Carmarthen Castle

Carmarthen Castle, Castell Caerfyrddin in Welsh, is a ruined royal castle in the county town of Carmarthen in south-west Wales. It stands about 20 metres, or 66 feet, above sea level on a high terrace above the tidal River Towy, also written Tywi, at what was the lowest bridging point, 11 miles or 18 kilometres from the sea. The river was navigable to this bluff, so a garrison and the town that grew outside the gates could be supplied by sea. The streets and property boundaries of the later town still run out from the site.

What a visitor meets today is only a fraction of a castle that once covered nearly a hectare, the whole ground now taken by County Hall, but the motte and the gatehouse still force the streets to twist around them, and the southern towers still rise above the river.

The Welsh name is pleonastic. In Castell Caerfyrddin, caer means fort, and fyrddin is thought to come from the Latin Moridunum, sea fort, so the full name stacks fort, sea-fort, and castle. Carmarthen’s origins are older than the Middle Ages. The Roman town of Moridunum is the reason the place is called the oldest town in Wales.

In the late twelfth century, stretches of the Roman city’s walls were still standing a little to the east of the medieval town. The castle is a separate work from that Roman fort, planted on the bluff as a Norman foothold.

An earlier castle stood 1.4 kilometres, about 0.87 miles, south of the present site at Rhyd-y-gors. William FitzBaldwin of Devon built it for King William II, probably after the local Welsh king Rhys ap Tewdwr was killed in 1093. That fort is last mentioned in 1106. Pembroke Castle had been established in 1102.

The move to the bluff at Carmarthen belongs to the next reign.

The first castle on the present site is dated to 1104, to about 1106, and to 1109. It is ascribed to Walter of Gloucester, also called Walter, Sheriff of Gloucester. One reading of the same years is that the castle had already been built when Walter was recorded in 1109 as being sent to defend Carmarthen. Another account says King Henry I ordered it about 1106, to put royal authority over both the Norman barons, whose invasion of Wales had been a series of private campaigns, and the Welsh princes.

A further notice simply says Henry I built a motte-and-bailey with timber defences. For many years this was the only royal castle in Wales. The country around it, Ystrad Tywi, was held by a Welsh dynasty with its own kings. For the Norman kings it was a volatile frontier.

Very little is known of the first plan. It was a motte and bailey of timber, and two baileys may have been there from the start. The motte that survives in the north-west corner was thrown up about 1106. It is more than 10 metres high and about 30 metres across, and it is entirely artificial, cast up from the surrounding ditch.

Deep ditches enclosed both baileys and the motte, except on the south, where the ground falls steeply to the river. Those ditches have long been filled. A town of merchants and artisans had been established outside the gates by 1116, encouraged by licences to trade. A small lordship had been formed around the castle by 1130.

The defences may have stayed largely of timber until the 1230s.

Gruffydd ap Rhys, also written Gruffudd ap Rhys, was prince of Deheubarth and the son of Rhys ap Tewdwr. He was born about 1090 at Llandeilo. After his father’s death in 1093 the Normans took Deheubarth, and he spent much of his youth in exile in Ireland. He returned to south Wales in 1113 and spent two years gathering support.

In 1115 Henry I accused him of stirring revolt. Gruffudd ap Cynan of Gwynedd planned to kill him for a reward, but his sister Nest ferch Rhys warned him and he escaped to Llŷn. He married Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd, daughter of Gruffudd ap Cynan, shortly after 1116. The story is that the two eloped.

Around 1116 Gruffydd ap Rhys took Carmarthen Castle in a night attack, even though the Normans had arranged for local chieftains to defend it in a rotation of two weeks at a time. He dismantled the castle and plundered the town. The same year is given for a wider raid in which he failed at Llandovery, broke the outer walls of Swansea Castle, and captured Carmarthen, with Kidwelly taken either in 1116 or in 1114. Another account says the attack on Carmarthen in 1116 was unsuccessful.

The timber castle is also said to have been burnt by the Welsh in 1116. In 1122 he made peace with Henry I and was allowed the Cantref Mawr, a portion of his father’s kingdom, but in 1127 Norman pressure drove him to Ireland again.

In 1136 he refused a summons from King Stephen and joined his brothers-in-law Owain Gwynedd and Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd in rebellion. While he was away, Gwenllian led his men against Maurice de Londres, was defeated, captured, and beheaded. Their son Morgan was killed and their son Maelgwn was captured. Gruffydd ap Rhys attacked the English and Fleming settlers of south Wales in revenge.

He died in 1137, still campaigning. Owain Gwynedd destroyed Carmarthen Castle in 1137. The castle is also said to have been taken that year and held by the Welsh. It was destroyed again in 1143.

It was briefly recaptured in 1144.

The castle was rebuilt in 1145 by Gilbert fitz Richard, Earl of Pembroke. The same rebuilding is also given to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, who then began a campaign to recover Ceredigion and built a castle in the commote of Mabudryd. Cadell ap Gruffydd, also written Cadell ap Gruffudd, was a son of Gruffydd ap Rhys and prince of Deheubarth. His brother Anarawd had taken the throne when their father died in 1137.

