1947, his heir gave the castle and its park to the people of Cardiff; the family flag came down at the handover.