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Laughton-en-le-Morthen & Conquest Landscapes with Duncan Wright - Ep 29
381 Plays5 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. In this talk, Archaeology in the City proudly presents - Duncan Wright on "Laughton & Conquest Landscapes." This talk took place on Thursday, January 30th, 2019 at the Red Deer in Sheffield.
Duncan is a senior lecturer at Bishop Grosseteste University. As an early Medievalist, he specialises in the establishment of kingships, studies of settlement, landscapes, and conflict. In this episode, Duncan speaks on the Norman Conquest of north England and the construction of early medieval castles. He has recently completed excavating in Laughton where he's found a Motte-and-Bailey earthwork castle, the remains of an Anglo-Saxon hall, and much more!
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email archaeologyinthecity@sheffield.ac.uk or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)
Content Warning: Listener discretion is advised as there may be adult language
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology and Ale Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Venue and Atmosphere
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Episode 29 of the Archaeology and Ale Podcast, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program of the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. The talks take place at the Red Deer, a popular pub on Pitt Street in Sheffield, near the archaeology department.
00:00:47
Speaker
It is a busy place, so there might be some background noise in our recording, and be advised that strong language may be used from time to
Lawton and the Landscapes of Conquest Project
00:00:54
Speaker
time. This month our guest speaker is Duncan Wright from BGU, speaking to us about Lofton and the Landscapes of Conquest.
00:01:14
Speaker
Cheers, thanks for having me and thanks for coming along. I'm really flattered that you came to hear me talk about Rotherham essentially, which is what tonight's about. I've divided this talk into two sections really. First bit all about Lawton, our work there, I've been leading this project, it's been a fair few
00:01:35
Speaker
contributors, but really I'm the sort of the project lead. All elements I should say, and I really should have a logo here, have been funded by the Castel Studies Trust, and they've given us money for the two phases of work.
Strategic Significance of Lawton
00:01:48
Speaker
So I want to talk about Lawton, what we found, what we think it means about this particular place in South Yorkshire, but also what that then tells us about landscape for conquest more broadly,
00:02:01
Speaker
and about the Norman Conquest and how we understand that archaeologically. So those are the two aims of the talk. Now, for those of you that don't know, Lawton lies just to the south and the east of Rotherham, essentially where the M1 and the M18 meet. If you're coming up the moto from the south, if you look to the right, the spire is quite distinctive, you can see it from a fair distance.
00:02:26
Speaker
It sits in quite a prominent place in the landscape. The outcrop of limestone runs kind of north to south as you look at that up and down on the map. You can see on a clear day from Lawton Lincoln Cathedral and the views to the peaks are really, really impressive as well. So it's in a very, very high point in the landscape. The place name is of interest. The first element is not so interesting. It means the Lawton bit probably means like a herb garden or a leek garden.
00:02:55
Speaker
Not that interesting, but the Unle-Moor-Thin is very, very interesting. The wider district in the medieval period was called Moor-Thin. I'll talk about that in a little bit and Lawton's relationship to it. But it appears to be derived from the term moor-thing, which is moorland, the moor-bit, and then a thing being an assembly
Exploration of Lawton Castle and Church Proximity
00:03:15
Speaker
place. So it's talking about an assembly place in the moor. A few ideas about where that place assembly might be.
00:03:22
Speaker
Again, probably under the M1 or the M18 at some point. But some other ideas have been chucked around. Again, I'll talk about those in a bit. So looking at more than a bit more detail, obviously what my interest really is as a medievalist, I've been aware of the site for a fair while, is that it has a castle and the castle sits at the western end of the village.
00:03:48
Speaker
And you can actually say, sorry, I'll go back again. So the castle sits just here and actually you can see from the contour lines here quite how rapidly it drops off to the west here. So the castle does sit on quite a nodal point in the landscape and the village does too. But I don't want to over emphasise that too much. A lot of what I'm going to say tonight is not about castles being just military, more interested about why castles are placed while they are.
