... and a brief history of the site.
Flint Castle stands on the Dee estuary in the middle of an industrial centre. Flint was a fortress built to assure the domination of an area brought under firm English control. It might also have been used as a springboard for further invasion in north Wales.
The region between the Rivers Clwyd and Dee, the extreme north-east corner of Wales, still bears much evidence of its history as a border zone. It comprised the old Welsh district or cantref of Tegeingl, and formed part of a debatable land, The Middle Country, between the two nations. The four cantrefs which composed the Middle Country, Dyffryn Clwyd, Rhos, Rhufoniog and Tegeingl, were surrounded to the south and west by the major principalities of Gwynedd and Powys. This vulnerable area was frequently fought over by the native Welsh princes themselves. It was also a natural target for English advance westward from Chester. Indeed, long before the arrival of the Normans on this part of the border, the pendulum of Saxon or Welsh supremacy had swung to and fro for centuries.
Following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s policy for the Welsh border was to establish a series of marcher lordships, with the principal centres at Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford. King William had the castle of Chester built in 1070 and granted the earldom, which was to include the Dee valley, to Hugh de Avranches, known as ‘Hugh the Fat’. Earl Hugh’s deputy, Robert, had soon established a base with an earth and timber castle at Rhuddlan, and his forces penetrated along the coastal strip of north Wales towards Anglesey, building castles as they went. But in 1094, the Welsh united against the common enemy and inflicted a series of major defeats on the Normans. It was Gruffudd ap Cynan, who died in 1137, who, according to his later biographer, “delivered the land of Gwynedd from castles”.
In fact, although the Norman conquest of England took just five years, the Anglo-Norman advances into Wales were to continue for the next two centuries. Mountainous Snowdonia, at the heart of the principality of Gwynedd, was to prove the firmest base of Welsh resistance. In 1114, three armies under King Henry I converged on the region and temporarily halted the expansion of Gruffudd ap Cynan. But by 1157 Gruffudd’s son, Owain Gwynedd, had established himself on the southern shore of the River Dee when he ambushed King Henry II at a road block near Coleshill. Henry escaped and pushed forward until Owain sued for peace. During the next ten years however, Owain was to capture the castles of Rhuddlan and Basingwerk, and an English invading army was defeated by appalling weather conditions in the Berwyn mountains in 1165.
Under Gruffudd ap Cynan and his son Owain, Gwynedd had enjoyed a golden era with the strength of the family dynasty built up gradually but effectively. Upon Owain’s death in 1170, the fragility of this success was exposed. According to Welsh custom, his lands were divided among his surviving sons, and there followed thirty years of family strife.
Llywelyn ab Iowerth, Llywelyn the Great, was the grandson of Owain Gwynedd. His rise to power was meteoric, like “the swirl of a great windstorm” as one of his court poets put it. Llywelyn swept aside uncles and cousins and secured recognition of his position from King John in 1201. Indeed, in 1205 he married John'’ illegitimate daughter, Joan. But relations between Llywelyn and his father-in-law were strained more than once, and in 1211 the king, outraged by Llywelyn’s insubordination, led two invasion forces into north Wales, penetrating with devastating effect deep into Gwynedd. The following year, John assembled a huge army and seemed intent on complete conquest. At the last moment, the king abandoned the campaign, with rumours of a threat against his life playing a large part in the decision.
After the death of King John, Llywelyn continued to extend his power and influence throughout Wales. He proved to be a master at exploiting the divisions between and within the English marcher families of the borders, and used his children to secure several important allies. In the north for example, the marriage of his daughter, Helen, to John ‘the Scot’ formed such an alliance with the earls of Chester.
On John’s death however, King Henry III acquired the earldom of Chester, which included the castles of Chester itself, and that of Shotwick which lay just across the river Dee from the later Flint Castle. Indeed, this was to prove a significant tactical advantage since the Crown now had a direct foothold on the borders of Wales. Chester provided the direct base from which the Crown might confront the power of Gwynedd and curb its ambitions in the border zone.