Cadell first appears the next year, helping Anarawd, Owain Gwynedd, and Cadwaladr in an assault on Cardigan Castle. In 1143 Anarawd was murdered by Cadwaladr’s men, and Cadell became prince. In 1146 he and Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd destroyed Gilbert’s new castle in Mabudryd. In 1146 Cadell captured Carmarthen, repaired it, and kept it for several years, and he took Llansteffan.

His young half-brother Rhys appears in the annals that year, fighting beside Cadell and Maredudd at the assault on Llansteffan. Another account says Carmarthen was re-captured in 1146 and strengthened by Cadell ap Gruffydd in 1150. A further account places the capture of Carmarthen in 1150, after Wiston in 1147 and before Loughor in 1151.

Cadell’s career was effectively ended when, out hunting, he was attacked by a Norman force from Tenby and left for dead. That attack is placed in 1150 and in 1151. He survived, too badly injured to resume the work. In 1153 he went on pilgrimage to Rome and left Deheubarth to his younger brothers Maredudd and Rhys.

He is not heard of again until 1175, when he entered Strata Florida Abbey after a long illness and died there. The castle was back in Norman hands by 1159.

Rhys ap Gruffydd, also written Rhys ap Gruffudd and called the Lord Rhys, was born about 1132 and died on 28 April 1197. He was the fourth son of Gruffydd ap Rhys and Gwenllian, with older half-brothers Anarawd and Cadell. He ruled Deheubarth from 1155 to 1197 and, in two surviving charters, called himself prince of Wales or prince of the Welsh. He was forced to submit to Henry II in 1158.

In 1163 Henry invaded, stripped him of his lands, and imprisoned him. Released within weeks with a small part of his holdings, he allied with Owain Gwynedd. After Henry’s invasion of 1165 failed, Rhys won back most of his lands. In 1159, while the king was in France, Rhys attacked Dyfed and besieged Carmarthen.

A relief force under Earl Reginald of Cornwall saved the castle. Rhys fell back to Cantref Mawr, where five earls marched against him. In 1171 he made peace with Henry II, was confirmed in his recent conquests, and was named Justiciar of South Wales. He kept good relations with Henry until the king’s death in 1189, founded Talley Abbey for the Premonstratensians and the nunnery of Llanllyr, and patronised Whitland and Strata Florida.

In 1188 he helped Archbishop Baldwin’s recruiting journey for the Third Crusade and prepared to go himself, then was persuaded to stay by his wife Gwenllian ferch Madog.

After Henry II’s death, Rhys ap Gruffydd revolted against Richard I and attacked the Norman lordships around him. His sons, particularly Maelgwn and Gruffudd, feuded with each other. In 1195 Rhys Gryg and Maredudd seized Llandovery and Dinefwr, and Rhys imprisoned them. The castle at Carmarthen is said to have resisted the Lord Rhys in 1190 and in 1196, and those years are tied to a first rebuilding in stone after the castle had returned to English royal control.

His brother, in one account, captured and destroyed the castle in 1195. His own last campaign, in 1196, captured Carmarthen, Colwyn, Radnor, and Painscastle, and defeated Roger de Mortimer and Hugh de Say near Radnor, with forty knights among the dead. He died unexpectedly the next year and was buried in St Davids Cathedral. By the time of that death, in 1197, only the castles of Carmarthen and Pembroke are said to have remained in Norman hands, after he had taken lordship after lordship through the late twelfth century and become the acknowledged ruler of south-west Wales.

The question of when the castle became a stone fortress is answered in several ways. One account places a stone rebuild in the later twelfth century, and the short history says it was rebuilt in stone during the 1190s. The resistance to the Lord Rhys in 1190 and 1196 is offered as the moment of that first stone work. The first recorded royal spending is £170 in 1181–3, under Henry II, a large sum for the time, and it may mark some building in stone.

Excavation on the motte found the footings of a round tower in the middle of the mound, earlier than the shell keep, and those footings may belong to that spending in the 1180s. Yet when the Welsh took the castle in 1215 they razed it to the ground, which suggests that it was still mainly of timber. A scheduled-monument account says the first masonry castle may have been built when the castle was recaptured in 1223. Another account says it was rebuilt in stone soon after that recapture, with the stone walls probably begun by Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, and perhaps complete by 1233, when the town wall was begun.

A tourism notice places the conversion to a stone fortress in the thirteenth century. Later documents speak of the five towers of the inner bailey, which may include the surviving south-west tower and the shell keep on the motte.

Llywelyn the Great, also Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and Llywelyn Fawr, was prince of Gwynedd from 1199 until his death on 11 April 1240. He was born in 1173. His reign turned Gwynedd from a land exhausted by thirty years of civil war into a polity that could claim suzerainty over most other native Welsh rulers. The English crown recognised his status, but he struggled to hold his vassals and to secure the succession of his chosen heir, Dafydd ap Llywelyn, son of his wife Joan, a daughter of King John.

In 1212 an invasion John had planned against Gwynedd was abandoned after warnings from Joan and from William the Lion of Scotland. In 1213 Llywelyn took Deganwy and Rhuddlan. He allied with Philip II Augustus of France and with the barons who forced John to seal Magna Carta, captured Shrewsbury without resistance in 1215, and was rewarded with provisions for Wales, including the release of his son Gruffudd. In December 1215 he led an army that included all the lesser princes and captured the castles of Carmarthen, Kidwelly, Llansteffan, Cardigan, and Cilgerran.

