THE EARLY LIFE OF A GREAT ROYAL FORTRESS

Transcription

1 <Footer addr ess> Podcast transcript THE EARLY LIFE OF A GREAT ROYAL FORTRESS Hello and welcome to a podcast from Royal Collection Trust. This is the first in a series of lectures examining new research into the history of Windsor Castle. Dr Steven Brindle explores old Windsor and the early history of the castle from the year 1000AD to For more information about these and other learning events, please visit the 'What's On' section of our website. Richard. Thank you, thank you very much indeed and always remember, ladies and gentlemen, it s quality not quantity that counts. Right, I am indeed the editor and lead author of The New History of Windsor, which the Royal Collection Trust are hoping to publish next year. And I wrote most of the medieval chapters, including the ones which relate to these periods. So the content is by may-, by way of being my responsibility or fault, whichever way you may come to think by the end of this presentation. Moving swiftly on to the content, we arrive here at one of the most superficially familiar, not to say famous places in Britain. A place so famous that in a way it always seems to have been here. The castle seems synonymous with the name. The name seems synonymous with the hill. And the castle absolutely seems to embody the idea of a great castle on a hill. But there is much in its early history which is paradoxical and strange. And amongst these things one might point out the fact, that in the in the very early stages, this place wasn't in Windsor at all. We were in the parish of Clewer. The parish boundary straddled the hill. Windsor meant Old Windsor. And there are things which are paradoxical and strange about this part of Berkshire too, if you go back far enough. We tend to think of this part of the world as being a pretty densely populated kind of place, not to say a little overwhelmed by the pressures of development.

2 By the pressures of modern life, which press on the environment in so many ways. But in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, the landscape looked very different indeed. And that came down to geology. The Thames Valley is lined with what geologists like to call gravel terraces. And the land is well drained and it's got the river. And it's fertile and it's good for growing things on. And the river has been navigable since time immemorial. And there has long been trade along it and settlement on it. But as to the areas to either side, well that's a very mixed picture. And that comes down to geology, at how easy it is to grow things on it. Now these great bands of dark red, are something called the Reading beds, or the Reading clay. Very heavy clay. The land doesn't drain at all well. It's quite good at growing trees, big trees. But it's not very good for growing very much else. You've got to work it very hard with a plough before you can get much of a crop out of it. People did in the middle ages, as the area of cultivation grew. But in the eleventh century, this area was covered in forest trees and generally wasn't occupied at all. And the south you see a yet more curious and distinctive kind of geology. And that area is a sandy soil. The Bagshot sands. And what that means is a very deep stratum of a soil which is really kind of compacted sand. And within that stratum, there are great big boulders. And the boulders are something which geologists call sarsen. They are very hard inclusions of sandstone within a stratum of sand. So in the same way, when you cut through a chalk cliff, every now and then you will find bands in it of flint, which appear as black bands if you cut through chalk in section. And when you take it out, it comes out as nodules of flint, like the size of a few fists. And you knap that and it can be a facing material. Well in the same kind of way, if you cut through a Bagshot sand, there will be bands of stone in it which on being dug will fall apart into boulders. And in the last ice age, that stratum was eroded out by glacial action and it created a landscape which looked like nothing in England today. Littered with thousands and thousands of boulders. Imagine yourself on Dartmoor or in the Scottish Highlands on the outback of Australia. You couldn't grow anything there 'cause it was covered in boulders. And it's thin sandy soil. And all it would grow would be bushes and grasses and things. And in the middle ages, that was sandy heath land, Bagshot Heath, Ascot Heath.

3 No one much lived there except the highwaymen who were still hanging out in the eighteenth century generally getting up to no good. But as for the boulders, well, our energetic medieval forbears recognized a handy sort of building stone when they saw one. Especially given the general lack of good building stones in the middle ages. Now our dear old Neolithic ancestors found similar kind of sarsen stones on Salisbury Plain. They turned them into Stonehenge. And our ancestors hereabouts turned the sarsen builders they found on the Bagshot sands into the outer facing of Windsor Castle. That is where the Heath stone comes from. That is what Heath stone is. It is the boulders, the sarsen boulders which are geologically more or less identical to stones from which sands-, from which Stonehenge is constructed, which were distributed in a geologically intense fashion across the landscape. Generally inconveniencing human activity of all kinds. Until our dear old ancestors scappled them, meaning split them up. Laboriously and painfully, painstakingly, and faced Windsor Castle with them. You find references in the Pipe rolls, in the reign of Henry II, to scappling ten thousand stones at Collingly and that kind of thing. Now the result of all of this rather hardcore geology is that not many people lived here. They lived here along the river. They tended not to live here, because it was all trees and wolves and things. And they tended not to live here because it was inhabited largely by boulders. And outlaws. And so if we look at, if we move swiftly on past this very wonderful vintage tree, to the very wonderful Domesday atlases of England, which I warmly recommend to you as bedtime reading. If you're obsessed by historical geography, that is. Look for the blank areas, which are areas where there are less than two point five people, that is individuals, per square mile. Not a dense population. You might think. And how surprising that this should be the south east of England. You'll see the Sussex Weald. Now all those trees, heavy clay soil, lots of trees, the odd outlaw, not many other people. And East Berkshire, an island of very little population indeed. And even when you get to the rest of East Berkshire, stretching right up to Cookham and Bray.