Within a year of the death of Llywelyn ab Iowerth in 1240, his son Dafydd, had been driven out of Tegeingl by Henry III who built a new stone castle at Dyserth. Dafydd died in 1246 and again within a year, his heirs, his nephews Owain and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, had no option but to agree to the Treaty of Woodstock. All of north Wales to the east of the river Conwy was now in royal hands. Henry III granted the earldom of Chester and its castles to his eldest son, Edward, in 1254. In doing so, he was also handing over what were to become further Welsh problems for the Crown, problems that were to take another thirty years to resolve.
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Llywelyn the Last, was the grandson of Llywelyn ab Iowerth. In 1255, he defeated his brothers, Owain and Dafydd, in battle and set about reasserting the authority of Gwynedd. He recovered his family’s manor of Ewloe as part of the cantref of Tegeingl, in 1257, and he built a castle. He later captured and destroyed the English castle at Hawarden in 1265.
Llywelyn’s success continued in 1258, with ‘the magnates of Wales’ swearing an allegiance to him. It was now that he first assumed, or was accorded, the title ‘Prince of Wales’. In the 1260s he supported the English baronial opposition to Henry III, and in 1267 the king, exhausted by repeated domestic difficulties, concluded a peace with Llywelyn. Under the Treaty of Montgomery sealed in that year, Llywelyn gained the formal recognition of the title Prince of Wales for himself and his heirs. Territorially, he had gained control over much of the country, with only the marcher lordships of the southern coastal region remaining firmly in English hands. In the north-east, although Hawarden Castle was returned to English hands, it was not to be rebuilt for thirty years.
Llywelyn’s achievements upto 1267 were quite remarkable, and no Welsh prince had commanded such power and influence since the coming of the Normans. But he was to remain at the pinnacle of success for just ten years. Tensions quickly became evident in the March, and Llywelyn gradually found himself sidelined with a feeling that he was being defrauded of the gains he had won under the Treaty of Montgomery.
King Henry III died in 1272, whilst his heir was on crusade. At first the accession of King Edward I did not herald an immediate change in the fragile accord between the Crown and Prince Llywelyn, yet a conflict soon became inevitable. Llywelyn failed to swear allegiance to the new king in 1273, and did not attend the king’s formal coronation in the following year. Moreover, between December 1274 and April 1276, he failed to answer five summonses to do homage to Edward as his lord. The king was particularly enraged when, having journeyed to Chester in 1275, he found that Llywelyn failed to turn up to perform homage.
In November 1276, after fruitless negotiations, Edward’s patience gave out and he declared his intention to go against Llywelyn “as a rebel and disturber of the peace”. Preparations for the war took time, but by May 1277 a new great tower was under construction up on the old royal castle at Builth in mid Wales, and in July a new stronghold was begun at Aberystwyth. The whole campaign was carefully planned and executed, with up to fifteen thousand, six hundred troops engaged in the royal force at its peak. Within a year of the declaration of war, Llywelyn had been comprehensively defeated and had been forced to accept the treaty of Aberconwy. The bounds of his principality were pushed back into the heartlands of Gwynedd, with English control once more extending across north Wales as far as the River Conwy.
At the start of the campaign in June 1277, four of the king’s clerks were despatched to recruit building workers throughout the shires of midland England. Supplies of tools and other equipment began to be stockpiled at Chester. By the middle of July, Edward I himself was at Chester, where he was joined by the fleet from the Cinque Ports of the English Channel. We are fortunate in that many of the royal bills and accounts for this period survive, and we can put together a very clear picture of the way the king’s programme of building works was planned and carried out.
About 21st July 1277, an army of soldiers, and another of wood-cutters and building workers from midland England, who had converged on Chester, moved forward to Flint. By this time it is assumed that Llywelyn’s castle at Ewloe had fallen to the English, and was never again to be used as a fortified stronghold.
