Tag: Edward IV

Setting the Scene for the Clavering Castle Excavation 2025

Excavation Director, and lead archaeologist for the past two decades in the investigation of Clavering Castle sets the scene for what they hope to find over the the next three weeks.

Norman knights fleeing the forces of Earl Godwin of Wessex coupled with miraculous encounters between King Edward the Confessor and St John the Evangelist form just part of the shady historical drama hidden behind the leafy tranquillity of Clavering Castle in north-west Essex.

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The scheduled site of Clavering castle is recognised as a rare example of a castle established in Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest. The castle has been subject of a twenty year programme of detailed historical and archaeological research by the Clavering Landscape History Group. This summer, archaeologists led by Simon Coxall of Warboys Archaeology Group, under a consent granted by Historic England and supported by the Castle Studies Trust, have a unique opportunity to explore by excavation this mysterious and previously unexcavated site.

Clavering LiDAR base

The castle platform which is entirely man-made is surrounded on all sides by imposing moated defences c4m deep and sits in the valley of the river Stort which evidence suggests witnessed significant diversion and management  of its river system to accommodate the estate.

Resistivity Survey of Clavering Castle Platform, copyright Warboys Archaeology

Geophysical survey suggests structures occupying twin courtyards once existed spanning across the sub-rectangular platform which measures c100m x 60m. The Castle platform abuts the parish churchyard to its south. Here further geophysical survey suggests the location of the now ‘lost’ chapel of St John the Evangelist which bore witness to Edward the Confessor’s aforementioned ‘Miracle of the Ring’. The twin courtyards appear connected to one another by an entrance court which issued out onto a bridged crossing of the moat connecting the castle with the family chapel where the alleged miracle occurred. It is suspected the geophysical evidence primarily relates to the powerful Neville family’s reconstruction of the castle site in the later 14th century, although some more ephemeral readings hint at the presence of earlier structures.

The Nevilles were arguably the most powerful baronial family in England during the 15th century and were through their marriage alliances with the Plantagenet royal family at the forefront of the dynastic conflicts now known as the Wars of the Roses. Clavering was selected by the Nevilles as their southern caput, these notorious northern lords presiding over their lordship and hundred of Clavering lying just a day’s ride from London. Clavering castle was successively held by the Neville Earls of Westmorland, Richard Earl of Salisbury, Richard Earl of Warwick and, through his Neville wife, George Duke of Clarence, the executed brother of the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III. With the fall of the house of Neville the castle was seized by the Crown and stayed a crown possession until it was granted back to effectively the last Neville lord of Clavering – Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (1473-1541) Though she refurbished elements of the castle and chapel in the 1520’s, as a devout Catholic and one of the last surviving scions of the Plantagenet royal family she too was executed on the orders of Henry VIII in 1541.

Beneath the levels denoting the Neville tenure of the lordship, archaeologists are hopeful of encountering earlier evidence of the de Clavering and FitzWymarc occupation of the castle. The de Claverings were, like the Nevilles, powerful lords of the north who feature extensively as Magna Carta sureties and later campaigning knights under Edward I and Edward II. With Robert FitzWymarc (c1030-1075) we return to the pre-conquest evidence that promises to push the history of the site back a thousand years to the dying days of Anglo-Saxon England.

Clavering Castle Platform looking east, copyright Simon Coxall

This summer’s excavations will initially focus upon the key area around the entrance court connecting the castle platform with the adjacent churchyard. Such will seek to explore the entrance court and bridged crossing, the various phases involved in their construction, the materials used and its status, whilst testing the geophysical responses.

Digging deeper still, in the same key area archaeologists are hopeful of exploring the earliest evidence for the construction of the castle platform as revealed by the layers underlying the later medieval structures on site. In doing so fresh light will be shone upon the earliest days of castle construction in medieval England.

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Pleshey Castle: a gatehouse fit for royalty

Progress has continued to be made in the understanding of Pleshey Castle, as project lead Patrick Allen explains.

