In AD 921, the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Elder, founded a burh named Cledematha (mouth of the Clwydd) at Rhuddlan.[4] 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). 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.[5]
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 NormanRobert 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's first Welsh chapel, now 17 Cross Street, was built in 1771.[6]
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. It is usually sung to the words of the hymns "Judge eternal, throned in splendour" and, more recently, "For the healing of the nations".
In 2021 February, archaeologists from Aeon Archaeology announced the discovery of more than 300 stone age tools and artefacts in Rhuddlan. They revealed scrapers, microliths, flakes of chert (hard, sedimentary rock), flints and even rudimentary tools. Expert Richard Cooke believes that the remains were belong to people who was passing through and made camp by the river more than 9,000 years ago.[7][8]