Meanwhile, timber had been cut in the king’s Cheshire woods, and in his brother’s forest of Toxteth. It was brought to Flint, much of it on newly-made rafts, and a wooden palisade was raised. The site of Flint Castle was selected for the first field headquarters, because it was about a day’s march along the ancient Roman road from Chester, and because of its accessibility to sea-going ships. Beyond Flint, another day’s journey away, lay Rhuddlan. There, the old Norman castle still survived as a major earthwork, and it was now to become the site of a great stone fortification. More specifically, the siting of Flint was determined by the location of a promontory of rock situated in an otherwise marshy estuary. Like all the other new towns and castles built for Edward I in Wales during subsequent years, the accessibility of Flint by sea as well as land, reduced the chances of a successful siege in times of war.
The name Le Flynt for this virgin site may simply refer to its rocky nature in an otherwise marshy area, but it should not be overlooked that Edward I incorporated symbolism into many of his castles. It has been suggested that the name Le Flynt may have been an allusion to Edward’s intention to strike a spark of fire whose flames would consume Llywelyn.
The first construction workforce at Flint included nine hundred and seventy diggers, plus many more late-comers, including three hundred from the Lincolnshire fens who had been escorted by three mounted soldiers to prevent their desertion en route. By the end of August 1277, the digging force numbered two thousand, three hundred men. At first there were also three hundred woodcutters and three hundred and thirty carpenters. Within a month, having completed the necessary temporary buildings, most of them moved on to the next camp at Rhuddlan. They cut back the woods beside the route as they went, thereby reducing potential cover for any Welsh attack on further supply trains.
The enormous force of navvies assembled at Flint was needed to dig a defensive ditch around the site selected for the new castle and town. The diggers worked with all speed, collecting performance pay with bonuses for good work and deductions for absenteeism. With the bulk of the work completed, most of the diggers moved on. Burgage plots in the town for new settlers were being granted by February 1278, and by 1292, there were seventy-four such settlers or burgesses in Flint wealthy enough to be taxed. Among those landlords holding plots was the king’s tailor, who had been responsible for much of the provisioning for the royal forces. Others included several of the building masters who had been engaged on building the castle.
In August 1277, two hundred masons were on Edward’s payroll at Flint. Some quickly moved on to other royal works, but many stayed behind to begin building the castle proper. They used material obtained from the ditches cut into the sandstone underlying the site, as well as some ten thousand stones ferried from a quarry near Shotwick across the River Dee. The end of the war, and the signing of the Treaty of Aberconwy in November 1277, by no means brought the work to a halt. Both the castle and town at Flint went on to become a permanent fortified base.
Plumbers were roofing two castle towers with lead in 1278, possibly the small towers of the outer gate, which was certainly completed before 1281. Although some diggers and carpenters remained on the payroll at Flint in 1278 and 1279, most of the expenditure in these years went on the wages of quarry workers. They were preparing thirty-six thousand stones at the Nesshead quarry on the Wirral, with twenty masons laying 200ft (61m) of wall in the late 1279 building season. There is no record of payments to masons during 1280, but a new lime-kiln was constructed and the main programme of building at Flint Castle was about to be resumed.
In 1278, King Edward had brought over a master mason from Savoy, on the French border with Switzerland and Italy, called James of St. George. Having carried out tours of inspection of other royal works in Wales, Master James appears at the head of the masons' payroll at Flint in November 1280. His name remained there for seventeen months, at a rate of two shillings per day. Indeed, Master James’ lasting connection with the work at Flint is also indicated by the grant to him of the nearby manor of Mostyn in 1295.
A large amount of stone dressing was carried out at Flint during the winter of 1280-81, and the number of masons at Flint rose sharply to an average of one hundred and ninety during the 1281 season. They were engaged upon cutting stones for special requirements, including window heads and spiral staircases, and building eight arrow slit embrasures. A new revetment was constructed, and a crane was used to raise floor joists into “the tower towards the sea”, work that was to continue in to the next year. Two towers stood incomplete, and their wall-tops were covered with straw as a protection against frost damage during the winter of 1281-82. Very large stocks of lime, for mortar, were paid for in preparation for the 1282 building season. Stones for the Great Tower doorways, well shaft, and pillars were then being cut, but the walls of this tower had to be thatched against frost in later years.
