Conwy Castle

Conwy Castle stands on a coastal ridge of grey sandstone and limestone above the west bank of the River Conwy, at the south-east corner of the walled town. The rock is elongated and high. Except on the town side it was once washed by the Conwy and by its tributary the Gyffin, so a direct assault by mining or by siege engines was very difficult. That setting explains why the plan is not a concentric castle like Beaumaris.

A second outer curtain would have been of little use. The extra defence at battlement level was timber hoarding. The castle is roughly rectangular, with a strong curtain and eight round towers, and a cross-wall splits it into an outer ward and an inner ward of unequal size. Each end has its own entrance, protected by a barbican.

Older accounts often spell the place Conway. The Welsh name is Castell Conwy, and since 2024 that Welsh name has been used in English as well.

Before the English town existed, the site held a Cistercian house, Aberconwy Abbey, favoured by the princes of Gwynedd, and one of their courts, a llys. Part of that court survives in the town wall at the southern end of the east side. One wall and an apsidal tower, built on a rocky outcrop in the early thirteenth century, were taken into the later English wall. Four window openings mark it out from the rest of the circuit.

It belonged to Llywelyn the Great and to his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and it is the most complete remnant of any of his courts. The place also commanded the crossing of the Conwy between the coast and the interior of north Wales, a crossing that Deganwy Castle on the opposite shore had guarded for many years.

The kings of England and the Welsh princes had competed for this country since the 1070s. After the Norman conquest of England, much of Wales was taken and held as Marcher lordships. Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth survived, and by the end of the twelfth century the March had been pushed back to the south and south-east. In the first half of the thirteenth century Gwynedd was the leading power.

Its princes took the title Prince of Wales, and Powys and Deheubarth became tributary. War with England in 1241 and 1245, and a dispute over the succession, weakened Gwynedd and let Henry III seize Perfeddwlad, the Four Cantrefs in the east. From 1256 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, later called Llywelyn the Last, took that land back. The Treaty of Montgomery in 1267 recognised him as Prince of Wales in return for homage, and accepted his recovery of Perfeddwlad.

Fighting with Marcher lords, among them Gilbert de Clare, Roger Mortimer and Humphrey de Bohun, did not stop.

Edward I of England was born at Westminster on the night of 17 to 18 June 1239, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, and he died on 7 July 1307. Before his accession he was the Lord Edward. In 1259 he briefly sided with the baronial reform movement and the Provisions of Oxford, then returned to his father and stayed loyal through the Second Barons' War. After the Battle of Lewes he was held hostage, escaped, and in 1265 defeated Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham.

In 1270 he left for the Ninth Crusade. He was on the way home in 1272 when he learned that Henry III had died. He reached England in 1274 and was crowned at Westminster. He was Lord of Ireland and, from 1254 to 1306, Duke of Aquitaine under the French king.

Contemporaries knew his temper and his height, about 6 feet 2 inches, or 188 centimetres. He reformed administration and statute law, and he is also condemned for his dealings with Wales and Scotland and for the Edict of Expulsion of 1290, which expelled the Jews from England. He left his son Edward II a war in Scotland and a heavy financial burden. His own annual revenue in the years of the Welsh wars averaged about £40,000.

The Conquest of Wales by Edward I ran from 1277 to 1283, in two campaigns, and it is distinguished from the earlier Norman advance into Wales. Henry III died in 1272. In 1274 Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys and Llywelyn's brother Dafydd ap Gruffydd defected and sought Edward's protection. Llywelyn refused to come to Chester in 1275 to do the homage required by the Treaty of Montgomery.

Edward was further provoked by Llywelyn's plan to marry Eleanor, daughter of Simon de Montfort. In November 1276 Edward declared war. His aim at that point was to discipline a vassal, not to conquer Wales outright.

Early in 1277, before the main army was ready, paid troops, Marcher retainers and household knights operated in south and mid Wales. Many Welsh rulers who resented Llywelyn's overlordship surrendered and joined the English. In July Edward led about 15,500 men into north Wales, of whom about 9,000 were Welshmen from the south, raised by a feudal summons. From Chester the army camped at Flint, then at Rhuddlan and Deganwy, and a fleet from the Cinque Ports kept it supplied.

There was no great battle. Llywelyn surrendered. By November Edward may have been short of men and supplies, and total conquest had not been his object. The Treaty of Aberconwy, in November 1277, left Llywelyn only western Gwynedd, though he kept the title Prince of Wales.

Eastern Gwynedd was divided between Edward and Dafydd. Deheubarth, Powys and mid Wales became a mixture of royal land and English protectorates.