00:04:14
Speaker
for like social reasons, for reasons of elite residence and continuity in elite residence. So it is an anodal point but I don't think it's really a strategic choice to place the castle here necessarily.
00:04:29
Speaker
Again, that's zoomed in slightly more closely there, the castle sitting at the west end, as I said. Interestingly and significantly, the church is located very, very adjacent to the castle. Now, a lot of times in castle studies, when you get a church located this closely, sometimes churches start off as almost like castle chapels and then develop into parish churches. This isn't quite the case here. The church is older and I think far more interesting than the
00:04:55
Speaker
of usual castle church development. But again, I'll talk about that in just a second.
Complex Settlement Findings at Lawton
00:05:00
Speaker
Other things you can see from the street topography. Very sort of distinctive sort of square enclosure. Lost a little bit in the modern development here, but it comes through. I'll show you some historic maps in a minute.
00:05:12
Speaker
that sort of go into that a bit more detail. But the interesting thing here is that we seem to have a castle, a church, and also a planned settlement. Now, as archaeologists, dating all that is very difficult, especially in South Yorkshire, where a lot of the early medieval period, so from about 400 to about 1100, is a ceramics. We don't have any pottery to deal with. So dating the phases is quite difficult, but we do have an interesting settlement plan as well.
00:05:41
Speaker
That's what it looks like. It doesn't. That's Warwick Castle. That's that's what, you know, that's what a castle looks like. And this is when I say I'm interested in castle studies. People go, oh, yeah, I went to like Windsor and I'm like, I'm not interested in that. It's really sad. I'm more interested in castles that look a bit rubbish, actually. Well, you might call sort of unimpressive, but I actually think it's a shame it's been chopped off the end of there. But this is an earthwork castle. There's no indication of any stone built
00:06:11
Speaker
Construction here at Lawton,
Lawton's Historical Records and Sketches
00:06:13
Speaker
purely seems to be timber and turf. And this seems to be a very, very early castle. So generally, we do get stone castles from an early period. The White Tower, Tower of London is a famous one, and York seems to have one as well. But generally, this type of early castle, 11th century castle,
00:06:32
Speaker
We don't generally get a lot of stonework, but it's a beautiful spot. I would recommend you visit, but you can see that the castle type here, this is a large mott. It sits at about eight or nine meters. And then we have what we call a bailey. So that's an earthwork enclosure. Now at the time it probably would have been enhanced with a palisade, a wooden palisade round it.
00:06:52
Speaker
And there seems to be a gap in the enclosure on the church side there as well. From the top of the mark, as I said, views to Lincoln, but also to the peaks as well. It's a really lovely spot. And it's one very fortunate family's back garden as well. So they're very, very generous. And I should make a point of thanking Mark Ferris and his family who not only let us into his garden, but let us mess it up and dig it up. And I didn't think he didn't quite understand quite how long 20 meters was when we said we want to put 20 meter trench.
00:07:22
Speaker
Maybe you've got feet and meters mixed up. So the previous work at Lawton, pretty unimpressive, but not a huge amount of it. An amazing named chap called Chalky Gould in 1904 was the first person to cite a
Re-evaluation of Lawton's Mott and Bailey Origins
00:07:41
Speaker
doomsday reference in relation to Lawton. Before that,
00:07:45
Speaker
The Earthworks had been recognised and they'd just been called British or prehistoric. They were thought to relate some sort of dim, distant past. They weren't seen as medieval in nature. But Chalky Godel was the first to say, actually, there's a doomsday book reference which is really, really interesting.
00:08:07
Speaker
in relation to Lawton. The Doomsday Book was written in 1086. It's a survey commissioned by William the Conqueror, 20 years after his initial conquest of England. Essentially, it's a glorified tax assessment. It talks about how much each mineral area owns, right down to the last pig. It's very, very detailed.
