Beaumaris Castle

Beaumaris Castle, Castell Biwmares in Welsh, stands at the eastern edge of the town of Beaumaris on the Isle of Anglesey, close to the water's edge on the Menai Strait. The ground is a low marsh at about sea level, formed of till and other coastal sediments. The name means fair marsh. It comes from the Norman French Beau Mareys, also written beau marais, and in Latin the castle was de Bello Marisco.

It is a concentric fortification of local limestone, sandstone, and green schist. It was left unfinished, and it is ruined. Building is placed in 1295, and the end of the work is given as the 1290s, as by the 1320s, as around 1330, and as 1331.

The castle is the last of the royal strongholds of Edward I of England on the north Wales coast. He lived from the night of 17 to 18 June 1239 until 7 July 1307, and he was king from 1272 to 1307. He was Lord of Ireland, and from 1254 to 1306 he held Gascony as Duke of Aquitaine, as a vassal of the French king. Before his accession he was called the Lord Edward.

He was the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, born at the Palace of Westminster. His height is given as 6 feet 2 inches, or 188 centimetres. Later ages called him Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots. None of his childhood was spent on this marsh, but the castle is one result of the kind of king he became.

In 1259 he briefly sided with a baronial reform movement and supported the Provisions of Oxford. He then reconciled with his father and remained loyal through the Second Barons' War. After the Battle of Lewes the rebellious barons held him hostage. He escaped after a few months and defeated Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265.

Within two years the rebellion was over. In 1270 he joined the Ninth Crusade to the Holy Land. He was on the way home in 1272 when he learned that his father had died. He made a slow return, reached England in 1274, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey.

Much of his reign went into law and administration, but his attention turned increasingly to war.

The Conquest of Wales by Edward I of England took place between 1277 and 1283. It is also called the Edwardian conquest, to set it apart from the earlier and only partial Norman invasion of Wales. By the thirteenth century Wales was divided between native principalities and the territories of Anglo-Norman Marcher lords. Gwynedd was the leading principality.

Its princes had brought much of the country under them and had taken the title Prince of Wales. Wars with England in 1241 and 1245, and a dispute over the succession, weakened Gwynedd and let Henry III take Perfeddwlad, also called the Four Cantrefs. From 1256 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, called Llywelyn the Last, took that land back. The Treaty of Montgomery in 1267 restored peace, and in return for homage Henry recognised him as Prince of Wales.

Fighting still flickered with Marcher lords, among them Gilbert de Clare, Roger Mortimer, and Humphrey de Bohun.

Henry III died in 1272. In 1274 tension rose when Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys and Llywelyn's younger brother Dafydd ap Gruffydd defected to Edward and sought his protection. Edward fought a first war in Wales in 1276 and 1277 and greatly reduced Llywelyn's territory. He intervened in North Wales for the second time in his reign in 1282, and the war of 1282 to 1283 overran Gwynedd and the other remaining Welsh principalities.

He invaded with a large army, pushing north from Carmarthen and west from Montgomery and Chester. He then decided on a permanent English colony. The Statute of Rhuddlan, enacted on 3 March 1284, set out the government. One account says Wales was divided into counties and shires on the English pattern, with three new shires in the north-west: Caernarfon, Merioneth, and Anglesey.

Another account of the same settlement says the royal land was organised into six shire counties and brought into a new Principality of Wales. Most of the conquered land stayed a royal fief, later by custom the endowment of the heir to the English throne who bore the title Prince of Wales. The rest was granted to Edward's supporters as new Marcher lordships. Welsh supporters of the English king were also rewarded, under feudal tenure.

The lands were not incorporated into the Kingdom of England until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 to 1542. The conquest itself is marked as the end of Welsh independence.

New towns with protective castles were set at Caernarfon and Harlech, the administrative centres of two of the northern shires, and a castle and a walled town were built at Conwy. Those three castles were begun in 1283. Plans were probably made in 1284 for a similar castle and settlement near Llanfaes on Anglesey. Llanfaes was the wealthiest borough in Wales and the largest in population, an important trading port on the preferred route from North Wales to Ireland.

The cost of the other castles forced that project to be postponed. A later inscription of the whole group dates the start of the programme to 1283 and says the works were hindered by the Welsh uprising of 1294.

Madog ap Llywelyn, who died after 1305, led the revolt of 1294 to 1295. Only the later rising of Owain Glyndŵr lasted longer. Madog belonged to a junior branch of the House of Aberffraw and was a distant relation of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. His father, Llywelyn ap Maredudd, was the last vassal lord of Meirionnydd.