War returned in 1282 because Dafydd was discontented with his reward. He attacked in concert with rulers in Deheubarth and north Powys who had been Llywelyn's vassals and were now Edward's. Llywelyn and leaders in the south joined what became a national struggle, fed by Edward's attempt to impose English law. Edward now treated it as a war of conquest.

He advanced into north Wales on much the same route as in 1277. Roger Mortimer operated in mid Wales, and the Earl of Gloucester led a large force in the south. Gloucester was defeated at the Battle of Llandeilo Fawr in June 1282. Edward replaced him with William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who raided as far as Aberystwyth but did not bring a Welsh army to battle.

Roger Mortimer died in October. On 6 November, while John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was negotiating, Luke de Tany crossed a pontoon bridge from Anglesey and was ambushed at the Battle of Moel-y-don.

The war turned when Llywelyn marched toward Builth and was killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge on 11 December 1282. Edward raised a new army, marched into Snowdonia in January 1283 and took Dolwyddelan. De Valence pushed north from Cardigan into Meirionnydd. Dafydd, who had succeeded his brother in December, was captured in June 1283, taken to Shrewsbury and executed as a traitor the following autumn.

One account of the new castle says Edward captured Aberconwy in March 1283. The ruined castle at Deganwy was abandoned and never rebuilt.

Edward kept much of the conquered land as a royal fief. The rest went to supporters as new Marcher lordships, such as Denbigh for the Earl of Lincoln. Welsh allies received their own lands back on feudal terms. Owain ap Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, of the house of Powys Wenwynwyn, received his ancestral lands as the lordship of Powys and became known as Owen de la Pole.

The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 declared the royal lands annexed and united to the English crown, though they did not become part of the kingdom of England. They were the king's personal fief, divided into six shires on the English model and administered by royal officials. English common law was imposed, with some local variation. Welsh law continued in some civil cases, including inheritance, but illegitimate sons could no longer claim a share.

In 1301 the royal lands were given to Edward's son, Edward of Caernarfon, the future Edward II, with the title Prince of Wales, and that endowment later became the custom for the heir. Wales was not folded into the kingdom of England until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542. The conquest, including the new castles, cost about £173,000. Sheriffs who administered royal law in Wales were mostly English for generations.

From 1277, and especially after 1283, Edward planted English towns such as Flint, Aberystwyth and Rhuddlan, and in places English settlers replaced Welsh peasants. In the lordship of Denbigh, 10,000 acres were in English hands by 1334. The stone castle was his main instrument of security. Under James of Saint George, his master builder, a ring of castles was raised around north Wales, among them Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech.

The new castle and town at Conwy were a colonial enterprise. Placing them on a high-status Welsh site was in part a symbolic act. Edward made the place the centre of a new county. The abbey was moved about eight miles up the valley to Maenan, where Maenan Abbey was founded, and an English castle and walled town were built on the monastery's former ground.

It was intended that Conwy be the county town and the main English base in north-west Wales. That role fell to Caernarfon, but Conwy remained an administrative centre and a royal residence until it fell in the revolt of 1401.

Work on the ditch began within days of Edward's decision. Sir John Bonvillars controlled the work, and the master mason James of St. George oversaw it. The first phase, from 1283 to 1284, concentrated on the curtain and the towers.

From 1284 to 1286 the interior buildings went up, and work began on the town walls. One account says the castle was complete by 1287. The building accounts do not separate the town walls from the castle. Together they cost about £15,000, a huge sum, on one comparison about twenty-five times the annual income of a fourteenth-century nobleman such as Richard le Scrope.

Labourers were recruited across England. Each summer they gathered at Chester and walked into Wales. The visit account of the standing castle says Edward and his architect built castle and walls in four years, between 1283 and 1287. An inventory of the masonry says what is seen today was built between 1283 and 1287.

Another account dates the castle and town wall to between 1283 and 1288. A shorter summary of that same record dates them between 1286 and 1288. The scheduling account has the work begun in 1283 and carried through quickly in one main building phase. A tabulated history gives the building dates as 1283 to 1289.

The residential buildings were started before the curtain was finished. Junctions with the curtain are awkward at ground floor and first floor. Later walls of the apartments partly block openings in the curtain, and floors in the main rooms sit higher than the earlier window embrasures, which shows that the planning of the apartments came late.

James of Saint George, also recorded as James of St. George, was a master of works from Savoy, born about 1230 and dead in 1309. In French he is Maître Jacques de Saint-Georges, in Latin Magister Jacobus de Sancto Georgio. The historian Marc Morris has called him one of the greatest architects of the European Middle Ages.

