Rhuddlan Castle, on the River Clwyd a little north of St Asaph, was built between 1277 and 1282 as part of Edward I's chain of fortresses securing his conquest of North Wales, at a cost of £9,613. Master James of St George — the architect-engineer behind Denbigh, Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech — took on Rhuddlan as his first commission for Edward, arriving on site in 1278.
The castle's greatest historical significance came in 1284, when the Statute of Rhuddlan was issued here in the wake of the defeat and death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales. The statute transferred the lands of the Welsh princes to the English Crown, created the new shires of Flint, Caernarfon, Anglesey, Merioneth, Cardigan and Carmarthen, and imposed English criminal law across Wales while allowing some Welsh civil traditions — around inheritance, land and debt — to continue. This administrative settlement lasted until Henry VIII's Act of Union in 1536.
It was also at Rhuddlan that Edward I is said to have promised the Welsh a prince 'born in Wales, who could speak no English' — a pledge popularly, if not entirely accurately, associated with the naming of his son as the first English Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1301. Twthill, an earlier Norman motte overlooking the same stretch of river, stands nearby as a reminder that Rhuddlan's strategic value long predated Edward's stone castle.
Rhuddlan Castle was built between 1277 and 1282 under the direction of Master James of St George, the master mason responsible for Edward I's ring of great North Wales castles, and it played a pivotal role in English royal history: it was at Rhuddlan in 1284 that Edward issued the Statute of Rhuddlan, formally annexing the Principality of Wales into the English legal and administrative system. To allow supply ships to reach the castle, Edward's engineers also undertook the remarkable feat of canalising nearly three miles of the River Clwyd.
The castle's diamond-shaped concentric design, with its twin-towered gatehouses, remains impressive even in ruin, and it is now cared for by Cadw as one of the key sites in the 'Iron Ring' of Edwardian castles across North Wales. Just south of the castle, the earthwork remains of Twthill mark the site of an earlier Norman castle built in 1086, showing how long this crossing of the Clwyd had been strategically important before Edward's conquest.