On Palm Sunday 1282, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s troublesome brother Dafydd, had sparked off a major Welsh revolt, attacking the castles of Flint, Hawarden and Rhuddlan. The town of Flint was burnt, and the building works on the castle must surely have been interrupted. Llywelyn had little option but to join and lead the revolt at large. King Edward was outraged, and intended “to put an end finally to the matter … of putting down the malice of the Welsh”. He was to assemble a force and engage in building campaigns even more breath-taking than those of 1276-77. Llywelyn’s death on 11th December 1282, in a skirmish at Irfon Bridge, near Builth, was effectively to bring the war to an end. His ancestral castle at Dolwyddelan in Gwynedd fell the next month. Dafydd became a fugitive, hunted down by a force of up to seven thousand men, and was only finally brought before the king in June 1283. He was to face an ugly death at Shrewsbury. The immense castles at Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech, all begun in the spring of that year, were to signify the final demise of the native house of Gwynedd.
Following the revolt, and even as building was progressing on the three new strongholds, more work was done on the town ditches at Flint, including repairs after the fire damage of 1282. The masons working on the castle were finally paid off at Martinmas 1284. It was at this time too, that the new shire county of Flint was established under the Statute of Wales. Finally, metal fittings and carpentry for the castle, including the bridge between the castle and the town, together with the roofing of the Great Tower in lead, were paid for in 1286.
Although it is difficult to be precise, altogether about £7,000 had been spent on the town and castle defences of Flint, mainly in the years 1277, 1279, 1281 and 1282. A further revolt in 1294-95 was to test the effectiveness of all of Edward’s Welsh castles. In the autumn of 1294, the constable of Flint Castle, who also served as mayor of the borough, burnt the town to deny shelter and provisions to the Welsh attacking force which was laying siege to the castle, a not unusual tactic of warfare through to more modern times.
In 1301, Flint Castle passed to Edward of Caernarfon, Earl of Chester, who was later to become King Edward II. Over the next two years, works amounting to some £146 were undertaken at the castle. The most significant item in the expenditure was the building of “a large timber structure, surmounted by a singularly beautiful wooden gallery circling the top of the Great Tower”. Its construction seems to have involved the complete re-roofing of the tower in lead. Carpenters were engaged to make a new bridge and were hanging window shutters in the battlements of the inner ward. Following this work however, little further building is recorded at Flint apart from regular maintenance. Items which stand out include the repair of the palisade on the outer bailey in 1328, with its parapet completed in 1337, and a new hall built “for hearing pleas before the king’s justices” in 1382.
These later items of expenditure are a reminder that through the 14th century the castle continued to be maintained in good order, serving as an administrative and financial centre for the county of Flint. Justice was dispensed from the site, and occasionally it served as a base for the assembly of troops. The county itself was governed as an administrative annex of the palatinate of Chester.
Flint’s most famous appearance in history was in 1399. King Richard II, returning from a campaign in Ireland, had been continuously harassed by adherents of his rival Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster. Richard, having moved from castle to castle, eventually arrived at Flint. Around the 14th – 16th August 1399, “having heard Mass, he went upon the walls of the castle, which are large and wide on the inside, and beheld the Duke of Lancaster as he came along the seashore with all his host”. Richard descended to “the base court, where kings grow base”, as Shakespeare put it, and was thereafter escorted to London where he signed a deed of abdication. The only other known medieval building work at Flint was the construction of a further hall and chamber within the castle in 1452.
At the outbreak of the Civil War between King Charles I and Parliament in 1642, Flint Castle had just been repaired and was garrisoned by local royalists. It was to serve as a useful base for harrying the besiegers of Chester and for helping blockade runners to get into the city by water. The castle was surrendered after a siege in 1643, but was recovered by royalist troops landed from Ireland. In 1645, it seems to have been retaken for Parliament, and then in turn, once more for the King, by Roger Mostyn, a young royalist colonel. When the royalist stronghold of Chester surrendered early in 1646, the Parliamentary forces simply bypassed the remaining castles held for the king. During a somewhat half-hearted siege by Brereton’s Parliamentary army, fresh from the capture of Caernarfon, Mostyn let his cavalry escape and resisted until his provisions ran out. He surrendered on honourable terms after three months however, in August 1646.
