[Music] Hi, my name's Kevin Hicks, welcome to my YouTube
Channel The History Squad. Now today we're on location in England, Tamworth in Staffordshire
where they have a castle right in the town centre. What makes this castle quite rare, it's not a
ruin. This castle has survived a thousand years of history and is still intact. So before we go into
the castle I've got to mention that the castle sits at the confluence, as it called, of two
rivers, the Anker and the Tame and the Saxons 700s actually built two water mills here and I found
archaeological evidence of them which makes them amongst the earliest water mills actually found
in England. Now the Saxons had a royal residence here, they used to spend uh Easter and Christmas
so it was quite an important place for the Saxons, a royal residence. But in 74 A.D the Vikings used
these very same rivers to row down attack the town and sack it. This places Tamworth in a dangerous
position because now they're on the borders of Mercia and the Daneland. To the north of here the
Danes ruled. This was quite a difficult period but we have a woman, the daughter of Alfred the
Great, Aethelflade, she re-fortified this area, turned it into a burgh, that's a fortified town,
ditches and all of that. So Tamworth was secured for the Saxons, in fact it was so secure that
Mercier merged with Wessex making it one of the most powerful Saxon kingdoms. I love this this
is ancient history, however something happened, some tiny little trivial thing in 1066. Oh yeah,
the Norman Conquest of Britain. Now we can go and have a look at the castle because it's those
who raised a motte and bailey here. Now when you look at these Norman motte and baileys. The
motte, the hill, of course that’s man-made but they're not made by the Normans they supervised.
This one at Tamworth was raised this motte, 1073. It's over 14 meters high it's made with
layers of stone, compacted earth and the locals, by point of sword, were made to raise these. Some
of them I've read only took around two weeks to actually build because they got everybody involved
and it's amazing to think they've built the motte, they've put a wooden castle on top but a hundred
years later they actually replace it with a stone shell keep. It took 10 years to build. It's 10
meters high, over two meters thick and for 800 years the castle has grown around that stone
shell keep, all built on top of that motte. What we have here is the stone causeway and
I think it is absolutely fantastic this is a cross-section of stone work from the Norman period
but once they are replacing the wooden fortress with the stone they needed a better access so what
they've done is they built this stone causeway. Just look at this herringbone pattern here how
intricate it actually is. The reason it's got the herringbone is quite fascinating this is
because of subsidence, it can take the weight and it can take anything giving underneath. The
stone causeway is testimony to that, here it is 800 years later. To me that is absolutely wow. So
now it's time to have a look inside the castle, let's make our way across this causeway.
Let's get inside see what's waiting for us. So here we are in the courtyard of the castle
and you can actually see the difference in the architecture medieval and then coming across this
range that spreads all the way around it looks a little bit Tudor to me and then behind us there is
some definite medieval. In fact it's the dungeon. It's interesting what you find, just before we go
into the dungeon have a look up there. So was that once a fireplace? If it was, that means there
must have been some form of building above us. These places are amazing, you've got to keep
your eyes open, just the tiniest little bit of evidence there was something else there
and it does in fact look like a chimney and further up another one so perhaps we
were inside a wooden fronted building. Now let's go and have a look in the dungeon. Do you know everybody thinks the dungeon
is the place of prison or torture. In fact dungeon comes from ‘donjon’ and it means stone
tower, how about that for a bit of knowledge. This is brilliant because it is a real Dungeon,
donjon. Mind the step. This is the base of the Norman tower right. Now this tower I do know part
of it was destroyed on the orders of King John in the Barons War because the family had changed
sides. This base could be for storage or it could be for refuge during the harsh times, for instance
of the Civil War 1640s when they had cannons. So refuge in here, this is the solid part of the
castle and to have an original dungeon, donjon, it's absolutely brilliant. So let's explore a
little bit more of the castle. Just before I go though, a willow bound barrel, this is before
they had iron-bound barrels, this is quite rare. This is well worth a look. We're
going up inside the battlements, the curtain wall, to an
actual arrow slit, perfect. So what's happened here is this was a full arrow
slit right and it's been filled in, probably around the time of the Civil War into a complete
musket Loop. So now I've got a view going right over the river, even a small cannon could fire out
of here and the enemy will have a hard job getting any shot back, so this shows you how the castle….