He was largely responsible for Edward's castles in north Wales: Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon, all begun in 1283, and Beaumaris on Anglesey, begun in 1295. Firm evidence for his childhood is thin. Circumstantial evidence puts his birth at Saint-Prex, and his father was a mason named John, identified with Jean Cotereel, builder of Saint-Prex and of Lausanne Cathedral. The west window at Lausanne has been compared with the eastern hall window later built at Conwy.

The name Saint George does not come from the English patron saint. It refers to his last workplace in the Viennois, Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche, and to a sainted archbishop of Vienne.

He began under Peter II, Count of Savoy, at Yverdon-les-Bains, at first with his father and by 1265 alone, which likely marks his father's death. He then worked under Jean de Mézos, a Gascon engineer who had served Henry III, at the Château de Melphe at Salins-les-Thermes in 1267 and 1268. After Peter II died in 1268 he worked for Philip I, Count of Savoy, who preferred the Viennois to Chillon. James built the palace-castle at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche and, between 1270 and 1275, castles at La Côte-Saint-André, Voiron and Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, three of them with round towers and one an octagonal palace-castle.

His last Savoy work may have been at Châtel-Argent in the Aosta valley in the summer of 1275. There is a gap in the record from 1275 until 1278, when he is first recorded in Britain. It has been suggested that in the gap he worked for the family of Otto de Grandson, perhaps at Grandson and Lucens. In 1950 the historian A.

J. Taylor argued that Jacques de Saint-Georges and Master James of Saint George were the same man, after comparing garderobes at La Bâtiaz, windows at Chillon and the town walls at Saillon with the Welsh castles.

Edward I of England probably met Master James of St. George on the way home from crusade. On 25 June 1273 he was at Saint-Georges-d'Espéranche so that his great-uncle Philip I could do homage, under a treaty of 1246 by which the castles of Bard and Avigliana, the palace of Susa and the town of Saint-Maurice had been enfeoffed to the English king. The first English record of the name, Magistri Jacobi Di Sancto Georgio, is dated 8 November 1280, two years after James arrived.

In April 1278 he is described as going to Wales to put the castle works in order, travelling to Flint and Rhuddlan while Flint, Rhuddlan, Builth and Aberystwyth were under construction. From 1277 to 1280 his main work was Rhuddlan and the canalisation of the River Clwyd, then Flint. Flint resembles his earlier castle at Yverdon. Around 1285 he was appointed master of the king's works in Wales, Magistro Jacobo de sancto Georgio, Magistro operacionum Regis in Wallia, at 3 shillings a day, with control of Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech.

Harlech, begun in 1283, was effectively finished in 1289. On 3 July 1290 he became constable of Harlech, succeeding John de Bonvillars, who had died in August 1287, and he held that post until 14 December 1293. Beaumaris, which Marc Morris has called his most perfectly conceived castle, was started in April 1295 and was unfinished at his death in 1309. Its outer gate is not aligned with the inner gate, so an intruder had to cross an open space on a predictable path.

James joined Edward in Scotland, probably around September 1298, oversaw new defences at Linlithgow in February 1302, and worked at Stirling during the siege of 1304. His wife was Ambrosia. No pension is recorded for her after his death, so she probably did not survive him. Two sons, Giles and Tassin of Saint George, did.

The castle hugs the ridge, and much of its stone was taken from the ridge itself when the site was cleared. That local stone was not good enough for carved detail. Sandstone was brought from the Creuddyn peninsula, from Chester and from the Wirral. It is more colourful than the grey rock and was probably chosen for its appearance.

The castle was originally whitewashed with a lime render. Four towers, each about 70 feet, or 21 metres, tall, stand on each side. Another measurement says the curtain is 3 metres thick and 27 metres high, and that the eight round towers rise 41 metres above the river. A continuous wall-walk runs around the top.

Putlog holes still spiral up the outsides of the towers, where the builders' timbers formed a ramp. The battlements had triple finials and a row of square holes. Those holes may have drained the wall-head, supported a hoarding, or displayed shields. The uncertainty remains.

Three-pinnacled merlons of the same kind stand at Castello di San Giorio di Susa, which Edward had visited in 1273 on the way back from crusade. Window styles, crenellation and the placing of putlog holes also belong to the County of Savoy in the same years, and they are ascribed to Master James.

The main entrance is the western barbican, once reached by a drawbridge and a masonry ramp that rose sharply from the town. The modern path runs east along the outside of the walls. The barbican has the earliest surviving stone machicolations in Britain, and the gate had a portcullis. The north-west and south-west towers, with the short curtain between them, form an extended version of the twin-towered gatehouses of the other Edwardian castles.

