Tag: Henry II

Ellesmere Castle – Revealing the Secrets of a Major Castle of the Welsh Marches

Ellesmere Castle in Shropshire is a substantial motte and bailey castle in the Welsh Marches that played an important role in the history of the area. However, very little is known about its form and structure with no standing remains above ground, or indeed when it was first constructed.

Starting on Monday 23 March, on behalf of the owners of the motte, Ellesmere Bowling Club, and with the support of owners of the rest of the castle Shropshire Council and funded by the Castle Studies Trust, archaeologists from the heritage organisation Heneb will be undertaking a programme of geophysical survey at the castle to assess the potential for surviving sub‑surface archaeological remains. The methods being used include magnetic gradiometry and electrical resistivity survey.

Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter

Ellesmere motte top, showing size as an shape of possible structure shown by GPR survey

The motte itself is substantial. It is approximately 80m in diameter at its base, 52m across the top and stands about 11m high. A steep-sided ditch, about 20m wide and 3m deep, separates the motte from the bailey to the south east. In 2024, a partial and informal Ground Penetrating Radar GPR survey was carried out, which suggested and indicated a substantial structure, probably indicating a stone structure with the dimensions of 23m x 14m.

Lidar image of Ellesmere Castle including areas of geophysical survey

This current survey builds on the work carried out in 2024. It will be covering four areas of this very large castle site. The LiDAR image below shows the four targeted areas for geophysical survey:

  1. Motte: to pinpoint the position of the curtain wall along with any other buildings within.
  2. Bailey: to determine the location and size of the buildings.
  3. Area three, to establish where the outer defensive wall once stood that came down from the top of the motte, and to understand the width and depth of the defensive ditch, along with deciphering the extent of the bailey (No2), part of which had been quarried away sometime in the past.
  4. Earthworks which are believed to be the outer defensive walls, showing what appears to be an entrance in the north east section, and to investigate the furthest easterly earthworks to determine whether there was both an inner and outer bailey.

Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter

The date of construction is unknown: it could have been built as early as the late eleventh century, by marcher lord Roger de Montgomery. The lands were confiscated by the crown following his son Robert de Bellesme’s rebellion. The castle was certainly in existence by 1138. In 1174 Henry II confirmed the manor to Dafydd ab Owain, a north Welsh prince, when he married Henry’s sister Emma in 1174. During the early to middle part of the 13th century the manor of Ellesmere passed in and out of royal control and throughout much of that century there are numerous accounts of building or repair works especially during the reign of Henry III.

Ellesmere Castle bailey with motte in the background, copyright Gary Bick

In 1241 John le Strange was paid forty pounds to build a castle also in the same year twenty one pounds was spent on building two bretasches. In 1256, the King’s house within castle was repaired at a cost of five pounds ten shillings and nine with a further one hundred and sixteen pounds being spent on castle repairs further emphasising the castle’s significance.

In historical terms, perhaps its most well-known claim to fame is that Joan, daughter of King John and wife of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, was confined to the castle for about a year following her infidelity.

While the survey will not answer questions on its history, it will hopefully supply more details on the castle’s form, and potential targets for future excavation so we can learn more about its history.

Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter

Marlborough Castle: the missing keep

Over the last two decades, the Marlborough Mound Trust has carried out extensive conservation and investigations on the ‘mound’ in the grounds of Marlborough College. The origins of the mound were uncertain until recently. It was known to have been part of Marlborough Castle, but there had been persistent speculation, on the strength of its resemblance to neighbouring Silbury Hill and the discovery of antlers in the early twentieth century (now lost) that it was of prehistoric origin. In 2008, when Silbury Hill was being investigated, the opportunity of taking cores from the mound to obtain comparative dates presented itself. After a precarious operation involving a very large crane, the necessary drilling rig was hoisted to the top of the mound. The resulting cores, as a paper published the following year by Jim Leary and his colleagues showed, supported a date in the second half of the third millennium BC, broadly contemporary with Silbury Hill.

The drilling rig for the coring operation is hoisted into place (copyright Marlborough Mound Trust)

Jim Leary has subsequently carried out a survey of some fifty castle mottes, looking for other sites where prehistoric mounds could have been reused as the base for a castle, and has found only one other rather uncertain case. This means that Marlborough may be unique in being a prehistoric structure recycled into a medieval castle.

But we now know more about the prehistory of the mound than the supposed castle keep. The only possible sighting of masonry on the mound is uncertain in the extreme. H. C. Brentnall, a master at Marlborough College, in one of his many contributions to the Proceedings of the College’s Natural History Society on the the history of the castle, had this to say in 1936:

“Excavations necessitated by building operations at Marlborough College in the course of this summer have revealed several traces of the medieval castle which perished gradually between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little remains above ground (if the elevation justifies that expression) is to be seen on the summit of the motte, where a buttress of the keep was laid bare some years ago.“

The note implies that the buttress was visible in 1936, but recent geophysical surveys have not found it.

