Discussion:
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Early history of the town
Beaumaris was the last of Edward's castle-towns to be built in north Wales. Facing across to the mountains of Snowdonia, it occupies a coastal site on the south-eastern shore of the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn), overlooking the Menai Strait and the 'beautiful marsh' (beau maris) that gave the town its name. The castle there was begun in early 1295, but Edward's intention to make use of the site may date back rather earlier, to 1282-3, when he was there in person and when the place was being used to create a pontoon bridge across the Strait.[33] At this time there was already a fairly prosperous port town close to where Beaumaris was sited. This was Llanfaes, an old-established Welsh settlement (maerdref) with an ancient church ('llan faes'). Nearby, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth founded a Franciscan friary in 1237, and during the latter half of the thirteenth century, during the time of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, a town comprising some 120 properties was present there with inhabitants involved in fishing, ferrying, and sea-trading, the latter linking them with Gascony and Liverpool.[34] Llanfaes was burnt in 1294 in a Welsh revolt under Madoc ap Llywelyn,[35] and in its place was built Edward's new town and castle of Beaumaris.
The Welsh revolt of 1294 gave urgency to the need to start work on a new castle. In the November of that year Henry Latham of Lancashire was instructed to take men and materials to Anglesey, including diggers and carpenters who 'would perhaps undertake such preliminary site work as the digging of trial holes and the erection of huts to accommodate the larger bodies of men that would follow'.[36] On April 17 1295, Master James of St George, the king's master mason in north Wales, received monies to start the building, and Edward who was also there at this time appointed Walter of Winchester as clerk of the new works.[37] Work at Beaumaris proceeded as a matter of priority throughout the summer as payments were transferred to the castle site from other projects, and its workers kept busy excavating the new moat as well as putting up a barricade around the site to protect it, the king having paid a final visit in July before leaving Wales.[38] By the end of February 1296 Master James and Walter of Winchester set out in a letter to the royal exchequer what had been achieved by then and what enormous progress they had made, as well as what still needed to be done, which included making a dock so that 'at high tide a forty-ton vessel will be able to come fully-laden right up to the castle gateway'.[39] By 1296, then, the castle was taking shape, as too was the new town.
Edward had seen to it that Llanfaes was rendered uninhabitable by its Welsh townspeople, and their former houses were taken down and used to make the buildings of the new town nearby.[40] In the process the inhabitants were moved to a new location further west on the island, to a new town sited at Rhosfair, called Newborough, a site of a royal Welsh palace.[41] By removing not only the townspeople of Llanfaes but also eradicating traces of their town the king's intention was clearly to erase the Welsh presence. Even so, some thirty of them still held on there, and were fined for their delay.[42] As the inhabitants of Llanfaes were being moved on, the new town of Beaumaris was formed, but as is usual for this period very little is recorded of this process, especially compared to the more thorough surviving account of the castle building. The new town received its borough charter on 12 September 1296.[43] This was some six months after the letter Master James and Walter of Winchester sent to the exchequer, and presumably work on the town had proceeded during this intervening time as it had done on the adjoining castle. The charter was written using the same terms as an earlier charter issued to Conwy whereby the town became a 'free borough' and the constable of the castle 'the mayor of the borough', to whom the burgesses presented two nominated bailiffs from their community 'every year on the feast of St Michael'.[44] As was usual for Edward's new towns in Wales, the burgesses of Beaumaris were also granted the right to have a merchant gild, and a clause inserted stipulating that 'if any man's bondman shall dwell in the town... for a year and a day without being claimed... he shall remain a free man in that town'.[45] The charter made Beaumaris an attractive prospect to immigrants who sought to take up residence and trade there, and gave some countryfolk opportunity to lose the ties binding them to their lord and his land.