That father lost his patrimony in 1256 for opposing the future prince at the Battle of Bryn Derwin, lived in exile in England on a crown pension, reconciled with Llywelyn in June 1262, and died in a skirmish on the Welsh side in April 1263. Madog, who may have been born in exile, received substantial gifts of money from Edward I of England in 1277 and used them to sue the prince in 1278 for the cantref of Meirionnydd. After Llywelyn's death in 1282 he returned to Gwynedd and received lands from the English king in Anglesey. The same king who later built this castle had, for a time, been his paymaster.

On Michaelmas, 29 September 1294, Madog put himself at the head of a national revolt. The grievances named for it are the actions of new royal administrators in north and west Wales and a tax of one fifteenth on all movables. There is no evidence that the aim was to restore the former principality, but in one land grant issued during the rebellion he used the title Prince of Wales. The rising had been planned for months, and the attacks came on the same day across Wales.

Madog acted in the north. In mid and south Wales the leaders were Cynan ap Maredudd, Maelgwn ap Rhys, and Morgan ap Maredudd of Gwynllwg in Glamorgan. They hoped that by the end of September the king and most of his forces would already be in France. Bad weather had kept that army from sailing.

Edward cancelled the French campaign and turned on Wales. The same decade had already taken him into a war with Philip IV of France after the confiscation of Gascony, and into the Scottish succession dispute that became the First Scottish War of Independence. In 1290 he had also issued the Edict of Expulsion, which expelled the Jews from England. That edict was not an event at Beaumaris.

It belongs to the same reign, five years before the first season on this marsh.

Caernarfon was overrun and its castle occupied. So were Castell y Bere, which was afterwards burnt, and Hawarden, Ruthin, and Denbigh. Criccieth was besieged for several months, and so was Harlech, which at one point was defended by 37 men. Morlais was taken under Morgan in the south.

Cynan ap Maredudd besieged Builth for six weeks. Half the town of Caerphilly was burnt, though that castle held out, and Kenfig was sacked. Henry de Lacy, lord of Denbigh, marched to his besieged castle and was ambushed outside the town on 11 November. His force was routed.

In the north-east, Reginald de Grey placed strong garrisons at Flint and Rhuddlan. Neither castle fell, though Flint endured a long siege. Many other castles were besieged and several towns were burnt. Among the dead was Roger de Pulesdon, sheriff of Anglesey.

In December 1294 Edward led an army into north Wales by Wrexham, Denbigh, Abergele, and other places, and he reached Conwy Castle shortly before Christmas. He was ambushed, retreated into Conwy, and lost his baggage train. The town of Conwy was burnt, and he remained besieged until his navy relieved him in 1295. The decisive battle was at Maes Moydog in Powys on 5 March 1295.

An army under the Earl of Warwick surprised Madog's men. The Welsh recovered their order and stopped an English cavalry charge with a porcupine formation of pikemen, a schiltron of the sort Scottish armies used against English knights. English arrows then caused heavy losses, and in the pursuit many Welsh soldiers drowned while crossing a swollen river. Madog barely escaped.

He was a fugitive until Ynyr Fychan of Nannau captured him and handed him to John de Havering in Snowdonia in late July or early August 1295. He was taken to London and seems to have stayed in captivity for the rest of his life. He was still alive in 1305. His sons survived him.

The spelling Madog ap Llewelyn is also used for him.

Once Anglesey was reoccupied in April 1295, Edward took up the postponed plan at once. One account starts the works in April 1295. Another places them in the summer of that year. The site chosen was about 1 mile, or 1.6 kilometres, from Llanfaes.

The Welsh people of Llanfaes were moved about 12 miles, or 19 kilometres, to the south-west, and a new town called Newborough was made for them. Their removal cleared the ground for an English borough protected by a large castle. The castle was set in one corner of the town, on a plan like that of Conwy, but no town walls were built at Beaumaris at first, although some foundations were laid. The borough was laid out beside the castle and received its first charter in 1296.

Its streets are thought to have been Castle Street and Church Street, on a plan like Newborough's. The castle's constable acted as mayor of the town. The parish church of St Mary and St Nicholas, a separate building from the castle chapel, is placed at about 1330.

Master James of St George directed the work. He was a master of works from Savoy, born about 1230, and he died in 1309. Little is fixed about his early life. The circumstantial case places his birth at Saint-Prex, and his father as a mason named John, identified with Jean Cotereel, the builder of Saint-Prex and of Lausanne Cathedral.

Similarities have been drawn between rose windows at Canterbury and Lausanne, and between the west window at Lausanne and an eastern hall window later built at Conwy, not at Beaumaris. After he came to England he was known as Master James of Saint George, from his last known home and workplace at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche in the Viennois. The name is not taken from the patron saint of England. It refers to a sainted archbishop of Vienne.