4 Not many people to pop down the Fat Duck, given that the population was at most five to ten, five to ten people per square mile. So it would've been rather easier to get a table chez Heston back then. So there we are, not very many people in East Berkshire at all, because of the geology. And the impression is reinforced. Ah those dear old Domesday geographers have, god bless them, plotted the size, this is the population of all the places in Berkshire in the Domesday book, Helpfully, helpfully conveyed by, by blobs of differing sizes. As you see, there is old Windsor. There's Bray, that, is that Cookham. Sorry, I'm not from around here. And here as you see, in the depths of the forest, there are just these three settlements and I think that one's probably Sunninghill. And as you see, only a couple of places mentioned in Domesday Book, clearings in the forest. Well, Windsor, as you will know, because unlike me, you are from around here, then meant Old Windsor. And the name has acquired such talismanic significance for England, that it really just, it means itself. It has been given a lot of like London, there are lots of derivations of London. So I'm very pleased to be able to tell you that there is no authoritative etymology, for the meaning of the name Windsor. It would seem rather like lèse-majesté, don't you think, to tell her Majesty the Queen that her family's surname positively meant the 'windless shore' much less 'the wind is sore'. I don't think I should like to be the historian to break that particular piece of news. So for my point of view, I prefer to step right back from the etymologists' tussles. I'm particularly pleased that Oxford and Cambridge, should be at odds over this. And step back from all the windlesses. I don't know who Wandle is supposed to be. This is the wonderful Reverend Harwood. Who was obviously very attracted by Wandle. I don't know who he is. Herne the Hunter's riparian cousin maybe? Anyway, let's step right back from that and just say it's mysterious. Which seems altogether more satisfying and interesting and, on the whole, respectful, I think we will say.

5 And, and I'm not trying to explain everything to death, which is terribly dull. Not to say, frankly, a bit officious on the part of the historians. Something, a fault I'm always, always noticing and chiding in myself, ladies and gentlemen. So there we are. The name refers to Old Windsor, about two miles distant. And although I've been remarking on the thinness of the population of East Berkshire, Old Windsor was a biggest place. It's the third biggest place in Berkshire in the Domesday survey after Redding and Wallingford. And it was on the river. So it was a place linked to other places by trade. But the most important thing about it is that it was one of the settings for the three great feasts regularly held by the late Anglo-Saxon monarchy. And I'll come to that and the implications of that in a bit. Now in the 1950s, there were excavations there by Brian Hope-Taylor, who died about fifteen years ago, I think. And he found traces of settlement from the seventh and the eighth centuries. And traces of settlement from the tenth and eleventh centuries. But what he didn't find was the focus of the settlement and he didn't find anything that could be identified as a royal hall, which is really what we'd be looking for. The most interesting thing he did find was the remains of a mill leat over twenty feet wide. And the remains of a timber mill with three water wheels, which had sat on it. And that mill leat had been cut right across that enormous meander of the Thames, so it must've been three quarters of a mile long. And the mill was itself a big thing. And it was dendrochronologically aged to the late eight century. So clearly it was made by someone with large resources. But we don't know who. So it may already have been a royal possession, but we've no real evidence of that. Certainly, it suggests that there was cultivation on a large scale on the riverside meadowlands. And then we know the place was occupied again in the tenth and the eleventh centuries. And there was evidence of that m-more up in this direction beyond the church. But Mr Hope-Taylor never got around to publishing his excavations. He's one of the prime examples of that rather regrettable phenomenon of the archaeologist who digs but does not publish. And at the time of his death, his archaeological archive was divided, the material finds

6 here had gone to Reading museum, but the paper archive was sitting in Mr Hope-Taylor's garage in increasingly damp condition. Whence it was eventually rescued by the Royal Commission for the Ancient Historical Monuments for Scotland. Because, because they found out about, Mr Hope-Taylor and the garage and the damp conditions and the archive, rather sooner than anyone in England did. So they descended with a van and took it all to Edinburgh. And spent the next, in fact, five years carrying out paper conservation to the Hope-Taylor archive. So if you want to know about the Brian Hope-Taylor's excavations, you have to go to Edinburgh. As a matter of fact, the excavation archive is notably incomplete. So this is a somewhat unsatisfactory situation. So we have evidence of, that there's a settlement there from the seventh century, eighth century onwards. We know that whoever settled there had a big water mill. We know they had r-resources to dig a great big mill leat. We know that it was quite an important place by the tenth century, when there was a lot of pottery found there. And we know that Edward The Confessor held court here and had a residence there. And we know he entertained his Thanes. And there are stories, all by Norman chroniclers of various, shenanigans and goings on in the palace of Old Windsor. King Edward the Confessor held, one of his documented miracles there when he cured a blind man of his blindness in the vestibule of his palace at Windsor. And the man in question, who was called Vifanius Spilcorn, then became the keeper of the palace. And we know that Old Windsor was the scene of an awful and very unseemly row between Harold Godwinson and his brother Tostig, who fell to brawling in the presence of the king. And it was also the scene of, an even more unseemly event, when King Edward twitted their father, the Earl Godwin, of having murdered his, King Edward's brother. And Earl Godwin, this is according to William of Malmesbury said, so I might safely eat of this bread, I am innocent of the deed. And promptly choked on it. So there we are. Please bear in mind, that these chronicles were all written by Normans, for whom traducing the house of Godwin, was an important consideration. So there we are. The early historical references we have to the, to the palace at Windsor do little more than tell us that there was a palace at Windsor. And otherwise have to be taken