00:08:30
Speaker
What it says about Lawton though, which is very, very interesting, it says that before the conquest Lawton was a site of Earl Edwin's howler. Now that's the old English word for a hall. Earl Edwin was a very, very high ranking noble. He's essentially a royal individual.
00:08:47
Speaker
He is brother-in-law of Harold of the arrow in the I fame. So not just a sort of your average sort of sanely individual or Lord, but a very, very high ranking Lord. And it says that he has an hour here. He has a hall. And the assumption is that this is one of his many
Research Motivations and Pre-Norman Structures
00:09:07
Speaker
residences. So very, very important place.
00:09:09
Speaker
However, it was a year later that Ella Armitage was the first to identify the Mott and Bailey as not being the howler. Everyone previous to it and Chalky included said that this sort of Mott and Bailey must be the howler, must be Earl Edwin's Hall. And actually it was Ella Armitage who said, no, this is post conquest. This Mott and Bailey castle is actually a Norman thing. And her work was very important. She actually associates it with the first Norman Lord in the area, Roger the
00:09:39
Speaker
And I think she's correct in that. However, throughout the kind of the later 20th century, not much further work, substantial work, no excavation. The survey, even the Ordnance Survey sort of map of it seems to be based on a very, very early sketch. The widespread belief
00:10:03
Speaker
and this is what we were kind of attracted to as a project team, was that Earl Edwin's Hall, the Anglo-Saxon Hall, his residence, lay underneath the earthworks of the castle. That was the widespread belief, but no one had tested it. And so that was our main aim as a project team, was like, does the hall sort of lie under that? And then what does that actually mean? And I think those
00:10:25
Speaker
Questions are really significant, really important about the conquest. What happens? What happens with castles? Are they here to just be military? Or actually, are these kind of statements of new people in power, elite transfer of places of residence? If this is an individual's elite residence, somebody coming in, the new elite building essentially a complete new form is very interesting and significant.
Geophysical and Topographic Discoveries
00:10:53
Speaker
So as you can see, I mean, I don't want to sort of knock my old boss, but this is Chalky Gould's sketch from 1904. And Ollie Crichton's in a century later, it's pretty much the same. So a kind of a lack of more substantive work been done, despite people like Ollie saying, this is really interesting. No one really tested that thesis that the hole lay underneath the castle.
00:11:17
Speaker
There has been exploration undertaken in the village itself and the results were pretty interesting too. So this area of rectory films, the high streets there, the castle to the left here, quite a large area in advance of development, excavated in I think 2005 to 2006 it was.
00:11:37
Speaker
um this is the kind of the complete plot got some um later material especially late medieval kilns it's very impressive but for our purposes which are quite interesting they did identify a late Saxon kiln it looks a bit like this you know an impressive
00:11:52
Speaker
to many people, but actually it came with lots and lots of ceramics as well. So a very rare instance of South Yorkshire having pre-conquest ceramics. So it seems to be a centre of industry, perhaps serving a wider area, but again, I'll mention that a bit later on.
00:12:12
Speaker
So we were particularly excited by those results because it suggested that if we did excavate, we might actually have dating material, we might actually have some ceramics that we could date to the pre conquest period. Just to mention All Saints Church and a little bit of work that's been done there as well. It's really worth visiting and going around. It's a lovely spot, as I said, and the church itself is
00:12:33
Speaker
is great. It's often open, which is not always the case anymore. Really prominently for our interests, for our purposes, is there is fabric within the church that is pre-conquest origin. This lovely doorway here, this outer one, sorry.
00:12:50
Speaker
This here, that is very typical, very, very early Romanesque dating to the late 10th, early 11th century. We've managed to phase that. We've done some funky 3D models as well. We've also got this reuse. This is a triangular headed window, which are very typical of 10th, 11th century architecture. It's been reused as a patina. It now sits in the chance of the church.