He destroyed Narberth and Wiston, burnt Haverfordwest, and threatened Pembroke Castle, leaving that attack on payment of £100. At Carmarthen the castle was razed. The Welsh, united under him, held it until 1223.

In 1218 the Treaty of Worcester with the new king, Henry III, confirmed Llywelyn the Great in his recent conquests. He was careful not to provoke the crown without need. In 1220 he made Rhys Gryg return four commotes in south Wales to their previous Anglo-Norman owners, and he fought William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Between about 1220 and 1230 he built stone castles at Criccieth, Deganwy, Dolbadarn, Dolwyddelan, and Castell y Bere, among the first sophisticated stone castles in Wales.

In early 1223 he crossed into Shropshire and took Kinnerley and Whittington. The Marshals used his absence. In April 1223 they landed near St Davids with an army raised in Ireland and recaptured Cardigan and Carmarthen without opposition. A royal army took Montgomery, and in October 1223 Llywelyn came to terms with the king there, gave up his Shropshire conquests, and saw his south Welsh allies restored to lands the Marshals had taken.

The man who took Carmarthen in 1223 is named William Marshal the younger, William Marshall the younger, and William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke from 1219 to 1231, the 2nd Earl. He held the castle from 1223 to 1226, an adviser of Henry III with vast Welsh estates, and after some repairs he returned it to royal hands in 1226. His brother Gilbert Marshal held it from 1234 to 1241. Henry III then released control to a succession of royal favourites, including the Marshal earls and Hubert de Burgh.

The castle became again the centre of royal strategy in south Wales, and the Welsh took it only once more, nearly two hundred years later.

Richard Marshal, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was born about 1191 and died on 15 April 1234. He was the second son of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, and of Countess Isabel, and the brother of William Marshal the younger, born in 1190. He was educated in the liberal arts. During his father’s quarrel with King John in 1207 or 1208 he was taken as a hostage, demanded again in 1212, knighted by John, and taken on the Poitou expedition of 1214, where he fell seriously ill.

After the Barons’ War he crossed to France. When his father died in 1219 he was in the household of Philip II Augustus, intended for his mother’s Norman lands. Those lands, centred on Longueville and Orbec, came to him after her death in March 1220, together with the English lordship of Long Crendon. In June 1220 he and his brother met Philip at Melun, and the king took his homage.

Around 1222 he married the twice-widowed Gervasia de Dinan. In 1230, on campaign in Brittany, his brother extracted a promise from Henry III that the king would not resist Richard’s succession. William died childless on 6 April 1231. Richard arrived in England on 25 July 1231 and was received at court.

His brother’s death cleared a path for Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, to bring down the justiciar Hubert de Burgh. In 1233 one of the bishop’s first victims was Gilbert Basset. Richard Marshal, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, sheltered him in the southern March. Hesitant at first, the earl then committed himself.

He allied with Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, his family’s old enemy. In 1231 Llywelyn, worried by Hubert de Burgh’s power, had burnt Montgomery and other Marcher towns, taken Neath and Kidwelly, and recaptured Cardigan. Hubert was removed in 1232, and much of his power, including several south Welsh castles, passed to Peter de Rivaux. In mid-October 1233, with Welsh support, Richard’s army swept south Wales and took Usk, Abergavenny, Newport, and Cardiff in quick succession.

A separate account of the end of 1233 says that he, Rhys Gryg, Maelgwn Fychan, and Owain ap Gruffudd besieged Carmarthen for three months. Another wording of that gathering names Maelgwn Fychan ap Maelgwn ap Rhys, Owain ap Gruffudd, Rhys Gryg and their sons, the host of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, and the host of the earl of Pembroke. They built a bridge on the Tywi and, for a time, shut off relief from the Bristol Channel. A further account says the castle withstood a three-month siege by Llywelyn in 1233.

In March 1234 Henry de Turberville sailed from Bristol with the tide, broke the improvised bridge, and killed many of its defenders. The Welsh withdrew. The town wall is said to have been begun in the same year, 1233, by which time the castle’s own stone walls may have been complete. The earl sailed for Ireland on 2 February 1234, before that March relief.

On 1 April 1234 he reached the siege lines on the Curragh with a small column of cavalry, was cut off, unhorsed, and fatally wounded. He died of those injuries on 15 April 1234 and was buried in the Franciscan friary at Kilkenny. His brother Gilbert, then a clergyman, succeeded him. Gervasia, childless by Richard, died in 1238 or 1239.

Henry III reclaimed Carmarthen Castle in 1241, and from then the crown kept it in direct control. On his orders a new suite of lodgings was built, including the King’s Hall and the King’s Chamber. The King’s Chamber is mentioned in 1250 as a private retiring room. Further domestic buildings appear in the documents.

The castle was not captured when the town was pillaged in 1244 and in 1246, during a new wave of Welsh attacks under Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, grandson of Llywelyn the Great and the last independent prince of Wales. In 1248 the castle was given to the custody of Robert Waleran, who added a hall and a chamber. In 1257 Henry III sent an army from the castle to recover the surrounding territory. On 2 June 1257, at Coed Llathen near Llandeilo, also written Coed Lathen, that army met a Welsh force led by Maredudd, grandson of the Lord Rhys.