7 with several pinches of salt, I think. So there we are. The Battle of Hastings, which has, which has swept away Harold and Tostig. And eventually swept away all the other Saxon thanes. But King William the Conqueror represented and maintained continuity with his Saxon predecessors in a great many ways. And one of those ways was in his holding of the three great feasts, which had been held in the, at a small number of places during the Confessor, and went on being held by the Conqueror in a rather loose sort of annual cycle. And as you see, we, there are a couple of occasions in This, that should say Slip of the hand there and 1072, the Whitsun feast was held at Windsor. And this one, Whitsun 1070 is a particularly significant one, which we'll come to soon. Note the Christmas feast preceding that held at York in severely unpleasant circumstances. If you've ever heard of the events known as the Harrying of the North, that means the Conqueror's systematic devastation and destruction of all means to support life in Yorkshire. That is what the Conqueror was doing there. And he held Christmas at York surrounded by English people freezing and starving to death. Which was his deliberate and direct intention. In order to stop them rebelling. That's what he was doing in York. And the following Whitsun, he was here. Probably giving the order for the castle to be founded. Amongst other things. But I'll come to that later. But that historic sequence Norman conquest in And then the Conqueror was out of England for most of And then back to crush rebellions. The Harrying of the North, in late At Windsor by That sequence of events becomes very important and I'll return to that. Now these events, the great feasts, were the great meeting of the political nation. The great thanes of Anglo-Saxon England, great barons of Norman England, would come. The great abbots and the bishops would come. And between them, they formed what the Anglo- Saxons called the witen and what the Normans called the Great Council. And there was ceremonial, there would be a crown wearing. The king would appear wearing his crown, holding the orb and sceptre. There would be a celebratory mass with the king wearing his regalia. There would be a procession. There would be probably a crown wearing appearance. And then there would be a banquet.

8 And the priests of the place, if they were available, would sing the Laudes Regiae. We're not sure who would've sung the Laudes Regiae at Windsor, because of course one of the things which really singled Winsor out here is that unlike the other places, it did not have a major church. And so in some ways, it's really rather odd that Windsor should figure in this list. Because Westminster had a great abbey. Winchester had a great abbey which is also a cathedral. Gloucester had a great abbey. Windsor, so far as we know, had nothing more than a very common or garden church. The Domesday book refers to the parish priest. So there's no evidence that it even had a college of priests there. There seemed to be an ordinary church with a single priest. If the Laudes Regiae was sung, they must've been sung by the royal chaplains. Well, as I said, we know there's a royal palace there. But Brian Hope-Taylor didn't find it. It seemed most likely it would've been somewhere in the vicinity of the church at Old Winsor, which is on the highest part of the site, as you'd expect. And he couldn't excavate anywhere very near there. What would it have looked like? Well, almost certainly it was built of timber. And the most of the clues we have about the appearance of Anglo-Saxon royal palaces are from the Bayeux Tapestry. And as you see, they are, shall we say, somewhat schematized. But I think if you think in terms of a great aisled hall. Timber posts, a high central section, lower aisles, and then apply that thought to what you're seeing here and decorate it. So we have a high roof. We have pantiles cut in a fish scale pattern. We have louvres, perhaps over hearths, along the line of it. We have a suggestion of the roofs over lower aisles there and there. We have a suggestion as to the external treatment. With probably timber cladding and windows in it. And we have a suggestion of decorative turrets at the corner. Now it's completely impossible to say how far this is an artist's sort of convention, this is a conventionalized representation of a palace, how far these are imaginary. But given the other clues we have in the tapestry, I think there is some grounds for thinking that a Saxon palace would have had such features.