00:13:16
Speaker
Wonderful thing, but clearly
Anglo-Saxon Residences Beneath the Castle?
00:13:19
Speaker
a big substantial building was here before the reconstruction. The church itself is mostly 13th century, but these fragments suggest there's a big Anglo-Saxon building here. We're almost certain that's a church. The Anglo-Saxons didn't really build
00:13:35
Speaker
anything else out of stone. Even until the 11th century, secular residences, Alfred the Great, Edward the Confessor, they were living in wooden-built constructions. It's the church that has the preserve of stone. We've also got, in the eastern end of the chancel, this lovely piece of stone here. This is a 10th century grave cover as well, so another indicator of something going on before the conquest of Lawton.
00:14:06
Speaker
So in terms of our work, what we did, the first thing we did was undertake an earth-resistant survey. So this is a type of geophysical survey. Essentially, if anyone's a cricket fan, it's a kind of glorified version of like Richie Benno's dampometer. I remember he used to get his, you know, sort of keys and then the dampometer. It's really what it does. It measures resistance in the soil by passing a very small electronic current through it.
00:14:30
Speaker
And then depending on what's underneath it we get high and low readings and if we find anomalies in the ground we can try and interpret them. Now unfortunately this image is not brilliant just because it's really scaled up so you've got to take my word for it.
00:14:46
Speaker
But what we do have and what we're able to do is actually take some survey. We did something in the village and we were hoping for some evidence of medieval settlement tenements and something interesting there. It's pretty much a mess. We didn't find anything really significant. This was the site of a later medieval and post-medieval hall. So there's a lot of noise, a lot of background stuff going on, which is a bit unfortunate.
00:15:12
Speaker
However, we did undertake some survey in the Bailey and also this area to the south of the Martin Bailey. People have identified this as a second Bailey, a second enclosure. To my mind, there's no evidence of that. It's just the area immediately south of the castle.
00:15:28
Speaker
In the northern part of the survey, in the Bailey, again, you just have to take my word for it, but we've got lots and lots of areas of high resistance. We seem to have buildings there. They look like medieval buildings. They look actually like a hall. Now, we can't really date that with just this survey alone, but
00:15:49
Speaker
We think it's actually probably pre-castle and actually that the Bailey is encircling the pre-conquest halls, which is really significant. What we were really excited about, and I should say Sam Bromwich was amazing this, he did the work with me, did the survey and the excavation as well as other helpers like Kate. I'm not seeing you, Sam, hello.
00:16:12
Speaker
was this area to the south. Now, if you could just see particularly this L-shaped feature here, this sort of negative anomaly, which seems to be low resistance and it looks like a ditch. So, ditches on this type of survey, ditches that hold water, ditches on the ground hold water.
00:16:29
Speaker
that is sort of conducive to electronic sort of well they're less resistant they conduct the electricity so we seem to have a ditch under the ground and some more ditches emanating to the south as well so it seems to have a lot going on and
00:16:46
Speaker
that haven't been many sort of examples of Anglo-Saxon elite residents excavated but these sort of features particularly got us quite excited and actually look like the ditches are sort of an enclosure ditch surrounding like a hall complex.
Church Layout and Historical Significance
00:17:01
Speaker
We seem to have a hall at the top, the hour we think and actually down here we have some of this sort of the palisade ditch that would have surrounded it but we weren't really satisfied with just doing that so we did some topographic survey as well
00:17:15
Speaker
and Adam Sanford of Ariel Cam came in and did a drone survey. I should have really put the links in actually but I can put those on Twitter and circulate those as well because we have these quite nice interactive 3D models from this work. Again just trying to find any further archaeological features through this sort of work.