For a time the castle was garrisoned for Parliament with one tower used as a prison. But in 1647, the garrison was removed, and along with other north Wales castles, it was slighted as ordered. Exactly what demolition was then undertaken is not clear, but debris of this date was found during archaeological excavations of the ditch near the south-west tower. In 1652, Flint was described as almost buried in its own ruins.
A new gaol for the county was built in the outer ward of the castle in 1784-85, a structure which survived until 1962. In 1919, Flintshire County Council placed the guardianship of the then Office of Works under the provisions of the Ancient Monuments Acts. The old gaol was later released from its occupancy by the territorial Army, and the outer ward reunited with the rest of the castle in 1939. Since 1984 the castle has been maintained by Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments.
The castle is entered from Castle Dyke Street. The medieval castle ditch was originally filled by salt water at high tide. The present grass-covered slope is essentially a modern feature, created when the ditch was cleared out. When first dug in 1277, the sides of the ditch were revetted in turf, though these were later replaced by local stone. The entrance path covers the remains of the 13th century bridge crossing the outer moat, and the steps lead up alongside a crag of masonry. The builders of the castle left a narrow tongue of rock just below water level to carry a wooden bridge on trestles. During archaeological excavation in 1971-74, the timber base-plates of the wooden bridge were found fossilised under the piers of a later stone-arched causeway.
The modern stone steps mark the site of the outer castle gatehouse, of which only a small fragment survives above ground level. At first, the gate simply comprised two side walls, but these were later replaced by a square tower projecting forward. The tower contained a stone-lined pit into which the inner end of a turning bridge descended when the entrance was closed. The inner part of the gate had a small square tower on each side.
The outer curtain wall as a whole formed a revetment along the inner side of the castle ditch, though the free-standing portion at the western end has been much reduced by industrial workings over a long period in that area. Excavation suggests that, at the far end of what remains, the wall curved back sharply to the right, towards the south-west tower of the inner ward.
The eastern end of the outer curtain eventually makes a right-angled turn and a stretch follows the edge of the natural sandstone shelf on which the castle stands. About 24ft (7m) further out into the area of the ditch, a parallel wall of red sandstone was found at a lower level. Massive timber lay beyond this, set parallel and even deeper, and may have been part of a quayside dock. There was a metalled road leading from the outer gatehouse to the inner gatehouse. Most of the interior of the ward itself was covered by the county gaol from 1785. When this area was excavated archaeologically, details of the cells were recorded, as well as of massive timbers from earlier castle buildings found underneath.
After crossing the outer bailey, one arrives at a modern timber bridge leading to the inner part of the castle. In dry weather it is possible to walk to the left and examine the south face of the castle at close quarters from the inner ditch. The stone ramp to the right represents the original approach to the medieval turning bridge. In the wall on the left, directly under the modern crossing, the slots in which the counterpoise beams of the medieval bridge turned, can still be seen. This is a different arrangement from the stone-lined pit of the outer gatehouse.
In the much patched southern wall of the inner ward, the positions of five arrow slits can be seen. Most of the wall is built of relatively small stones, but there are evenly-matched large blocks towards the bottom. The remains of a projecting horizontal string-course largely separates the two types of masonry. Some of the lower stones in the wall have masons’ marks carved upon them, with up to three such marks on certain blocks. Such marks probably served as the signatures of the cutter and layer of each stone. The third mark perhaps the light cross, may be that of the clerk of the works, certifying payment for the task.
Excavation of the ditch in this area showed that it was initially some 20ft (6m) wide. The fill contained early 15th century material, including stone shot for great catapults, which lay below the Civil War demolition layers of 1646. The shot could have been abandoned stores, or it might be evidence for military action during the Welsh uprising under Owain Glyndwr in the early 1400s.