9 Disposed around that basic model of an-an isled hall. Either as a single vessel or with rows of columns and isles to either side. All of this, remember, is very speculative. So there we have King Harold's own residence. Here resides Harold, king of the English. There is Archbishop Stigand. Here is King Edward, so we know that this is an English palace again. And again, we have a suggestion of a gabled roof. We have a suggestion of decorative turrets at the corners. We have a suggestion of a decorative treatment of the facade. We have a suggestion that it was quite brightly painted. As one might expect the residence of a king to be. And finally, we have Harold's house at Bosham. A much discussed, much talked over image. This is the church at Bosham with again, a suggestion that Saxon churches were plastered and painted on the outside. And we now think that for other reasons too. And here is a, a suggestion that Harold's house at Bosham had a sort of arcaded lower floor. And actually had a first floor with a feasting room. And again, had what one might interpret as clay pantiles or might interpret as timber tiles. Which are given a colour. And one could interpret that as being timber pilasters at the corner of the building. Again, which have been given colouring using earth colours, red and yellow, ochres. Apply that sort of decorative language to the kind of late Saxon buildings which are excavated, say, at Cheddar in the 1970s by the great Philip Rahtz, and the picture might start to become a little clearer. The only masonry buildings at Cheddar were chapels. All the other buildings were timber. We've no reason to think of any Saxon royal palace would've been anything other than timber. And there is a small hall which as you see has been succeeded by a much larger hall. That kind of isle design I'm talking about. And here is Rahtz's reconstruction of the big hall at Cheddar. So if you try and imagine that kind of thing, clad with a sort of decorative colour scheme, possibly turrets at the corners, a decorative colour to the tiles on the roof, the walls lime washed, the verticals painted probably in a red colour, that being much the easiest colour to make from earth pigments. And give it a palette rather like this. This is work done by my good friend, very distinguished Dr Warwick Rodwell. Reconstructing colour schemes on Saxon masonry churches. So Saxon

10 buildings were probably quite brightly coloured. Especially ones of high status. And here's some more evidence from Warwick's research. Note the yellow ochre and red ochre tones. So that probably is what you should be imagining at Old Windsor. A series of halls, big roofs, bright colours, and this sort of tribal art decorating the doors, little windows, the end posts to the roofs and gables. Brightly coloured, a kind of folk art which was then swept away by the Norman conquerors. Now at the time of the Norman conquest, East Berkshire was dominated by the crown. And the thinly populated landscape, had mostly been given to monasteries. And Abingdon Abbey was important. Chertsey Abbey, which owned really most of the land going this way, was important. But most of the rest of East Berkshire at the time of the Norman conquest was still royal domain. This was huge tracts of land which were still in royal hands. And there were a couple if islands of secular lordship here, of which one was Clewer, which is the eventual site of the castle. Windsor itself was a possession of the crown until the last year of Edward Confessor's life. And very shortly before he died, he willed the manor of Windsor and his regalia to Westminster Abbey. Which greatly discommoded or incommoded and inconvenienced his successor, William the Conqueror, who wanted both the regalia and the manor back. And so by the time of the Domesday book in 1086, Windsor has reverted to being a royal possession. But a great many other manors in East Berkshire have been given away as part of the rather complicated Norman settlement here. It would seem that the crown needed to reward the church, especially the bishop of Salisbury, in whose diocese we are or were. But they didn't want, really, to alienate land to secular lords. But the Conqueror did want Windsor back. He wanted it back for hunting and other things which are suitable for kings, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us. And so he obliged Westminster Abbey to exchange Windsor in return for the manors of Feering and Ockenden in Essex. And he got back his regalia in return for the manor of Battersea. And so Windsor came back into royal control. But Clewer, and we'll return to this, remained an island of secular lordship in a very curious kind of way.

11 And I'll talk about more than that very shortly. Because that really bears on the nature of the, on why it was the castle was founded here, when Clewer wasn't actually a royal manor. It's one of those puzzles I talked about earlier. Now why was Old Windsor one of the settings for the great-, three great feasts? It's nothing like as important as the other places. It didn't have a great church. That's the oddest thing of all. To help with the ceremonial aspects. No one knows this at all. One clue of course is the proximity of Runnymede, whose name means something like 'council meadow' and whose name of course is very ancient and long predates the Magna Carta. And it seems likely-ish that the use of Runnymede on that one famous occasion in 1216 had something to do with convenience, its location between Windsor and London, the headquarters of the rebellion. But also had something to do with folk memory of this being an ancient meeting place. And if that was an ancient meeting place from the deep past, from Anglo-Saxon times, then it may be that the actual human gatherings the three great feasts, were held here rather than in Old Windsor itself. So that is one possibility. Another idea to draw to your attention is the fact that the Thames here forms the natural boundary between the two most important English kingdoms. Those of Mercia and Wessex. As well as being obviously the major transport route in southern England. So you could get to it by water. And its character as a meeting place may have had something to do with the fact this is where the two great kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia met. So all of this is speculation, but in the absence of any hard evidence, that's really all we can do. There is, it would seem, folk memory of this being an ancient meeting place. And that may be one reason why one of the places where the late Saxon kings held their great feasts was that folk memory. This is a place where the nation periodic-, occasionally came together. Now so far, of course, I've been talking about Old Windsor, two miles away. Rather than about the site of the castle. And the castle came here quite soon after the Norman conquest. And I think probably in And in circumstances about which we have just one or two clues from documentary sources.

