Norman Walks episode 2
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00:00Welcome to the Welsh Borders.
00:12The other side of that ridge is Wales and I'm in England, but only just.
00:16And this is a textbook from Mott and Bailey Castle.
00:26It was the Normans who famously built Mott and Bailey Castles and this one here at Longtown
00:31is one of just dozens spread through this part of the country.
00:35What were the Normans trying to achieve here?
00:38How were they using these castles to impose their control across great swathes of the
00:43British landscape?
00:44And why are there so many of them in this part of the Welsh Borders?
00:49Well I'm going on a walk today that's going to take me past several of them and I should
00:53get some answers.
00:56The Welsh Borders
01:08this really is a classic Mott and Bailey castle I'm in the Bailey area down here now that man-made
01:34earth mound is the Mott there's a stone keep on top which is about 150 years after the Norman
01:40conquest but it seems very likely this would have been an important military position right the way
01:44through the Norman period and it's one of just dozens in this area just take a look at this map
01:50there's a Mott here Mott there and also a Mott there but in the case of this particular castle
01:57the extraordinary thing is there's another one about a five minute walk down the road
02:04I've come to this packed corridor of medieval history to understand how the Normans consolidated
02:11their rule following their victory at Hastings throughout much of England they inherited an
02:16efficient well-organized state from the Saxons here around the valley of the River Mono the
02:23situation was very different and from the outset it's clear that the Normans made quite an impact
02:29oh yeah there it is the unmistakable lump another Norman Mott I love the way this one's just in
02:37someone's back garden this whole area in the shadow of the Black Mountains is crisscrossed with a
02:44complicated anarchic network of castles and other defensive fortifications and they were presided over
02:50by a group of men known as the Norman Barons the story of these castles is the story of the Barons
02:57my first two Mott and Bailey's lie on the western extremity of English lands the Black Mountains make
03:05a superb natural boundary so it's no surprise they still form part of the modern Anglo-Welsh border moving
03:13south the border begins to follow the route of the River Mono and my walk explores the landscape and some of
03:19the many castle sites in and around the valley but on my way to the start of the walk there's one site
03:27which demands to be visited this cluttered heap is actually the Mott of a castle called U.S. Harold
03:38now actually doesn't look like much but it is a historical gem because this place has a claim to being the
03:44first Norman castle ever built in Britain in fact it's so old it was actually built before the Norman invasion
03:52U.S. Harold with its back to the Welsh mountains stands at the confluence of the Mono and the Dorr rivers
04:01you only have to look at the landscape from above to appreciate the site's potential as a communications control centre
04:08in 1050 the King of England Edward the Confessor sanctioned the building of this castle here
04:16it's often forgotten that Edward had spent much of his childhood his formative years in Normandy he was
04:21almost more Norman than English and even after he returned here to take the throne of England he retained
04:28lots of Norman advisers and they were responsible for the building of this castle so this is a pre-Norman Norman castle
04:36I find it quite extraordinary that a milestone in British military history like U.S. Harold today
04:43goes almost unnoticed another small blip on the Ordnance Survey map a loosely demarcated area tended
04:50only by a band of friendly goats shortly after the Norman conquest this castle was re-fortified by a
04:57man called William Fitz Osborne who was a close advisor and a relative of William the Conqueror
05:03he was the first Norman to have a big impact on this part of the country you can see the Mono
05:08valley there stretching directly from England towards Wales so this is the route he and his followers
05:13must have taken I always imagine it like tentacles of Norman influence spreading ever further inland
05:22Fitz Osborne kicked off an intense period of castle building
05:26Fitz Osborne it formed the backbone of efforts to bring the turbulent Welsh borders under Norman control
05:32and my walk today explores the purpose of these castles set amid the stunning landscape of the Mono valley
05:41from the Welsh side of the river I'll be setting off from the imposing white castle
05:47there's already a popular route here called the three castles walk leading me east across farmland to meet the
05:54Mono at Skenfrith castle I'll then head upstream following the modern England-Wales border across