In fact these are Tudor bricks so yeah, this has been altered, Civil War for firearms. The hidden
treasures that you find in these places it amazes me, and interestingly you have an arrow slit, just
about big enough for a crossbowman to get into, covering the main door to the Great Hall. Bang. So here we are in the Great Hall, now
I've got to tell you this late medieval, early Tudor Hall holds a special place in my
heart. One of my earliest memories of a castle is here at Tamworth coming into this great hall with
my dad. I must have been around five or six years of age and I was blown away, it has a fantastic
fireplace. Absolutely fantastic, the bricks behind it though tell a story because some of them
are late medieval early Tudor and then some are later as the fireplace has been repaired, but
you imagine coming into this place for a banquet, for a meal and the fire is blazing away or on
a sunny day with the sun shining through these windows. These windows by the way are nothing
more than a symbol of the wealth of this Castle, but there is a nice little window to the back
of the hall and if you look up you can see it. You open those windows, put the minstrels
behind it and they will play. Now I seem to remember that they were fully open when I
when I first came here as a kid and I was told that this was the minstrel’s gallery. I'm not
sure now, but most importantly about this Hall it's the roof it is a tie-beam roof and
it's nine meters wide which is incredible and what a tie beam is, is when you have the
rafters they come together at a point but then you have a vertical beam joining them to
the horizontal beam tying everything in, the tie beam. Also this room itself is over eight
meters high which makes it one of the biggest, or the greatest if you like, great Halls we have here
in England, but there is a sinister side to it. If you come with me to the back of the Great Hall
here we have all of this lovely oak paneling with a collection of swords and armor there's
some firearms down there, ranging through the centuries but there is one particular
sword here, it is, it's a serving sword, it's for beheading. Remember Anne Boelyn? This
is the kind of sword that would have been used to take off her head this particular one belonged to
Franco Sebastian Solaris, a Spanish executioner, and it has been said that this sword has been
used to take off the heads of many, many people and interestingly it’s said that this sword is
haunted by the souls of those people it has taken. We're in the Tudor part of the castle
now and it's been altered, been changed, quite a lot however we have the dining hall
and a parlor, so let's pop in and have a look. Come and have a look at this wall
this is fantastic typical Tudor construction this is lovely you know
in England you often see the dowels that join all of this together and they're always
proud and the reason being is the beams shrink and the dowels stay their size because they're
cut through you can see where alterations have been made looking at this carving here this is, is
quite possibly Stuart, just shows you the grandeur and if you come over here this must have
been a doorway at one time but has been filled in and it shows you the inside of what's
called lath and plaster how they used to make a smooth wall that's on the inside this will be
plaster that's what it's like on the inside. With some of the furniture in here a writing desk look at the glass work on there and the jug the
table is a buffet a buffet and an armchair but I do know that those armchairs sometimes the
lid lifted up and you could sit and have a poop So we're going from a pile of what they call
the day parlor where the family would spend time together and we're going to go into
the dining room mainly for the family to eat but also for entertainment but
it's decked out for a school group that's visiting so there's lots of
artifacts out so let's have a look It's interesting when you look at the Tudor
period because that's what we're looking at here Henry VII for instance the great glutton uh it's
just an interesting aside that he suffered from constipation because it meet highs pasties gorged
on that kind of food apparently he didn't consume that much fruit or vegetables so he had a bit of
a problem one of the things they loved was pies and we have the old nursery rhyme four into
any blackbirds baked in the pie and when the pie was open the birds began to sing what is
that it wasn't that identities to set before the king well it's two pies you got the pie with
the meat in underneath and then a pie on the top which has got live blackbirds they open it the
birds all pop out hey isn't that lovely it's the whole the whole business of showing off with
food the Elizabethan age the Tudor the later Tudor age they were absolutely marvelous at it
however one slight problem if you're at a Tudor banquet most of the food you eat will be warm
not piping hot because it had been paraded around Now this is an interesting one this is what they
call an anti-chamber but it's part of the kitchen was accessed through here could have been
downstairs and up here they bought for the final stage of the food as it's been sent through