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Since the publication of the article on Pleshey Castle in Current Archaeology (Issue 344, Nov. 2018, CST blog 15/09/20), we have been able to reconstruct in detail the gatehouse of the timber bridge over the motte moat, whose upper chamber is identified from building accounts for 1460-1 as the Queen’s privy chamber (‘Q’ on Fig.1). It would have been occupied by Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, who held Pleshey between 1445 and 1461. Pottery dating, documentary evidence and the style of the floor tiles, however, suggest that the gatehouse was built in the 1380s by Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, and the upper chamber would originally have been occupied by his wife, the duchess Eleanor. In the late medieval period, it was usual for accommodation to be provided above gateways. This gatehouse at Pleshey closed off the keep and the lord’s private quarters from the rest of the castle, but although it would have provided a degree of security it should not be confused with the heavily fortified gateways of castles with a more obviously military role.




FIGURE 1: Plan of the castle, with the queen’s chamber over the bridge gatehouse (Q) and the king’s chamber (K) immediately to its east, with the line of the timber bridge shown in blue. (Drawn by Iain Bell).

The physical character of the gatehouse can be reconstructed from specialist building material reports by David Andrews, Paul Drury and Nick Wickenden. The gatehouse was built of flint, with greensand dressings for the foundation plinth, corner stones, and door and window mouldings, with a peg-tile roof and lead gutters. Together with the chapel and the keep (which was timber but had a stone façade) it was one of the few stone buildings in the castle, as even the great hall in the bailey was of timber on stone sleeper walls. The ground floor room next to the gateway had a simple gravel floor and was probably a guardroom, but the upper chamber was luxurious. Its floor was of decorated glazed tiles made at Penn in Buckinghamshire, with three different roundel patterns (Fig. 2). Fragments of glass and lead cames show that the chamber had leaded glazed windows, while part of a chimney pot found in a spread of demolished roof tile implies that it was heated by a fireplace. The walls were plastered and decorated with simple painted designs, rather like modern wallpaper.

Three designs of Penn decorated tile floors as reconstructed by Paul Drury, based on tiles found in the demolition rubble of the bridge gatehouse. (Drawn by the Drury McPherson Partnership).

The chamber would have been dominated by a large four-poster bed with richly embroidered silk or fine wool hangings for curtains around it, as well as the tester for its canopy and the valence at its base. Several sets of these hangings are described in an inventory of goods seized from the castle following Thomas of Gloucester’s arrest and murder in 1397 (Dillon and Hope 1897). The chamber may have had tapestry wall hangings, also described in the inventory. The carpets that are mentioned would have been more like rugs and most of the decorated floor would have remained uncovered.

There was a general improvement in the private living quarters in the castle in the late 14th century, especially with the addition of fireplaces and privies. In the 1450s, when Pleshey was held by Queen Margaret of Anjou, the building accounts suggest that the keep had become guest accommodation, with the Queen’s chamber in the gatehouse and the King’s chamber next to it, approached by a ‘revealing’ or audience chamber (‘Q’ and ‘K’ on Fig. 1; Ryan 2010, 252). Queen Margaret would have been an absentee landlord as she spent most of her time at court, but these chambers would have been prepared for occasional visits. One such visit probably occurred when she ordered major building works at Pleshey early in 1458. After the defeat of the Lancastrians in 1461 Pleshey passed to the Yorkist Edward IV and, from 1465, Queen Elizabeth Woodville. Several entries in the building accounts for the 1460s record cleaning and refurbishment work before royal visits, and the gatehouse accommodation would still have been of a high standard, fit for a queen, eighty or so years after it was built.

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References

Dillon, Viscount and Hope W.H.St.J. 1897, ‘Inventory of the goods and chattels belonging to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester and seized in the castle at Pleshey, Co. Essex, 21 Richard II (1397); with their value as show in the escheator’s accounts’, Archaeol. J., 54, 275-308 (transcript from PRO E 136/77/4): Available:

<https://www.archaeologicaldateservice.ac.uk/…/view/archjournal/contents.cfm?vol=54>

Ryan, P. 2010, ‘The fifteenth-century building accounts of the Duchy of Lancaster in Essex’, Essex Archaeol. Hist., 4th ser., 1, 248-60

Featured image courtesy of Chelmsford Museums Service.