The problem is further compounded by the subsequent use of the mound. It became a garden feature in the seventeenth century, and a spiral was cut into the side of it to give access to a summerhouse at the top. Stukeley’s engraving of the countess of Hertford’s gardens in 1723 shows only the summerhouse, and no traces of masonry.

Stuckley’s engraving of countess of Hertford’s gardens.

About the same time, a water tank was installed to supply the Hertfords’ newly built mansion. This was enlarged by the College after its establishment in 1843, and adapted over the years, until the top of the mound was graced by a large iron tank surrounded by a spoil bank, concrete steps, and substantial pipework. This meant that in effect most of the original top of the  mound had been destroyed.

This raises the question of what we are looking for. The earliest mentions of the site, in 1070 and 1110, present the king’s establishment as a place of imprisonment and a site where a royal court was held. In the 1140s, Marlborough castle is first mentioned as such. It is described ‘very defensible’ in The Deeds of King Stephen. It was held by John Marshal, who used it to control the surrounding countryside, and there is no record of it ever being attacked.

The only entry in the plentiful records for the castle under Henry II and Henry III is in the context of payments in 1222 for work designed to create a substantial royal residence there. This is a single sum for the building of a lime kiln ‘for the Great Tower’, which must therefore have been of stone. There is no indication where this tower was sited, and it may well have been part of the lower bailey. It has simply been assumed that it was on the mound.

An inconclusive exploratory dig was carried out by Wessex Archaeology for the Mound Trust in 2019, and at the time of writing, it is still hoped that a follow up to this will be possible in 2020. The present assumption is that the mound was among the hastily erected timber forts from immediately after the Norman conquest, and that this was replaced by a stone keep after 1222. It would be good to be able to find some actual evidence as to the nature and even the existence of the keep at Marlborough.

Richard Barber is a trustee of the Marlborough Mound. He would welcome any comments, particularly on the replacement of timber with stone, and the nature of ‘great towers’: email rwbarberuk at yahoo.co.uk.

Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter

Medieval Engineers: history’s forgotten builders

“King Henry II built the great tower at Dover Castle” is the kind of statement you will hear when visiting one of this country’s magnificent fortresses. But the King himself never lifted a single tool to get any castle built. While the hard manual work was done by labourers, and the finer details worked by master stone masons and carpenters hired because of their great skills, the general plan as well as the day to day running of the construction would have been overseen by an engineer-architect. Under Henry II, records survive telling us who they were (in this case, Maurice the engineer) but in most instances they are anonymous.

Dover’s great tower (the tallest building) was constructed by Maurice the engineer for Henry II. Photo by Mark Whibley, licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This anonymity is not a surprise: the writers of medieval chronicles were interested only in the great who ruled society – kings, bishops, great lords. It was this gap that persuaded me to write my book The Medieval military engineer. From the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century (Boydell Press 2018).

Today, sappers and engineers form a key part of every state’s army, and was also true of imperial Rome. But in medieval times craftsmen were hired to carry out engineering roles and quite often the same people would have many skills, so that alongside building castles they might also design bridges, churches and cathedrals, or oversee the creation of, and sometimes operate, siege weapons. Because they were commoners, and with only a handful of exceptions, their names were not recorded throughout early medieval times. Often we only know them when (like Maurice) records start surviving showing what they were paid for their work. The great lords who also had hands-on military engineering skills were named in history, but were a tiny handful.

Many interesting questions become easier to answer as more records survive, such as how much did these engineers actually know, how they learnt their skills, how knowledge was transmitted across generations, and what part did they play as technology became more sophisticated?

The same skills that St Guthlac used to design and build a chapel (shown above) could be used to build castles.building a chapel. From the British Library’s ‘Guthlac roll’, made in the late 12th or early 13th century. Harley Roll Y.6.

Historians no longer see the years between the end of the western Roman empire and the European renaissance of the fifteenth century as one long period of ignorance, and we are more aware that change and improvement were continuous, witnessed with the development of ever more spectacular cathedrals and castles, but also mundane but vital skills such as bridge and ship building, irrigation schemes, and military equipment such as siege artillery – the trebuchet, taken up across Europe and the Islamic lands during the thirteenth century, was a game-changer, before giving way to gunpowder artillery during the fourteenth.

Change happened because people questioned existing conventions and came up with new ideas, but also because they developed the skills to put them into practice. It is time to give them the credit they are entitled to. Next time you visit a large stone castle, ask not just which lord lived there and paid for it, but who actually designed it, and admire their skills; and if despite its strength it was captured in a siege, who built the wooden engines that do not survive, or who undermined it, which decided the outcome?

Peter Purton, DPhil (Oxon), FSA.