The English lost more than 2,000 men, including their leader Stephen Bauzan. One notice calls it a massacre of an English army from Carmarthen. Field names around the battlefield include the Field of Death, the Field of Vengeance, the Field of Groans, and the Place of Shouting. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was recognised as Prince of Wales.

Carmarthen stayed in the king’s hands, but the country around it did not. In 1258 the castle was bestowed on Prince Edward, later Edward I.

A survey of 1275 described a great tower, five small towers, a hall, a kitchen, a stable, and a chapel, all inside a stone wall with one gate, and all in need of repair. Edward I was crowned in 1272. In 1276–7 he launched a three-pronged attack on Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and the southern campaign was waged from Carmarthen Castle. South-west Wales was brought under English control and Llywelyn’s power was badly weakened.

In the war of 1282–3 the castle was again the headquarters of the English armies in south Wales. Robert Tibetot, the king’s lieutenant, led the royal forces up the Tywi valley and was defeated near Llandeilo, but Llywelyn was killed soon afterwards at Cilmeri in mid Wales and Welsh resistance collapsed. The local dynasty, which under the Lord Rhys and his grandson Maredudd had held its lands for nearly two hundred years, lost the whole region to Edward. From 1284 the land was reorganised as the county of Carmarthenshire, smaller than the present county, administered from the castle.

The castle had long been a centre of government, law, and economic administration for the lordship of Carmarthen. Many surrounding Norman lordships were subject to its courts. A custodian appointed by the king lived there. After the defeat of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1283, Edward made Carmarthen Castle the centre of government for the whole of south Wales, as Caernarfon Castle was for the north.

A resident justiciar acted as the king’s deputy. Financial business belonged to a chamberlain, whose exchequer was in the castle. Military business belonged to the constable. A sheriff was added for the new county.

The appointment of Bogo de Knovill as Justiciar of South Wales is dated 1280. Robert Tibetot, also written Robert de Tibetot, is named Justiciar of south and west Wales from 1281 to 1298. He was a Gascon, a companion of Edward I, and had gone with the king on the crusade of 1270–1272. Early justiciars were usually soldiers.

Later the post was a reward for service, or a grant to a favourite such as Roger Mortimer, who afterwards turned on Edward II and had a part in that king’s death. Some deputies in the fourteenth century came from local Welsh families. Chamberlains were clerks of the royal household, or local dignitaries such as the prior of Carmarthen.

One last local rising was put down from the castle in 1287. Rhys ap Maredudd, son of Maredudd ap Rhys, had been allowed to keep Dryslwyn Castle but was under Tibetot’s control. He attacked Carmarthen, burning it to the gates, and failed to take the castle. A large force drawn from England and Wales gathered at Carmarthen, besieged Dryslwyn, and in the end captured and executed Rhys, called the last prince of south-west Wales.

The castle was repaired in 1288 for £169 15s 3d, also given as £169.76. In 1283–84 a large area of woodland in the Tywi and Cothi valleys, formerly Welsh, was deliberately clear-felled as a security measure. From the late thirteenth century those forests also supplied the timber unloaded at the quay.

Through the fourteenth century the castle was repaired and enlarged with royal and administrative rooms. The list includes the king’s hall and chambers, the king’s chapel, the queen’s apartments, the chamberlain’s hall, a chapel for knights and esquires, exchequer offices, kitchens, a granary, a wine cellar, an armoury, and stables. The chamberlain’s hall was repaired in 1340. A wine cellar was made under the hall in 1355.

Another hall had been added by 1370. A gate and a chamber between the two wards were complete by 1394. The Black Prince received the lordship in 1343 and visited in 1351, 1362, and 1370. Richard II stayed in 1399 on his way to and from Ireland, shortly before his deposition.

Kings rarely came. Edward I stayed several times and, after one visit, began a large building campaign: courthouses and offices, kitchens, and stables. The outer bailey may have been walled in stone in this period. A new bridge to the gatehouse, with a barbican, had been added by 1317.

The south curtain, built without footings on a steep slope, collapsed and was rebuilt in an almost constant cycle recorded in the medieval documents. Strengthening continued, and a new gatehouse and turrets were added to the outer bailey. Some of the work may answer French invasion scares in the Hundred Years’ War, notably in 1338, 1359, 1367, and 1385, when the castle, like most British castles, was garrisoned and munitioned. The invasion did not come.

Expenditure on painted hangings is noted for 1435–7.

The household was a crowd. Officials, their families, deputies, bailiffs, and clerks were supported by servants, cooks, masons, carpenters, and grooms, and the residents included many women and children. In a crisis, soldiers were added. Nobody has left a count of how many people lived there at one time.

In the early years everyone ate, drank, and slept in the Great Hall, the King’s Hall of the documents. Privacy grew later. By the early fourteenth century there was a hall and a chamber for the knights and their attendants, and a queen’s chamber. The justiciar and the chamberlain each had a mansion inside the castle, with its own kitchen and stables.

The constable’s rooms were over the gatehouse. Later notices name the janitor’s house and the chamber of Jenkin Maredudd. Beside the lodgings stood the main stables, more kitchens, an armoury, a bakehouse, wine cellars, workshops, and at least two chapels. There can have been very little open ground inside the walls.