To the left, the string-course does not continue around the south-west tower, nor does it run along the west curtain wall on the far side of the tower. In fact, on that side the wall has two courses of red sandstone which contrast with the rest of the masonry and form an ornamental band. Archaeological excavations on this western side were complicated by the foundations of industrial buildings, including chemical works, which here came right up to the medieval walls. There was evidence that the river often flooded the area, so that the inner ward of the castle stood on a rocky ledge projecting into the tideway on three sides.
Crossing the modern wooden bridge into the inner ward proper, one can see on the right the few remaining stones of the entrance arch of the inner gatehouse. On the left are the ruins of a porter’s lodge from which people seeking entry could be challenged and questioned. There were doors at the inner end of the passage, and the holes for these can still be seen in the wall on the right. One of the holes is very long, so that the wooden bar could be slid completely out of the way when the doors were open. The other hole is shorter, demonstrating that there were two crossbars working in opposite directions. High up in the opposite wall, there are slight traces of a portcullis groove. The portcullis would have sat just in front of the doors.
In the south wall, to the west or left of the porter’s lodge, are four large embrasures for arrow slits facing out across the outer ward. There were probably timber-framed buildings against the wall here, as well as elsewhere in the inner ward, with some light coming through from the embrasures. The sentry wall walk along the top of the curtain continued around the back of the south-west tower, which meant that defenders moving from place to place did not have to pass through the rooms inside the tower or descend to the inner ward.
On the left-hand side of the entrance to the south-west tower is a drawbar hole so close to the wall face that its purpose must have been to bar exit from the tower rather than entry to it. Just within the doorway, there is a lobby with the remains of a spiral stairway rising anti-clockwise. Overhead there is the opening of a window over the door. Looking into the circular basement of the tower, the large square holes which once held the floor beams stand out clearly, having eight beams running in one direction and two others supporting them at right-angles below. The tower had at least three upper storeys, and unlike the other towers, appears to have been circular at all levels. The first floor room had three embrasures, probably for arrow slits rather than windows.
There is a small section of wall which adjoins the outside face of the south-west tower on its north-western side. This may have formed part of another dock, since the river is known to have come up to this point. The space between the wall and the tower formed a latrine recess.
Here, and on the other two sides of the inner ward, only the lowest parts of the 13th century curtain walls survive, and are best seen from the outside, although the ground can be very marshy. The upper parts of the wall here were probably destroyed, at least in part, after the Civil War of the 1640s, at a time when many medieval strongholds were slighted sufficiently to prevent their reoccupation. There is also a record of a large portion of the south-east side of the castle ruins falling in 1848. The dwarf walls around these sides of the ward, as well as those in the centre of the courtyard, must belong to more recent phases in the castle’s history.
The medieval buildings, which probably included a hall, chapel, kitchen, smithy, brewhouse and bakehouse, may well have been built in timber. They would have stood against the curtain walls, in a pattern also identified at Rhuddlan Castle. It can be assumed that the kitchen would have been close to the surviving well.
The line of the west curtain continues to the north-west tower. Judging by the spacing on the surviving south wall, this stretch may have contained six embrasures with arrow slits. Two of these survive, with parts of two others. The wall walk again continued around the back of the north-west tower above a thickening of the curtain.
Three arrow slit embrasures can be seen in the circular basement of the north-west tower. Two of these are carefully aligned to cover the outside face of the curtain wall on each side of the tower, while the third looks out to the river estuary. Another good arrow slit survives at the next floor level, where the plan of the room, and of those above, is multi-sided. There is a large fireplace in one of the walls, and to the right of the destroyed hood there is a projecting stone which was intended to carry a lamp. The upper rooms were linked by another anti-clockwise spiral stairway, situated off a lobby contained within the thickened inner wall of the tower.