12 And the most important of these is the Abingdon Chronicle, that is the chronicle of Abingdon Abbey, which was the most powerful local landowner. Now they really dominated the other end of Berkshire. And they had considerable estates here in East Berkshire. And after the Norman conquest, they really got up the nose of the Conqueror somehow and their abbot was dismissed and imprisoned. But Abingdon, was thereafter closely involved in the establishment of Windsor Castle. And in their account of this, England was shaken by rebellions all over between 1068 and about Now in the immediate aftermath of the Norman conquest, the balance of London and Archbishop Stigand and a great many other people made their submission for the Conqueror. And it seemed that the conquest was a done deal really by the time of his coronation famously on Christmas day in And so he left. He went back to Normandy, where he had the odd local difficulty. Problems with his nominal overlord, the king of France, to sort out, at about Easter of And he left his illegitimate half brother, Odo of Bayeux, in charge of the country. But by the end of 1067, things were looking very shaky indeed. And in 1068, the whole country went up. Bear in mind that most of the Anglo-Saxon leadership had been massacred at Hastings. That partly explains, I think, why it took a long time for English resistance, English rebellion to take off. But take off it did. Towards the end of 1067 and right through 1068 and 1069, in the southwest. And in the fenland. And in the north of England, most of all. But also in the Thames Valley. The Abingdon Chronicle tells us that Thames Valley was unsettled and the Conqueror ordered castles to be built at Windsor, Oxford, and Wallingford to control it. And that is the the first, more or less dateable historic reference we have to it. We can date the foundation of Oxford and Wallingford to by And it would seem that Windsor must've been founded around the same time. I think we can pull that back a little earlier to the Whitson Court of We know he was in the area. So this is the sequence of events. The conquest, the first phase of the conquest played out between Battle of Hastings, October 1066, and Christmas, Conqueror's coronation. He goes back to Normandy, around Easter of Leaving Odo of Bayeux in charge. England erupts in rebellion all over the place in The Conqueror has to come back.

13 Right through 1068 and 1069, he is travelling round England facing down rebellions. The worst of these happened in the north of England, which are supported by an actual invasion fleet by swain, and swain king of Denmark. And as a result in , the Conqueror was engaged in making three successive trips to north of England. And the last of these, towards the end of 1069, he carried out the harrowing-, the harrying of the North. Which to judge by the evidence of the Domesday book, drastically reduced its population by a deliberate policy of destroying villages, destroying crops, driving the inhabitants into the forest, and deliberately robbing them of the means to feed themselves. So that the population of Yorkshire was deliberately decimated by starvation. That is why the Conqueror spent the Christmas of 1069 in York. And that is the immediate background to the Easter court at Winchester and the Whitson Court at Windsor. And so it's most likely in this period and in these unhappy of circumstances that the Conqueror, who was needed elsewhere, in the fenland to cope with Hereward the Wake, ordered castles to be built at Windsor, Oxford, and Wallingford. And that is the historic context of the building of a castle here. For Oxford and Wallingford, the Conqueror had an obvious candidate in mind. That was a great northern nobleman, you may have heard of, called Robert D'Oyly. He was, the Sheriff of Oxfordshire. He was the heir to Wallingford, because he married the heiress to an English thane called Wigod, the Lord of Wallingford, who had been an initial and early supporter of Normans. So Robert has inherited a great lordship, a great honour based at Wallingford. And is ordered by the Conqueror to fortify Wallingford and he's ordered by the Conqueror to build a castle at Oxford as well. And Wallingford was at that point the closest thing Berkshire had to a county town. And Oxford was certainly the county town of Oxfordshire and you'll note that they both are, they sit on the river Thames and they both have the word 'ford' in their names, which is a rather substantial clue to the whole point of those places. Wallingford is probably the, highest or lowest, lowest point on the Thames where the river could then be forded. Hence the name. We think a bridge was built at Wallingford quite soon after the conquest on the site of Wallingford Bridge now. And we know that there was already a bridge and a causeway at Oxford, the place called Grandpont, by the time of the Norman conquest. So

14 those were important crossing places over the Thames, offering one a very broad clue as to why you might want to build a castle there, if you were trying to control territory because it would help you control the means of getting over the river. At the crucial points. So we have some kind of historic context and explanation for the sitting of castles at Oxford and Wallingford. What about the third one? What about Windsor? Well there wasn't a sort of a convenient local lord really, in East Berkshire because as we've seen, most of the land was held by the crown or by monastic houses. And so the conqueror had to improvise. And the improvisation took rather an odd form. And one of the odd things about it was that the castle was of course not founded at Windsor at all. It was founded two miles away in the neighbouring parish of Clewer. As the Domesday Book helpfully records for us in Ripplesmere hundred, Ralph, son of Seifride holds Clewer from the king, Earl Harold held it, NB. Then it answered to five hides. A hide is about as much land as you can cope with a plough team in a year. But it's not a very, it's a terribly difficult concept. Now for four and a half, Windsor Castle is in the half hide, so note that it's Windsor Castle, not Clewer Castle, presumably in reference to the thane of neighbouring Windsor, in comparison with the obscurity of Clewer. Nine villages and six smallholders, this is not a large place. Lots of things jump out at one from this. Why did the Conqueror found the castle here, not at Windsor? Who was Ralph, son of Seifride If Earl Harold held it before the Norman conquest, does that mean that Ralph had been given it after the Norman conquest, that is, by the Conqueror? If William the Conqueror, who after all, had just more or less starved three quarters of the population of Yorkshire to death, wanted a site for a castle, why did he leave this man whose father was apparently English, in possession of this place? And rent, yes rent, the site from him? For twelve shillings a year. The crown did not own the site of Windsor castle until And they were paying twelve shillings rent for the, the site of their own castle, to the Lord of Clewer, until Did you know that