00:17:34
Speaker
we do you can just about see some linear anomalies there's one there and one there which mirror our geophysics again it looks like the halls orientated in a broadly east-west direction not a huge amount of further evidence from that but quite a nice
00:17:51
Speaker
sense of the landscape from that drone plot as well. So we thought we'd found our owler, we thought we'd found part of the palisade, the enclosure around it as well, but we wanted to test that, and especially with that idea that we had pre-conquest ceramics kicking around in the village, that we can actually solidly date that as well. The church itself, again, it's just the scale on my laptop. It's great, I promise.
00:18:14
Speaker
but the scale is washing a bit of this out but the sort of the eye of faith you might see a little anomaly here a little rise and it actually continues into the bailey as well and sounds very nicely illustrated it for us as well on this image here
Anglo-Saxon Structures and Dating Challenges
00:18:30
Speaker
It seems to be that the church sits within its own enclosure as well, and that is significant. So this is the later medieval and post-medieval churchyard, but before that we have a nice bank suggesting that not only the hall lies an enclosure, but the church is in its own enclosure as well.
00:18:51
Speaker
So that's the kind of, compared to this now flipped, you can see this anomaly much, much more impressively, and you can see the whites as well, just of the whole orientated broadly east-west. And that's just our interpretation of it as well, but I've talked through most of that, so I won't dwell on it. Okay, so our excavation really focused on two areas. We were really interested in particularly dating that palisade. There's a few reasons for that.
00:19:19
Speaker
This was the kind of most impressive anomaly if you like but also it wasn't scheduled and you can excavate scheduled monuments but it's far more difficult it's far more restricted and this area to the top and actually the mott here which we surveyed didn't find a huge amount was scheduled as well but this area was just Mark's garden so we could we could do what we wanted with it.
00:19:41
Speaker
So we put essentially a slot across the east-west to get the northern-southern extension here, and then again, catching this east-west extension there. And that's what they broadly look like, but again, it was slightly washed out at this scale. There they are in relation to the castle itself, and this area is kind of out of bounds because it's scheduled. Is it going to work? It'd start working.
00:20:10
Speaker
Oh, there we go. So that's our excavation. That's pretty much the start of the excavation. So two trenches, as I said, Mark didn't realize quite how long 20 meters was. It was, we were trying to like not kill any children, I have to say, because you can see the goalposts in the background, and we did start encroaching onto the usable part of the garden. To be fair, this part was a bit more sort of wet and not that pleasant.
00:20:38
Speaker
He was very patient, I think it's fair to say. Hand excavation, the soil was taken off by a machine and once we identified features, we started excavating them. I should say this got help from Sam and also Kate.
00:20:53
Speaker
but sounded a lot of the physical labor. Just a younger fitter and a better archaeologist, so it's probably fair to say. But yeah, the interpretation as well. And we were kind of slightly misguided. We were hoping to find nice sort of brown soil indicating our ditches, but actually it was a very, very compacted. And instead we got these rock cut ditches. So the ditches seem to be cut directly into this sort of limestone, broken limestone bedrock here.
00:21:23
Speaker
We've got absolutely no data material from it. Our big headline of let's find the hole and data and it's definitely going to be pre-conquest.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, it didn't really happen. What we did find was a remarkably consistent fill. I think that's fair, isn't it, Sam? And that is quite interesting in itself. But yeah, nothing to firmly date it. Likewise, in the second trench, we did find the features that we expected to find, if you like, but absolutely no dating material. So this is
00:21:55
Speaker
the outer ditch so we had we had sort of the palisaded ditch if you like which we were really interested in in both the trenches but we also had the ditch which we think relates to the settlement enclosure as well and that is I think actually trench 2 which is the sort of east-west extension if you like had the nicer
00:22:15
Speaker
ditch profile and you can see it here quite clearly and especially you can see the very very narrow shallow base and we found what looked like the scrapes of even like the stakes being removed so imagine a palisade sort of a wooden fence running along here
00:22:34
Speaker
sort of stakes going in and then sort of slats going across it, it seems that from the fill very consistent has gone in quite quickly but also we seem to have evidence of the stakes being pulled out as well. So what we kind of expected we
00:22:49
Speaker
Not many of these things have been excavated comprehensively, as I said, but all of them, all these high status owlers, these elite residences of the Anglo-Saxon period seem to be essentially wooden palaces, nothing big and build out stone, but relatively ephemeral archaeology.