06:02the most fertile land and through ancient woodland to reach the third castle it sits overlooking the river
06:09at Grosmont surrounded by church and village
06:15to end my walk I'll cross the river border to England and in particular to Kent church seat of the
06:22Scudamore family here I'll drop in on a thousand years of family history before ascending the giant
06:29Garway hill a famed border viewpoint the ideal place to assess the landscape that the Normans worked to bring
06:37under control and in 1067 all of this land on both sides of the Mono was in the hands of William Fitz
06:46Osborne the conquerors great Earl of Hereford welcome to Wales I've come a few miles south of
06:55U.S. Harold and yet now I'm in Wales but really these modern borders aren't much help in 11th century terms
07:02back then this area was neither totally English nor totally Welsh which goes some way to explaining the
07:09impressive nature of the start of my walk here at White Castle I haven't actually been here since
07:17I did a rather geeky road trip with my dad when I was about 11 through the Welsh castles and I forgot
07:22just how complete this one is it's stunning if U.S. Harold represents phase one of Norman Castle
07:30building in this part of the country this and others is phase two
07:34White Castle enjoys a spectacular outlook set high overlooking the low ground around Abergavenny
07:44it's regularly touted as a Norman castle yet like so many medieval castles most of what we see here
07:50today was added a good deal after the Normans so to find out what was happening here shortly after the
07:57conquest I've arranged to meet David Austin professor of archaeology and an expert in medieval landscapes and
08:04settlements and on a day like today where better to discuss such matters than from the top of a castle
08:12what you get when you get up here is this absolutely incredible view wow amazing isn't it
08:17you're looking slam right across into Wales and these wonderful rolling hills in in this direction
08:23and straight across to England over there does the high number of castles around here basically
08:28mean it was this was sort of the badlands no man's land the way I like to think of it really
08:33is this is this is liminal country this is frontier country and it's best to think of these these this
08:39region has really made up a whole whole patchwork quilt of these small political local power brokers
08:46operating within river valley systems and and and so on who acknowledge some power structure above them
08:54and I don't think they're bad lands but it needs controlling and the Normans have to invent a way of
08:59controlling and what and what do they invent well what they use is a concept I think really comes
09:05out of the great period of Charlemagne creates this thing called the march now the march comes from a
09:10German word which an old German word which means the boundary at the edge the mark and this is what
09:17Charlemagne did he created these great marches around the edges of his empire he used those as the buffer
09:23zones while he established this incredible Charlemagne empire right of the core which became of course
09:29the holy roman empire and what happens on this march you just send some of your toughest guys out and
09:33say look I don't care what you do but just keep that border safe for me it's sort of like that at the
09:39march your contract is if you can hold it you can run it and you can exploit it to your great extent
09:45if you want and by the way because you're on a boundary if you want to go further everything beyond you
09:50you take you hold it's yours they're given sub-regalian powers in other words they're allowed
09:56to act as if they're kings in their own territories and so William Fitz Osborne is sort of entrusted with
10:03this like this buffer zone but by William the king is he yes he is well William Fitz Osborne was was
10:11one of the dozen or so men in 1066 and I like to think of them as a band of brothers they grew up
10:18together they fought together they knew to trust each other in battle but what do we know about
10:23Fitz Osborne in this part of the country well we don't know a great deal about him to be honest
10:30we know he's given this great lordship and we hear of him building castles but as far as the legacy
10:37is concerned of course we're looking back through all this wonderful marcher history and he's the
10:43progenitor he's the origin myth of the whole of the march so we feel we know more about Fitz Osborne
10:49than we actually do and this castle standing in here right now where does this fit in do you think
10:54well it's an absolutely classic example it looks for all the world as this is a very very early castle
11:01you would expect it to be a Fitz Osborne castle most of the speculation in guidebooks and so on
11:06but actually there isn't a shred of evidence the first evidence for a white castle is in the 1160s and
11:14the architecture the layout the morphology of it suggests that it might it might be earlier than