His patron probably met him while returning from crusade and visiting Savoy in 1273. On 25 June 1273 Edward was at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche so that his great-uncle Philip I, Count of Savoy, could do homage under a treaty of 1246. The first English record of the name Magistri Jacobi de Sancto Georgio is dated 8 November 1280, two years after James is first recorded in Britain. There is a gap in the record between 1275, his last notice in Savoy, and 1278.

His career as Magistro Jacobo began at Yverdon-les-Bains for Peter II, Count of Savoy, at first with his father and by 1265 alone, which is taken to mark his father's death. He then worked under Jean de Mézos, an engineer from Gascony who had worked for Henry III, at the castle of Melphe at Salins-les-Thermes in 1267 and 1268. After Peter II died in 1268 he worked for Philip I, who preferred the Viennois to Chillon. Between 1270 and 1275 James built for Philip at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche, La Côte-Saint-André, Voiron, and Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, three of them round-towered castles and one an octagonal palace castle.

A possible last Savoyard work is at Châtel-Argent in the Aosta Valley in the summer of 1275. Around 1285 he was appointed master of the king's works in Wales, at a wage of 3 shillings a day, with authority over Conwy, Caernarfon, and Harlech. Harlech, begun in 1283, was effectively finished in 1289. On 3 July 1290 he became constable of Harlech, after John de Bonvillars, who had died in August 1287.

He held that constableship until 14 December 1293. It was Harlech, not Beaumaris. From 1295 Beaumaris was his main charge, and he was often styled master of the works of Beaumaris. His wife was Ambrosia.

No pension to her is recorded after his death, so she probably died before him. Two sons, Giles and Tassin of Saint George, survived him. A statue of him now stands at this castle. He is also described as one of the greatest architects of the European Middle Ages, and this castle as his most perfectly conceived.

The first season was enormous. The early stages are unusually well known because the spending was written on the pipe rolls, the running record of royal expenditure. In the first summer the average workforce was 1,800 workmen, 450 stonemasons, and 375 quarriers. Wages ran at about £270 a week.

The project fell into arrears, and officials issued leather tokens instead of coin. Temporary huts for the workforce filled the centre of the castle over the winter. The next spring James set out what the week required: 400 masons, both cutters and layers; 2,000 less skilled workmen; 100 carts; 60 wagons and 30 boats bringing stone and sea coal; 200 quarrymen; 30 smiths; and carpenters for joists, floorboards, and other jobs. That list left out the garrison and the purchase of materials.

He wrote that the men's pay had been, and still was, badly in arrears, and that the difficulty was keeping them because they had nothing to live on. A comparison offered for the scale of the money, not a modern price, is that a typical baron of the time had an average annual income of about £700. A week of wages at £270 was about a third of that income. The finished spend of £15,000 was about twenty times it.

Work slowed in 1296, though the debts kept growing, and it fell further the next year. It had stopped entirely by 1300, by which time about £11,000 had been spent. The main cause was Edward's new wars in Scotland, which took his attention and his money. James had joined the king in Scotland, probably around September 1298.

In February 1302 he was appointed to oversee new defences at Linlithgow, and he also worked at Stirling during the siege of 1304. The halt left Beaumaris only partly built. The inner walls and towers were only a fraction of their intended height, and the north and north-west sides had no outer defences at all. In 1306 Edward feared a Scottish invasion of North Wales, and the unfinished castle was already in poor repair.

Work began again on the outer defences, first under James and then, after his death in 1309, under Master Nicolas de Derneford. One account says the effort continued almost without a break for thirty-five years and that the original plan was never achieved. Another says the money and the trouble in Scotland made the work peter out by the 1320s. Another says it finally halted in 1330, still short of the intended height, with £15,000 spent.

The inscription of the group of castles says the work at Beaumaris continued until 1331. A separate town guide places the end of the money in the 1290s. A royal survey in 1343 reckoned that at least a further £684 would be needed to finish the castle. That sum was never spent.

Edward I of England died on 7 July 1307 and left his son Edward II a war in Scotland, heavy debts, and this unfinished fortress. When the king died, the duchy of Gascony had been recovered, but the French war had eased the pressure he could put on Scotland.

A. J. Taylor, born Arnold Joseph Taylor in London on 24 July 1911, became the historian of these building accounts. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and at St John's College, Oxford, where he read history, and after a diploma in education he taught at Chard School in Somerset.

In 1935 he joined the Ministry of Works as an assistant inspector of ancient monuments. After wartime service in Royal Air Force intelligence he was appointed inspector of ancient monuments for Wales, with the Edwardian castles of North Wales in his care. In 1953 he wrote the official guidebook to Caernarfon Castle and its town walls, reissued with revisions in 1964. He became assistant chief inspector in 1954 and chief inspector in 1961, and he retired in 1972.

