Interdisciplinary and comparative study re-examines the fortification’s architecture in the light of tangible traces of Caernarfon’s pre-medieval fortified and elite settlement, as well as the intangible memory represented in the Romance legend of The Dream of Macsen Wledig in the Mabinogion. This paper presents a fresh interpretation for this widely studied Edwardian castle, based on a broader temporal and spatial research approach. The late thirteenth- to early fourteenth-century Caernarfon Castle and its associated townscape in Gwynedd, North Wales, has been the subject of detailed academic historical, archaeological and architectural scrutiny for considerable time. The third section explores for the first time unpublished material, principally annual audits and building accounts, in order to understand the castle and its constituent buildings. This paper attempts to make good both deficits by exploiting a range of medieval documents to reconstruct the stages of the castle’s evolution and its role in national affairs, as well as in the local economy, discussed respectively in the first two and the fourth sections of the article. Even so, it fell far short of a narrative of the castle as both a local and a national institution and the roles it played through the centuries before its demolition, and gave virtually no account of its physical evolution as a fortress and residence. A two-volume history of the town that made some use of documents to produce a useful narrative of town and castle was published in 1881. Recent archaeological investigation, both non-invasive and invasive, has revealed rich stratigraphy, going back in places to the late Iron Age. The surviving ramparts of Wallingford Castle betoken a once formidable castle, ‘most securely fortified’, but almost nothing of its walls remain.
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