While the Edwardian castles of Conwy, Beaumaris, Harlech and Caernarfon are rightly hailed as outstanding examples of castle architecture, the castles of the native Welsh princes are far more enigmatic. Where some dominate their surroundings as completely as any castle of Edward I, others are concealed in the depths of forests, or tucked away in the corners of valleys, their relationship with the landscape of which they are a part far more difficult to discern
than their English counterparts.
This ground-breaking book seeks to analyse the castlebuilding activities of the native princes of Wales in the thirteenth century. Whereas early castles were built
to delimit territory and as an expression of Llywelyn I ab Iorwerth’s will to power following his violent assumption of the throne of Gwynedd in the 1190s,
by the time of his grandson Llywelyn II ap Gruffudd’s later reign in the 1260s and 1270s, the castles’ prestige value had been superseded in importance by an
understanding of the need to make the polity he created – the Principality of Wales – defensible.
Employing a probing analysis of the topographical settings and defensive dispositions of almost a dozen native Welsh masonry castles, Craig Owen Jones interrogates the long-held theory that the native princes’ approach to castlebuilding in medieval Wales was characterised by ignorance of basic architectural principles, disregard for the castle’s relationship to the landscape, and whimsy, in order to arrive at a new understanding of the castles’ significance in Welsh society.
Princely Ambition also advances a timeline that synthesises various strands of evidence to
arrive at a chronology of native Welsh castle-building. This exciting new account fills a
crucial gap in scholarship on Wales’ built heritage prior to the Edwardian conquest and
establishes a nuanced understanding of important military sites in the context of native
Welsh politics.