Caldicot

Founded by the Normans, developed in royal hands as a stronghold in the Middle Ages and restored as a family home, Caldicot Castle has a romantic and colourful history.

The gatehouse from the keep.

The area in which the castle now stands has been occupied since the Bronze Age. Boat timbers, a bridge or jetty and other evidence of human activity were found on what would have been the bed of the river Nedern during this period. In the hills nearby was Llanmelin, the great iron-age fort of the Silures tribe. When the Romans reached the area and imposed military control, they built a new capital, called Venta Silurum, for the Silures at nearby Caerwent.

At the time that the Domesday Book was written, Caldicot was held by Durand, Sheriff of Gloucester, and the estate was valued at six pounds. The people living in Caldicot at the time included a knight, who would have needed a substantial home, but there is no evidence of a timber castle at Caldicot at that date. In 1127 the estate passed to Durand's nephew Walter Fitzroger, Constable of England, a great castle builder. The first phase of building in stone was during the early twelfth century when the round keep was built. The castle would have dominated the area around it, including the crossing points of the nearby river Nedern, which was then navigable and of the River Severn, where the two Severn bridges now stand.

The estate passed to Walter Fitzroger's granddaughter Margaret who married Humphrey DeBohun in 1158. The DeBohun family held the castle for over two centuries and enlarged it with a curtain wall, towers and an impressive entranceway, influenced by the design of fortifications in the Holy Land. It was confiscated by the crown on several occasions, often for rebellion, but was always returned to the family.

The gatehouse - inner view.

Humphrey DeBohun the 10th carried out extensive repairs to the castle in the 1360s and when he died his inheritance passed to his young daughter Alianore. In 1376, while she was still a child, Alianore married Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III, and so Caldicot Castle passed into royal hands. The Woodstock Tower was built by Thomas in the late fourteenth century and the Great Gatehouse is believed to date from the same period. Large windows were cut into the curtain wall at some time in the fourteenth century, but it is not known whether these represent the remains of a Great Hall made of timber or whether they were the beginnings of works that were never completed.

The gatehouse - external view.

Thomas and Alianore feature in Shakespeare's play Richard II. Thomas was King Richard's uncle, but his opposition to Richard's alliances with France led to his death in France as a traitor. After being held directly by the royal family, including Henry V and his widow Katherine of Valois, for several decades, the castle passed to the Duchy of Lancaster. It was leased from them by the Herbert family in the sixteenth century. By this time, with the introduction of artillery powerful enough to breach stone walls and the relative peace in Britain, the great age of the castles had passed and their importance was limited to the agricultural land held with them. In 1759 the Pontypool industrialist Capel Hanbury leased the castle, and his family held it until 1830. The castle passed to Charles Lewis of St. Pierre, who bought it outright in 1857, adding to his extensive estates in the area. The castle's grounds were often used for fetes, processions and garden parties during the nineteenth century.

In 1885 Joseph Cobb, an antiquarian, bought Caldicot Castle and went on to restore it as a family home. Cobb rebuilt areas of the castle as he believed they had originally been, replacing the woodwork and roofs in the Keep and the Woodstock Tower, building much of the main Gatehouse and reconstructing its unusual drawbridge in full working order. The Cobb family owned the castle into the twentieth century. The towers were divided into apartments and rented out until the 1960's and they still contain features such as a bath that dates from before the Second World War. The castle was acquired by Chepstow Rural District Council in 1963 and is now owned, with the surrounding country park, by Monmouthshire County Council.
(Monmouthshire County Council 2001)