West Bailey, Corfe, Day 5 The Burial Ground

The view south across the finished trenches and the West Bailey high above the Purbeck countryside

A day to take photographs, make scale drawings and polish the archaeological record. This will be the residue of our days once the trenches ..and eventually we are gone.

Drawing the revealed part of the buried north wall.
Once, it is thought, the 13th century constable’s house. Someone like Richard de Bosco who made sure the Castle was at the cutting edge of military design for his master Edward I.

What of past digs? Thomas Bond in the 1880s left his book on Corfe Castle and a few photographs.. and the RCHM scholars published their article in Medieval Archaeology and created their wonderful Dorset volumes. Volume II pt.1 has their account of Corfe Castle.. still the best .. though we have added something new this week.

But Corfe’s RCHM men were mainly experts in medieval history and architecture. There was so much to say about medieval royal Corfe that Corfe the post-medieval new money mansion got a bit neglected. Queen Elizabeth I flogged it in 1572 and from the Hatton family is passed to the Bankes. Sir John and Dame Mary garrisoned the Castle in support of Charles I, and, following its capture in 1646, Parliament insisted on blowing it to bits. It’s this late Tudor, early Stuart and Civil War knowledge of Corfe that the National Trust’s research over the years has built up. It’s great that Ralph Treswell created his plan of the Castle in 1586 but as we found out this week Sir John Bankes paid for a lot more work on his prestigious new home before its destruction.

One of the lumps of animal bone mixed in the limestone debris on the east side of the 17th century wall.

Carol and Kate spent the last hours digging down on either side of our narrow wall in trench B while the well-cut masonry of the ‘Constable’s House’ was being measured and drawn in trench A.

We have some good information on some of the constables. My favourite is Richard de Bosco who served Edward I in the 1280s-90s. His name shines out as the Castle’s Project Director in the parchment account rolls which survive in the National Archives, London. He made sure that what was required got done. If you know medieval latin and can decipher the handwriting and abbreviations (I can’t but we found someone who could).. they’re a great read (well, if you’re into that sort of stuff). Month by month they detail the repairs to the Castle, naming nearly everyone involved and how much they got paid. Some good touches too.. like the candles bought to enable the craftsmen to work at night “in preparation for our Lord King’s arrival”.

Not a royal wall but a revetment wall. This the rough east side was not meant to be seen built up against a pile of limestone debris.

In the 1630s, the Bankes family called on local builders who did a good job but the wall in trench B was very different to that in A. It only had a good finished face on the west side. Carol uncovered only a rough rubble surface on the east which was clearly not meant to be seen. It was a revetment wall, built to shore up a slope made of limestone gravel and rubble containing animal bones and the odd fragment of medieval pot.

The west side of the 17th century wall. Well built and pointed with orange brown mortar. The sand and rubble peeled off onto a level gravel floor. Pottery dated this floor to the 17th century.

The west face was nicely finished and pointed with an orange mortar. It appeared as good as new, presumably because it had been covered by debris for over 350 years. It was probably less than a decade old before Captain Hughes and his Parliamentarian soldiers did their work. At the lowest level, were a few fragments of green and yellow glazed earthenware typical of the 17th century, just above a limestone gravel floor.

What was this lower west end of the West Bailey used for? The RCHM men give us an idea in their report, though not enough information..”of the later history of the site we have little knowledge except that.. at some date after 1600 the area west of the cross-wall was used as a burial-ground. The most likely period for this later development would be that of the blockade of the castle in the years 1643-6, when the use of the parish church-yard might well have been denied the garrison over long periods”. Sadly no explanation.. how many bodies were found and when? Where are they now? Perhaps a trip to the English Heritage National Monuments Record in Swindon to see if there are extra records there. No grave-like features appeared on the geophys.

What do we take away from this? Well, the obvious..that there is much that we still do not know about this place and particularly its use for the 60 years after Treswell. Our resistivity survey picked up traces of the ‘Constable’s House’ north wall and also the 17th century revetment wall in trench B. We found the very edge of another wall abutting its west side at 45% and the geophysics picked up its continuation south-west, parallel with another feature 6m further south.