The outer ward was for public business and for service. The north-west tower, reached through the porter's lodge, had limited lodging and stores. The south-west tower may have housed the constable or the garrison, and it contained a bakehouse. Each of the four towers opening from the outer ward had two floors, each with one habitable room, and a basement.

The Prison Tower is exceptional. It has a well-concealed sub-basement designed as a cell. Behind the great hall, the constable used that tower to hold prisoners. A room called the dettors chambre, the debtors' chamber, is named in the sixteenth century, together with an underground dungeon.

On the south side of the outer ward a range sits on cellars that are now open to the air. The great hall is thought to have stood at the centre, with a lesser hall served through an ante-room at one end and a chapel at the other. Stubs of masonry and one surviving stone arch from the 1340s can still be seen. Only foundations remain of the kitchen, guardrooms and domestic offices along the north and east sides.

The well is on the east side of that court. A kitchen, a brewhouse and a bakehouse backed onto the kitchen tower, which also had lodging and storerooms. The outer ward has been described as housing the great hall, kitchens, stables and prison.

A wall, a drawbridge and a gate, with a ditch cut in the rock, separated the inner ward. The ditch was filled in the sixteenth century and the drawbridge removed. The spring-fed well beside the gate is 91 feet, or 28 metres, deep. The inner ward could be held even if the outer ward fell.

A small gatehouse covered a narrow passage. The inner ward could also be reached from the river. The elaborate watergate has gone, but steps still lead up to the east barbican. The four inner towers resemble the outer ones, except that each is crowned by a turret, probably so that a watch could be kept and the royal flag shown.

Two of them, the King's Tower and the Chapel Tower, contain further royal rooms. The Chapel Tower also holds a vaulted chapel. The Stockhouse Tower and the Bakehouse Tower are entered from the inner court, and their upper rooms may have been meant for guests. An L-shaped building of two storeys housed the royal apartments.

The historian Jeremy Ashbee has called this the best preserved suite of medieval private royal chambers in England and Wales, and other accounts call it the most intact set of residential buildings left by the medieval English monarchy in either country. The rooms were a palace in miniature. They could be sealed off from the rest of the castle and supplied from the eastern gate by sea, though the royal family rarely used them. The arrangement has been compared with the thirteenth-century Gloriette at Corfe.

The great chamber, or king's chamber, and the queen's chamber had separate entrances, at the south-east and south-west of the courtyard. Servants could reach the king's chamber from their quarters in the south-east tower and from the kitchens. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the rooms were rearranged as one clockwise sequence: chapel and hall or great chamber at the north-east, then an outer or presence chamber, an inner or privy chamber, and a pair of withdrawing rooms at the south-west.

The east barbican enclosed the castle garden, overlooked by the royal rooms. In the early fourteenth century there was a lawn, in the late fourteenth century vines, in the sixteenth century crab-apple trees and a lawn, and in the seventeenth century formal flowers. A postern once led down to a small dock so that important visitors could enter in private and the castle could be supplied by boat. Later bridges hide that gate.

The town wall that accompanies the castle is an unbroken ring of about 1,400 yards, or 1.3 kilometres. Restored spiral stairs in the great towers now allow a complete circuit of the battlements.

A royal charter of 1284 made the constable of the castle mayor of the new town as well, and the mayor is still ex officio constable. He commanded a garrison of 30 soldiers, including 15 crossbowmen, with a carpenter, a chaplain, a blacksmith, an engineer and a stonemason. Another list for 1283 gives 30 men, 15 crossbowmen, one superintendent at arms, one chaplain, one stonemason, one carpenter, one artisan and ten others. The first constable was Sir William de Cicon, who had been the first constable of Rhuddlan.

He is also named William de Sikun and Sir William de Sikun, with a yearly fee of £190. Later names on the constable list include Thomas Brickdall in 1292, William de Archoleghweth in 1297, John de Havering in 1300, and John de Clykum and again Sir William de Sikun in 1302.

In 1294 Madog ap Llywelyn rebelled. He was the son of Llywelyn ap Maredudd, last vassal lord of Meirionnydd, who had lost his patrimony in 1256 for opposing Llywelyn ap Gruffudd at the Battle of Bryn Derwin, received an English pension in exile, reconciled with Llywelyn in June 1262, and died fighting for the Welsh in April 1263. Madog, who may have been born in exile, received substantial gifts from Edward in 1277 and in 1278 sued the prince for Meirionnydd. After Llywelyn ap Gruffudd's death in 1282 he returned to Gwynedd and received lands in Anglesey.