11:20that but to be perfectly honest you can't tell because most of what you see here in fact is 13th century
11:27so we know Fitz Osborne was here effectively acting as king in his new marcher earldom but frustratingly
11:35as I set off on the first leg of my route the extent of his actions here are unclear
11:41lost in a land where royal record keeping did not apply
11:49and by the middle of 1071 less than five years after the invasion William Fitz Osborne was dead
11:57his son and heir Roger would prove to be a liability breaking the bond of the band of brothers
12:03rebelling against William the conqueror and losing the great Fitz Osborne earldom in the process
12:11never again would the Norman kings grant one individual so much land and power in one area
12:20for my walk today though the demise of the Fitz Osborne's was a turning point
12:24the area of the three castles would now become one small barony
12:28I've started the walk at the white castle which of the three castles is the furthest west it's the one
12:36that juts provocatively into welsh territory the other two are alongside the river mono heading back
12:43towards the english heartland
12:45now this according to my trusty guidebook is the old coaching road from London to Abergavenny
12:59and points west all the way out to Milford Haven
13:04like so much of the infrastructure of early modern Britain this road seems to have been built
13:09on an earlier Roman road and speaking of the Romans there's an interesting contrast between them and
13:14the Normans the Romans built forts along their roads at regular intervals so there'd be a certain
13:20number of miles between each one and people have often argued that the Normans would build castles
13:25about half a day's horse ride away so a knight could ride to a castle and be back by nightfall at
13:30his own castle but actually as we've seen here in the borders that's nonsense castles were built
13:35haphazardly to meet different threats at different times by all sorts of different barons
13:43the Normans lacked a master plan but by exploring the landscape you get to assess how they went about
13:49colonizing this area it's surely no coincidence that they built two castles close to this major access
13:56route to south wales those Romans really knew what they were doing didn't they this is a fantastic road
14:02here running right along the top of this ridge there's a beautiful view from here of the mono river
14:07valley it comes up through there in a great curve and into the black mountains and of course it flows
14:13that way where Chepstow the great seat of Norman power the base of William Fitz Osborne himself was
14:21but from this high point it's downhill for me to the second of my three castles
14:25Tucked quietly away in a natural surround of hills is the delightful village of Skenfrith
14:33after the eagle's nest vantage point of white castle you couldn't imagine a more different setting
14:42and like white castle the great stone walls here from the early 13th century
14:46but Skenfrith has no large mot no ditch or moat and it's surrounded by higher ground
15:01in fact this castle would have been a liability in terms of defense
15:04Aha one of the key reasons for the sighting of this particular castle the mono river
15:22the truth of Skenfrith is that it didn't play any part in the early Norman settlement of the march
15:28there's no evidence of a castle being here until around 1140 70 years after fitz osborne's death
15:35king stephen the last of the true norman kings would have been on the throne by which time
15:40the invaders had become the establishment and norman dominance had spread west deep into welsh territory
15:49so although these ruins are post norman the river mono was always an absolutely central strategic
15:54corridor for the normans particularly because it led downstream to chepstow and monmouth the two
16:00great centers where the norman lunge into south wales was really being planned from and all the
16:06way up the river you see on this map a series of motte and bailey castles there's one here
16:13one up here at grossmont where i'll be going later and right the way around to places like us harold
16:18and longtown which are all part of the mono river system
16:22and the map also shows us one other fascinating thing about this particular area a place called
16:27newcastle appropriate enough it was a early norman motten bailey castle it does seem that
16:32castle high up there in the hills could have been the focus of the early norman efforts but this place
16:38skenfrith was developed later as the normans moved from the phase of conquest to consolidation
16:43today the mono seems like an irregular shallow stream but the castle here once had a wharf proving that
16:53boats could pass from the bristol channel and up towards the welsh hills
17:00it also proves that by the end of the norman period transport and communications along the mono valley
