Dinbych and Its Castell

     While dining in a pub called the Black Boy in Caernarfon,on a Friday night,I found myself seated next to a party of three. This was most fortunate for me, since they did a great deal to change my understanding of the culture I was visiting. The tale of this evening will be found on the Caernarfon page, so I won't dwell on the story except to say that Mair is from Dinbych (Denbigh, in English). On visiting the town, with its fine castle crowning the heights, I began to grasp a deeper implication from the castles in Wales. The majority were not built to protect the Cymro, but rather to control them. The fortress was no longer, for me, a romantic relic of an age gone by, but rather a symbol of subjugation. As I watched the children playing on the lawns at the foot of the walls and heard their gleeful shouts, in a tongue most obviously non-English, I had to wonder about the duality of their feelings. Today, the castle is a great generator of tourist dollars, and thus, is vital for the economic well-being of the community, in a very limited spectrum of available revenue generating possibilities.

     The fortress was built by Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, at the command of Edward I. There is reason to believe the fortification was planned with Edward's master mason, James of St. George, as an administrative center and symbol of power, in 1290. Only partially completed by 1294, the castle fell to the forces of Madog ap Llywelyn, but was retaken and subsequently completed to more rigorous structural standards. The subsequent story involves several different families of power, eventually being presented by Queen Elizabeth to her beloved Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.