00:23:08
Speaker
And that's our official photo, but the light was terrible. So I'm not sure what we're going to have to do. I'm going to have to graph our measuring, because that's a lovely profile, but wasn't quite finished. And then the sun came out and then mucked up our official photo. So I have to sort of botch that in post-ex, I think.
00:23:25
Speaker
Okay, so that's our excavation. That's what we found. We found what we think we wanted to find. It was slightly frustrating. We didn't get anything to date it, but we're relatively confident, despite that, that we did identify this palisade enclosure and actually that is pre-conquest. It dates to before the castle. We did find some ceramics. We got a couple of bits of
00:23:47
Speaker
later medieval and we got about 12 shirts of Roman stuff which is, you know, you just think this whole thing is medieval and then the Romans turn up. I don't know what this is really about but all of those were residual. They don't seem to have any relation to what I'm talking about but there seems to be a Roman presence in the area. There is an antiquarian reference to a tessellated pavement being found somewhere in the village and our
00:24:12
Speaker
evidence is the only more substantive or certainly the only archaeological evidence that we found of any Roman activity. So that's to be confirmed, but it doesn't seem to have any bearing on what we're interested in. So a slightly optimistic reconstruction, but I think bearing it on, you know, on other excavated examples, we seem to have an enclosure a bit like this.
Significance of Lawton Pre-Conquest
00:24:35
Speaker
So we've got its extension, its corner here.
00:24:38
Speaker
And if I put that in, it probably extends, encompasses the halls at the top, and also we have a separate enclosure with the church, with this big, important pre-conquest church in its own enclosure as well, which is a very, very similar pattern to that identified at Rauns. This is probably the most, the best excavated example of a thaney residence that we have in the whole country.
00:25:01
Speaker
The only slight variation in our evidence is that we think the halls are broadly orientated east-west, but you can see there's a very, very close symmetry there. We have a church and cemetery in its own enclosure and this sort of slightly larger arrangement for the halls, the domestic dwelling area as well. So that's what we think is really going on. We're almost certain that we have Earl Edwin's Hall and the Castle line over the top of it.
00:25:28
Speaker
Just to talk about the church as well, my friend Michael Chaplin has been looking at the church. He's very very interested in Anglo-Saxon sculpture and Anglo-Saxon churches primarily. That wonderful doorway, for a long time people have thought that that was reset, that must have moved and essentially it was used in the 13th or the 15th century as a kind of an intellectual curiosity that they kind of picked it up and
00:25:52
Speaker
when they're rebuilding the church that they've reset it. Michael's now pretty confident that that's not the case, that that's actually in situ. So that doorway is where it always has been. And there's three possible reconstructions of what the Anglo-Saxon church might have looked like based on that piece of evidence. The second one down here, that would be
00:26:17
Speaker
a very, very substantial church. We don't think it's a minster church, and that's the reconstruction there. The third one, and see, this is a form that's not really recognised in Anglo-Saxon building, so we're almost certain that we have a church that looked a bit like this, a freestanding, what we call a tower-nave church.
00:26:36
Speaker
really pretty much a private church for the Lord. Not a sort of a parish church, not for public use, but essentially that Earl Edwin was having, you know, had a private church to go along with his, you know, his residence. What town a church has looked like, very, very few still standing. This is a lovely example of Barton upon Humber in Lincolnshire, though. You have
00:27:00
Speaker
this central tower which also acts as the kind of congregation area of your very, very small group, basically the Lord and his immediate entourage. And sometimes you have a baptistry like here, you might have a tiny little chancel as well, but really these aren't churches as we understand them in the later medieval period. They're very, very much for, well, private worship, but also private display.