The privileges set out in the charter for Beaumaris were derived from those 'used in the city of Hereford'.[46] This was a commonplace legal borrowing in the founding of new towns in Wales during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[47] But the actual wording of the charter itself was derived from that previously issued to Conwy in 1284. This connection between the two town charters becomes significant for interpreting their respective town plans. Of the precision involved in the laying out of Beaumaris, a clue is provided in a royal account in which the original size of the burgages is stated to be eighty feet deep by forty feet wide.[48] This compared a little unfavourably to the size of the burgages at nearby Caernarfon, which were rather larger at eighty feet deep and sixty feet wide,[49] but in terms of its population size Beaumaris was from the start a larger town than Caernarfon, even though it was founded some ten years afterwards. In the earliest account of the town's fiscal contribution to the king's coffers, dating to 1305, 132¼ rented burgages in Beaumaris are recorded, a figure that rises to 154 by 1322.[50] During the same period only Aberystwyth and Conwy came close to this number in this part of north Wales, a clear indication not only of the relatively large size of Beaumaris compared with Edward's other new towns, but also the greater aspirations that its founder had for the place.
One of the uncertainties about the early history of Beaumaris concerns whether or not it originally had town defences like its neighbouring and near-contemporaries of Conwy and Caernarfon. In 1407, following an attack by Owain Glyndwr in 1403 in which part of Beaumaris was burned, the burgesses received from the Prince of Wales a donation of £10 'in aid of making a ditch round the aforesaid town', and soon after, in 1414, work on it had clearly begun as the new building of a stone wall encircling the town had required the loss of 30 of the town's burgages.[51] The circuit of this wall is shown by a map of 1610 by John Speed, and it linked to the walls of the castle.[52] It ran along the seashore, then northwards across Castle Street parallel to Steeple Lane before turning sharply east to cross Church Street where its remnants still survive. This is the circuit marked by the Ordnance Survey and shown on a map of the town's historical monuments.[53] However, an earlier and larger circuit is also discernable. This is apparent from archaeological work west of the castle, which revealed a shallow ditch running south-westwards.[54] The alignment of this, if extended, would join with the moat of the castle - which David the Dyker of Caernarvon was employed on 'perfecting' between 1312 and 1315[55] - and in the opposite direction would link with the surviving remains of the town wall east of Church Street. If this is accepted then the alignment of the ditch may have continued on around the town, running parallel to New Street and turning south where the street makes a ninety degree turn. This larger coffin-shaped circuit would have taken in all of the town, beyond the fifteenth century defences. The fact that 30 burgages had been lost in building the latter suggests that the Steeple Street area was by then built up, a thesis that relates to the design and planning of the new town.
Beaumaris was clearly an ambitious foundation and right from the start was reasonably successful. It continued to survive through the later middle ages as the island's main port and administrative centre.[56] The king had ensured the town's dominance for he himself had 'enacted that all ships nearing the coast-line of Anglesey should call at Beaumaris, and there display their goods and merchandise for sale, and not elsewhere'.[57] But the initial economic success of the new town was perhaps also at least partly owed to the legacy of its prosperous Welsh precursor, which it replaced. In creating their new town at Beaumaris, then, Edward and his men were capitalising on the fortunes of the older town of Llanfaes.
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Design and plan of the town
The layout of Beaumaris is based on two main streets that meet at right-angles to form a T-shape. One of these, Castle Street, runs parallel to the shoreline up to castle gates located at its northern end, while the other, Church Street, is perpendicular to the shoreline and extends uphill past the church of Ss Mary and Nicholas. Both streets are laid out on straight alignments. Beyond these two core streets, the original extent of the new town, as it was laid out, is open to debate. The uncertainty is linked to the question of where the town's medieval defences ran. The accepted view, that defences around the town were built only as late as the fifteenth century, is challenged by the discovery of a ditch alignment to the west of the castle moat.[58] A longer circuit has been postulated already, which would have encompassed a much larger area than that enclosed by the shorter fifteenth-century circuit. Was this larger area the extent of Beaumaris as it was first laid out, or was it an area added later as the town's prosperity grew? This is a question that gets to the heart of how Beaumaris was planned, and what its original layout comprised.