15 Now there really is a weird fact. So who was Ralph and why did the king not just take the manor off him or indeed exchange it as we've seen he had done to recover Old Windsor? Well of course we don't really know. What we can say, and I owe this to my good friends Dr David Roth and Professor Katharine Keats-Rohan, is that Ralph had a brother who was called Richard. And both Ralph and Richard had property in Wallingford. And Richard is described, in the Domesday Book, as a minister of the crown. And he held property in Wallingford in right. In what was called serjeanty that is in right of holding an office at court as a minister of the crown. And if his brother Ralph was a minister of the crown, that would help explain why the Conqueror left him in possession. And just took enough of the manor what he deemed the manor, that he needed to found a castle and Windsor Castle is in the half hide. So, this is a very odd situation. But it does tell us lots of things, really. Whoever Ralph was, he clearly had the king's favour. Was he English or a Norman? Well, Ralph is a French name and Seifride is an English name. So heck, you tell me. It's likely that this was an Anglo-Norman family in service at the court of Edward the Confessor. Ralph and his brother may well have been ministers of the crown. There are several other cases hereabouts of people with roles at the court of Edward the Confessor. Albert of Lorraine, who was one of Edward s chaplains, had land at Dedworth, for example. There were goldsmiths attached to the court who had property in Old Windsor, who were given property roundabout Windsor so they could be in proximity to the places where the king was. And if Ralph and his brother were ministers of the crown, they were part of the apparatus who knew how the royal administration worked and the Conqueror needed them. Now it is possible that Ralph had served Earl Harold as a steward before the Norman Conquest. So David Roth, who really understands these things, tells me alternatively, it's possible that Ralph was simply given the manor to keep him on site after the Norman Conquest.

16 But at any rate, there it is. He held Clewer and when the Conqueror wanted to build a castle here, instead of dispossessing this man with his English father, he leased half a hide of it in order to build Windsor castle. Curious, what? And up, and an enormous motte. An enormous chalk man, that is all that survives of the first castle. Its great size and great height are striking. You take what's already a vantage point in the landscape and make it higher. And that suggests one of the things that they were after here was height, was a vantage point. But I think there were other considerations here too. And what was built here was doubtless a motte-and-bailey. You could run one of these up in a matter of months if you had enough forced labour. Labour, as you might've seen, might have been a bit of a problem. They might have had to dragoon the population of Old Windsor, as we've seen East Berkshire, generally rather thinly populated. It would've been a matter of ditches, of a big motte, of timber palisades, of timber buildings. Remember, this was a response to a crisis. It was nothing fancy and it certainly wasn't a royal residence. I think we can say that with absolute certainty. And you'd see from those circumstances that if this was going to be a royal residence, the king would seem unlikely to have left the manor in the hands of its original owner and only taken half a hide of it. This was a fort. A place to site a garrison and I think to site a garrison over a crossing place of the Thames. Now if you look at Sir William Hope's great book, he reconstructs the first plan of the castle with enormous baileys here and here. And he says it's most likely that the castle was initially laid out to its present plan with two large baileys to either side of a motte with a, with a keep on it. Now I think that's most unlikely, really. Because Windsor is one of the big-, no, it's the biggest castle by area in the British Isles. It comes to thirteen acres. You need a huge garrison to maintain defences like that. You'd need an army of labourers to make the ditches. And why would you do it for such purposes? It would, it would ve occupied more than the half hide of the manor, in all probability, than than had been taken. So our conjectural reconstruction of the early castle as you see is a much more minimal one. Why is the bailey this funny shape? Well, that is because back in the middle ages, the lower ward of the castle was divided.