you have a swan over yonder that's been prepared a royal feast now I used to think when I was a kid
and I'd seen these kind of things did they put all the feathers back in but they didn't this is how
they did it they skinned it all the feathers are off salt the inside of the skin cooked the bird
then you pin it all back together here he is this wonderful beast smoked eels animals hanging so the
maggots will eat all the way through and then drop out so they're actually gamey meat and then here
this is good stuff I haven't seen one of these for years this is actually to keep food away from
the mice and the rats so your cheese might be up in there yeah this is quite an interesting
place and this will be kept under lock and key this is the spice chest very expensive and of
course your willowed wine barrels down there this is great I love it fish from the
local river, carp and that kind of thing one of these a suckling pig now I've cooked one
of these and I cooked it in the old traditional way and the whole outside of the pig was crackling
and it was in the army I did it as a favor for a friend who needed a bit of a celebration and I
got the heel of the knife and just went a long breaking the crackling and the guys and the lasses
they were just pulling chunks of pork but I'd stuffed the inside full of apples and potatoes
and the whole thing was absolutely scrumptious these wouldn't have had potatoes although they
came in the late Elizabethan period they wouldn't have had potatoes the way we eat them now and of
course he's all the cups and jugs great just great now I don't know if this is a salt tower or
whether it's actually sugar but I do know that sugar in those days was brown not white so
I would say this this is probably rock salt and you've got all the pestles and mortars to grind
it down so I think more than likely it's salt as opposed to sugar and in this corner I have to
show you these because it's, it's just honest. These are brooms from the day they're not for
flying on they are actually for brushing the floor and these were made by men who lived in the
forest and their job was to make rooms simply that the end of the 18th into the 19th century the
castle was inherited by the Townsend family but it was dilapidated a bit of a ruin so they
spent an absolute Fortune modernizing the castle you have an iron fireplace there so the great
works it's not the big roaring fireplace or the judicized but they also changed
the windows into the Georgian period style windows they took out the Tudor bay
windows they modernized the place just like you would modernize your own house at home around
the world people they have houses they put in double glazing well hey that's exactly what the
Townsend family did well they saved the castle unfortunately for them though it bankrupted
one of them and the castle was sold to a London businessman I understand but the
town's end family later bought it back and that opens up another Leaf into the history
of Tamworth Castle I just thought I'd show you this because we're actually making our way
up the stairs to the very top of the castle. Warning for Julie here as she holds the
camera, mind your head. Wow look at this right at the very top of Tamworth the
amazing thing is about Tamworth Castle it was here first then the town grew
up around it and it continues to grow so you've got Edith's church over there
that's 14th century so it just shows the, the town was getting more and more
prosperous to have a nice church like that. So right at the top of the castle and it's
decked out for the Stuart period the 1600s so they've now got servants living in the
top of the castle they don't just doss down in the great hall or anything like that they
have their own place to live and what they've done is they've opened this all up and they've
made a simple bed and what I love about this is the way it has the rope that
the mattresses actually sat on now these had to be wound tight they actually
tightened them with a stick all the way down and then fasten them at the end and this is
where in English we get a great old saying sleep tight don't let the bed bugs bite so you
sleep tight because you're on the tight rope and the bed bugs well they speak for themselves
but it's great here at Tamworth because in this castle they're showing you all of the different
stages of the life of the castle but also the different people who worked and lived in
the castle that's great so just before we leave the servant's quarters have a look at all
this beam work right this holding up this roof but if you look underneath you can just see my
finger poking through there and possibly there were down beams cross beams laugh and plaster
there this was a doorway so this was two separate rooms but in later history it's been opened
up into one chamber the servants chambers This room is wow turn of the 1600s the Stuart
period your oak paneling and an incredible four poster bed with all of the coat of arms the
carvings all over it this is absolutely wow I love this it's an interesting reflection the
bolster on the bed if you put pillows against it, it means that you can't lie full out and that's