In 1940 he married Patricia Guilbride, and they had a son and a daughter. He died at Compton in Surrey on 24 October 2002, aged 91. He was a freeman of the City of London from 1959, a CBE from 1971, and a Fellow of the British Academy from 1972. He was president of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society from 1971 to 1973 and president of the Society of Antiquaries from 1975 to 1978.

He identified the Savoyard origin of the architect. He called Beaumaris Britain's most perfect example of symmetrical concentric planning. For many years the castle was treated as the peak of military engineering in the reign of Edward I of England. That evolutionary reading is now disputed.

The castle was as much a royal palace and a symbol of English power as it was a fortification. Had it been finished it would probably have looked much like Harlech, though Beaumaris is the more regular of the two.

In 1986 the castle was inscribed, with Conwy, Caernarfon, and Harlech, and with the town walls of Conwy and Caernarfon, as the castles and town walls of King Edward in Gwynedd. The inscribed property of the whole group is 7.27 hectares. The boundary takes in the medieval defensive structures and not the planned towns or the waterfronts. There is no buffer zone.

An essential setting and significant views have been defined for each castle. The inscription calls the four castles the finest examples of late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century military architecture in Europe, for their completeness, their state, the evidence of organised domestic space, and the range of their medieval forms. It calls Beaumaris and Harlech a unique artistic achievement for the way they join a double wall, of the kind characteristic of the late thirteenth century, to a central plan, and for the beauty of their proportions and masonry. It also says that the royal commission is unusually fully documented, including where the workmen came from, the use of quarried stone, the financing, and the daily life of the workmen.

Workmen were brought from all regions of England. Over about the last hundred years the conservation of the group has followed a rule of leaving the fabric as found, with little reconstruction except some late nineteenth-century work at Caernarfon, which is not claimed for Beaumaris. The plans, materials, and parts of the castles are described as largely unaltered. The coastal relationship remains, and the inscription warns of unsympathetic building on the town side and of coastal or offshore development in the setting.

The stone came from within 10 miles, or 16 kilometres, and some of it, including limestone from the quarries at Penmon, was brought along the coast by ship. Limestone, sandstone, and green schist were used fairly randomly in the walls and towers. The use of schist stopped after a pause in the building in 1298, so schist is limited to the lower levels. The design is an inner ward and an outer ward, with a moat around them, now only partly filled.

One description counts four concentric rings, among them a water-filled moat with its own dock. Another describes the moat as fed by the tide. The main entrance was the Gate next the Sea, beside a tidal dock so that ships could supply the castle directly. The dock was protected by a wall later called the Gunners Walk and by a firing platform that may have held a trebuchet in the Middle Ages.

The gate opened into an outer barbican, with a drawbridge, arrow slits, and murder holes, and then into the outer ward.

The outer ward has an eight-sided curtain with twelve turrets. The curtain is said to enclose an area about 60 feet, or 18 metres, across. One gate led back to the Gate next the Sea. The other, the Llanfaes Gate, led out on the north side.

One account says the Llanfaes gate was barely begun before it was abandoned. The outer defences are credited with about 300 firing positions for archers, including 164 arrow slits, and also with 300 arrow loops on the outer walls alone. Sixty-four slits near ground level were later blocked so that an attacker could not use them. The blocking is placed either in the early fifteenth century or during the civil war of the seventeenth century, and the two dates are not resolved.

The outer gate does not line up with the inner gate. Anyone who got through the outer gate had to cross open ground on a predictable path to the right, under fire for the whole of that distance, before reaching the inner gate.

The inner walls are more massive than the outer. They stand 36 feet, or 11 metres, high, and they are 15.5 feet, or 4.7 metres, thick. The same 36 feet is given as the height of the castle. Huge towers and two large gatehouses enclose an inner ward of 0.75 acre, or 0.30 hectare.

One description of that inner court is a square courtyard with round towers at the corners, D-shaped towers along the east and west sides, and twin-towered gatehouses to the north and south, the south gate flanked by the projecting Gunners Walk. Another describes two large D-shaped gatehouses and six massive towers. The inner ward was meant to hold the lodgings. Ranges were planned along the west and east sides, and remains of fireplaces can still be seen in the stonework.

It is uncertain whether those ranges were ever built, or whether they were built and demolished after the civil war. Another account says the intended residential ranges were not begun. If the castle had been finished it could have housed two large households and their followers, for example a king and a queen, or a king, a queen, a prince, and the prince's wife.

The D-shaped north gatehouse of the inner ward was designed to rise two storeys, with two sets of five large windows. Only one floor was completed. It was to contain a hall on the first floor, about 70 feet by 25 feet, or 21 metres by 7.6 metres, divided in two, with a separate fireplace in each part. The south gatehouse was meant to copy the north, but the work got even less far before it ended in 1330, and some of its stone may have been taken away later, lowering it further.