The household drank large quantities of French wine brought by sea. Lead and iron came by sea as well. Building stone was mostly from local quarries, but it too was boated up to the quay.

The manor of Llanllwch, 2 kilometres west of the town, was set aside to feed the castle with grain and other produce, farmed in open fields on the Norman pattern, with mills and great barns. Welsh tenants of the lordship owed an annual tribute of seventeen cows, received in the lord’s larder. In war the link to Llanllwch could be cut, and the castle depended on the sea. The town, meanwhile, spread beyond the walls built in the 1230s.

Suburbs ran up Lammas Street to the west, where Edward I established a Franciscan friary, and along King Street and Spilman Street to the north-east. The castle was the reason the Norman town existed, and it remained the hub of the street plan.

Henry VIII’s Act of Union in 1536 brought Wales under the Westminster government and ended the castle’s role as the administrative centre of south Wales. Local courts continued there for about a century. After that, the building that came back into prominence was the gaol, which had always been one of the castle’s uses. At first only important prisoners, rebels, and outlaws were held.

By the later Middle Ages ordinary felons joined them, and most of the towers were used as dungeons. One of the five towers, possibly the south-west tower, was called the Prison Tower in 1321.

Owain Glyndŵr, also Owain ap Gruffudd Fychan, Owain Glyn Dwr, and Owain Glyndwr, was born about 1359 and died about 1416. He was lord of Glyndyfrdwy. A dispute with his English neighbour Reginald de Grey was the local spark of a national revolt. His supporters acclaimed him Prince of Wales on 16 September 1400.

Penal laws against the Welsh, passed by the English parliament in 1401 and 1402, deepened the rising. He captured Grey and ransomed him. In June 1402 he defeated Sir Edmund Mortimer at Pilleth, the Battle of Bryn Glas. Henry IV would not ransom Mortimer, who then allied with Owain and married one of his daughters.

In February 1405 Owain negotiated the Tripartite Indenture with Edmund Mortimer and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. In 1404, after a run of castle sieges and battlefield victories, he controlled most of Wales and held a parliament at Machynlleth, with envoys from France, Scotland, Castile, and Leon, and representatives from every region of Wales. France, Brittany, and Scotland gave military aid. On 31 March 1406, in the church of St Peter ad Vincula at Pennal, he wrote to Charles VI of France asking for continued support, and he set out plans for two universities, one in the north and one in the south, for the restoration of the laws of Hywel Dda, and for a Welsh border pushed into England.

By 1409 Harlech and Aberystwyth, the last rebel castles, had fallen. He refused two royal pardons, fought on from the hills until he disappeared from the record in 1412, and was never captured. He is thought to have died in hiding about 1416. In Welsh tradition he became a folk hero beside Cadwaladr, Cynon ap Clydno, and Arthur, the son of destiny.

He appears in Henry IV, Part 1 as Owen Glendower.

At Carmarthen the rising is dated in more than one way. In 1403 Glyndŵr’s campaign reached south Wales. The castle surrendered, but only after the town had been burnt. It was recaptured two months later, after Henry IV arrived in person.

The garrisons he left averaged 300 soldiers, among them Thomas, the son of Geoffrey Chaucer. Owain Glyndŵr is also said to have captured the castle in 1403 and then lost it again. A listed history says he sacked the town in 1403 and captured the castle in 1405. The year 1405 was the year of the French in Wales.

A formal treaty was negotiated. French forces landed at Milford Haven, burnt Haverfordwest, and tried to take Pembroke Castle before they were bought off. The combined French and Welsh army then took Carmarthen. The occupants were given safe passage, and the town walls were burnt.

The same stroke is also described as a mixed force of 10,000 receiving the castle’s surrender for a second time and holding it for nearly a year. A later account, standing without corroboration, has the allies march through Herefordshire into Worcestershire to Woodbury Hill, ten miles from Worcester, watch an English army from a mile away for eight days, and then both leave. Most of the French withdrew after politics in Paris turned toward peace. The rebellion had died down by 1408, and rebel territory was gone by 1409.

In the aftermath the town walls of Carmarthen were extended, because many buildings had been burnt, and the castle gatehouse, which had been destroyed, was rebuilt. In 1409 more than £380 was spent on repairs, nearly £100 of it on the gatehouse. The gatehouse that stands now is dated to 1409 in its present form, and it may incorporate part of the earlier gatehouse destroyed in the rising of 1405–6. Stylistically it is placed about 1400, and it has been compared with the gatehouse at Kidwelly, possibly the work of the same mason.

The castle mattered again in the Wars of the Roses. Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, half-brother of the Lancastrian king Henry VI, took possession for the House of Lancaster. He had been created earl in 1452. In August 1456 Yorkist troops led by William Herbert captured the castle and imprisoned him.

Edmund died a prisoner there on 1 November 1456. He was 26. Another account says he was captured while fighting for Henry VI in south Wales and died shortly afterwards in the castle. His only child was born three months later.

Lady Margaret Beaufort, then 13, gave birth on 28 January 1457 at Pembroke Castle, in the English-speaking part of Pembrokeshire called Little England beyond Wales, not at Carmarthen. That child was Henry VII of England, also called Henry Tudor, king of England and lord of Ireland from his victory on 22 August 1485 until his death on 21 April 1509, the first king of the House of Tudor. He was probably baptised at St Mary’s, Pembroke, though no record of the baptism survives. His claim ran through his mother to John of Gaunt.