Just beyond the north-west tower it can be noticed that the north curtain wall has been thickened on the inner side. On the exterior face, there are projections in the masonry, and this may have been where ships tied up to load or discharge cargo. Looking out and downwards to the left at this point, one can see the natural sandstone rock on which the north-west tower stands. Further along the curtain, there is a higher section of original wall extending up against the north-east tower.
Modern wooden steps lead up to the entrance of the north-east tower, which is the best preserved of the three around the inner ward proper. Inside, on the right, there is the shaft of a spiral staircase leading to the upper floors. This staircase also linked to passages which led to latrines. Although the outer walls of these latrines have gone, on the exterior of the tower there are clear traces of where they were corbelled out over the water. The spiral stairway also led to a doorway leading out to the east curtain wall, which itself has been all but demolished to the level of the courtyard.
Above a circular basement, which must have been entered by a trapdoor in the ground floor, there were three more levels in the north-east tower. Beam holes show the position of the floors, and each of the upper rooms took the form of an irregular hexagon. The ground floor room had three arrow slit embrasures. Above, the first floor appears to have served as the principal apartment, with the remains of a large hooded fireplace. The second floor also had a similar but smaller fireplace and two window openings.
The Great Tower stands at the fourth corner of the inner ward, immediately adjacent to the inner gatehouse. It can be seen from the castle plan that the curving wall from the gatehouse is broken off on the eastern side. It is doubtful however, that the wall continued right around the Great Tower to provide it with a separate moat.
The modern wooden bridge from the inner ward leads out from a stone buttress. This buttress originally supported a small guardroom, and projected out from the curving wall towards the entrance to the Great Tower. The entrance into the tower itself may have only been defended by a door, with no evidence for a portcullis. As designed however, part of the timber bridge across the moat would have been movable, so that it could be drawn up against the door by chains pulled from the upper part of the tower. Timber for an “engine” to do this was bought in 1303. To the right of the bridge a low wall can be seen across the moat. This may have screened the bridge from the outer ward, or it may have been part of the water control of a tidal moat.
Inside the Great Tower, a flight of stone steps, now partly covered by a modern timber staircase, leads down into the central area. One passes through a pointed arch, which was originally closed by double doors, and enters a circular chamber which is open to the sky. Three other large pointed openings are placed around the area, each with three high steps leading to an arrow slit embrasure across a circular passage.
The passage forms a high, wide gallery running all the way around the tower within the thickness of the walls. In fact, a few feet from its base, the walls of the tower are 23ft (7m) thick. One of the arrow slit embrasures overlooks the inner gatehouse and ditch, another has a view of the possible dock area, and the third covers the roadstead of the Dee estuary. Between each two arrow slit embrasures, there is a narrow vertical shaft in the outer wall. These are chutes for the latrines venting out into the moat, and which would have been cleansed by the tide. The gallery is slightly narrowed at one point by a well. A hole in the gallery roof shows that buckets could be hauled up to the floor level above. Under the entrance passage to the tower, the gallery steps down, with a much lower vault overhead. Each set of steps is lit by a narrow slit through the outer wall.
Returning up the modern wooden steps and turning to the right, on the left one can see another latrine pit and a chute rising to a floor above. Next to this are traces of the outward opening doorway which led to the spiral staircase rising to the upper floor. This stairway climbed clockwise, unlike those in the three other towers of the inner ward.
Only the first floor of the Great Tower survives, and this has an external thickness which is only half that of the basement below. Just above the entrance, the wall is even thinner, with its floor set higher than elsewhere, thereby clearing the roof of the entrance passage. The movable bridge at the entrance would presumably have been worked from this point. The floor level itself is divided into five rooms by crosswalls which radiate like the spokes of a wheel. Each room was entered from the one next to it. There is evidence of at least one threshold of a doorway next to the traces of an inner wall. It is not known whether the inner wall was circular like the basement below, or, if as suggested by two cut stones protruding from the generally rough face, it may have been polygonal.
