Dr Pamela Marshall – “The priest and the knight may come in” … but who else populated the medieval castle?
The deliberately overbearing and overtly militaristic nature of the medieval castle may have, perhaps not surprisingly, perpetuated a popular view in the public imagination about who predominantly constituted the occupants of medieval castles: great lords and men-at-arms immediately spring to mind. But who else typically lived in castles? How diverse was the castle community? What roles did individuals have within it and how were their lives organised, both on a practical and a social level, within those curtain walls? Here we take a look behind the castle gates to explore the evidence that enables us to provide some answers to these questions.

Dr Andy King – Edward I’s Castles in Wales
As part of his efforts to contain, and then conquer, the Welsh principality of Gwynedd, Edward I built a series of castles. These have been hailed as the very heights of medieval castle design; UNESCO, for instance, lists them as ‘the finest examples of late 13th century and early 14th century military architecture in Europe’. This talk will explore various aspects of the purpose, design and building of these castles. It will discuss their intended military and political functions, and the use of deliberate historical symbolism in their design and siting; it will raise some of the practical issues of building and garrisoning such enormous edifices; and it will examine the sources of their architectural design: just how innovative were they? And can their design really be attributed to the genius of a single overarching ‘mastermind’?

Dr John Kenyon – Raglan Castle
John Kenyon will explore one of the finest late medieval secular buildings in the UK, namely fifteenth-century Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire, built by William ap Thomas and his son William Herbert, later earl of Pembroke, men of Welsh gentry stock. Raglan was a castle that was to be transformed into a great country house for the Somerset family, later dukes of Beaufort, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries before destruction following the Parliamentarian siege in the summer of 1646. Ap Thomas’s detached hexagonal great tower in its own moat and Herbert’s domestic ranges are just two of the features to be examined.

Chris Jones-Jenkins FSA
Castrum Leonis roars again: the reconstruction of Holt castle, Denbighshire
The talk will detail the visual reconstruction of Holt Castle, from barely surviving ruinous scraps to a fully realised three-dimensional model, utilising detailed analysis of surviving medieval documentation to put flesh on the scant remains.

Dr Jeremy Ashbee
The Royal Castles of Edward I and the English control of North Wales 1283 – 1400
The royal castles of north Wales, especially Conwy, Harlech, Caernarfon and Beaumaris, are justly world-famous as exemplars of medieval military architecture. This talk will contain a discussion of a less well-known topic: what the castles actually did in the century after their construction, and how well they did it. It has often been stated that Caernarfon Castle, and implicitly the others too, constituted the principal centres of the English government of north Wales. They are interpreted as bases for the most important officials, seats of justice, financial administration and imprisonment of offenders, and potentially places in which the king and queen might reside. Historical evidence, especially plentiful in the fourteenth century, suggests that this model needs to be qualified. The relationships between the castles and royal officials, and indeed the royal court, was rarely a simple one, and while it is clear that towns such as Caernarfon and Conwy did play important roles in governing north Wales, the castles themselves often took second-place to other buildings. In practice, the castles performed a more limited range of day-to-day roles: as prisons, arsenals and garrisons. But their scale and imposing architecture were highly effective in communicating English royal power and deterring potential rebels; the active parts they took in the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr amply demonstrates that they retained their potency long after the death of Edward I.