It
was one of the strongholds which belonged to the Spencers, and
served for a short time as a retreat to the unfortunate Edward the
Second. It was ruined by Cromwell, the grand foe of the baronial
castles of Britain, but not in so thorough and sweeping a manner as
to leave it a mere heap of stones. There is a noble entrance porch
fronting the west - a spacious courtyard, a grand banqueting room,
a corridor of vast length, several lofty towers, a chapel, a sally-
port, a guard-room and a strange underground vaulted place called
the mint, in which Caerfili's barons once coined money, and in
which the furnaces still exist which were used for melting metal.
The name Caerfili is said to signify the Castle of Haste, and to
have been bestowed on the pile because it was built in a hurry.
Caerfili, however, was never built in a hurry, as the remains show.
Moreover, the Welsh word for haste is not fil but ffrwst. Fil
means a scudding or darting through the air, which can have nothing
to do with the building of a castle. Caerfili signifies Philip's
City, and was called so after one Philip a saint. It no more means
the castle of haste than Tintagel in Cornwall signifies the castle
of guile, as the learned have said it does, for Tintagel simply
means the house in the gill of the hill, a term admirably
descriptive of the situation of the building.
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