The heritage account says the south gatehouse and the six great towers of the inner ward never reached their intended height, which is why the castle looks squat. The inner walls contain long first-floor passages, like those at Caernarfon, so that people could move between the towers and reach guardrooms, sleeping chambers, and latrines. The latrines were designed to be flushed by water from the moat. The system does not seem to have worked well.

The six towers were meant to be three storeys high and to contain fireplaces. The castle chapel was built into one of the towers and was for the king and his family, not for the wider garrison. The towers and the gates of the inner ward are also described as simply lacking their upper storeys.

In 1400 a revolt against English rule broke out in North Wales under Owain Glyndŵr, also Owain ap Gruffudd Fychan. He was born in or before 1359, the son of Gruffudd Fychan and Elen ferch Tomas. His father's line went back to an earlier Gruffudd Fychan, a younger brother of the last lord of northern Powys, and ultimately to Madog ap Maredudd. On 16 September 1400 his supporters acclaimed him Prince of Wales.

A dispute with his English neighbour Reginald de Grey was the immediate quarrel, inside a wider hostility between Welsh and English in Wales. Penal laws against the Welsh followed the rising and widened support for him. Between 1404 and 1405 the rebellion controlled the whole country. In 1404 he held a parliament at Machynlleth, with envoys from France, Scotland, and the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and with people from every region of Wales.

France, Brittany, and Scotland gave military aid. In the Pennal Letter of 1406 he wrote of two universities, one in the north and one in the south, of restoring the laws of Hywel Dda, and of pushing the border of Wales into England. English pressure and the lack of lasting foreign help then took the territory back. By 1409 the last rebel castles, Harlech and Aberystwyth, had fallen to English forces.

He refused two royal pardons, went on with a scattered resistance until he disappears from the record in 1412, and is thought to have died in hiding around 1416. He was never captured. In Welsh tradition he became a folk hero, set beside Cadwaladr, Cynon ap Clydno, and Arthur, and he appears in the play Henry IV, Part 1, under the name Owen Glendower. Those later castles and that death are not events inside Beaumaris.

What happened here is narrower. The castle was besieged and taken by the rebels in 1403, and royal forces took it back in 1405. One account says the rebels held it for two years. The town, as well as the castle, was in insurgent hands for those two years between 1403 and 1405.

The townspeople had already petitioned Edward II for a wall. The plea was refused. After the occupation, in 1407, the town was given £10 toward a bank and ditch around the settlement. Those earthworks were judged ineffective against Scots and Welsh rebels, and in 1414 a stone town wall was built.

One national record dates the walling to the years 1407 to 1414 and attributes it to stresses which that record places in the opening years of the thirteenth century. The excavation account ties the same years to the aftermath of 1403 to 1405. The wall was kept up while foreign attack and piracy were feared. In the 1530s and 1540s stone was brought from local quarries and from Penmon Priory to repair it.

From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, stone and lime still had to be bought for repairs. As housing grew in the nineteenth century the wall was taken down piece by piece to make room. Coastal erosion has removed the south-eastern part of the original town. The ditch, about 550 metres long, enclosed roughly the same area as the wall.

It was recut when the wall was built, and at least once more after about 1600.

The castle's own later Middle Ages are described in two ways. One account says it was maintained throughout the medieval period. Another says it was ill kept and falling into disrepair, and that by 1534, when Roland de Velville was constable, rain leaked into most of the rooms. In 1539 a report found an armoury of only eight or ten small guns and forty bows.

The new constable, Richard Bulkeley, thought that store useless against a possible Scottish attack. By 1609 the castle was classed as utterly decayed. The Laws in Wales Acts, which brought Wales into the English legal kingdom, fall in the same Tudor decades as that decay. They were not passed in this building.

Strict trade rules attached to the new town, together with the site, are credited with making Beaumaris the financial and shipping centre of Anglesey up to the seventeenth century. The record does not set out the text of those rules.

In March 1592 the Welsh Roman Catholic priest remembered as William Davies (priest) was held in the castle, and on 27 July 1593 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered there. He died at about 37 or 38 if a birth around 1555 is right. His birthplace is given as North Wales, probably Croes yn Eirias in Denbighshire, the old name for the ground between Llanelian and Colwyn Bay, now in Conwy. A former student, William Robins, later said Davies was born into the Welsh nobility.

A legal paper of 1596 names his father as Syr William Dai and his paternal grandfather as the harpist Dafydd Nantglyn, winner of the silver harp at the Caerwys eisteddfod of 1523. The Exchequer rolls, by contrast, describe the father as neither a gentleman nor a yeoman. The father was not a Catholic. The names of the mother, Katherina Jevans, and of a sister, Elena Davies, appear on the recusant rolls of 1587 to 1588 for the parish of Llandrillo-yn-Rhos.