He belonged to a junior branch of the house of Aberffraw and was a distant relation of the last recognised native Prince of Wales. On Michaelmas, 29 September 1294, he led a revolt planned for months, against new royal administrators in north and west Wales and against a tax of one fifteenth on movables. There is no evidence that the aim was to restore the old principality, but in one land grant during the rising he used the title Prince of Wales. The leaders hoped Edward would already be in France.

Bad weather had held the fleet, and Edward cancelled the French campaign. While Madog acted in the north, Cynan ap Maredudd, Maelgwn ap Rhys and Morgan ap Maredudd of Gwynllŵg led attacks in mid and south Wales.

Caernarfon was overrun and its castle occupied. Castell y Bere was taken and later burnt. Hawarden, Ruthin and Denbigh fell. Criccieth and Harlech were besieged for months.

Harlech was at one point held by 37 men. Morgan took Morlais. Cynan besieged Builth for six weeks. Half of Caerphilly burned, though the castle held, and Kenfig was sacked.

On 11 November Henry de Lacy, lord of Denbigh, was ambushed and routed outside the town. Reginald de Grey held Flint and Rhuddlan. Flint was besieged at length, and neither castle fell. In December 1294 Edward marched by Wrexham, Denbigh and Abergele and reached Conwy shortly before Christmas.

He was ambushed, lost his baggage and retreated into the castle. The town of Conwy was burned. He was besieged and supplied only by sea. One account places the siege between December and January 1295 and the relief in February.

Another says the navy relieved him in 1295. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough says that in those austere conditions Edward refused to drink his own wine and had it shared among the garrison. The decisive fight was the Battle of Maes Moydog in Powys on 5 March 1295. The Earl of Warwick surprised Madog's men.

They formed a schiltron of pikes, called a porcupine, and beat off a cavalry charge, but English arrows broke them, and many drowned in a swollen river during the pursuit. Madog escaped, was captured by Ynyr Fychan of Nannau, and was handed to John de Havering in Snowdonia in late July or early August 1295. He was taken to London and was still alive in 1305. He was survived by sons, including Maredudd, who died about 1334, and Hywel, who died about 1352.

Edward answered the revolt with humiliating ordinances that restricted Welsh civil rights and economic opportunity. The building of the wider group of castles, begun in 1283, was hindered by this rising. Work at Caernarfon continued until 1330 and at Beaumaris until 1331. For some years after the siege, Conwy was the main residence for senior visitors.

In 1301 Edward's son, the future Edward II, came to receive homage from Welsh leaders.

The castle was poorly kept in the early fourteenth century. A survey of 1321 found it badly equipped, with limited stores, leaking roofs and rotten timbers. By 1332 it was unfit for the king. These problems lasted until Edward, the Black Prince, took control in 1343.

His chamberlain, Sir John Weston, built new stone arches to support the great hall and other parts of the castle. Around 1347 the great hall range and the royal apartments were remodelled for a newly leaded roof. After the Black Prince died, neglect returned. He had died in 1376, and his son Richard was left heir to Edward III.

Richard II of England was born at Bordeaux on 6 January 1367 and died about 14 February 1400. He was king from 1377 until his deposition in 1399. His father, Edward the Black Prince, died in 1376, and the ten-year-old Richard succeeded his grandfather. Government at first lay with councils influenced by his uncles John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock.

The Hundred Years' War dominated the reign. In 1381 Richard played a central part in the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt. He was less warlike than his father or grandfather and sought to end the French war. He believed in the royal prerogative, restrained the aristocracy and kept a private retinue.

His court was cultivated and the king was presented as an elevated figure. Dependence on a few courtiers, among them Michael de la Pole and Robert de Vere, angered the nobility. In 1387 the Lords Appellant took control. Richard recovered it by 1389 and for eight years governed with relative harmony.

In 1397 he struck at the Appellants. Many were executed or exiled, and the next two years have been called his tyranny. In the autumn of 1394 he took more than 8,000 men to Ireland and stayed until May 1395. Irish chiefs submitted.

It was one of the successes of the reign, though the English position there did not last.

John of Gaunt died on 3 February 1399. Richard had already exiled Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke for ten years, after a quarrel with Thomas Mowbray that was meant to be settled by battle and was instead ended by exile. Richard then extended the exile to life and took Bolingbroke's lands. In May 1399 Richard left for a second Irish expedition, taking most of his household knights.

In June, Louis I, Duke of Orléans, allowed Bolingbroke to leave France. Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspurn in Yorkshire near the end of June, saying he wanted only his inheritance. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, supported him. Edmund, Duke of York, the keeper of the realm, had little choice but to join him.

Richard did not land in Wales until 24 July. On 12 August 1399 he was at Conwy and met Northumberland. Percy swore in the chapel that he would not harm the king. On 19 August Richard surrendered to Bolingbroke at Flint Castle, promising to abdicate if his life were spared.