17:06was certainly important
17:14what an absolutely beautiful bend in the river
17:18england there on one side wales here on the other
17:23back then this would have been a highway into the interior carrying all sorts of traffic soldiers coming
17:29in but being followed by colonists settlers tradesmen craftsmen and administrators all
17:37using this river to get right up into the hinterland nowadays of course the the road sticks to
17:43high ground so this feels like a little forgotten corner of this part of wales
17:53in rugged areas like this river valleys were always prime agricultural strips but in the 11th century
18:01farming here lacked the market towns and the economy of the saxon heartlands
18:05the barons cemented their own power by overseeing a process of civilization encouraging new settlers from
18:12both england and normandy and as my walk climbed towards grosmont the landscape still shows signs of
18:24how the barons managed the activities of the population vast tracts of land became subject to forest law
18:31a concept the normans brought with them from the continent here the barons were lawfully allowed to
18:37control access and administer their own swift justice we think of forests as wooded areas
18:44but forest law applied to up to half of the land in the area it was an authoritarian regime enabling
18:51the minority to dominate the majority
19:03there's the fertile valley of the mono river there there's a big hairpin bend just over there
19:08you can see a castle that's where the normans chose to build one and today the castle and the
19:13village that sprung up around it is called grosmont but it's spelt much how the normans would have
19:18pronounced it grosmont meaning big hill the third cornerstone of the three castle walk
19:29is a fine example of the normans success here there's the castle itself with its d-shaped earthwork ditch
19:39the church that would have been established by the local lord
19:42and the village that was encouraged to develop a fine example of a three-part norman settlement
19:51i've come here specifically to meet a man who has written a volume on each of the three castles
19:56and here finally he believes it's possible to find serious norman stonework that survive to this day
20:04so paul how much of the fabric of this castle do you think is norman
20:07i think basically we've got this hall block here behind us this is early it fits the earthwork
20:14perfectly it's built in the spine of the d and we know that the stone it's built from came from the
20:19ditch it's been geologically tested therefore it's got to be built at the same time so the thing itself
20:25we can see has got down it this battered plinth coming down here at an angle and this is seen on
20:32lots of early norman structures we've also got pilastra buttresses all the way around so it looks
20:39very early so what's the proof how do we know william fitz osborne was here well he made a lot
20:43of grants to his own abbey lear in normandy and one of them was the forest of gromont and the nearby
20:49church oh perfect there we've got the original latin about him granting the forest to gromont fantastic
20:55so we know that this was was his his domain his domain yeah yes so do you think william fitz osborne
21:01actually built and would have occupied this building i think quite likely he never even got
21:06here i mean he may have dashed up and down the border once or twice but he was such a busy man
21:10he was too busy running the country as regent for william the first he was fighting in york he was
21:15fighting in stafford fighting at chester he was all over the place and he was even ill in normandy at one
21:21point so i don't think he'd have actually got here until 1070 which would only have left him a few months
21:26here before he was killed so i think it was all lieutenants doing the work and when do you think
21:31this hall then might have been completed my suspicion is it was built by 1135 it's purely for
21:37living in it's show off its power and it would have been beautiful with 11 windows on the ground
21:42floor massive windows up above it would have looked absolutely gorgeous whitewashed it would have
21:48dominated the entire district and you'd have known somebody of substance was here so by 1135
21:55the norman barons were building great halls rather than great fortresses just two generations after
22:02the conquest the mono valley was not a warlike borderline it was a settled norman land back at
22:10white castle with its prominent position facing into wales the original intention may well have been to
22:16create an impregnable fortress at the edge of the norman empire but within decades the boundary line had
22:22moved west through wales and even into ireland leaving the three castles to become the elaborate
22:29status symbols of a succession of medieval lords
22:37to end my walk i'm off to see a remarkable example of the norman settlement of these borders
22:42once this would have meant crossing from one barony to another