On their fold-out map at the back of Dorset II pt.1, the RCHM show a continuous cross-wall (Ben’s Shweppes bottle suggests some unrecorded digging along there) but we found that it was not continuous and not of the same period, but two walls following a similar line but built 300-400 years apart.

We also found that the erosion along the steep slope, from the east to the west sides of the cross-wall, was not causing any damage to the archaeology. National Trust staff have put a geo-textile barrier across the area overlain with clay .. and although the gradient is never likely to look pristine, it can be topped up with soil from time to time.

Someone said this week. ‘I came here as a child and today I’ve come back with my children, it’s so good, it feels just the same.’ Corfe Castle,..Dorset Scheduled Ancient Monument No 1, will always need funding, monitoring, maintenance and conservation repair to enable it to be enjoyed long into the future.

Carol found a shiney new 5p piece dated 2014 and we put it under a stone placed on the quoin of the ‘Constable’s House’. Then the trenches were refilled and we pushed the wheelbarrows back down the hill.

Trenches gone.

So that’s it. Many thanks to everyone for their help and support. Those who dug and encouraged and particularly the staff of the NT Corfe Tea Rooms.

West Bailey Corfe Day 4 Into the Garden

We had to cope without Ray, our front of house manager. Although irreplaceable, we did our best by rapidly annotating our illustrations with marker pen. Still very hot but a bit of a breeze so carefully placed Purbeck limestone rocks to hold the interpretation in place.

The annotated maps on the information table.

It was time to leave the ‘Constable’s House’ West Bailey and climb the stone steps through the gateway into the King’s domain in the Inner Ward. Treswell’s plan of 1586 shows a garden above the well in the north-east corner of this top and most prestigious area of the Castle. The feet of many thousands of visitors have revealed a wall forming the edge of the garden but it post-dates Treswell.

Ralph Treswell’s Inner Ward plan of Corfe of 1586. The eroding wall is above the well (top right). It is not on the plan so perhaps it was built for Lady Elizabeth Hatton or for Dame Mary Bankes.

Today it was photographed and drawn to scale and Andy will protect it under a geo-textile and clay capping. This will stop the garden structure being worn away. We don’t know very much about the garden but it was probably managed and enjoyed by Lady Elizabeth Hatton who owned the castle from the end of the 16th century or Dame Mary Bankes wife of Sir John Bankes who bought the Castle in the 1630s.

The 17th century wall in trench B was cleaned and the ground lowered on either side of it. In trench A Carol and Kate uncovered the buried wall face of the 13th century building thought to be the enlarged hall of the Castle’s Constable. When in residence he would have managed Corfe and the Forest of Purbeck for the King.

Carol and Kate have uncovered the face of the 13th century return wall of the ‘Constable’s House’. In the foreground the smaller 17th century wall.. after a brush down.

At the end of the day Carol found a ring.. I wonder who it belonged to.

Last day tomorrow..

West Bailey, Corfe Day 3 Both Sides Now

Ben returned to his trench today. He had researched on line and the bottle was typical of a Ginger Beer bottle manufactured by Schweppes in the 1930s.

Some of the older finds from the soil over the wall in trench B. Fragments of ox and sheep bones and more slender bones perhaps hare, rabbit or birds. The meds ate all sorts of birds which we don’t bother eating today. Black medieval cooking pot fragment and a green glazed medieval jug fragment.

He pressed on with uncovering the wall and soon the silver paper and bottle tops disappeared and a new layer was reached containing fragments of coal and lengths of tobacco pipe stem. When this was removed both sides of the wall could be seen. The east face was exactly in line with the medieval wall in trench A but that wall is over a metre wide. The wall in B is only 0.68m and not so well made. A void in the middle might have been for a post.

Trench B the wall now clearly visible but it is narrower and less well built than the wall in A. There is part of another wall on the right hand side of the picture meeting the main wall at an angle from beyond the trench.

