Cefnllys Castle

The first castle at Cefnllys was a timber motte-and-bailey on the bank of the River Ithon, a mile north of the ridge later known as Castle Bank, and it is assumed to be the work of Ralph Mortimer of Wigmore. One of a group of Norman barons who overran the region in 1093, Ralph is credited with the construction of a castle in Maelienydd named "Dynyetha", probably between 1093 and 1095. After his death around 1104 the area was retaken by the Welsh and stayed disputed territory throughout the twelfth century. Dinieithon, the fort on the River Ieithon, was last documented in 1179 and not then described as a castle, which suggests it had by that date been destroyed, abandoned or possibly reused as a llys. English control was still far from secure when Llywelyn the Great, ruler of the ascendant state of Gwynedd, established his authority over southern Powys between 1208 and 1216 as protector and suzerain of the local Welsh dynasty. The historian Paul Remfry has speculated that the northern castle on Castle Bank may have been begun between 1216 and 1234 under Llywelyn's direction, although it is generally taken to be a Mortimer creation.

Llywelyn's death in April 1240 opened an internal power struggle within Gwynedd and presented Ralph Mortimer II with an opportunity to strengthen his position in Maelienydd. By the end of Henry III's Welsh campaign of August 1241 Ralph held the whole cantref and had secured submissions from the local nobility, and to consolidate those gains he ordered the "strengthening" of a "castle in Maelienydd" in 1242. The work was undertaken in his absence in the name of his young son Roger, and is identified with the north-eastern castle at Castle Bank; the word used, firmavit, may imply the rebuilding of an existing castle in stone, particularly as the establishment of a castle at Cefnllys is nowhere explicitly recorded. Later primary sources call it the "new castle". Ralph died in 1246, and a patent roll lists Cefnllys as passing into the custodianship of the crown until Roger came of age.

From 1256 a large Welsh uprising led by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the new prince of Gwynedd, caused an English military reversal across Wales. By the time a truce was signed in 1260, Cefnllys had become Roger Mortimer's most advanced outpost, the neighbouring commote of Gwrtheyrnion and the castle at Builth having been lost. In late November 1262 the castle was seized from Roger's constable Hywel ap Meurig by a small band of Welshmen who entered "by treachery", took Hywel and his family captive, sent word of their success to Llywelyn and torched the place.

Roger Mortimer levied an army of Marcher lords and arrived at Cefnllys to start repairs on the walls, only to be caught off guard when Llywelyn surrounded him with a larger force. The siege ran three weeks, the Marcher force penned inside a damaged and unprovisioned castle while Llywelyn's soldiers sacked Roger's other castles at Bleddfa and Knucklas, until Roger was forced to negotiate safe passage. Llywelyn allowed the Marcher force to retreat, a chivalrous gesture probably designed to strengthen his case at future peace negotiations, then destroyed the remaining defences and continued his campaign against England. What the fall of Cefnllys meant along the border shows in a letter written to Henry III by Peter of Aigueblanche, bishop of Hereford, as he fled for Gloucester: "Mortimer's castle of Cefnllys has capitulated: Roger and his retinue have left unharmed. All this has led to rumours of treachery and the whole March is in terror."

The peace signed at the Treaty of Montgomery in September 1267 was a major success for Llywelyn, granting him formal recognition as Prince of Wales. Cefnllys remained outside his direct control and Roger Mortimer was permitted to rebuild it, but Roger would hold the land provisionally on Llywelyn's behalf, for as long as Llywelyn could demonstrate his right to it, and the ambiguous clause covering the castle became an imminent point of contention. The northern castle may have been repaired before the end of 1267, when Llywelyn wrote to Henry III complaining about the status of Cefnllys. Roger then began a new and stronger castle on the southern side of the ridge, which Llywelyn, reading the treaty as permitting repairs only, viewed as a provocation. He sent a letter to Edward I on 22 July 1273 or 1274 protesting Roger's "new work" and asking the king to stop the building, failing which he would act himself. The Welsh case against the new work ran that the treaty allowed Roger only to repair the castle at Cefnllys, that justice over the castle and its adjacent lands had still not been obtained, and that what had gone up instead was "not merely a fence, as has been suggested to the king, but a wide and deep ditch, and stones and timber have been brought to construct a fortress".