22:45today it means arriving on english soil well i'm leaving the public highway behind now because
22:55the owners of the kent church estate have granted me an audience sat between the mono river and the
23:01sizable end of my walk garway hill lies 5 000 acres that seems hidden from the modern world
23:09at the heart is kent church court which has always been the home of the scudamore family
23:15is the current chatelaine of kent church court her home dates back to the 14th century her deer
23:36park is almost certainly older than that but having done some homework before this walk i know that
23:42neither are as old as the family itself so on the internet we have found you couldn't make this
23:47up we found an american called warren skidmore and he claims to be part of your family i suppose and
23:53he's written a massive history from the norman conquest onwards he's amazing he came to stay here a few
23:59years ago and i think he must be about 90 and i think keeping up with the scudamores their lineage
24:05keeps him going because he is the definitive chronicler of the scudamores and thank goodness we've got him
24:12but what's the skidmore all about sure that's some sort of american adaption no skidmore was the
24:17original pronunciation and over the years i suppose like all people their um the way they form their
24:23letters changed and so skidmore became skewed more but originally when they came over from normandy they
24:30were called a skewed a more which i think loosely translated as the shield of love so you guys must have
24:35a whole chapter in this book we've got quite a few pages you can see here burke's landed gentry ralph
24:43living 1086 this does seem to agree with warren skidmore and it's quite interesting that originally
24:49they started off as walter in fact ralph who came here and worked at the castle at us harold for edward
24:58confessor so hang on so so your first scudamore we got actually arrived before the norman invasion
25:04yes pages and pages of people you've been here ever since
25:11how on earth did your family manage to survive in this place through civil war upheaval of all kinds
25:16how are they still here i think through judicious marriages they married for land they married for
25:22position i think you could almost say they're a teflon family because they always seem to be on the
25:27wrong side if the parliamentarians were in they were royalists if they were catholics they were
25:32protestants the scudamore family and their land have survived a good deal better than most of the
25:39norman evidence in this area they are quite remarkably the living legacy of successful 11th century
25:46settlement by the normans and they owe their longevity to another norman institution that of primogeniture
25:54a simple practice of passing titles and land to the eldest male heir
25:59perhaps that's one reason why so much of our history appears to start in 1066
26:07brilliant you can see where i've come now the mono valley skenfrith just down there and beyond it
26:12the bristol channel
26:13getting dangerously close to the top here it's gotta be it oh curses full summit would you believe it
26:27garway hill is a hangover from medieval times on one side the private hunting forest of the kent church
26:34estate still full of deer and pheasant whilst on top it remains common land uncultivated yet free for
26:42grazing my final hill could be unchanged in a millennium
26:51well finally no more full summits i know i'm at the top now because there
26:55is the good old triangulation point
26:57extraordinary view from up here you see right across england and wales apparently on a clear day
27:11you can see seven counties the gloucestershire and the cotswolds that way right down towards bristol
27:17over there and then this way of course incredible barrier there of the black mountains and beyond it
27:22the brecon beacons this was the challenging topography that fitz osborne and his successors
27:31had to deal with the marcher lords came here swift on the heels of their victory at hastings
27:37with no collective plan and through turbulent generations of barons they made a lasting impression
27:44on what had been a wild frontier land i came here today to where england meets wales not just to
27:52look at how the normans came to dominate these valleys here but to show that the conquest
27:56is so much more than just an english story what happened right here was a microcosm after the
28:02battle of hastings the normans spread out in a chaotic violent unplanned way right through england
28:09wales scotland and ireland it was the one of the greatest imperial expansions in the history of the
28:16british isles join me next week when i'll be in yorkshire an area that suffered terribly at the
28:22hands of the normans but was ultimately left with one of their greatest legacies the great abbeys of the
28:28north
28:58of the north
29:12of the north
29:18of the north
29:22of the north