Rhuddlan Castle

I can imagine that Edward I would have agreed with Mao Tse Tung's dictum that 'political power grows from the barrel of a gun', though in Edward's day it was swords. Rhuddlan, built between 1277 and 1282, was one of the first of Edward's 'Iron Ring', like Wednesday's blip, and was also the setting in 1284 for the proclamation of Edward's constitution for North Wales - the Statute of Rhuddlan - which stayed in place for over two hundred years until the Act of Union in 1536. Its current state dates from a vote by Cromwell's House of Commons in 1648 that it should be made untenable - a fate it shared with many Scottish castles. I suspect Cromwell too, would have agreed with Mao.