Flint Castle

Flint was the first of the castles raised during Edward I's campaign to conquer Wales, and the first of the chain later known as the Iron Ring, the fortresses meant to encircle North Wales and hold down the Welsh. Building began in 1277, almost as soon as the king opened the First Welsh War, initially under Richard L'engenour, who would become Mayor of Chester in 1304. Some 18,000 labourers and masons built the castle and its earthworks in local Millstone Grit ashlar and sandstone.

The site on the western shore of the Dee estuary was chosen for its strategic position. Flint lay one day's march from Chester, supplies could come up the River Dee or by sea into a harbour protected by its own defensive wall, and a ford nearby carried traffic across to England at low tide — before the estuary's course was altered in the eighteenth century the crossing could be made by boat at high water or waded at low. Shotwick Castle stood on the English shore opposite.

The Savoyard master mason James of Saint George was assigned in April 1278 "ad ordiandum opera castorum ibidem" — to undertake the castle works — across Edward's Welsh projects. In November 1280 he began overseeing construction at Flint directly, the pace of building having been slow and needing acceleration. He stayed seventeen months before moving on to complete Rhuddlan.

When work stopped in 1284 the castle had an inner ward and an outer bailey divided by a tidal moat and joined by a gatehouse and drawbridge, with a plantation town laid out beyond. Edward spent £6,068 7s 5d in all on fortress and town together.

Flint follows Savoyard models in which one corner tower is enlarged and set apart to serve as both corner tower and donjon, as at Dourdan in France; the detached keep guarded the inner gatehouse and the outer bailey, while the inner ward carried three further large towers. The keep has been compared to the donjon at Aigues-Mortes, which Edward may have known from passing through it on his way to join the Eighth Crusade in 1270; another line of argument credits the influence of Jean Mésot, who had worked in southern France, on James of Saint George. The castle has also been called a classic carré savoyard, close in shape and style to Yverdon though a third larger on the ground, and most historians attribute that to James of Saint George.

The keep's walls are 7 metres thick at the base and 5 metres above, with small rooms built into their thickness and a vaulted passage running right around the inside at ground level; entry was by drawbridge into a central chamber on the first floor, and there would originally have been at least one storey more. A timber gallery was added on top for the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1301. The design was not repeated in any other castle Edward built in North Wales, and the layout remains unique within the British Isles.

Five years after building began, Welsh forces under Dafydd ap Gruffydd, brother of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, besieged Flint in a rising against the English Crown. In 1294 it was attacked again during the revolt of Madog ap Llywelyn, and this time the constable set fire to the castle himself rather than let the Welsh take it; it was afterwards repaired and partly rebuilt.

With the Welsh wars concluded, English settlers and merchants were given property titles in the new town laid out in front of the castle. The plantation borough was defended by a ditch with a wooden palisade on earth banking, and its outline is still legible in the street pattern. From 1284 until 1935 the Constable of Flint Castle served ex officio as Mayor of Flint, living, until it was destroyed, in the donjon.

In 1399 Richard II was held at Flint by Henry Bolingbroke before being taken back to London. During the English Civil War the castle was held for the King; the Parliamentarians finally took it in 1647 after a three-month siege, and it was then slighted under Cromwell's destruction order to stop it being used again. By the nineteenth century part of the outer bailey had been turned over to Flintshire's county jail, with a quarry working nearby. J. M. W. Turner painted a watercolour of the ruin in 1838.