The argument over Cefnllys was foremost among a series of territorial disputes between Llywelyn and the Marcher lords, which fed into a deteriorating climate of suspicion and distrust, increased further when Edward accepted defectors from Llywelyn's realm in 1274. The historian Robert Rees Davies wrote that Llywelyn, under intense financial and domestic pressure as well, came to suspect "an orchestrated attempt to undermine his hard-won gains, especially in the middle March, and to subvert the terms of the Treaty of 1267". These grievances escalated into his refusal to pay homage to Edward I in 1275 and fuelled Edward's determination to pacify him, culminating in the subjugation of Wales between 1277 and 1283. Cefnllys itself was not directly attacked in that conflict, but formed part of a chain of garrisoned castles encircling Llywelyn's territories which contributed to the rebellion's suppression. Roger died in 1282, and his heir Edmund Mortimer, 2nd Baron Mortimer, paid for a garrison of eight horsemen and 20 footmen throughout the second phase of the fighting in 1282–3.

In October 1294 Cefnllys was listed as one of the castles captured by "Rees ap Morgan" during the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn, though the archaeologists David Browne and Alastair Pearson have expressed uncertainty over that account. In 1306 the castle passed into the hands of Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, whose unsuccessful rebellion against Edward II resulted in the confiscation of his holdings, Cefnllys among them, in 1322. He returned from exile in 1326 and overthrew Edward, briefly ruling England in fact alongside Queen Isabella until his execution in 1330 by Edward III; Cefnllys was forfeited by the Mortimers as punishment and returned to the family the following year. Repairs to the castle and its hall were carried out from 1356 to 1357. At the outbreak of the uprising led by Owain Glyndŵr in 1400 Cefnllys was in temporary royal custody, defended by a well-provisioned force of 12 spearmen and 30 archers, and a detailed register of supplies sent to the castle in 1403 survives. This may have been insufficient: a grant of 1405 to Richard Grey described the lordship as "burned and wasted by the Welsh rebels", although it is unclear whether the castle itself was sacked or the destruction was limited to its hinterland.

The Mortimers encouraged the development of a castle town at Cefnllys, to consolidate their hold on the surrounding land and on the wider cantref. Its date of establishment is unrecorded; it is first documented in 1297 with the granting of a market charter, and was accorded borough status in 1304, when it possessed 25 burgesses, a church and a town mill. Records of pontage indicate a toll bridge, and a deer park was recorded in 1360. A manor at Cefnllys was highly unusual given the upland terrain and demonstrates the Mortimers' efforts to establish manorialism in Maelienydd. Their rule was unpopular among the local Welsh, who took their complaints to Edward I in 1297 and compelled Edmund Mortimer to restore the traditional court at nearby Cymaron as an alternative to the manorial court at the castle; the lord's authority stayed limited to the district around it, and only limited tribute, rather than rent, was extracted from the wider Welsh community. Growth stalled before 1332, and in 1383 the town was recorded as having only ten residents. Davies judged that a site chosen for defensiveness and the projection of strategic power undermined its economic viability: "the artificiality of [its] commercial setting was too obvious once the military opportunities ... had been removed". Major outbreaks of bubonic plague across Britain in 1349, 1361–62 and 1369 contributed to its failure, and the persistent threat of violent conflict within the March expedited its demise.

The death of Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, of plague in 1425 marked the end of the Mortimer male line, and Cefnllys was inherited by his nephew Richard, Duke of York, who paid for repair work and appointed officials from a new class of Welsh office-holders to manage his distant estate. Throughout the Marches minor Welsh nobles were rising to local power, and they preferred the comfort of oak courts to draughty stone castles; the historian Richard Suggett describes the change as "expressed architecturally by the decay of the masonry castles ... and by the building of new timber halls at or near the castle sites by the Welshmen of influence within a lordship".

Cefnllys got such a hall. The pre-eminent travelling poet of the mid-fifteenth century, Lewys Glyn Cothi, composed four poems concerning Cefnllys, surviving in a manuscript of 1468 though probably dating from 1432 to 1459, in praise of the Welshman Ieuan ap Phylip, constable of the castle and receiver of the lordship of Maelienydd. Ieuan had a two-storey hall built to exhibit his status and entertain guests, and Lewys' verse uniquely preserves the name of the master carpenter, Rhosier ab Owain. When Richard's son and heir Edward took the English throne in 1461, Cefnllys became crown property. It was included in a grant of predominantly ruined castles made to Prince Arthur by Henry VII in 1493; the antiquarian John Leland recorded that the castle was "now downe" in the first half of the sixteenth century, and a deed of sale of 1687 described it as ruins.

Cefnllys remained a borough after the decline of the medieval settlement, holding that status into the nineteenth century: the census of 1831 counted, besides the church and the castle ruins, 16 inhabitants in "three Farm Houses and one small Cottage". Both castles on Castle Bank are now entirely ruinous and only traces remain. The hill is open access land, and the site is a scheduled monument and a National Monument of Wales. The sole surviving medieval structure at Cefnllys is St Michael's Church at the foot of the ridge, thirteenth century in origin and heavily restored in 1895.