This wall is not shown on our only detailed plan of the castle.. pre Civil Ware demolition. It was surveyed in 1586 by Ralph Treswell. Perhaps this is evidence of a building constructed at some time in the 60 years after Treswell. Ben hit a orange brown soily layer mixed with a few fragments of stone. This looked like an earth floor layer and contained a small fragment of earthenware with a wet looking green glaze. This very shiny type of glaze is often found on 17th century pots so this might be a Civil War layer. We will see tomorrow.

This is the West Bailey part of Ralph Treswell’s map of 1586. The wall we are interested in is the central one pointing north, the one to the left of the South Tower. The wall in trench B is not there..

In trench A the wall is buried deeply below rubble we worked hard but it was a very hot day.

Trench A, footings of the wall discovered in 1952 seem deeply buried.

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West Bailey Corfe Day 2 Ben’s Bottle

Today, Andy brought up the gazebo, bollards and information sign and we broke open the string and 6 inch nails and marked out the two trenches.

Dry and hot and the ground was hard but Ray soon had a crowd round the information table and Nancy’s National Trust archaeology badges were flying off the shelf. Ben asked if he could help and spent the day with us.

Trenches A and B hoping to pick up the line of the wall.

We came down onto a limestone rubble layer beneath the topsoil and were excited to find medieval pot fragments but they were mixed with silver paper, bottle tops, a sticking plaster (yuk) and then Ben found a rounded brown shape amongst the stones. It came out whole. There in his hands was a c.1950s SCHWEPPES bottle. Probably one of the 1952 RCHM diggers who had a lemonade and chucked it in the spoil heap as the trench was backfilled. Ben’s dad brought us drinks which were greatly appreciated.

Ben’s 62 year old Schweppes bottle.

At the end of the day we hit a solid stone and then two more and it seems that we have found the top of the wall we were looking for. We’ll find out tomorrow..

A line of stones in the trench nearest to the camera. It is in line with the 13th century wall so perhaps we have found what we’re looking for.

Remote Sensing in Corfe’s West Bailey

Thomas Bond of Tynham first dug in the West Bailey. Writing in 1883 he said “Some diggings which, by kind permission of the owner, W.R.Bankes Esq. I have recently made within the castle, have brought to light some curious facts, which afford much food for conjecture.” Next to investigate the area were scholars of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in 1949-52.

One of the 11th century windows in the West Bailey later blocked by the construction of 13th century curtain wall in King John’s reign.

This year we are reopening one of their trenches and seeing whether the wall that was found over 60 years ago continues north to join the curtain wall. If foundations exist, the footings may be able to act as a foundation for a revetment wall which will even up the slope and limit further erosion

The last few lines of the resistivity survey at the west end of the West Bailey

The plan of the West Bailey. The area of the geophysical survey today. The site of tomorrow’s excavation is at the top of the long black wall pointing to the top of the page. Did it once continue right across the West Bailey.

Our first task was to try to detect the buried walls using geophysics. Both resistivity and magnetometry were used. It’s not a big area.. about 60m long and narrowing from 20m at the east end to less than 10m in the west.

A hot sunny day as we pushed our wheelbarrow loaded with gear up through the potters and weavers of the craftsmen village in the Outer Bailey ..up through the South West Gatehouse and into the West Bailey.

A busy day with lots of interested people from Europe and USA mixed with the Brits asking us about the survey and the Castle’s history. Quite a few student groups led by their guides. We wove backwards and forwards with our machines making the survey but we completed it in good time. We will mark out the trenches tomorrow.

Welcome to the Constable’s House, Corfe Castle

The National Trust SW is in the midst of CBA Archaeology Festival.

Corfe Castle from the village of Kingston to the south. A view from Kingston on Purbeck’s limestone plateau.

Tomorrow we are in the West Bailey, Corfe Castle. A geophysical survey and evaluation excavations are needed and have been saved for the Festival.

We are trying to solve an erosion problem while discovering more about the Constable’s House in the West Bailey.

Erosion in the West Bailey. Is this area part of the Constable’s House?