00:27:23
Speaker
You imagine these things are the only stone built thing in the landscape, a real sort of symbol of elite power. Building upon that and also consolidating that idea, I think, is the evidence from just down the road outside of Lawton. So we've got our castle here and it's, you know, it's
00:27:41
Speaker
sort of a precursor if you like and the private church. We've got something very odd going on down at St John's. Now I'm almost certain that St John's is actually the original parish church for Lawton and that probably well into the medieval period that church up in the village centre
00:27:59
Speaker
was actually a private chapel. And that's sort of metered out in the sort of the parish boundaries. You can see how weirdly this is now, St. John's is now in throughput parish, doesn't really make sense. You look at how that's been included. And it's, there's other indicators too. There's a lot of Lawton personal names in all the kind of the grave memorials. And it seems to be that actually Lawton was originally served by this church at St. John's.
00:28:30
Speaker
Just to finish the idea of sort of pre-conquest Lawton as well, it's really very interesting that it sits within a very, very extensive estate. Often they have these Lawton place names as well. Lawton seems to be a very important central place. However, at this time, we shouldn't be looking for one single important place. It's a time when functions are kind of shared around. So the assembly seems to be slightly further to the west.
00:28:55
Speaker
But Lawton does seem to draw in, yeah, it seems to have a lot of importance and it has a lot of influence.
Post-Conquest Changes in Lawton
00:29:02
Speaker
So it seems to own a lot of these churches who have to give it dues well into the later medieval period. And also, as we saw earlier, it's a place of resource production and processing as well, well into the later medieval period. So it's part of this large and very interesting state. How old this is, we're not really sure.
00:29:22
Speaker
But our expert thinks it's actually 10th century. I was really hoping it for it to be like 6th century and like a kingdom, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
00:29:30
Speaker
So then, Lawton before the conquest, what have we got? And I think it's interesting to try and put all this together and all this material is actually quite closely dated. It's all kind of late 10th, early 11th century. And we seem to be having somebody or a group of people who are really trying to make their mark. Now, whether this is Earl Edwin, the Earls of Mercia more broadly, but we have these kind of like technologies of sort of elite power, if you like, and the kind of expressions of elite power. So we've got our
00:29:59
Speaker
residents, including private church. We have an extensive area which it draws upon and also we've got evidence of funerary sculpture. Unfortunately, the sculpture we can't date quite so closely. It might well be early Norman, but we have this really interesting and very, very significant elite signature, if you like, before the conquest.
00:30:21
Speaker
Now, the second part, I'm really just for the last five minutes or so to talk about castles more broadly, what Lawton tells us about castles in a more general sense. And a few things to say about the Norman Conquest. Now, we all know about the Norman Conquest, or at least we think we know about it. 1066, I think it's meant to be like a third of people's pin numbers. So if it is, change it. Apparently, British people can't remember four other numbers, which is...
00:30:50
Speaker
Terrifying, isn't it? But, you know, the arrow in the eye, all the rest of it, and Battle of Hastings and the Normans are in town. That's partly true, but actually, the conquest was a much more protracted thing than that. It didn't end in one battle. Yes, Hastings is decisive and it's important.
00:31:11
Speaker
But it's a good 20 years, the Doomsday Book's not commissioned for another 20 years, and you can probably say that, I would say, is the end of the conquest, where William feels confident enough that he can conduct a tax survey. So we have things like Exeter in 1068, a significant siege, and eventually it falls, and you've got this wonderful example of very early Norman.
00:31:33
Speaker
but actually using Saxon masons. This looks like the Normans are commissioning local people to build a tower and they build a church tower despite being at the castle. They build this thing and it looks that's more at home in a Saxon church than it is in a Norman castle. I should say also, because there's a bit of a family thing going on, it seems to be Harold's mum who's leading a lot of the rebellion here. So, you know, you kill my son, there's got to be some sort of consequences.
