The Early Life of a Great Royal Fortress
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
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 1216. 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. <Footer addr ess> 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. 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. 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, 1086. 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.