Tenby Castle & Town Walls
The recorded history of Tenby starts from the Norman conquest of Pembroke and its adjacent territory in the late 11th century. Where the `little fortress' had been, a castle was built (first mentioned in 1153).
Town Walls
The town was enclosed on its landward side by a ditch and a high earthen rampart. But these were progressively replaced by stone curtain walls, towers and heavily defended gates. Defensive works fortified the head of the harbour and the isthmus joining the town to the Castle Hill. In 1457 Earl Jasper Tudor conveyed the walls to the burgesses. At a crucial period in the Wars of the Roses (1471), Jasper and his nephew Henry Tudor (future Henry VII), as fugitive Lancastrians, were sheltered in the town before sailing into exile from which they returned in 1485 and marched to Bosworth where Richard III was defeated.