17 And there was a wall just above, just between where the Albert Memorial Chapel and the Deanery is now. And there was a ditch, and there was a wall, and there was a gatehouse. And you see that on Norden's aerial view and you see it on Hollar's aerial view. And so it is at least possible that the castle started with that, what we would now call the middle ward, as its bailey. And that the upper and lower wards were added later. And I'll come to that later. Now all of this is deeply speculative, obviously. It is just possible that someday dating evidence may be found in the castle's ditches. It's possible but not especially likely that we'll find positive dating evidence for the digging of those ditches. I think all we'll ever be able to do, really, is speculate. But I'm afraid I simply don't buy Sir William's idea that the whole castle was laid out at this state. He justifies it by referring to a rather small group of castles. There are, those are Rockingham and Arundel and Carisbrooke. Rockingham in Northamptonshire, Arundel in Sussex, Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight. All of which originally had a motte and a shell keep and two large baileys to either side of the motte. And I think in most cases, a smaller bailey somewhere in between them. But Rockingham and Carisbrooke and Arundel are even less securely dated than Windsor. Most likely they were founded later. And if you go to the historical accounts of those three castles, Carisbrooke, they all discuss their development, hourglass plan, two baileys, with reference to each other. So Windsor is justified and to Windsor. So Windsor is justified. You know, having been this plan at the outset, by reference to Rockingham, Carisbrooke, and Arundel. And they in turn all refer to Windsor. So the argument is a perfectly circular one. So I'm afraid I don't buy it. So we're going out on a limb and I'm doubtless exposing myself to brick bats from the castleologists. Well we'll see when we get published, but I thought it best to stir things up again here. Now the hill. A hilltop site. Castles belong on hills, don't they? Well, Windsor certainly embodies the idea of the castle on a hill wonderfully. But in many ways, this is not the obvious place to put it. Like if we go downstream, for example, the next Norman castle that you encounter going downstream from Windsor is this well known example, which as you see, is not very elevated at all. And if you go upstream, the

18 next Norman castle from Windsor are ones we've encountered already. They are in fact Wallingford and Oxford. Both of which are right down next to the river. Because they're there in order to control crossing places. So they're not on hills at all. Now if you were to apply this thinking at Windsor, you might think that the obvious site would be Old Windsor down by the river. But of course there isn't a crossing place there and no bridge was built there until the nineteenth century because the Thames is much wider and it can't ever have been possible to ford or it seems most unlikely. So the hilltop site seems less obvious when we consider the comparisons. And when we think about the other reasons why Normans founded castles, you could sort the reasons into six overlapping categories. Centre of royal power and administration, like Shire castle. Well, Oxford and Wallingford. And in the case of Windsor, wouldn't that mean Windsor? Meaning Old Windsor. Control of towns and cities. Well, there were no really large cities here. But much the largest place in East Berkshire was Old Windsor. So frontier defence obviously doesn't apply here at all. Centre of lordship and estate administration, like our friends at Wallingford and Arundel. Well, the largest place here was Old Windsor. A royal or lordly residence, I'm sure you're getting the picture by now, is clearly Old Windsor, because that is where the royal residence was. So the only one we're left with is control of communications. And this I think brings us back to the idea that Windsor's peers, Oxford and Wallingford, clue in the name, were both founded at crossing places over the river. Because in the circumstances, great crisis, England going up in flames, the Conqueror orders the foundation of a castle here that the key to controlling Thames Valley, I suggest, was to control the crossing places over the river. Which means that there was a crossing place over the river here and that is why the castle had to be here, not at Old Windsor. And this brings us to where the roads might ve been. The Oxford road, Akeman Street. This is one of the maps we, we didn't have redrawn for the book, which is my, why you get my nasty sketch.

19 So there is Staines and the Roman road, which goes cross Bagshot Heath towards Silchester. And here's the great west road, which by the thirteenth century, was crossing the Thames at Maidenhead on its way towards Reading. And if there was a bridge at Windsor, then at New Windsor that is, at Clewer, that would help to explain the foundation of a castle here. So what I'm proposing, my hypothesis is that there either was already a bridge here, or more probably, a bridge was built here being about the lowest place on this stretch of the Thames where William's engineers reckoned a bridge could be built. Now we have historic views of Old Windsor Bridge. Timber trestles. A medieval bridge would ve looked very much like that. Our problem of course is that we've no idea when the bridge at Windsor was first built. Windsor was repaired in We have a documentary hint that there was a bridge at Windsor in the 1190s. That's actually the earliest reference we have to it. If there was a bridge at Windsor in 1070, that would provide a rationale for the foundation of the castle on this site on a half hide of land, leased from Ralph, son of Seifride, which otherwise would seem lacking because I would suggest all the other criteria which normally guided the Normans in locating castles would've pointed to Old Windsor as the natural site for it. So why was Old Windsor founded here? I suggest because it was to do with the control of communications. And that that was the prime reason for sitting a castle here and given a big mound in order to be able to scan the horizon. Because it was founded in response to a crisis. And without much more thought at the time from that. The castle was equipped with a hereditary constable, who was called Walter FitzOther, and with a garrison. Walter had the keeping of the king's brood mares. So he was someone pretty close to the crown. And he became the constable of Windsor and the keeper of Windsor Forest. And those two roles, castle constable, keeper of Windsor Forest, have been united ever since. And he became the lord, the master of the royal domain in East Berkshire. And the constable of Windsor became effectively the master of this whole end of the county. With quasi-royal authority. The authority of the sheriff here. And I'll talk a little more about that.

