Qualla: St Briavels Castle

St Briavels Castle: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Row17, CC BY-SA 2.0. In a 120-day stretch in 1233, three men in a forge inside St Briavels Castle, John Malemort, William the Smith, and William the Fletcher, produced 120,000 crossbow bolts. That works out to a thousand a day. Malemort alone was capable of a hundred. The barrels were carted out of the gate, down the spur of land above the River Wye, and shipped to wherever the king needed them. For most of the thirteenth century this stone fortress on the western edge of the Forest of Dean was the most important arms factory in England, the principal source of quarrels for the royal crossbows. By the eighteenth century it was a debtors' prison so foul that the prison reformer John Howard wrote it up as a scandal. Today it is a Youth Hostel. You can sleep in the lord's chamber for the price of a bunk bed.

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Image: Row17 | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Briavels Castle: The Forester's Castle

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hchc2009, CC BY-SA 3.0. St Briavels Castle takes its name, probably, from the obscure Welsh saint Brioc. It was built between 1075 and 1129 by the great Norman family of Walter de Gloucester and his son Miles, both sheriffs of Gloucester, as the administrative headquarters of the Forest of Dean. The Nor...

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Image: Hchc2009 | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Briavels Castle: King John's Hunting Lodge

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Davies, CC BY-SA 2.0. King John loved hunting in the Dean. Each November he came down to St Briavels with his court and chased deer through the oak woods. In 1207 he entertained the Welsh lord Gruffydd ap Cadwallon here. His expenditure on the castle, around 291 pounds in a four-year stretch, was subs...

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Image: Roger Davies | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Briavels Castle: Worn Out Like a Shoe

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saffron Blaze, CC BY-SA 3.0. After Edward I conquered Wales in 1282, the castle's strategic purpose evaporated. The structure decayed slowly across the following centuries, passing between royal favourites and disgraced earls: held by Roger d'Amory under Edward II, by Thomas le Despenser under Richard II, by...

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Image: Saffron Blaze | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Briavels Castle: I Am Weary of the Place

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bin im Garten, CC BY-SA 3.0. Conditions in the castle prison were notorious. The reformer John Howard documented them in 1775. Parliamentary commissioners after the 1831 Forest of Dean riots, led by Warren James, recorded them again. They found a cell with one window a foot wide that did not open, a privy wi...

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Image: Bin im Garten | CC BY-SA 3.0