Davies reached Douai on 6 April 1582, in time to serve at the first Mass of Nicholas Garlick. He received the tonsure and minor orders on 23 September 1583, with seventy-three other students from England and Wales. He was ordained on 5 April 1585, and on 6 June 1585 he went back to Wales as an outlawed missionary.

Under the covert protection of Robert Puw of Penrhyn Hall, who died in 1629, a recusant gentleman of the Creuddyn peninsula and grandfather of the poet Gwilym Puw, Davies made the manor an underground school. The ruined medieval chapel of the Virgin on that estate was used as the seminary chapel when it could be. After Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, replaced Sir Henry Sidney as lord president of the Council in the Marches, a harder pursuit of Catholics followed. Pembroke was charged by Elizabeth on 15 September 1586 to enforce the laws with rigour.

From about August 1586 until 14 April 1587 Davies was one of eight men hiding in a cave at the Little Orme, between Llandudno and Penrhyn Bay. There he and Puw printed a run of the banned book Y Drych Cristianogawl, a short essay on the love of God by the exiled priest Gruffydd Robert, taken to be the first book of Welsh literature printed in Wales. For safety, the printed title names Rouen as the place of printing. Sir Thomas Mostyn of Gloddaith and other priest-hunters later raided the cave and took the altar and the press.

On 15 March 1592 Davies was arrested at Holyhead with four students from the Penrhyn school, whom he was sending by way of Ireland to the English College at Valladolid. A Protestant named Foulk Thomas instigated the arrests. Local Catholics tried to intervene, and Robert Puw, who was on the same errand, escaped. Davies was taken to Beaumaris the next day and questioned by Hugh Bellot, bishop of Bangor.

He confessed that he was a priest. He refused the Oath of Supremacy and refused to name anyone who had helped him or received the sacraments from him. He was separated from the students and put in a dark and stinking dungeon. After a month he was allowed to see each of them for an hour a day, and even to say Mass.

The jailer, treating them as prisoners for religion rather than as ordinary criminals, was lax enough that they might have escaped. Catholics came to consult him, and Protestant ministers came to argue with him. He was then sent to Ludlow, and from there to Bewdley, where he shared a prison with felons, and on to other jails. He was brought back to Beaumaris and lived with the young men for about six months as a small religious household, dividing the time between prayer and study.

Robert Puw wanted to rescue him. Davies refused, because the attempt would have needed violence. It is thought that in this stretch of imprisonment he composed a surviving Welsh poem, Carol Santaidd i'r Grawys, a holy carol for Lent.

At the summer assizes it was decided that he must die as a traitor. He was offered his life if he would once go to church, and he refused. No local person would act as executioner, so a butcher was brought from Chester and paid 40 shillings. On 27 July 1593 he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at the castle.

Before he climbed the ladder the deputy sheriff asked what he thought of the queen. He answered by wishing her a long and prosperous reign and the grace to die a member of the Catholic Church. On the ladder he called Anglesey the dark island, said the name had never fitted better, and asked that the blood he was about to shed might light again a faith the island had received more than a thousand years before. One account adds that he kissed the rope and said that the Lord's yoke was sweet and the burden light.

He was interrupted, and he said three times, in Latin, that he commended his spirit into the Lord's hands. He was then turned off the ladder. One account, given under the name of John Bennett, says he was allowed to die on the gallows before he was cut down, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. Another, from Diego de Yepez, says he was cut down and disembowelled while he was still alive.

His head and two quarters were spiked on Beaumaris Castle. One quarter was displayed at Conwy. The last was displayed either at Caernarfon or at Caus Castle in Shropshire. The four students were convicted of felony for having been taken with a priest and were condemned to prison for life.

They later escaped. The youngest, William Robins, reached Valladolid and told the story to Yepez. The executioner sold the bloodstained cassock, the bloodstained tools, and the table Davies had used as an altar in prison back to the four young men, and they kept them as relics. John Edwards of Plas Newydd dipped a handkerchief in the blood.

Robert Puw obtained the severed hand, which the Puw family kept for generations. Davies was beatified on 22 November 1987 by Pope John Paul II, among the eighty-five martyrs of England and Wales. His feast days are 27 July and 22 November. A fibreglass relief of the martyrdom stands at the west end of the nave of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, a Catholic church in the town, not a fitting of the castle.

The English Civil War began in 1642 between the supporters of Charles I of England and the supporters of Parliament. Charles I of England was born at Dunfermline Palace on 19 November 1600, the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, and he was baptised on 23 December 1600. He became heir in 1612 when his elder brother Henry Frederick died, and he was king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution on 30 January 1649. He married Henrietta Maria of France, quarrelled with Parliament, and held to the divine right of kings.

