It’s not always straight forward when finding the answer to a question.
Sometimes your initial question changes with every piece of information you learn along the way to that elusive solutuion.
This is what happened with the question we asked at the beginning of the blog.
The original question was :
Who was the Constable of the Castle that Plas Coch was built for?Â
The role of the constable of Ruthin Castle, became an honorary title, with the state of the deteriorating castle.
It turns out that the remaining historical records have no mention of any such position existing in Ruthin past 1539 when Henry Somerset 2nd Earl of Worcester, who had been gifted the position for life, died.
So the existing question then morphed into another: Who built Plas Coch? This question needed to be tackled with some intelligent historical investigating skills and Gareth Evans was just the man for it! Gareth and I had discussed how we thought the surname Thelwall would prove to be the original owner, but this proved to be a red herring.
Gareth found a property transaction from 1587 that, added with some location evidence, placing this property near Dog Lane and between named properties, helped identify Plas Coch. By sheer genius Gareth found records of a family who lived in Llanbedr and had enough property to gift their youngest son five burgages in Ruthin. In today’s terms five properties! This included the large Plas Coch property.
So the question had morphed again into:
Who owned the land at the time Plas Coch was built?
Thanks to Gareth Evans and his investigation the answer we have is the name (drumroll please) Gruffydd ap Richard ap Harry.
Gruffydd unfortunately passed away not long after Plas Coch was built leaving the property to his son and heir Robert Parry.
This mystery still exists regarding where the link between the Constable of the castle and Plas Coch came from.
The land behind the property was called The Constables field. Who knows maybe the house was known locally as Plas Coch the house by Constables field or the Constables field house?
We can only imagine.