From here, we are reminded that the inner face of the cylindrical chamber below is built of smooth ashlar masonry. This ends above the basement at a fairly constant level, a little above the inner arches. Above this, there are several feet of rough stone filling, but there is no positive evidence for any stone vault or roof covering the central space. There must however, have been some covering or good drainage, otherwise the central area would have filled up with rainwater and been useless. Three of the radial crosswalls contain latrine chambers within their thickness. Each of these has a narrow horizontal slit on one side of the shaft to provide both light and ventilation.
Proceeding around the floor in a clockwise direction from the spiral stairway, the first room encountered was once a chapel. It faces east, had a stone barrel vault, and has a piscina or basin in the right-hand wall. This was almost certainly the chapel in which King Richard II heard mass in August 1399, before he went up on the castle walls and saw Henry Bolingbroke with his army approaching along the seashore to confront him.
The next three rooms each have an arrow slit embrasure. These embrasures are offset from those in the gallery below, so that the wall was not weakened by openings one on top of another. It also meant that fields of fire would be overlapped rather than duplicating one another. The room opposite the entrance stairway contains the top of the well shaft, and it has been suggested it may have served as a kitchen, though there is no evidence of a fireplace. The last room one enters before reaching the stairway again, has tilted stones springing from the wall-face at two points. These would have supported transverse arches which were probably part of the ceiling or roof structure. Evidence of latrine shafts descending from above within the thickness of the wall provides further evidence that the tower had at least one more floor.
The Great Tower was designed to a unique plan. Nowhere, except at Flint, can be found a suit of continuous wedge-shaped rooms ranged around the outside of what would ordinarily have been the only room at that level of the building. Nowhere else has a tower of which the cellar or basement communicated through a series of wide openings, with a capacious vaulted tunnel-like gallery contained within an encircling wall. The gallery and wall had to be of sufficient thickness to carry a ring, or probably originally two rings, of residential rooms above.
The first explicit reference to the Great Tower occurs in a list of payments in May 1281 for the trimmings and dressing of over thirty thousand blocks of stone, one hundred and fifty-two of them stated to be used for building the well in the Great Tower. Building appears to have gone on season by season until 1286, though no doubt interrupted by the rising of March 1282 when the Welsh captured and pillaged the unfinished castle. Each winter, the walls were protected by thatching, until finally in September 1286, lead was being cast at a foundry near Ewloe and guarded night and day until it was needed for the tower’s permanent covering.
It is hard to believe that when finished, the height of the Great Tower would not have matched that of the north-east tower. On 7th February 1301, King Edward I formally granted his son, Edward of Caernarfon, the earldom of Chester and the principality of Wales. The prince was at Flint on 22nd April to receive in person the homages and fealties of some one hundred and seventy of his new Welsh tenants. At Chester, where the prince had spent the preceding days carrying out the same duty, part of the castle had been specially refurbished and decorated for his accommodation. It looks very much as if corresponding preparations were made to accommodate him at Flint. In particular, a splendid looking timber structure was added to the top of the Great Tower.
A carpenter, Henry de Ryhull, was appointed to erect the large timber structure, incorporating a dignified and handsome ring of woodwork. For the whole of the carpentry and other works, including the making of windows and wooden stairs in the tower, Henry de Ryhull was paid £28 5s. In addition, Robert of Melbourne, a mason, was paid £7 3s 4d. for adapting the stonework of the tower to match the new woodwork, Benedict de Staundon received £24 19s 1½d for fifteen loads of lead for the roof, and William the Plumber was paid £6 7s 5d. for making the lead roof round the tower.
On or before 25th April 1301, the prince left Flint for Rhuddlan, where he was to receive further homages. Meanwhile, for two days at least, and perhaps three or four, the newly beautified Great Tower, with what must have been some form of brattice or viewing platform, would surely have been his place of lodging.
As to the identity of the tower’s architect, the evidence points strongly to James of St. George. The explanation for the tower’s unique plan is clearly that it provided accommodation for the highest level of occupant. The prince in 1301 was one such occupant. Another, on regular but less ceremonial occasions, might have been the justice of Chester, on circuit to preside at the justice’s court.