What The Normans Did Next After 1066 | Dan Snow's Norman Walks | Chronicle

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

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 45,827

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, norman conquest of england, norman conquest documentary, norman conquest of england documentary, norman conquest of britain, norman conquest bbc, william the conqueror documentary, norman invasion of wales, norman castles in wales, dan snow documentary, dan snow norman walks, dan snow history, british history bbc, british history bbc documentary, bbc medieval documentary

Id: i7zxTiTlDDA

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021