One argument would be to see the area enclosed by the fifteenth-century defences as the earliest part of Beaumaris, with the areas to the outside of it, to the north and west, as suburbs of later origin. The plan of the town provides some evidence against this however. In particular there is an alignment of Little Lane and Chapel Lane which runs parallel to the north of Castle Street and crosses through where the fifteenth century defences ran (along Steeple Lane). This suggests that this was a street alignment pre-dating the later town wall, and that the circuit of the latter cut through existing streets and properties. There is documentary support for this, for we know 30 burgages were removed to make way for the new wall in 1414, and it is clear also that this was a new work and not a replacement of an existing fortification.[59] If the streets and plots in this western area of the town were originally included from start they would lie within the postulated thirteenth-century circuit. The curious ninety-degree turn in New Street itself suggests that this road was bounded and constrained by something, following a ditch perhaps? But the name 'new street' is also suggestive that it was a later arrival, which might then be interpreted as a sign that the area to the west of the fifteenth-century wall was indeed a suburb added onto the town's earlier nucleus. So the evidence can be read in two different ways. One further possibility, which might help to resolve this issue, is to see New Street as a new, fourteenth-century addition inserted to help develop this part of the town, but within an area already prescribed by an existing circuit surrounding the town as a whole. Future excavation in the New Street area may help to confirm or refute this view, but there is also another avenue available to explore these ideas, using the town's earliest written records.
The area of the new town occupied by rented burgages at the start of the fourteenth century can of course be estimated by multiplying the number of recorded burgages in 1305 with known dimensions of the town's original burgages. Taking the figure of 132 burgages, the area covered would be 132 x (80 x 40) feet, that is, 132 x 3200 square feet. This equates to 422,400 square feet in all (41,100m²). By 1322, when the burgage total had risen to 154, the area covered by rented burgages in the town was 492,800 square feet (45,780m²). Using field-survey measurements made in the present-day town as a basis, these areas can be mapped-out and related to the town's plan.[60] However to deduce the entire inhabited area of the town from the 1305 rental the curtilages associated with the burgages also have to be taken into account.[61] The length and breadth dimensions of these were recorded in statute perches (16½ feet). Not all of the burgages had associated curtilages, but many did. For example, Walter of Winchester had three burgages (of 40 by 80 feet) and two curtilages of eight by four, and five by two perches, while Roger Capello had just one burgage.[62] Combining the area of both burgages and curtilages listed in 1305 produces an overall figure of 605,827 square feet (14 acres/56,300m²), an area measuring about 780 feet on two sides (238m). This easily encompasses all plots along Castle Street and Church Street (both within the fifteenth-century circuit as well as outside), and those along Rating Row and Steeple Street, but not the plots along New Street. That some building-plots on the two main streets date back to the time of the town's foundation is also verified by modern field-measurement, for a width of forty feet is still evident across some property frontages, especially those plots close to the intersection of Castle and Church Streets. Also, excavations in former plots east of Rating Row revealed domestic occupation and industrial activities, together with timber-footed buildings, of late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century date, showing that this area of the town was likewise occupied right from the start.[63] Indeed these buildings appear to have fronted a now lost road that once ran northwards out of the town towards Llanfaes, and one reference from 1306 to wages paid to a mason and four labourers working to obstruct the 'gate towards the field' may refer to the blocking-up of this route at an early date.[64] So from the calculated built-up area derived from the property rental it appears that New Street was developed after 1305.
Perhaps, then, we should see Beaumaris as having two phases of development? The first including Castle Street and Church Street, the area closest to the castle and the quay, and a second, perhaps coming soon after the first, extending the town further westwards in the area of New Street. It may be that at the outset the whole of the new town was provided with a ditched circuit encompassing not only the earliest development but also the area of New Street. This would then explain why the fifteenth century town wall appears to cut through pre-existing streets and properties. Having provision for urban expansion built into the town's original design is not unknown, and shows foresight on the part of the planners. We have already seen that Edward himself had high expectations for the future prosperity and success of Beaumaris. The tighter circuit of the later, fifteenth-century town wall is probably a reflection of the need to keep building costs down - the donation of £10 to the town by the prince has already been noted - and perhaps also to make use of the church as part of the town's defensive system. In this context, Steeple Street itself probably dates from when the later wall was constructed, providing extra-mural access around the new defences for those properties that now lay outside them, especially since the wall had itself apparently severed access behind Castle Street properties between Little Lane and Chapel Street.