He was held in the crypt of the Agricola Tower at Chester, rode to London behind Bolingbroke, and was imprisoned in the Tower on 1 September. On 30 September an official record said he gave up the crown willingly. The Traison et Mort chronicle describes a furious meeting the day before, in which Richard called his cousin a traitor. Thirty-three articles were read by John Trevor, Bishop of St Asaph.

Richard was formally deposed on 1 October 1399, and Henry was crowned on 13 October. The normal heir by primogeniture would have been Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, descended from Lionel, Duke of Clarence. An entail of 1376 had preferred heirs male, and thus John of Gaunt and Henry. After the Epiphany Rising, Richard is thought to have been starved at Pontefract Castle on or about 14 February 1400.

His body was shown at St Paul's on 17 February and buried at Kings Langley on 6 March. Henry V moved the remains to Westminster Abbey on 4 December 1413. A man in Scotland was treated by some as the surviving king until 1419 and dismissed by Henry IV's government as an impostor.

Henry IV's accession was followed in north Wales by the revolt of Owain Glyndŵr. Owain ap Gruffudd Fychan, or Owain Glyndŵr, was born in or before 1359 and died in hiding about 1416. His father was Gruffudd Fychan and his mother Elen ferch Tomas. The family descended from the royal houses of Powys, Deheubarth and Gwynedd.

After the conquest an earlier Gruffudd Fychan was allowed, on 12 February 1283, to hold his land of the king by Welsh barony, owing military service and keeping his own court. Owain's father held Glyndyfrdwy in Meirionnydd and half of Cynllaith in the Marcher lordship of Chirk. Owain was a soldier and a patron of the poets Gruffudd Llwyd and Iolo Goch. His main house was the moated court at Sycharth.

His income may have reached about £70 a year, modest by English standards and high among the native Welsh gentry. In 1384 he and his brother Tudur served at Berwick with Sir Gregory Sais. In 1387 they mustered at Sandwich in the retinue of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. Iolo Goch praised his descent from Rhys ap Gruffudd, Bleddyn ap Cynfyn and Gruffudd ap Cynan.

In the late 1390s his neighbour, Baron Grey of Ruthin, also called Reginald de Grey, seized land. Owain's petition to Parliament was ignored. In 1400 Grey failed to tell him in time of a royal summons for the Scottish border, then called him a traitor. An angry letter, in which Owain admitted taking horses and answered a threat to burn and slay, was said to be destined for the council.

Richard II had support in Wales, and in January 1400 Chester saw serious disorder after the execution of one of Richard's officers. At Sycharth on 16 September 1400, before his family, his in-laws, men from Berwyn, friends from north-east Wales and the Dean of St Asaph, about 300 people in all, Owain proclaimed himself Prince of Wales. The next day the rising against Henry IV began. Ruthin, Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint, Holt, Oswestry and Welshpool were attacked.

On 9 November 1400 Sycharth was forfeited to John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset.

On Good Friday, 1 April 1401, forty of Glyndŵr's men, led by his cousins Rhys ap Tudur and Gwilym ap Tudur, took Conwy Castle. They pretended to be carpenters come to repair the castle, killed the two watchmen and seized the fortress. Welsh rebels then took the rest of the walled town. Henry IV appointed Henry Percy, called Hotspur, to restore order.

Hotspur was the son of the earl who had negotiated with Richard in 1399, not the same man. About a month after the capture, king and Parliament issued an amnesty for all rebels except Owain and the Tudurs. One account says the brothers held the castle for about three months and then received a royal pardon from Henry. Another says they gave up Conwy on 28 May 1401 and were pardoned, and that Hotspur won a fight at Cadair Idris two days later and then laid down the command.

An archaeologist has said the whole town is thought to have been burned about 1401, in the revolt against English forces. A scheduling account has the supporters of Owain Glyndŵr capturing the castle two years after Richard's refuge there. Owain himself was in south Wales that spring. In June 1401 he won his first major field victory at Mynydd Hyddgen.

In October Henry IV retaliated at Strata Florida.

Parliament in 1401 and 1402 passed penal laws against the Welsh. The laws were meant to force submission and instead drove more men into the revolt. Owain captured Grey and held him for almost a year until a ransom was paid. In June 1402 he defeated Sir Edmund Mortimer at the Battle of Bryn Glas near Pilleth and took him prisoner.

Henry IV would not ransom Mortimer, whose nephew had a claim to the English throne. Mortimer allied with Owain and married one of his daughters. In 1402 Prince Hal described the destroyed house at Sycharth as well built, with a fine lodge in the park. By 1403 Owain had a first division of about 4,000 and about 12,000 men in all.

