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Plans for a sculpture near a Welsh castle have been shelved after thousands signed a petition claiming it celebrates the “subjugation and oppression” of the Welsh people. Here, Dr Matthew Stevens argues that is a misguided stance which fails to recognise the rich historical and cultural inheritance of Wales.

It saddens me to see the negative popular reaction of some to the recently approved art instillation at Flint Castle.

It is a reaction that radically underplays the deep, rich, fascinating and, most importantly, complex medieval cultural inheritance of Wales.

I worry, though I would be reluctant to say for sure, that it might also underscore a troublesome lack of self-confidence in a proud Welsh identity.

In 1066, some 951 years ago, a Norman Frenchman and his rabble conquered England and secured it with his own iron ring of castles, the centrepiece of which was the Tower of London.

The Tower is now celebrated not as the instrument of Norman oppression it was created as, but as part of the rich tapestry of English heritage. In 1277, some 740 years ago, Flint castle was begun by Edward I. Cannot we too, as a nation, manage similarly to wrest free our own cultural inheritance from the centuries-old past, and make Wales’ iron ring our own?

(Image: Cadw/Crown Copyright)

As noted in the Welsh Government press release, the architect states "the sculpture will take a balanced form, some buried beneath the ground, the remainder projecting into the air, to demonstrate the unstable nature of the crown". This sculpture is a crooked crown, knocked off kilter by the people, and rightly so.

There are at least two good reasons why we ought to see the sculpture as celebrating Welsh resilience and the futility of foreign "conquest".

First, the short reason.

Yes, Flint was one of the first four castles built by Edward I to secure his military gains following his first war against the last Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gryffydd, in 1277, along with Builth, Aberystwyth and Ruddlan. Now, three of these castles are in the hands of Cadw, and the fourth, Aberystwyth, belongs to the local council, and the Welsh flag flies proudly over all sites. The ‘iron ring’ as it were, is now Welsh and in Welsh hands. From a heritage perspective, the iron ring has long, long since been knocked off kilter by the people of Wales. That is something to celebrate.

Second, the long reason.

If one wants to go digging around in the history of the ‘conquest’ they need to know that the situation was much more complex than English versus Welsh.

Wales, in the 1100s and 1200s, was divided between the Marches of southeast and south Wales, and ‘native’ controlled north and west Wales. And within native Wales there were three Welsh kingdoms, Deheubarth in the southwest (think Cardiganshire), Powys in mid-east Wales, and Gwynedd in the northwest. These kingdoms fought tooth and nail for dominance over one another until Llywelyn ‘the Great’ ap Iorwerth of Gwynedd used both talk and war to dominate the other kingdoms. This included, at one point, sidling up to bad King John of England and even marrying his illegitimate daughter Joan!

(Image: Frerk Meyer/Flickr)

The princes of Gwynedd then started calling themselves ‘Prince of Wales’, and bullied the other Welsh kingdoms to ‘toe the line’ until their relations with England soured, followed by Edward’s ‘conquest’. But in reality, the princes of Powys resisted, making alliances with the English king when helpful, and – as Prof. David Stephenson has recently published – the men of Powys were in armed conflict with Gwynedd’s ‘princes of Wales’ more than 25 times between 1132 and 1282, including as allies of the English in Edward I’s 1277 and 1282 campaigns of ‘conquest’.

Much of the old kingdom of Powys outlived the ‘conquest’ and the construction of the iron ring, until the princely lines of Powys simply died out. One ought not overstate the role of the ‘iron ring’.

Edward’s four castles of 1277, including Flint, were also not as helpful as he would have liked. Edward again waged war on Wales in 1282, after which about ten more castles were built by Edward, or men to whom he granted lands conquered from the Prince of Gwynedd, including iconic Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech castles. These too proved not enough, and following the widespread and destructive rebellion of Madog ap Llywelyn in 1295 – during which Caernarfon castle and at least three others were taken by the Welsh – he began work on Beaumaris castle, which ultimately he could not finish because he ran out of royal funds.

In fact, Edward’s arguably futile castle building was so expensive that it hampered his other political aspirations in Scotland, and substantially contributed to the virtual state of English bankruptcy under which the ill-fated and constantly cash-strapped Edward II would come to the throne in 1307, only to be deposed by his wife and teenaged son in 1327 and miserably executed. The cost of the iron ring, one could argue, unbalanced the English monarchy for two generations.

(Image: Paul Pierce/Flickr)

(Image: The Carlisle Kid/Creative Commons)

Moreover, as fate would have it, the last of Edward I’s Plantagenet dynasty, his great great grandson Richard II – himself a notorious tyrant – was deposed after he was caught by his enemies and forced to surrender at Flint castle. Richard II, whose rule effectively ended in Wales on the site where Edward I’s first great castle was begun, would later be ingloriously starved to death in captivity. This is the transfer of power to the ‘usurper’ Henry IV which was famously dramatized by Shakespeare, something of which the Welsh Government’s press release shows awareness.

Lastly, the deposition of Richard II and the shaky revolution in England would form the backdrop for the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr, who would conquer and control the ‘iron ring’ castles of Aberystwyth and Harlech in 1404, holding a Welsh parliament at Harlech in 1405 and making it his military headquarters for the next four years. Throughout the rebellion Owain would do everything in his power not just to assert control over Wales, but to destabilise the new English monarchy. This included, in 1405, making his tripartite alliance with two factions of rebellious English barons, and even hosting an invading French army which spent the summer campaigning with the Welsh.

Even beyond the Middle Ages – skipping over such crucial characters as the ‘Welsh’ Henry VII – one could go on to point out how the ‘English Civil War’ was fought in Wales around the castles of the ‘iron ring’, such as Flint, which were generally manned by conservative Welsh royalists, in opposition to Cromwell’s overwhelmingly English parliamentarian forces. In fact, Flint and Aberystwyth, cornerstones of Edward’s 1277 ‘iron ring’, are in the ruinous state we see them in today because Cromwell ordered them destroyed after capture to prevent Welsh royalists again occupying them. By the seventeenth century the ‘iron ring’ was thoroughly Welsh.

Against this complex backdrop of the rich historical and cultural inheritance of Wales, it is sadly short-sighted to see the ‘iron ring’ as simply a marker of Edward I’s conquest. It is not inappropriate to put this installation of an off-kilter ring, representing a destabilised crown, next to Flint castle. Flint, and the rest of the iron ring, in the fullness of history, do not represent centuries of steady oppression, but the resilience of the Welsh, who have punched above their weight in directly or indirectly destabilising the English monarchy and government over the centuries. The ‘iron ring’ is woven into the tapestry of Welsh history in a thousand ways, and the off-kilter ring as proposed, to be lined with engravings celebrating local perspectives on the site, would require some creative negativity dismissive of much of the history of north Wales to be seen strictly as a symbol of English oppression today.

Matthew Frank Stevens is senior lecturer in medieval history at Swansea University and fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2010-present). He completed a PhD in history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 2005 and has since been a postdoctoral fellow of the Economic History Society at the University of Oxford (2005-6), researcher at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2006-10) and visiting fellow at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland (2010). He has wide ranging interests in the interrelationships between the economy, law, gender and race in the medieval and early modern periods. He is author of Urban Assimilation in Post-Conquest Wales: Ethnicity Gender and Economy in Ruthin, 1282­­-1348 and is currently preparing his second book, Race Law and the Origins of National Identity: Northern Europe in the Middle Ages for Manchester University Press. He may be reached at m.f.stevens@swansea.ac.uk .