From 1642 he fought the armies of the English and Scottish parliaments. He was defeated in 1645 by the New Model Army, fled from his base at Oxford, surrendered to a Scottish force, and was handed to the Long Parliament. He escaped in November 1647, was held again on the Isle of Wight, and was tried and executed for high treason in January 1649. None of those scenes is placed at Beaumaris.

What the castle controlled was part of the route between his bases in Ireland and his operations in England.

Thomas Bulkeley, whose family had managed the castle for several centuries, held Beaumaris for the king and may have spent about £3,000 on the defences. A rich man of that time, Henry Somerset, had an annual income of about £20,000, which is the contemporary scale offered for the sum. Later conversions of the £3,000 into 2011 values run from £406,000 to £86,000,000, depending on the measure, so the seventeenth-century figure is the one the records actually give. One account says the Bulkeleys defended the castle for the king for three years.

Another says that by 1646 Parliament had beaten the royal armies and that Colonel Richard Bulkeley surrendered the castle in June of that year. A monument record says the castle was put in order and garrisoned in the war but does not seem to have been maintained after the surrender of 1646. Anglesey rose against Parliament again in 1648, royalists briefly reoccupied Beaumaris, and the castle surrendered a second time in October 1648. That second surrender belongs to the renewed war, and it came before the king was executed.

Many castles were then slighted, which means deliberately ruined so that they could not be held. Parliament feared a royalist landing from Scotland and spared Beaumaris. Colonel John Jones became governor, and a garrison was kept at a cost of £1,703 a year. When Charles II was restored in 1660 the Bulkeleys were restored as constables.

The castle appears then to have been stripped of its lead, its roofs, and what else of value remained. It fell into ruin around 1660.

Thomas Bulkeley, 7th Viscount Bulkeley, bought the castle from the Crown in 1807 for £735 and took it into the park of his house at Baron Hill. A later conversion of that price into 2011 values spreads from £56,000 to £2,600,000, again according to the measure. By then the castles of North Wales drew painters and travellers who liked ivy-covered ruins. Beaumaris was part of that fashion, though less visited than other places in the region.

One nineteenth-century visitor found the moat silted up and the walls largely overgrown with vines. Another speaks of ivy. In 1828 the German prince Hermann von Puckler-Muskau recorded a visit in which the chambers inside the gate tower and the chapel were in good repair, and in which he objected to a tennis court that the Bulkeleys had laid out on the lawn of the castle yard. The future Queen Victoria came in 1832 for an eisteddfod.

J. M. W. Turner painted the castle in 1835.

Some of its stone may have been reused in 1829 to build the Beaumaris Gaol, which is a separate building in the town. The town had its own courthouse and prison, was a leading Welsh port in the late eighteenth century, and was the administrative centre of Anglesey until that centre moved to Llangefni. It began to lose the through traffic to Ireland when the Menai Suspension Bridge opened, and from the middle of the nineteenth century it was a seaside resort. Those are changes in the town around the castle, not works inside the walls.

In 1925 Sir Richard Williams-Bulkeley, 12th Baronet, kept the freehold and placed the castle in the care of the Commissioners of Works. A large repair followed. Vegetation was stripped, the moat was dug out, and the stonework was mended. One record says the castle was returned to state care in that year, that there has been some partial demolition in places, and that the building remains largely intact.

In 1950 it was designated a Grade I listed building, the grade used for buildings of exceptional, usually national, interest, and it is also a scheduled ancient monument. No date of the first scheduling is stated in the accounts read here. In the financial year 2007 to 2008 it drew 75,000 visitors. Repairs cost £58,000 in the financial year 2002 to 2003.

Those figures are for those years, not a claim about the present crowd or the present bill.

In October 2015 an evaluation trench was cut for a proposed flood culvert, 385 metres long and 1,050 millimetres across, which was to run to the north, the east, and the south of the castle, across a field, a playground, and an open parking space, and then to the coast. The trench was on the east side, where the moat is no longer visible above ground, on ground then used as a playground and a putting green. The written grid of that evaluation is SH 60787 7622. The castle itself is recorded at SH 60723 76245.

The trench found the moat and its fills at 1.1 metres below the surface, with the edge 20 metres from the curtain wall. The edge was clear, falling at 45 degrees to the vertical, then levelling after 0.9 metres, with a slight slope on toward the middle. The base was not reached in the open trench, because the safe depth stopped at 2 metres. An auger showed a flat bottom between 2.34 and 2.46 metres below the ground.

A specialist note in the same evaluation places that floor between 2.34 and 2.46 metres above ordnance datum, and also says the base stood at 2.34 metres above ordnance datum, beside a modern tidal range of more than 6 metres. Those two uses of the same numbers are not the same measurement, and both are left as the evaluation states them.