The Constable was the baron appointed by the King to oversee his magnificent castle of Corfe and administer justice in the Isle of Purbeck. We have the names of many of the prominent men of the time who were appointed to the position of Constable at various times from 11th-16th centuries. The Constable’s house would have been high status accommodation but it changed greatly in form and plan during 500 years as fashions and architecture changed.

The King’s apartments, when he visited, were at the top of the Castle in the Inner Ward but the Constable is thought to have lived in the Middle Ward or West Bailey.

His house can now only be seen in fragments of walls..what remains of the rest of the site lies below the ground.

We’ll let you know how we get on as the work progresses.. but if you’re in the area come along and visit.

St Michaels Hill, Montacute

The phone rang today… Was I on my way?

Where? …St Michael’s Hill…. It doesn’t feel good when you’re supposed to be somewhere.. and aren’t.

A speedy trip along the A303 to Montacute. Parked my car on the dirt track leading to the hill and across the grass field to the gate beside the notice board with its reconstruction of a Norman Castle.

The stile and notice board showing an artist’s reconstruction of the Norman castle.

I reached the top of the hill, caught my breath and apologised. I hoped that they would forgive me for arriving so late and began to talk about this special place (Usually I bring pictures, I hope this blog makes up for that a bit)

The National Trust does own some spectacular hill tops and St Michaels on the Montacute Estate is a good example. The rain cleared while we were on the summit and the views across the Somerset countryside stretched gin clear for many miles in all directions.

The 18th century prospect tower built on the flat summit of St Michael’s Hill with its views out across the Somerset landscape.

Such a vantage point must have been valued in pre-Saxon times. The Saxons found a stone cross here which they venerated as a sacred Christian relic. The Normans took the place over in 1066 and decided to build a castle here and renamed the place the steep hill (Mons Acutus). The locals were angered by this lack of respect for a holy place and attacked the new castle …but their revolt failed.

The castle was not needed for long and in 1102 a monastery was founded at the bottom of the hill, the castle was cleared and a chapel built there. It was dedicated to St Michael the archangel, leader of the heavenly host, often the saint chosen for hill top locations.. Glastonbury Tor and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall are other examples.

The 18th century prospect tower over the footings of the medieval chapel of St Michael.

The chapel stayed there until at least 1630.. even after the priory was put out of action in 1538, during Henry VIII’s ‘Dissolution’ of the monasteries.

About 1600, the Phelip’s family (who had purchased the monastic land from the crown) built the magnificent Montacute House out of the local golden-coloured Ham stone. It was built next to the village reusing much of the stone from the ruined monastery which in its day had taken materials from the castle.

By 1760, the hill was valued as an ‘eye-catcher’ for the house.. something to look up to. A spiral track lined with trees was designed to enable easy access to the top of the hill. Here they built a prospect tower and above its door, in Ancient Greek, they inscribed the word ‘periscope’. You can still climb up the tower’s stone spiral stair to the top.

The view from the lower bailey showing the rampart and the steep slope up to the summit and the 1760 prospect tower.

We walked down the hill to the middle castle ward and looked at the moss covered wall hidden by trees marking the terrace edge. We considered the massive amount of work needed to re-profile the hill, probably using conscripted Saxon labour.

Today’s conservation management of the hill is a battle with trees and scrub. In the 1940s the hill was grass covered and grazed by sheep but grazing stopped and it became overgrown with scrub woodland. George the ranger has worked hard with his team of volunteers, it looks good this year but needs a few cattle up there in the Spring to keep the regrowth down.

St Michael’s Hill in the 1940s when the hill was grass covered and the ‘hat-like’ shape of the hill was clear. The timber Norman keep once stood on the summit the perimeter defended by palisades. The stables, garrison and store buildings would have been on the lower terrace. Montacute House is middle left in the photo. The priory site is centre right in the field right of the parish church.

There has been very little archaeological excavation to help understand the massive earthworks created over 900 years ago, but in 2010 I carried out a watching brief when a new water trough was installed on the hill. I noticed that burrowing animals had dug into the broad lower terrace. It’s always worth looking in mole hills and rabbit burrows. In the disturbed soil was some of the rubbish the Norman garrison had left behind.. fragments of cooking pots and splinters of animal bone, left-overs from their meals.