If this view of the original size and extent of Beaumaris is accepted, the town was designed to cover an area that was equivalent approximately to that of Conwy, founded in 1283-4; but unlike Conwy it did not acquire stone defences until much later. An indication, though, that defences like Conwy's were perhaps envisaged for Beaumaris is the surviving foundations of a substantial stone-built wall connecting with the castle-defences close to the dock that Master James and Walter of Winchester had written to the exchequer about in their letter. We know that money for the castle project ran short after 1300, and that it was never completed,[65] and so it would be no surprise that any initial plan to wall the town would have to be abandoned, leaving only vestigial traces such as the alignment of new Street and the ditch alignment west of the castle. One further suggestion that New Street was part of the original town design is its orientation, since it matches that of both Castle Street and Little Lane/Chapel Street. This shared alignment makes it look as if they were all laid out at the same time. This alignment also matches that of the surviving section of town wall that joined up with the castle defences beside the dock. The evidence at Beaumaris, then, is for a castle and town, closely connected in their layout, seemingly laid out to one overall plan. This places Beaumaris in the same category as other Edwardian towns in north Wales, especially Conwy, a connection that is further indicated by the shared forms of their main streets. The T-shape of Castle Street and Church Street is replicated at Conwy by the same shape as Castle Street and High Street. Both towns have one of their two main streets (the one running up to the castle) placed parallel to the quayside and shoreline, with a second, perpendicular street running at right-angles up from the waterfront. In both cases, too, this perpendicular street actually extends across the line of Castle Street slightly to meet with the water's edge, so the 'T' becomes more of a cross-shape (†). The two towns also share the same oddity in their plans, a curved street, Rating Row in the case of Beaumaris. This particular street seems to be out of keeping compared with the town's other streets with their straight alignments, and it may be that it preserves a trace of some relict, pre-urban landscape feature, one possibility being the boundary of a once much larger oval shaped enclosure, a common feature associated with early Christian monastic sites in western Britain and Ireland.[66] If so it would pre-date the burgesses' new chapel in the town, built in the early 1300s 'because their parish church is at two leagues or more... so that they cannot go there when the weather is tempestuous'.[67]
The similarities between the layout of Conwy and Beaumaris are curious, not least because the two towns are separated by a period of more than ten years. However, since the two towns shared the same wording in their respective charters, it is a similarity that should not be too surprising. Then there is the involvement in both places of Master James of St George. He had been responsible for the construction of the castle and town-defences at Conwy in the mid-1280s, and it was he who Edward had placed in charge of building works at Beaumaris a decade later.[68] The shared town plans may therefore be a signature of Master James' involvement, not only in orchestrating the two castle-building projects, but also in the design and planning of the two new towns. It is of note that of Edward's new towns in north Wales, only these two had this shared design, and both were places that saw the king's master mason involved right from the start of the work. In this regard, Beaumaris might be one of the rare cases in medieval urban planning where we are able, with a small degree of confidence, to pinpoint the author of a town plan. Moreover, with its precisely laid-out plots and set-square streets, the same geometrical thinking that lay behind the plan of the town underpinned the architect's perfect 'symmetry of design' for the castle.[69]
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The town as it is today
As future capital of the island of Anglesey, Edward had great aspirations for Beaumaris but the town's port function was later eclipsed by Holyhead, and its administrative role by Llangefni. Today, Beaumaris is a small, quiet country town, little larger in physical size than it was in the fourteenth century,[70] visited in summer by tourists who come to see the ruins of Edward's last Welsh castle which still faces across the Menai Strait to the high mountains of Snowdonia. The town's two main streets are fronted by buildings with mainly eighteenth and nineteenth century façades, but these still respect the bounds of much earlier building plots, some of which conform to the original burgage-size of forty by eighty feet.[71] These plot boundaries are themselves of substantial construction, especially those visible in gardens behind buildings that front onto Castle Street. The town also has one of the oldest urban buildings surviving anywhere in Wales, a late-fourteenth century timber-framed house close to the corner of Castle Street and Church Street.[72] No doubt there are also early internal structural elements in other buildings along these two streets, for the exterior appearance of buildings is often deceptive, concealing behind their modern façades much older fabric. Behind modern properties fronting Rating Row are the remains of the fifteenth-century town wall. Also visible is its alignment running through the west side of the churchyard, beside Steeple Street. There are some remains of it still embedded in the rear walls of properties on the south side of Castle Street. The straightness of the town's two main streets are very apparent from the ground as well as maps, and gaining access to the top of the castle's southern gatehouse gives a clear view all along the length of Castle Street, surely no accidental design and one that perhaps places us close to the vision that Master James had when he set out the town and castle in the later 1290s.
