died shortly afterwards in 1245. The castle briefly reverted to the Crown again, but in 1247 passed by marriage to William de Valence, half brother to Henry III. De Valence was a French nobleman from Poitiers and a noted soldier who spent most of his life fighting in military campaigns; Henry arranged his marriage to Joan de Munchensi, one of the heiresses to the Marshal estate. The marriage made Valence immensely rich and gave him the title of Earl of Pembroke. The Welsh border situation remained unsettled however, and in the decades after 1250 security grew significantly worse, as the Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd conducted numerous raids into English territories. The Wye valley and Goodrich were particularly affected by these raids. Accordingly, William de Valence began to build a much larger castle around the original keep from the 1280s onwards, demolishing Marshal's earlier work. As part of the extremely expensive construction work, Valence used oak trees drawn from several royal forests. Valence was building at the same time that his nephew Edward I was constructing his major castles in the north of Wales, and the concentric castle that he built at Goodrich is both very similar in design and a rarity in England itself. Valence's son, Aymer de Valence built an additional line of outer defences before his death in 1324, including the external barbican, inspired by that at the Tower of London, and for which the earlier Valence barbican at Pembroke may have been an experimental forerunner. The effect was an early success in converting a fortress into a major dwelling, without damaging its defensive arrangements, and influenced the later castle conversion at Berkeley. The castle then passed to Aymer's niece, Elizabeth de Comyn, a well-connected young noblewoman. By the middle of the 1320s, however, England was in the grip of the oppressive rule of the Marcher lords Hugh le Despenser the older and his son Hugh Despenser the younger, the royal favourites of King Edward II. As part of a "sweeping revenge" on their rivals, especially in the Marches, the Despensers illegally seized a wide range of properties, particularly from vulnerable targets such as widows, wives whose husbands were out of favour with the king or unmarried women. Upon her inheritance, Hugh le Despenser the younger promptly kidnapped Elizabeth in London and transported her to Herefordshire to be imprisoned in her own castle at Goodrich. Threatened with