Norman pottery uncovered by rabbits burrowing into St Michael’s Hill

Such scraps enable you to touch the past and to realise that there is still so much more that can be learned about this place.

Upside Down Archaeology at Corfe

It’s a basic rule of archaeology that the deeper you go the older you get. That’s why everything is excavated in sequence. Unpacking the information backwards from most recent to most ancient.

In 1987, we were puzzled by an apparent exception to the rule. It was the second year into the access and display archaeological project at Corfe Castle in Dorset.

Looking from the Inner Ward down onto the West Bailey in 1986. The tarmac path runs beside the remains of a wall thought to date to the 12th century

Corfe ended its days as a stately residence in 1646. It was captured by parliamentary forces and blown apart. During our excavation campaign we only tended to take away the demolition rubble to reveal walls and pathways at Civil War level.

An important element of the National Trust access plan was to replace in stone the slippery tarmac path which led up the steep slope that crosses the Outer Bailey up through the middle gatehouse to the West Bailey.

In the West Bailey, traces of a wall could be glimpsed above the turf. This, it was thought, was a large medieval wall dating to the early 12th century. The idea was to uncover this wall and run the new path beside it showing it off to visitors so that they would know that this was the limit of the castle during the ‘Anarchy’ when supporters of the Empress Matilda held Corfe against King Stephen’s forces.

Just below the modern topsoil with its plastic smarties lids and crisp packets was a Victorian coin, some glass and below this large fragments of medieval pottery.

A scaffold walkway was erected as a temporary visitor route to enable us to dig up the path and reveal the wall.

We wanted to know the width of the great medieval wall, built to defend a royal castle. So we placed two exploratory trenches across it. The turf contained the sort of thing you would expect. Things dropped by recent visitors like snack debris (from Corfe, we have a near complete typological series of Twix wrappers decimal and pre-decimal!), the odd 6d and Victorian penny. Then quite a lot of 18th-19th century window glass… and then medieval.. lots of it. Chunks of limestone and pottery of various types.

This went down quite a way but beside us our medieval wall was looking rather puny. It only had a wall face on the east, downslope side. We scratched our heads and kept digging through the rubble.

Then the rubble disappeared. Peeled off onto smooth, level dark soil and out of it came a tobbaco pipe. That’s not right. Nobody was smoking in the middle ages, or were they… No, definitely not, the next find was a lead musket ball. Here was the missing Civil War layer beneath the medieval period and it continued under the 12th century wall. Madness. A puzzle. What was going on?

Curious. Below the medieval rubble was a smooth dark layer of soil. A buried turf and in it tobacco pipes and a musket ball or two.

John Wesley gave us the answer in his diary Wednesday October 12 1774.–

” Afterward we took a walk over the remains of the castle, so bravely defended in the last century, against all the power of the Parliament forces, by the widow of the Lord Chief Justice Bankes. It is one of the noblest ruins I ever saw: the walls are of an immense thickness, defying even the assaults of time, and were formerly surrounded by a deep ditch. The house, which stands in the middle on the very top of the rock, has been a magnificent structure. Sometime since, the proprietor fitted up some rooms on the southwest side of this and laid out a little garden, commanding a large prospect, pleasant beyond description. For a while he was greatly delighted with it: but the eye was not satisfied with seeing. It grew familiar; it pleased no more and is now run all to ruin. No wonder:
what can delight always but the knowledge and love of God?”

The 1769 map of Corfe Castle by Archer Roberts showing the ruined castle when the rector of the parish made himself a garden and residence in the north and south towers of the West Bailey.

The Rector of Corfe, a relative of the owner, John Bankes, levelled up the West Bailey in the 1760s to create a quiet retreat within the ruined castle. So,our medieval soil was dug from the north side and dumped on the south burying the old grass surface for us to uncover again 220 years later. The wall was his garden wall made of chunks of demolished castle rearranged.

