Dr John Kenyon, FSA: Raglan Castle

John Kenyon will explore one of the finest late medieval secular buildings in the UK, namely fifteenth-century Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire, built by William ap Thomas and his son William Herbert, later earl of Pembroke, men of Welsh gentry stock. Raglan was a castle that was to be transformed into a great country house for the Somerset family, later dukes of Beaufort, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries before destruction following the Parliamentarian siege in the summer of 1646. Ap Thomas’s detached hexagonal great tower in its own moat and Herbert’s domestic ranges are just two of the features to be examined. Dr John Kenyon has been studying castles and later fortifications from the 1970s and has written a number of books on the subject. As well as academic papers in various journals, he has written guidebooks for both Cadw and English Heritage. He contributed the castle entries for two of Yale University Press’s Buildings of Wales series, namely the volumes on Gwynedd and Powys.