French, Breton and Scottish help arrived. At the Battle of Stalling Down a Welsh army with a French contingent, led by Owain Glyndŵr, Rhys Gethin and Cadwgan, lord of Glyn Rhondda, defeated a large English force reputed to be led by Henry IV himself. In 1404 Owain controlled most of Wales and held a parliament at Machynlleth, with envoys from France, Scotland, Castile and León, and men from every region of Wales. The Pennal Letter of 1406 proposed two universities, the laws of Hywel Dda, and an enlarged Wales.

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

Shakespeare put him in Henry IV, Part 1 as Owen Glendower. The earliest upstanding domestic building still inside the town walls of Conwy is Tŷ Aberconwy, dated between 1417 and 1420, after that burning.

During the Wars of the Roses, from 1455 to 1485, between Lancastrians and Yorkists, Conwy was reinforced and saw little fighting. Henry VIII had restoration done in the 1520s and 1530s, when the castle served as a prison, a depot and a possible lodging for visitors. Minor repairs are recorded through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the early seventeenth century it was again dilapidated.

One record says it was already a ruin when Charles I sold it.

Charles I of England was born at Dunfermline on 19 November 1600 and was executed on 30 January 1649. He was the second son of James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark. When Elizabeth I died in 1603 his father became James I of England. Charles became heir in 1612 on the death of his brother Henry Frederick.

An attempt to marry him to the Spanish infanta Maria Anna failed after a visit to Spain in 1623. He became king of England, Scotland and Ireland on 27 March 1625 and soon married Henrietta Maria of France. He believed in the divine right of kings and quarrelled with Parliament over prerogative and over taxes raised without consent. His high-church policy, his Catholic queen and his failure to aid continental Protestants in the Thirty Years' War alienated Puritans and the Scottish Covenanters.

Attempts to impose Anglican practice on the Church of Scotland led to the Bishops' Wars. From 1642 he fought the English and Scottish parliaments. After defeat by the New Model Army in 1645 he left Oxford, surrendered to a Scottish force, and was handed to the Long Parliament. He refused a constitutional settlement, escaped in November 1647, was held on the Isle of Wight, and allied with Scotland.

By the end of 1648 the army controlled England. He was tried and executed for high treason in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished. It was restored in 1660 under his son Charles II.

In 1627 Charles I sold Conwy Castle to Edward Conway for £100. Edward's son, also Edward, inherited the ruin in 1631. The price is hard to translate into a later currency. One calculation for 2011 puts £100 somewhere between £15,200 and £3,180,000, depending on the measure.

For comparison, Henry Somerset, among the richest men in England, had an income of about £20,000 a year. When the English Civil War began in 1642, John Williams, Archbishop of York, took the castle for the king and repaired and garrisoned it at his own expense. In 1645 Sir John Owen was made governor instead. The two men quarrelled bitterly.

The archbishop went over to Parliament. One account says the town of Conwy fell in August 1646 and that in November General Thomas Mytton took the castle after a substantial siege. Another says the castle surrendered to Parliament in 1645 after Williams changed sides in a dispute with the king's commander. A scheduling account places the capitulation in 1646, among the last strongholds to give in, and says that despite an attempt at deliberate destruction the castle remained virtually intact.

The Trevor family asked Mytton for the return of property they had lent to the archbishop. Colonel John Carter was then appointed governor and further repairs were made. In 1655 the Council of State ordered the castle slighted. The Bakehouse Tower was probably pulled down in part at that time.

At the Restoration in 1660 the castle went back to Edward Conway, Earl of Conway. Five years later he stripped the remaining iron and lead and sold them. His overseer William Milward finished the work despite opposition from the leading townspeople, and the castle became a total ruin.

By the late eighteenth century the ruin was admired as picturesque and sublime. Thomas Girtin, Moses Griffith, Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Paul Sandby and J. M. W.

Turner painted it. Bridges across the river increased the number of visitors. A road bridge, Thomas Telford's suspension bridge, is dated 1826, and one account spreads that work from 1822 to 1826. A rail bridge is dated 1848 in one account and 1849, as Robert Stephenson's bridge on the Chester to Holyhead line, in another.

A further road bridge was built in 1958. These bridges hide the old watergate. In 1865 the castle passed from the Holland family, who had leased it from the Conway descendants, to the civic leadership of the town, and restoration began, including rebuilding of the damaged Bakehouse Tower. Another account dates the transfer to the mayor and council to 1877.