The section modern turf over medieval over the buried turf and within it the evidence of the 1640s Civil War. The limestone pathway lay beneath with fragments of 16th and 17th century broken stuff trodden into it. Our blog emblem head was found near here. The path ran under the wall. Not a 12th century bailey wall but Rector Thomas L’Anson Bankes’ 18th century garden wall.

Glad we sorted that one out. So where was the 12th century wall? Deeper. We found it almost completely robbed away a couple of years later.

1646 Keep Collapse blocks Inner Gate

The Inner Ward Gate looking up towards the Keep. The gateway was excavated to 1646 level but the steps take you up above the demolition rubble the old ground surfaces in the Keep are buried several metres deep under Civil War demolition rubble.

At Corfe on Thursday we were just walking down from the top of the Castle. We’d been looking at the erosion and wall repairs that were needed this year. Phil the Area Ranger said “this always amazes me” and I knew what he meant. We shouldn’t be standing there at all and 20 years ago it would have been impossible. Some clever engineering opened the Inner Ward Gate for us.

Corfe is a great craggy romantic ruin. An irate visitor once said to me “how can the National Trust have let it get in this state?!. It’s not our fault. It’s been this way for over 350 years. The owners, the Bankes family, supported King Charles in the Civil War which made the Parliamentarians want to make it useless as a fortress… after they eventually got hold of it (2 sieges later).

The Inner Ward Gate is below and slightly to the right of the tall Keep tower at the centre of the picture. Corfe looking south towards the village. The castle is divided into three main areas, the Outer Bailey is entered first across the bridge from the church and through the Outer Gatehouse, then up the hill to the South West Gatehouse which gives access to the West Bailey. Up the hill again to the highest stronghold of the Inner Ward where remains of Henry I’s great tower Keep and King John’s manor house still stand.

The NT were given the castle by the Bankes family in 1982. The plan was to make the place more accessible and enjoyable for the visitor. The route to the top was OK until the Inner Ward Gate was reached. Here, we were confronted with a jumble of massive chunks of masonry and the only option was to weave a narrow path between great chunks of demolished castle. The Parliamentarian Captain Hughes, had ordered his men to undermine the west wall of the Keep and place gunpowder charges there (quite a lot). This had brought the whole thing down successfully burying the gateway.

The Inner Ward Gate before the move. The only way to the Inner Ward is along a narrow worn path against the railings. Bit of a queue to go up and down at busy times.

In 1991, we dug between the blocks and found the gateway. It had a 80 ton block on one side of it, a 50 ton block on the other and an 8 ton block in the middle.

The NT working group thought up various solutions to this 350 year old access problem, involving large amounts of scaffolding in unseemly unaesthetic places. Then a wild idea. Could the blocks be moved. Unlikely. Worth asking the question of the engineers though. The answer was …. of course. A bold and exciting scheme was devised.

Preparing to move the blocks visitors are provided with a temporary scaffolded walkway to get them to the Inner Ward.

50 ton was undermined and tilted to the north. 8 tone was lifted on a gantry and 80 ton was surrounded with a cradle of steel girders, and, after excavation, rails set in concrete were built beneath it. Then it was pushed to one side using a particularly powerful machine.

The 80 ton block of collapsed keep is cradled in a gantry with runners placed beneath before sliding it to one side.

We excavated the gateway floor after the move and found it to be full of good quality robbed castle stone. Perhaps it was left there by mistake and could not be retrieved once the Keep was blown up.

A scatter of good robbed ashlar stone found under the block of Keep once the engineers had moved it in 1996. Perhaps the Parliamentarian sappers meant to retrieve it but it was too late once the Keep west wall had been exploded across the gateway.

After the archaeology, the 1996 masons pinned the blocks in their new positions, made a new flight of steps that took visitors through the gate at 1646 level up and then up above the unexcavated demolition accumulated within the Inner Ward. There is rubble several metres deep in places, particularly within the Keep.

The view through the blocked Inner Ward gate towards the West Bailey before opening

I know what Phil means though. It always gives me goose bumps when I look up to see the shifted blocks of Keep and stand at the Inner Ward Gate.

The Inner Ward Gate looking back towards the West Bailey when opened