Edmund’s death left him to be raised by his uncle Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, a Lancastrian, and by William Herbert, the Yorkist who had taken Carmarthen and who received the guardianship of Margaret and the boy, along with Pembroke Castle and later the earldom. After Edward IV retook the throne in 1471, Henry spent 14 years in exile in Brittany. He won the crown at the Battle of Bosworth Field against Richard III, the last English king to take the throne on the field of battle, and he defended it at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487, which ended the Wars of the Roses, dated 1455–1487. He married Elizabeth of York, Edward IV’s daughter.

He reigned nearly 24 years and was succeeded by his son Henry VIII.

Later in the medieval life of the castle, it was granted to Sir Rhys ap Thomas, who died in 1525, as Chief Justice of South Wales. A sketch of the castle at its fullest extent is placed about 1430. John Speed’s plan of about 1610 shows the west curtain with a tower between the gatehouse and the south-west tower, and a barbican in front of the gatehouse. Those features have since gone.

The plan is not treated as a precise survey, but it shows things that are otherwise known.

In the Civil War between Charles I and Parliament, dated 1642–45 in one account, the castle was taken by parliamentary forces under Laugharne, named as Colonel Laugharne and as General Laugharne. One account says the capture was in the 1640s. Another says it was in 1644, without resistance, and that the castle was soon recaptured by royalist forces and may have been strengthened. The towers of the gatehouse, originally hollow, were filled with mortared rubble, possibly during the 1640s.

An extra earth rampart was thrown around the town. The surviving part, the Bulwarks, is called the only defence of this type still standing in Britain. On the king’s defeat in 1645 the castle surrendered to Parliament. By 1648 Laugharne, given the personal name Rowland Laugharne, had changed sides and led a royalist rising in south Wales.

Oliver Cromwell put that rising down. He won back Chepstow Castle on 25 May 1648 and, six days later, forced the surrender of Tenby. The castle at Carmarthen was destroyed by burning. The much stronger castle at Pembroke fell only after a siege of eight weeks.

Cromwell dealt leniently with former royalist soldiers and more harshly with men who had been in the parliamentary army. John Poyer was executed in London after lots were drawn. Cromwell then marched north, and at Preston, in sole command for the first time, with an army of 9,000, he beat a Scottish Engager army.

The slighting of Carmarthen is placed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell, probably when he halted at the town, and also simply in the middle of the seventeenth century. By 1648 that order is described as probable. In 1660 the castle was reported as quite demolished. Enough survived the slighting for the inner bailey to go on as a gaol, using the gatehouse, the keep, the south-west tower, the Square Tower, and a newer building shown in early prints.

There were eight cells, a day room, and an exercise yard later turned into the gaoler’s garden. By the 1740s the outer bailey had disappeared and been laid out as an open space called Castle Green. A map of 1786 shows the old gaol and Castle Green, with very little of the castle left above ground, though the banks and ditches are still marked, and a road lined with cottages crossing the green on the line of the ditch between the baileys.

Conditions in the old gaol were dreadful. The buildings were dilapidated and full of vermin. Men, women, and children were held in the same rooms. The windows had no glass, no fuel was allowed, and prisoners depended on friends for food.

Gaolers were unpaid. They took tolls from families and often charged discharge fees before they would release people the courts had already freed. On the recommendation of the penal reformer John Howard, the gaol was rebuilt between 1789 and 1792 to the designs of John Nash, who also worked at Brighton Pavilion and Buckingham Palace. The new prison stood on the east side inside the curtain, and much of the medieval fabric was demolished to make way for it.

A section of the original castle collapsed about 1811. Nash’s gaol was clean, dry, and airy, with cells around open courtyards, a chapel, and an infirmary, part of which survives. The scaffold for public executions stood outside the main entrance, facing Spilman Street, until 1829, when many offences still carried death. The last execution was in 1894.

Nash’s prison was largely swept away when the gaol was rebuilt and extended in 1868–9, also given as 1869, across Castle Green. It remained a place of punishment and hard labour. Escapes were rare, but some succeeded. About 1860 a two-storey police station and lock-up was built between the outer and inner walls, used to hold prisoners on their way to the nearby courthouse until 1947, and now called Castle House.

Another account says the Old Police Station was the headquarters of the Carmarthenshire Constabulary from the early 1880s until 1947, and that it is the only surviving county lock-up in Wales. Two cells can still be entered. In 2007 the rest of that building was a centre for the Prince’s Trust. Castle House, inside the remaining walls, has also been described as a museum and as the town’s tourist information centre.

The gaol closed in 1922, less than thirty years after the last execution, and the prisoners were moved to Swansea and Cardiff. The county council bought the site in 1924, and also in 1925, at first intending a headquarters with a county library and a museum, and there were plans to convert the prison until a new building was chosen. Demolition of the gaol is dated 1936, 1933–39, and 1938. County Hall, a French-inspired château by Sir Percy Thomas, who also designed Swansea Guildhall, the Temple of Peace and Health in Cardiff, and a large part of the Aberystwyth university campus, is dated as completed in 1938, as built in 1939–55, and as officially opened only in 1956, after the Second World War stopped the work.

