Tag: Marlborough

Marlborough Castle: twenty years of restoration and exploration

After two decades of research into Marlborough Castle, the Marlborough Mound Trust has collated all the results of their work in to a new publication. Here, Richard Barber of the Trust looks at what they have found.

Marlborough Mound is one of the least visible of the great monuments of England, and almost unknown except to local historians and specialists. It stands in the middle of Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and even for generations of members of the school, it was no more than a mysterious but familiar presence, largely concealed by trees, and with nothing to explain what it is or why it is there.

In the last twenty years, the curiosity of one Marlburian, Eric Elstob, who set up a trust for its systematic restoration and the exploration of its history, has led to dramatic results. The key moment came when the Marlborough Mound Trust was offered the use of a coring machine by English Heritage, who were investigating the structure of Silbury Hill six miles down the Kennet valley. They wanted to see if the Mound was comparable to their site. As a result, we now know, thanks to the dating that radiocarbon analysis has enabled, that it is the second- largest Neolithic mound in the whole of Europe, broadly contemporary with Silbury Hill, and thus part of the much-vaunted ‘Stonehenge landscape’.

Marlborough Mound Now copyright Marlborough Mound Trust

Subsequent research by Jim Leary has shown that Marlborough is currently the only known example of the reuse of a prehistoric mound as a castle motte. However, only a few traces of the foundations of the medieval castle survive. We have nothing of the keep which once stood on the Mound. So here the question was not of archaeology – several trial pits were unsuccessful – but of historical research. Initially in the hands of the family of William Marshal, (whose family retained a connection with the castle as late as 1297), the records in the National Archives enable us to reconstruct many of the details of the vanished buildings.

However, the use of the castle in the early thirteenth century is a much richer story. To take one example, John sent the queen and his children to Marlborough for safety just before the signing of Magna Carta. For Henry III, it was one of his most favoured residences outside London, and he spent a total of about two years there in the first three decades of his reign. His love for Eleanor of Provence is reflected in the costly refurbishment of the royal chambers in the castle. There is also evidence of ‘herbers’, the small courtyard gardens found in other royal castles of this period.

After Henry III’s death, the castle passed to Eleanor, and thereafter was part of the dowry of English queens until 1548. It began to decay shortly after Eleanor’s death [insert date], when part of the great tower collapsed, and by 1400 the whole castle was more or less deserted. The meagre list of royal property there in the fourteenth century is matched by accusations against the local rector who had surveyed the castle in 1371, which described how he had removed material from the site to build his own houses. By 1541, when John Leland came to Marlborough on his great journey round England recording its antiquities, only the remains of the keep were still prominent.

One other interesting element at Marlborough castle was the fishpond. The ‘king’s great fishpond’ survived unidentified until a year or two ago, when it was filled in (and now appears to be a paddock for polo ponies). It was a major source of supply for freshwater fish such as bream – not to be confused with sea bream – and pike. Henry and Eleanor, however, preferred lampreys, finding all other fish ‘insipid’. The fishponds also supply breeding stock for other castles, shipped in water-filled barrels.

Marlborourgh Castle as in C18 with Summer House on top of the motte

The last stage in the Mound’s history was its adaptation, probably in the decade before the civil war, as a major feature in the garden laid out by Francis Seymour, the owner from 1621 and builder of the first house on the site of the Castle. A spiral path and a grotto were cut into it, possibly in the 1640s. The Mound was well maintained when Marlborough College took over the house in 1843, but later photographs record steady decay and encroaching trees. A water tank was installed on the top early in the seventeenth century, which had become a massive cast iron and concrete structure after the second world war, surrounded by a jungle of undergrowth.

The Mound Trust’s work over the past twenty years has restored something of the impressive aspect of the original mound, and this newly published book presents a fascinating picture of the history of the hidden treasure in the heart of the College.

The Marlborough Mound: Prehistoric Mound, Medieval Castle, Georgian Garden

Copies are available to followers of the Castles Studies Trust at £25 direct from the publisher, Boydell and Brewer Ltd, on their website (until December 31 2022) at:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783271863/the-marlborough-mound/

Use code  BB072 when completing the order. Normal price is £45.

 ISBN 978 1 78327 186 3, 234 pages, 234 x 156 mm, 54 illustrations.

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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.

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