00:31:59
Speaker
But also in the north of England, we have what's known as the herring of the north, where there seems to be really substantial conflict. The Normans, they've been accused of sort of genocide as well. There's not a huge amount of recording of what's actually happening, but for several years, perhaps even the two full decades, there is a lot of
00:32:20
Speaker
destruction, a sort of a burn earth policy, really trying to stop all the rebellions from the Normans as well. I think actually the Bay of Tapestry, sorry, that's one of the first depictions of refugees in medieval Europe. So it's a protracted process. It doesn't happen overnight. It's different parts of the country come under influence. Yes, the conquerors crowned on Christmas Day 1066, but really it's a much, much longer process than that.
00:32:50
Speaker
And Lawton at the conquest, I think this is, you know, the harrying of the north is in that context in which I see the castle being built. The idea of the infilling of those ditches being very, very rapid. The fact we've got no ceramics from it does suggest we're not got sort of a long-lived place as well.
00:33:08
Speaker
And actually Lawton, really the castle, it's raison d'etre is kind of met by its very construction. I'll talk about the kind of wider landscape in a minute, but this is about elite power transfer. The fact we've got no real evidence of medieval settlement,
00:33:27
Speaker
If this is a castle that's used into the 13th or the 15th century, we'd expect loads of stuff, animal bone, medieval pot, all that stuff. But actually, I think the very purpose of the castle at Lawton is just being built. It's sort of a seal, it's a very symbolic thing of new power
Castles as Symbols of Power Shifts
00:33:46
Speaker
in town. And actually, it probably wasn't even used once it was constructed. It just said, here's the new authority.
00:33:53
Speaker
And I think castles are often doing that across the country. And that's sort of substantiated slightly by the fact that after the conquest, Lawton's incorporated into something called the honour of Blythe Tickle, a new administrative arrangement. But actually, the primary castle emerges at Tickle. This becomes the secular centre, actually reusing a Saxon, a pre-existing Saxon place. And the Ecclesiastical centre emerges at Blythe. Lawton keeps some importance, but really it's
00:34:23
Speaker
it becomes kind of a secondary or even a tertiary centre to these two. And it does suggest, Tickhill again is somewhere that's occupied throughout the medieval period, into the post-medieval period. This is the main estate centre at Tickhill. At Lawton, something's difference going on. It's purely a power exchange and that happened through a castle building.
00:34:45
Speaker
So understanding castles then, the few that we have excavated castles where we've got evidence of pre-conquest occupation and elite residents, they're very, very few and far between and actually poorly understood. I hope that our work is showing how really from a couple of weeks work of intensive local study, geophysics and topography, we can start to understand why castles are where they are.
00:35:10
Speaker
And I think actually the more we look at these places, the more we understand they're not here for military purposes. They're here actually for transfer of power. They're here because Anglo-Saxons were living here beforehand and the Anglo-Saxon elite. So we should move away from these very, very few and actually piecemeal excavations we have. We actually hope to roll this project methodology and this sort of concept to other places as well.
00:35:35
Speaker
Just to finish, that preoccupation with castles being military, it's rooted into, you know, I started looking at castle under attack for this picture, and there was all sorts.
Conclusion and Preview of Next Episode
00:35:47
Speaker
And actually, castles, we really have this preoccupation of it being military. That's not always the case. He-Man may be, but not William the Conqueror.
00:35:58
Speaker
If you were interested in what I've got to say, this comes out next week. It's a very short piece in Current Archaeology, which kind of summarises the main points of our work at Lawton and where we want to take it forward. But that's all I've got to say and I'll take any questions. Thanks.
00:36:19
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology in Ale. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network and check the show notes which are attached to this episode. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Join us next month when our talk will be led by the University of Sheffield's Colin Mariny speaking on the Roman fort of Naveo. See you next time.
00:36:55
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.