The start had been held until 1939 by the demolition. The building is Grade II listed. Its grey walls are lightened with Portland stone from Dorset. It has 100 large rectangular windows, steep roofs of grey-green Pembrokeshire slate, and four chimney stacks on Portland plinths.

The entrance carries sculpted reliefs of the building’s functions, including education and taxation. Some gaol cells are said to survive as store rooms. The entrance portico of Nash’s gaol, kept in the 1868 rebuilding and a landmark of the town, was carefully taken down to be re-erected, but the stones were lost during the war. From 1938 the new hall is also said to have obliterated whatever medieval remains still lay on the gaol site inside the curtain.

Most of the castle and the gaol now lie under County Hall and its car park. How much survives under the ground is unknown.

The standing medieval work is rubble, mainly of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, heavily repointed, and on the motte mostly of nineteenth-century appearance, with little clear medieval fabric. The scheduled remains are a stone-revetted motte, a twin-towered gatehouse, a south-west corner tower, a wall turret east of that, and short lengths of curtain, all on the west of the site. The motte wall has two small half-round turrets on the north and paired buttresses marking a further turret on the west. The majority of that motte masonry is nineteenth-century reconstruction.

The curtain between the motte and the gatehouse is also largely rebuilt. Another account says the wall around the motte partly follows the medieval shell keep but was largely rebuilt in the early twentieth century, when deep garden soil was brought in and the top of the motte was laid out as a garden. The shell keep is unusual. Instead of ringing the top of the mound, the wall partly encases the motte, an arrangement also seen at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire and at Farnham Castle in Surrey.

As first built, probably in the 1230s, it would have been much higher. It was not a tower. Ranges of buildings stood against the inside of the shell wall around a small courtyard. Excavation found traces of those ranges, and the earlier round-tower base in the middle.

Two semicircular lobes on the outside may be original. A stair in the thickness of the original shell wall survives at its base on the west. Modern steps climb from the County Hall car park through an open enclosure that may have begun as a medieval forebuilding. Scars and sockets on the outer face are left by gaol buildings that have been demolished.

Backyard walls of the surrounding houses radiate from the motte along the lines of medieval burgage plots, and those yards have eaten into the sides of the mound.

The gatehouse is the largest surviving piece. It stands 13 metres, about 43 feet, high over Nott Square, the medieval marketplace, and it is still the main way in from the town. Another entrance is the old gaol entry on Gaol Hill, also called Castle Hill. The gatehouse is described as a fine three-storey building of about 1400, roughly square, with paired turrets flanking a large four-centred arch, and also as two storeys, with a gate passage between two round towers and the constable’s chamber above them.

The towers were originally hollow and were later packed with rubble. The outer portcullis slot can still be seen. The passage was partly blocked in the eighteenth century as part of the gaol. The upper floor, the constable’s chamber, has ashlar traceried trefoil-headed windows.

Machicolations, the chutes for dropping missiles, are Bath stone arches corbelled out between the towers. The rear half of the gatehouse has gone. A small doorway at the inner end of the passage was inserted after that rear section was removed. Part of the lost section’s south wall, and some blocked doorways, remain.

A turret with garderobes and service rooms stood in the angle with the former south curtain. The lower two-thirds of the south face were cut away, possibly to open a way from a neighbouring property after the Middle Ages, and later rubble filled the gap.

In front of the gatehouse, excavation in 2003 found the medieval bridge across the ditch. It had two main builds. At first two free-standing masonry piers carried a timber bridge. Connecting walls then turned that into a continuous masonry causeway.

The piers run 25 feet below street level. A drawing of about 1610 shows the barbican, the outer gateway onto the bridge, which has gone. The outline of the bridge is marked in the surfacing in front of the gatehouse. In the waterlogged fill of the ditch, conditions that preserve organic material, the dig found a medieval leather shoe and part of a wooden bowl, along with pottery and other leather shoes.

Earlier in that same year the work had already found a network of medieval walls, cellars, and cobbled floors. The cellars under the ground between the gatehouse and Nott Square belong to houses and shops built in the filled ditch in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one of them incorporates part of the medieval bridge. The dig and restoration then closing were described as a project of £1 million after two years of work. The upper levels of the gatehouse and the shell keep were opened to the public in 2003, with access around the ground level, and a grass area with benches was made on top of the keep.

Cellars that had belonged to a demolished inn were uncovered during the same works.

The high wall between the gatehouse and the shell keep is mostly medieval, though much altered, and is the west curtain of the inner bailey. The medieval wall from the gatehouse to the south-west tower has gone. A low modern wall replaces it, but the stub of the old wall shows on the south face of the gatehouse. Excavation showed that the lost wall ran along the top of a massive earthen bank.

The wall, and the square tower drawn halfway along it about 1610, were removed when that bank was levelled.

The south-west tower is three storeys and 15 metres high, and it was originally taller, with a fourth storey. It dominates the view from the south. It stands at the south-west corner of the inner bailey, against the steep drop to the river, and it retains that slope. It is cylindrical, with bold spur buttresses.

