Montgomery

Fewer than 1,300 people live in Montgomery. It gave its name to a county covering roughly a third of what is now Powys, and its castle was deliberately pulled down on parliamentary orders in 1649. The town has been getting quieter ever since.

Start with the ford. Rhyd Whyman, on the Severn just north of the present town, was one of the few dependable crossings on this stretch of river. Whoever held it controlled movement between the Welsh interior and the English midlands. That is the only reason anything happened here at all.

The first castle

Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, built the first castle in the 1070s at a site now called Hen Domen, the old mound. Earth and timber, motte and bailey, roughly a mile from where the town stands today. He named it after his family holdings in Normandy, which is how a Welsh border town ended up with a French name. The motte still stands about eight metres high and forty across.

Hen Domen has been excavated more thoroughly than any other timber castle in Britain, on and off from the 1960s into the 1990s. What came out of the ground was a surprise. The buildings inside the palisade were far grander and more complicated than anyone had expected of a frontier post, which rather undercut the assumption that timber castles were crude things thrown up in a hurry.

It was not a safe posting. In 1095 the castle was attacked and the garrison killed.

Two names, two men

The Welsh name arrived by a different route. When Robert of Bellême rebelled in 1102 the castle passed to the crown, and from around 1105 to the de Boulers family. Baldwin de Boulers gave the place its Welsh name, Trefaldwyn, Baldwin's town. Either way, the two names for this town come from two different men in two different languages, and neither man was Welsh.

The stone castle and the treaty

The stone castle came in 1223. Henry III ordered it and Hubert de Burgh oversaw it, built on a rock spur about a mile from Hen Domen because Llywelyn ab Iorwerth had made the old site untenable. A new town was laid out below, receiving its first charter in 1227, the same year work began on St Nicholas' church. Llywelyn attacked in 1228 and again in 1231. His son Dafydd tried in 1245.

Then, on 29 September 1267, the thing Montgomery is actually known for. Henry III came here and concluded a treaty recognising Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as Prince of Wales, with the homage of the other Welsh lords owed to him rather than to the crown. In exchange Llywelyn owed fealty and 6,000 marks.

It was the high-water mark of an independent Wales and it lasted fifteen years. In 1282 the garrison of this same castle rode out towards the Wye as part of the campaign that ended with Llywelyn dead near Builth in December.

Decline, punctuated

After that the story is mostly quiet interrupted by violence. Glyndŵr's men sacked the town in the early 1400s. The Mortimer lands came to the crown in 1425 and eventually to the Herberts; the poet George Herbert was born here in 1593.

In September 1644 the fields below the castle saw one of the largest engagements fought in Wales during the Civil War. The royalist infantry broke. Around 500 royalists were killed and some 1,500 taken prisoner, against roughly 100 casualties on the winning side, including the parliamentarian commander Sir William Fairfax. Five years later the castle was slighted so it could never be held again.

Montgomeryshire was created by the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 to 1542 and named for the town. The county courts sat here. But administration drifted to Welshpool and Newtown over the following centuries, and when a county council was finally created in 1889 it did not meet here at all. The town got a handsome town hall in 1748 and then, more or less, stopped.

What is there now

Which is exactly why it is worth going. The medieval grid is still legible in the street pattern, sections of the town wall survive, and the landform around it has not changed. Ffridd Faldwyn, an Iron Age hillfort, sits on the hill to the north-west — several centuries older than anything Norman, and a reminder that the Normans were not the first people to notice this spot. Offa's Dyke Path runs close by.

In the churchyard at St Nicholas there is the Robber's Grave, where John Davies was buried after being hanged in 1821 protesting his innocence. The story says grass would not grow on it. People still come to look.