Rhuddlan

Rhuddlan (ˈr̥ɨðlan) is a town, community, and electoral ward in the county of Denbighshire, Wales, in the historic county of Flintshire. Its associated urban zone is mainly on the right bank of the Clwyd; it is directly south of seafront town Rhyl. It gave its name to the Welsh district of Rhuddlan from 1974 to 1996. As of the 2001 census, the population was 4,296 decreasing to 3,709 in the 2011 census. The name of the town is a combination of the Welsh words rhudd "red" + glan "riverbank". In AD 921, the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Elder, founded a burh named Cledematha (mouth of the Clwydd) at Rhuddlan. In the following century, before the Norman Conquest and subsequent Norman occupation of lower Gwynedd, the Perfeddwlad, Rhuddlan was the site of a Welsh cantref and served as the seat of government and capital of Gwynedd for the Welsh king Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (ruled 1055–1063), whose family may have been the traditional Welsh lords of Rhuddlan for generations. Following the Conquest, in 1086, Rhuddlan was recorded in the Domesday Book as a small settlement within the hundred of Ati's Cross and in the county of Cheshire. A mint established at Rhuddlan in the 1180s by Dafydd ab Owain, and later maintained by Llywelyn the Great, was responsible for minting the first native Welsh coinage since the reign of Hywel Dda. The town is known for the ruins of Rhuddlan Castle, built by order of King Edward I from 1277 to 1282, and for the site of another castle at Twthill, built by the Norman Robert of Rhuddlan about 1072. Well-preserved Rhuddlan castle has a great round tower and many surviving walls. It was built soon after the conquest of Wales. The town was thus where Edward I signed the Statute of Rhuddlan, laying down the way by which the Principality of Wales, created by the princes of Gwynedd, was to be governed. The town's first Welsh chapel, now 17 Cross Street, was built in 1771. The hymn tune "Rhuddlan" was brought to wider prominence by Ralph Vaughan Williams as music editor of the first edition of The English Hymnal in 1906, and it has since been adopted by numerous other hymnals.