In June 1953 the Ministry of Works took the castle and the town wall on a ninety-nine-year lease. Arnold Taylor directed a wide programme of repair and research. Preservation of castle and wall went on together. The courtyard was excavated to its former level, revealing a stone-pitched path along its length and the foundations of a building on the north side.

Missing stair treads in the north-west, south-west, north-east and south-east towers were remade in concrete, the first pair up to roof level and the second pair up to the wall-walk. Work on the north-west tower was finished and work on the south-west tower was in progress. The well was being excavated, and the ditch to the south of it had been cleared. On the town wall, the spur wall running down to the sea, the tower at the north-east corner of the town, the four towers to the west of it, and the wall-walk between them were treated.

The castle was already a scheduled monument. It is a Grade I listed building, and one account dates that listing to 1950. Two post-medieval copper ring dials have been recorded from the site.

In 1963 and 1964 the site of the medieval king's hall and wardrobe, beside the southern stretch of the town wall from the Mill Gate toward Benarth Road, was excavated. A hall and associated buildings of the thirteenth century were found. The western part is likely to have been the king's hall, named in documents as iuxta La Mulne Gaste and prope cimiterium. The eastern part probably held the main works headquarters during the building of Conwy and Beaumaris.

The ditch between it and the castle is described as lying between the castle and the camera of the master of the works. The remains were backfilled. The ground is now a car park. The place is still regarded as archaeologically sensitive, with the evidence below the surface.

In 1986 the castle was inscribed, with the town walls, as part of the Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd, together with Beaumaris, Harlech and Caernarfon and the fortified town at Caernarfon. The four castles are described as the finest examples of late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century military architecture in Europe, because of their completeness, their condition, the evidence for organised domestic space, and the range of medieval forms that survive: barbicans, drawbridges, fortified gates, chicanes, redoubts, dungeons, towers and curtain walls. James of St. George is named as Edward's chief architect and as the greatest military architect of the age.

The royal commission is unusually well documented, including where the workmen came from, the use of stone quarried on the site, the financing, and the daily life of the workforce. Beaumaris and Harlech are singled out for the beauty of their concentric plans. Conwy and Caernarfon are the fortified towns. The castles have had only minimal restoration.

For about the last hundred years the approach has been to conserve them as found. The town walls at Conwy still form an almost complete enclosure. There is no buffer zone. An essential setting and significant views have been defined instead.

The castles and walls are scheduled and held in guardianship. In 2010 the castle received 186,897 visitors. A new visitor centre opened in 2012. Repairs in the financial year 2002 to 2003 cost £30,000.

In May 2013, during work on a sewage pipe in Castle Street, about 100 metres from the castle, workmen uncovered a medieval house, a cesspit and a road, with glazed pottery, coins and metalwork. The layers were deeply stratified. Ashley Batten, a senior planning archaeologist, said the remains could date from before the revolt in which the town is thought to have burned about 1401, and that they might show medieval Conwy before that destruction. Archaeologists stayed on site while the pipe was laid.

The finds were still to be studied after the digging.

On 29 October 2019 the castle was twinned with Himeji Castle in Hyōgo, Japan, at a ceremony in Himeji. A practice of improving visitor safety has run alongside that public use. Donald Insall Associates was commissioned in 2019 to develop better access, and a later statement of the same project says the commission for protection against falls was given in 2023. A heritage impact assessment of March 2025 accompanies an application for scheduled monument consent for new guardings.

Parapets are incomplete or lower than a safe height, given in one place as a minimum of 900 millimetres and in another as 750 to 950 millimetres. Some modern rails are climbable because the gaps are wide. The proposals run from flat metal bars in embrasures to freestanding balustrades with mesh and timber handrails, set at the west and east barbicans, along wall-walks, and at the north-west tower, the King's Tower, the Bakehouse Tower, the Prison Tower and the well and drawbridge. The aim is to remove temporary rails that harm the appearance, without heavy loss of old fabric.

Trial samples have been tested on the castle. A short section of the town wall, between the Watch Tower and the Wing Gate, is closed while stronger railings and protective mesh are considered, with the hope of reopening that stretch in time for Easter 2027. In December 2023 a published ranking placed the castle first among castles in Europe, ahead of Eilean Donan and Kylemore Abbey.

The castle still shows how a royal household of the late thirteenth century was arranged, and how that arrangement was altered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The outer ward kept hall, chapel, kitchen and prison within one court. The inner ward kept the king's rooms, the queen's rooms and a private chapel, defensible on their own and open to the river. The dates of the building, of the civil-war surrender and of the later transfer to the town do not agree in every account.

The walls, the eight towers and the royal rooms remain, on the rock above the crossing that the princes' court and the English castle were both built to hold.