20 Walter had a big family. They almost certainly grew up here. There are documentary hints again in the Abingdon Chronicle that Walter did actually live at Windsor Castle. His eldest son William FitzWalter succeeded him as constable of Windsor and as Keeper of Windsor Forest. And other children served the crown and so are buried at St Edmonds Abbey. And his youngest son, Gerald de Windsor, married a Welsh princess called Nesta. From his eldest son descend the de Windsor family, later lords Windsor of Stanwell. They are still with us. The Windsor-Clive family who are earls of Plymouth and they live at Oakley Park in Shropshire. And Gerald's sons, the FitzGeralds, became the Fitzgeralds, dukes of Leinster. And their coats of arms, to this day, rather curiously, are the reverse of each other. So that's the arms of the Fitzgerald dukes of Leinster, which as you see, is, I have to think for a moment about this, argent a saltire gules. Whereas the arms of Windsor, if you take out the crosslet, which arrived there a few centuries later, is gules a saltire argent. Now so the fact that these two families, which remember, parted in genealogical terms way back then in the eleventh century, should have coats of arms which are the mirror of each other seems unlikely to be a coincidence. So it seems not unlikely that even though this is before the science of heraldry is supposed to have existed, that one or other of these emblems, and more probably that one, was associated with Walter FitzOther himself. This isn't me, this is the work of a man called JH Round, who I'll come to further. So this is what we are about to publish. As a reconstruction of the first castle with a little bailey. And with pigs and cattle and horses. And with a bridge that it commands. And with a broad landscape around it. Something raw and new and basic and compact. Something that could be manned by a garrison of six knights. Why six knights, you ask? Right, well we'll come to that too, shortly. Walter was the constable of the castle and the warden of Windsor Forest. And a lot hangs on the word forest in the middle ages. It was a legal term, 'forest' means outside, meaning outside the normal judicial regime. The normal law. It didn't seem to mean an area covered in trees. These are areas that were under

21 forest law in the middle ages and as you see, there's Windsor Forest and the huge areas of royal forest covering much of Hampshire. And Windsor Forest extends into Surrey. The areas under forest law did sort of fluctuate in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. And here they are at their maximum extent in the thirteenth century. And here is Windsor Forest covering East Berkshire and extending into Surrey. That's the constable's domain. And there's an important point here about all this royal forest, and lots of royal manors being concentrated in the Wessex and Thames Valley areas. Because that meant that that's where the kings had good hunting and where they had lots of royal manors at their disposal. And we can say as a certainty that in the twelfth century and the thirteenth centuries, when the English kings could decide where they were going to be and where they're going to stay, it tended to be in this area more than anywhere else. At a number of residences at Winchester and Gilford and Windsor and Clarendon and Woodstock and Marlborough, above all. This was the English equivalent of the 'Île-de-France' in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. So Windsor became one of a constellation of royal residences in the Thames Valley and Wessex area. And from this area, they had a route down to the Solent for the crossing to Normandy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Forest law was no laughing matter for those who lived under it. The effect of the law was supposed to be to freeze the landscape for the benefit of the wild beasts living in it. Rather than benefit of the human inhabitants who might want to cut down trees in order to extend the area of cultivation. Well the forest law debarred them from doing this. It said they could pull down the loose dead timber by hook or by crook, but they could not cut any living branch. And their dogs had to be lawed, that is had their claws clipped so they could not hunt even small game. And anyone who was found pursuing small or god help them, the great game, was likely to be in big trouble. And if they were caught pursuing the great game, they were liable to be hanged. In the twelfth century. By the, by the later twelfth century and the thirteen century, Henry II and his sons Richard I and King John were finding that swinging fines were a rather more

22 effective way and sort of slightly more financially rewarding way of managing the system than by just hanging people. But all the same, it was a complete economic nonsense. The population was growing. It was exerting pressure on resources. More landed was need-needed to be brought under the plough. The effect of the forest law in slowing the march of cultivation was of course greatly to reduce royal revenues from those areas. So they imposed fines as a kind of alternative way of raising revenues. It was bitterly resented, as you may imagine. It was policed by the constable and within his domain, the constable s word was pretty much law, in the eleventh and twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is the constable s domain. About eleven hundred. These are the royal manors. The royal manors were at any rate, these ones were in the more thickly populated areas. Wargrave, Cookham and Bray generated most of the revenue, that the constable had to run his domain with. The depth of it of course was the forest. His domain extended deep into Surrey. This area of Surrey was deemed to be part of Windsor Forest. And, and the constable answered for the revenues of his domain in the Pipe rolls at the twice yearly court of the Exchequer. So from the reign of Henry II on, really, we know a fair bit about what happened in the constable s domain from his returns at the court of the Exchequer in the Pipe rolls. He actually does the accounting of. So he did for his domain what the sheriff did in the rest of Berkshire. And he had revenues of maybe two hundred, two hundred fifty pounds a year. So the royal domain here was the equivalent in financial terms of a medium sized county. So the constable presides over the hundred courts at the time of the Norman conquest, just three hundreds. And these were increased eventually to seven. You may know the expression the seven hundreds of Windsor Forest. I don't know why the constable deemed it necessary to have seven hundreds and thus seven hundred courts, but they'd appeared by the reign of Henry III to the original ones of of Ripplesmere and Charlton and Beynhurst. Or added these new smaller ones in Bray and Cookham, single parishes but very rich ones became hundreds in their own right. So there's the constable s domain divided into seven