King Edward’s Planted Towns
Welcome to our video about King Edward’s planted towns in North Wales! Planted towns, which in modern words might be called planned towns or planned communities, have been in existence for millenia. The Romans were well known for establishing grid patterns in any new settlement they built, and their street system remains in many British towns. The Anglo-Saxons established planned towns, and as the middle ages progressed, lords and kings at times wanted to establish a town where there hadn’t been one before. The Normans called these bastides. They were usually created for economic purposes, and were designed for the mutual benefit of the king, the landowner, and the new townsfolk to provide an efficient way of marketing surplus food and other goods and supplying a newly established castle. The landowner would charge a rent for a building plot (a Read more…
An Iron Ring of Castles
An Iron Ring of Castles is in many ways just like it sounds: a series of castles built around Wales to control the populace after the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Prince of Wales. In the 1270s and 1280s primarily, Edward I began the construction of this ring. The castles were focused in the north, in Gwynedd, since that region had always been a hotbed of Welsh resistance and resentment of English authority, and it was there that he built some of the most impressive monuments to his victory. http://www.castlewales.com/edward1.html He began in the northeast with three castles: Hawarden, Flint, and Rhuddlan, all built before the 1282 war. Hawarden was the first castle attacked by Dafydd ap Gruffydd on Palm Sunday, 1282, when he started what became the final war with England. Edward began Flint in 1277, bringing Read more…
King Edward’s complicated relationship with the Welsh
Sparked by a post yesterday, in which a historian commented that King Edward had a Welsh guard and didn’t ‘hate’ all Welsh as some people seemed to think, I feel compelled to comment. First off, Edward was an English king who had the interests of the English crown and the English people first and foremost. He conquered all these countries from that position, with the idea that English law/church/language/culture (and that means Norman, really) was far superior to the barbaric north and west. That doesn’t mean he hated all Welshmen. A lot of what he did initially, in fact, was because he loved Dafydd, Llywelyn’s brother, in particular, and felt horribly betrayed by him when he started the rebellion in 1282. And really, fine that he had a guard of Welshmen, but really, what were their choices? Nobody can prove Read more…
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