Seven fills, read as natural silting, lay between 1.1 and 2.0 metres down. They were sealed by 0.90 metres of subsoil and then by topsoil. A cut for a ceramic drain, probably of the nineteenth century, truncated the fills and was itself sealed by the subsoil, which may have been soil laid down in later landscaping. Further ceramic pipes cut that subsoil.

No dateable object and no animal bone came from the moat fill. A one-litre subsample of the deposits did hold plant detritus, moss, seeds, insect fragments, shells, and fish bone. The scan of that sample noted a marine element, including tellins identified as probably Scorbicularia plana, foraminifera, cockle shell, and Hydrobia ulvae, a snail of estuaries and saltmarsh, together with midge larvae that suggest fresh water. The auger and the core are said to show that the moat held both fresh water and sea water at different times, and that it would have been tidal if it was joined to the sea.

Earlier work on the ostracods, used by this evaluation, read the basal sediments at 2.6 to 2.15 metres as fresh to slightly brackish, the band from 2.15 to 1.3 metres as brackish or marine and therefore linked to the Menai Strait, and the upper sediments as less salty, which was read as a later break from the strait. One reading says this eastern length of moat was probably dug between 1316 and 1321, after the outer curtain. Another says the digging of the moat was still going on in 1312 to 1315, and that during construction, before any sea connection, rain would almost certainly have flooded it from time to time. The same note doubts that rain alone explains as much as half a metre of the fresh or slightly brackish basal fill.

The visible moat that was cleared in 1925 is not this buried eastern stretch.

A separate excavation, from 2018 to 2023, was not inside the castle. It was on the site of the former social club on Steeple Lane, for the Isle of Anglesey county council, during work that included a plan for flats. The club stood in a range built between 1800 and 1826. A map of that time shows town wall along the back of the property.

A rear extension of the 1970s was thought to have destroyed that fragment. When the extension came down, two stretches of wall were still standing on either side of its footprint. One was 9.5 metres long, up to 4.6 metres high, and up to 2.5 metres thick. The base lay about 1.3 metres below the present ground.

The 1970s work had cut the outer face and bitten into the core, and tree roots had disturbed it. The wall was of the same mix seen at the castle, mostly limestone, with sandstone and schist in the facing around a rubble core. A patch of the north-east face had been pointed with rough lime mortar, perhaps a later repair. Against the masonry, and sealed by the 1970s building, was a dump about 9.5 by 10.5 metres and about 1.3 metres deep, full of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century glass and stoneware soda bottles.

Thirty-one soft-drink bottles were recovered, 26 of glass and five of stoneware, from six firms, many of them in Liverpool. A metal sign advertising Sunlight Soap lay near the glass. The dump may belong to the making of Margaret Street in the late 1800s, or to the open ground being used as a tip, and the number of bottles suggests a grocer or a public house. Drinking houses are known on or near Steeple Lane at that time.

A second piece of the same wall rose toward the church.

Along the Steeple Lane frontage the town ditch survived about a metre under the street, for about 16 metres, and it was at least 1.5 metres deep, with its full width running beyond the trench. Five slots found at least two recuts. The latest held material of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The objects in the ditch run from the thirteenth century to the late eighteenth, which fits repeated recutting and the rubbish of the neighbourhood before the houses of about 1800.

News of the same dig called the wall and ditch a find of national significance, dated them to the early 1400s and to the era of Owain Glyndŵr, and listed domestic and trade waste, animal bone, medieval pottery, tile, glass and ceramic bottles, stone pot lids, and sharpening and burnishing stones. Those objects, and the wall itself, belong to the town defences and to the later life of Steeple Lane. They are not a new assemblage from the castle wards. The castle's own recent ground evidence remains the 2015 section through the buried eastern moat, which produced no dateable artefact.

What the place was for is written in the plan and in the way it was paid for. It was a royal fortress and a palace that was meant to hold two households, planted in the corner of a new English borough after the Welsh town of Llanfaes had been moved away. It guarded a crossing toward Ireland and a coast that Edward I of England had decided to hold for good after the Conquest of Wales by Edward I of England, and after Madog ap Llywelyn had shown that the earlier castles could be taken. The stake was the permanence of that conquest.

The change was a new town, a new mayor who was the constable, and a castle whose symmetry was never given its full height. It was later a prison for a priest, a royalist hold in two surrenders, a ruin in a private park, and then a monument in public care. The walls still show the pause of 1298 in the change of stone, the missing upper floors, and the gate that forces a right-hand crossing of open ground. The eastern moat, where it was cut in 2015, shows silting, a nineteenth-century drain, and water that was fresh and salt at different times.

No source read for this history states a new object found inside the wards in the last few years.