one of the wealthy people would sleep kind of semi-sitting up and they would often have
a servant at the end of the bed and that servant there on a little chuckle bed was there
because if the devil looked in through the window it will claim the soul of the servant first
oh my goodness me the beliefs of history hey. This is the picture of Mary and it tells
you the whole story that she married uh Sir Henry Gough in 1670 and by him had 10 sons
and six daughters she must have been exhausted. You know you don't see these very often it's
an old wardrobe all hand carved. Now I've got a story about one of these and it goes back
to this period exactly one of these pieces of furniture when a man called John Churchill who
later became the Duke of Marlborough who actually hid in one of these because he was having
an affair with a lady who was married but was also having an affair with Charles II and
Charles II came into the room finding that his lady or somebody else's lady wasn't expecting
him but somebody else. He heard the creek, so the legend goes, opens the wardrobe and there
is John Churchill, totally naked except for his hat. So he doffs his hat, your majesty. Now
they've both been caught, the lady and the King, so John Churchill was rewarded, invested his
money, obtained a commission but that is a whole different story. It's just one tiny
tale of a wardrobe from the Stuart period. You know it's incredible isn't it you look at
all this carving here it's amazing but this fireplace has been changed it's been filled in
and a Georgian fireplace put in its uh stead you imagine a blazing fire in here and officers during
the English Civil War discussing what they're going to do next because the Civil War breaks out
in 1642 and this castle was held for the King, for Charles the first and it would have just
stayed that way really because it was a minor place wasn't that important however the garrison
the soldiers used to sally forth out of the castle and attack Parliamentarian wagon trains that were
going to supply Lichfield for their siege of the cathedral so this became a thorn in the side of
Parliament they should have left it alone. So it's the 23rd of June 1643 that the Parliamentarian
army paid attention to Tamworth Castle. Siege lasted two days the garrison surrenders, this
now becomes a parliamentarian castle, but in 1644 the Royalists try to take back Tamworth Castle
from the Parliamentarian forces, they had over two thousand I think it was 2,200 troops for the
siege of Tamworth Castle but they failed and that meant that the castle stayed in the hands of the
Parliamentarian army so at the end of the Civil War it was on the right side, it wasn't slighted
and you will find as you go round England, Wales, Scotland even that many castles that stood for the
king were slighted, they were pulled down or made indefensible by the Parliamentarians and that's
the key thing. Come the end of the Civil War, this is in the hands of Parliament. It
is actually on the right side to survive. So we've just come through a time warp, we've come
off the medieval battlements into what was the Tudor range there was another storey above us but
that was knocked down when they, uh the Townsend family, spent literally a fortune refurbishing the
castle and now here we are in the 18th century, the late 1700s. This is their parlor, and
it is a time warp. Swags and tails curtains, a clock, books, Staffordshire pottery over
on the mantelpiece there, updated fireplace. You know it's not surprising that all the
renovations that were done on this castle bankrupted one of the, the Townsend families.
It's sad, I think it was George on his death he was found to be bankrupt but they remortgaged
and managed to get the castle back so I understand that's how they did it but they didn't live here,
they rented it out and there was an elderly lady lived here with her footman and cook and a couple
of servants but later on it was Thomas Cook, a wealthy widower who rented the castle. Now
Thomas Cook was important because he was a textile manufacturer he employed 500 people in
Tamworth so he was a very, very important man, but the Townsend family towards the end of
the 19th century sold the castle and it was purchased by Tamworth Council and turned into a
museum. That's how come Tamworth Castle survived. Built by the Normans, survives the Baron Wars
there, survives the Civil War, it's not slighted because it was on the right side and then various
families held onto it, made it better until eventually it now belongs literally to the people
of Tamworth, and to me that is just fantastic. Well I hope you enjoyed our video, our
little tour around Tamworth Castle, the complete Tamworth Castle. Well worth a
visit. Well if you liked it then of course like, share and subscribe and don't forget to
turn on the all notification button so you know what's coming down the line from the
History Squad. But before I go quick mention to a couple of our Patreon members, Jeffrey
Hollowell and Steve Valley hey guys thanks a million. Without your help I wouldn't
be able to do these films. Bye for now.
