| Abergavenny town walls | |
|---|---|
| Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales | |
 View from the remains of Abergavenny's town wall | |
  Abergavenny town walls Shown within Wales | |
| Coordinates | 51°49′17″N3°00′56″W / 51.82140°N 3.01544°W grid reference SO299141 |
| Type | City wall |
Abergavenny's town walls are a sequence of defensive walls built around the town of Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, Wales.
After the Norman invasion of Wales in the 11th century, a castle was built at Abergavenny; this included a relatively small, walled town. [1] This town had a rectangle of wooden walls, protected by a V-shaped ditch, stopping just short of the modern Cross Street. [2] In the 12th century this ditch was filled in, possibly because of a pressure on land in the town, and the town of Abergavenny then appears to have lacked any defences until the late 13th century. [1]
In the late 13th century a larger town wall was built around Abergavenny in stone, forming an oval shape, approximately 350 m by 215 m across. The wall was paid for and maintained by murage, by which the king allowed a city to raise taxes on the imports of particular goods.
By the 21st century, only occasional masonry remains of the medieval walls, although the line of the wall can be seen in the form of later buildings and walls.
A castle is a type of fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by military orders. Scholars usually consider a castle to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a mansion, palace and villa, whose main purpose was exclusively for pleasance and are not primarily fortresses but may be fortified. Use of the term has varied over time and, sometimes, has also been applied to structures such as hill forts and 19th- and 20th-century homes built to resemble castles. Over the Middle Ages, when genuine castles were built, they took on a great many forms with many different features, although some, such as curtain walls, arrowslits, and portcullises, were commonplace.
Castles have played an important military, economic and social role in Great Britain and Ireland since their introduction following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Although a small number of castles had been built in England in the 1050s, the Normans began to build motte and bailey and ringwork castles in large numbers to control their newly occupied territories in England and the Welsh Marches. During the 12th century the Normans began to build more castles in stone – with characteristic square keep – that played both military and political roles. Royal castles were used to control key towns and the economically important forests, while baronial castles were used by the Norman lords to control their widespread estates. David I invited Anglo-Norman lords into Scotland in the early 12th century to help him colonise and control areas of his kingdom such as Galloway; the new lords brought castle technologies with them and wooden castles began to be established over the south of the kingdom. Following the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s, under Henry II, castles were established there too.
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