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References:
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, pp.103-4.
- I. Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Phillimore, Chichester, 1983), p.166. The town was in the hands of the Welsh princes and no borough charter is known. In 1294 its burgesses yielded £8 8s 5¾d, see Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.51.
- Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, p.166, citing CClR 1318-23, p.71.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, pp.103-4.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, p.104; on Master James see A.J. Taylor, 'Master James of St George', English Historical Review 65 (1950), pp.433-57.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, p.105.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, pp.106-7.
- Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.49; Taylor, Welsh Castles, pp.110-111.
- Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, p.166; see Newborough.
- M.W. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages (Lutterworth, London, 1967), pp.49-50, citing PRO: E 101/109/2.
- CChR 1257-1300, p.465.
- CChR 1257-1300, pp.276-77.
- CChR 1257-1300, pp.276-77; see G. Usher, 'The foundation of an Edwardian borough: the Beaumaris charter 1296', Transactions of the Anglesey Archaeological Society (1967), pp.1-16.
- CChR 1257-1300, p.277; Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.282.
- M. Bateson, 'The laws of Breteuil', English Historical Review 15 (1900), pp.73-8, 302-18, 496-523, 754-7; 16 (1901), pp.92-110, 332-45.
- Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.63.
- Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.63.
- Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, pp.51, 66. The 1305 rental is printed in a supplement to Archaeologia Cambrensis 1 (1877), pp.xiv-xix, headed 'Extent of burgages, lands, etc, assigned for the castle of Beaumaris'.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, p.111, citing PRO: SC 6/1216/2 and 6/1152/5; also Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, p.79.
- The foundations of the town wall are visible where they meet the castle defences.
- RCAHMW, An Inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Anglesey (HMSO, London, 1937), pp.cxlviii-cxlix, 8-13.
- Excavation report: Anon., Archaeological Assessment of the Site of Former Outdoor Activities Centre, Beaumaris (G1044) (Gwynedd Archaeological Trust report 28, c.1985); P.J. Fasham, 'Investigations in 1985 by R.B. White at Castle Meadows, Beaumaris', Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club (1992), pp.123-130. The ditch was not fully excavated. It is not dated with certainty though fourteenth century ceramics were found in its upper fill.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, p.113: 10½ perches of moat were to be perfected by David, a length of some 170 feet.
- Soulsby, Towns of Medieval Wales, p.80.
- Lewis, Mediaeval Boroughs, p.206.
- See above, 'Early history of the town'.
- Taylor, Welsh Castles, p.111, fn. 3 and 5; R.B. White, undated, untitled typescript report on 15th-century town ditch in Steeple Lane (GAT town files).
- Measurements based on a field-survey conducted in 2004. See 'Data downloads'.
- 'Extent of burgages', Archaeologia Cambrensis 1 (1877), ppxiv-xix.
- 'Extent of burgages', Archaeologia Cambrensis 1 (1877), pp.xiv, xvi.
- Excavation report: D. Hopewell, 'Beaumaris Health Centre Excavations', Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club (1997), pp.9-36: burgage boundary ditches were identified (p.25).
- Arnold, Welsh Castles, p.111, though he interprets this as evidence for blocking a gate in the castle defences. By 1300 the cost of construction for the castle works was nearly £11,400.
- Arnold, Welsh Castles, pp.110-114; RCAHMW, Anglesey, pp.8-13.
- See L. Swan, 'Monastic proto-towns in early medieval Ireland: the evidence of aerial photography, plan analysis and survey', in H.B. Clarke and A. Simms (eds) The Comparative History of Urban Origins in Non-Roman Europe, British Archaeological Reports, International Series 255 (1985), ii, pp.77-102.
- Calendar of Ancient Petitions, ed. Rees, p.471. Letter from the burgesses to the king and council, dated 1305 or 1314-15.
- Arnold, Welsh Castles, pp.45-55, 104-111; see also 'Conwy'.
- Arnold, Welsh Castles, p.114.
- Population in 2001 was around 2000 for Beaumaris ward, which covers an area slightly larger than the built-up town.
- RCHAMW, Angelsey, pp.13-16.
- Number 32 Castle Street, c.1400 date according to RCAHMW, Anglesey, pp.13-14. For more details on historical monuments in Beaumaris see www.coflein.gov.uk
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