Its style is typical of the late thirteenth century, but the documents suggest it may be earlier, from the 1230s, and it may be the Prison Tower of 1321. A listing calls it possibly late thirteenth century, with a rounded exterior, a square interior, openings on each storey, and a whitewashed basement under a two-centred barrel vault, reached by a newel stair. All three original storeys held rectangular stone-vaulted rooms. The interior was enlarged in the late nineteenth century by cutting back the south-east wall, and the medieval windows were blocked, which shows that the medieval rooms were still in use after the gaol had been extended.

The concrete floor of the basement is modern. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cellars, tunnelled in from adjoining houses, had undermined the medieval floor. The tower had been built, in the usual medieval way, with no footings, so once the derelict houses that hid it were cleared in 1994–5, the first task in 1995 was to keep the tower standing. A modern entrance from the terrace below was inserted after excavation and consolidation in the 1990s.

The Square Tower, also described as the basement of the rectangular Water Tower, is now one storey at basement level, built against the same southern slope, looking down on Coracle Way. It is entered by the original spiral stair from the car park. A blocked area in the south wall may mark the medieval postern, or back door, mentioned in the documents. The vaulted ceiling is original.

In style the tower looks fifteenth century, but a postern may have stood here since the late thirteenth century. The south side was partly rebuilt in the 1960s. The interior is a tall square chamber of whitewashed rubble with a flat stone vault and narrow openings to each face. Like the south-west tower it was built without footings and was undermined by at least one neighbouring cellar in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

The medieval south curtain that once joined the two towers has gone. Its stubs remain on both towers. The wall now there is modern. That curtain was replaced more than once in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the later walling had partly collapsed when clearance began in the 1990s.

The building stone is mainly local limestone and sandstone, with some imported Bath stone in the dressings. Nothing remains of the outer bailey. A long stretch of the mid-nineteenth-century gaol wall survives inside the medieval defences. It was built when the prison was extended in 1868–9 and originally ran round the whole castle site, because the old medieval walls were no longer secure.

A slightly higher piece immediately behind the gatehouse, through which one now enters the County Hall car park, belongs to Nash’s infirmary of 1789–92, built on the site of an earlier building shown in eighteenth-century prints. A blocked window and a circular opening beneath it, both with brick surrounds, show the quality of that work. A second blocked circular opening is also described. The infirmary was demolished when the gaol was extended and the police station was built.

The doorway and railings in that wall are modern.

The remains have been listed at Grade I since 1954, with the designation dated 18 August 1954, as substantial remains of a major medieval castle, principally a fortified motte and a large gatehouse. They are also a scheduled monument, of national importance for what they can still show of medieval defensive practice, with a strong probability of structural evidence and intact deposits. The castle is one of only three Grade I listed buildings in Carmarthenshire. A national inventory gives the foundation as disputed, originating in 1109 or in the late thirteenth century, which sits beside the early twelfth-century dates for the first timber castle and the later dates for the stone work.

The same inventory lists the surviving pieces as the motte, a donjon with towers, the gatehouse, and the south-west drum tower, and it notes the county gaol from the eighteenth century and the medieval borough around the castle.

A programme of archaeological and conservation work began in 1993 under Dyfed County Council and continued under Carmarthenshire County Council, managed by the design practice TACP, with archaeologists from Cambria Archaeology watching each stage. The published study of that work runs from 1993 to 2006. Around the turn of the twenty-first century the Square Tower and the south-west tower were made accessible after detailed investigation, and surrounding buildings were removed so the castle could be seen. In May 2018 a watching brief on a new high-voltage mains joint trench, cut as a condition of scheduled-monument consent and largely re-excavating older service fills, met pre-twentieth-century deposits only at the bottom.

Those deposits included a possible eighteenth-century ditch fill and the possible western edge of the medieval defensive ditch.

In 2026 the county council received listed-building consent to repoint and repair the old gaol wall and the police house, the north curtain wall, and the forecourt. Work on the cottage garden was left until the foliage is cleared. Interim consent for the scheduled monument was granted separately. Both consents carry conditions that have to be met before work can start.

Funding had not been secured, no contractor had been procured, and no start date could be given. A heritage assessment prepared for that application described the castle as in reasonable condition, remarkable given its age and the poor materials used in earlier repairs, and treated the consented work as maintenance that had fallen behind, intended to preserve the ruin and to open areas that had been shut. The monument is in the care of the Welsh government’s historic environment service, which accepted that the county council could decide the listed-building application.

The castle’s use followed its politics. It was a timber base for carving a royal lordship out of a hostile region, then a stone headquarters of south Welsh government, a prison for rebels and later for ordinary felons, a place of public execution, a Victorian hard-labour gaol, and at last the ground under a county hall. What was at stake, from Henry I to Edward I, was whether south-west Wales would be ruled from Dinefwr and Dryslwyn or from this bluff above the Tywi. The English crown won that contest in 1283 and kept the machinery of a county here until 1536.

What the excavations have shown is that the timber phase lasted longer than the standing stone suggests, that a round tower may have stood on the motte in the 1180s, that the gatehouse of 1409 sits on a bridge of two builds, and that the ditch still holds organic objects. The 2018 trench found the edge of that ditch still identifiable under a modern service cut. The walls that remain are a shell keep, a rebuilt gatehouse, a south-west tower, a square water tower, and fragments of curtain, hemmed in by the hall that replaced the prison.