Hever Castle is one of the most remarkable historic houses in Britain. It's got 700 years of turbulent history marked by glitz and glamour as well as decline and fall. Today I'm going to give you a whirlwind tour and show you my favourite bits.
Let's go! First off, here's a potted history of the place. At the start of the 13th century, this site was home to a timber, mott and bailey castle. This would have been quite a basic structure, a timber hall with just a few outbuildings.
But in 1271, during the reign of King Edward I, the design was taken up a notch. Permission was granted to strengthen the house at Hever with a wall of stone and lime and to crenellate it in the manner of a castle. So a gatehouse was built to replace the original timber hall. And it was from this gatehouse, which still stands today, that more additions were made in the 14th century.
Soon there were crenellated walls with towers on the corners. They added a moat and even a great hall. It's hard to imagine, but in the 14th century, the exterior walls would have been whitewashed with a mixture of powdered chalk and water and even decorated in bright bold colours.
This wasn't just to make the castle more imposing, it was also to protect the stone. Across the years all sorts of people have lived here at Hever Castle. Since the 13th century it's passed through 37 different owners and 13 families.
It was originally the home of William de Hever who gave the castle its name. And in the 15th century the Fynes family lived here, the ancestors of the great explorer. so ran off fines. Of course the most famous of Hever's residents were the Boleyn family who then spelt their name B-U-L-L-E-N.
The castle was bought by Geoffrey Boleyn in 1462 and it was his grandson Thomas Boleyn who lived here and raised his three children Mary, Anne and George and it was Anne Boleyn the middle child who became Henry VIII's second wife. Spoiler alert the Boleyns rise to power didn't last long. In fact, it was cut brutally short when Anne and George Boleyn were accused of adultery and incest and executed in 1536. Their father, Thomas Boleyn, was shunned at court and died two years later. With the Boleyns out the picture, Hever Castle came into the possession of King Henry and in 1540, Henry gave it to his fourth wife after he annulled the marriage.
This was Anne of Cleves, also known as the Flanders Mayor. Since the Tudor period... Hever passed through the hands of several different families and gradually fell into decline.
It may well have fallen into total disrepair had it not been snapped up by the richest man in America, William Waldorf Astor. Astor threw his immense fortune into refurbishing and reimagining Hever as a grand Tudor fortress, filling it with ornate oak panelling and magnificent Tudor portraits. He created a lavish family home that could indulge his passion for history and impress his VIP guests.
So what we're looking at today is a real hot potch of 700 years of tweaks and alterations. Even the moat has caused all sorts of problems in the past. We're on quite low ground here, and as the moat used to join the River Eden, it would spill over the banks and flood the castle's courtyard.
Of course, Astor sorted all of that out in his renovations, and in 1906 he took out the crumbling brick bridge and reinstated this wooden drawbridge which can still be raised. No doubt useful for any guests who had turned up late. This gatehouse is home to two of the oldest surviving portcullises in England, one of which can still be operated.
And here in the castle courtyard, you can clearly see the difference between the 13th century gatehouse and the timber-framed Tudor additions. In Anne Boleyn's day there would have been four doorways on each side rather than the two we see today. The east wing was where the servants worked and slept and the west wing had the private rooms of the Boleyn family. This is the 13th century gatehouse, the oldest part of the castle. This is where William de Hever would have eaten, slept and entertained his guests and it was pretty luxurious.
It even had a guard robe aka a loo. which emptied directly down into the moat. Look out below! Sorry!
It's a pretty gruesome collection in here. There are executioner swords, pieces of armour and even instruments of torture. And one of the strangest pieces are these scolds bridles.
These were designed to be worn by outspoken women, a bit like myself, who were suspected to be witches, shrews or scolds. Next we're heading to the inner hall. In the Boleyns' day, this was the kitchen where great feasts were prepared, and Thomas Boleyn even had high ceilings installed to help dissipate the smoke.
Of course, it doesn't look much like a kitchen these days, as much of this panelling and woodwork was installed by William Waldorf Astor, who used this as his grand reception room. Astor employed 748 men to refurbish the castle, and he was careful to preserve as much of the original structure as possible, with strict instructions to use... historically authentic tools, materials and techniques where possible. But my favourite detail in this room is this portrait of Elizabeth de Valois, who was the third wife of Philip II of Spain.
Now it's a beautiful portrait of Elizabeth, but what's most interesting is this pear-shaped pearl hanging in her hair. This pearl is La Peregrina. It's believed to be one of the most symmetrical natural pearls ever found. It was also owned by Queen Mary I. And it stayed in the hands of royalty, Hollywood royalty that is, when Richard Burton bought it for Elizabeth Taylor.
And the pearl actually returned to Hever Castle when Elizabeth Taylor wore it whilst filming here at the 1969 film Anne of a Thousand Days. Isn't that neat? The other bit of bling to look out for in this room is this gilt bronze clock on the mantelpiece. This is a replica of what Henry VIII gave Anne Boleyn on the morning of their marriage in 1532. I know historians talk all about the significance of this representing the time finally coming or time running out, but for me it's far more simple. Just hours before the wedding, Henry gave Anne a clock.
I think he's saying, please don't be late. And who can blame him? Caterers are expensive.
The next stop on our tour is the drawing room. Originally used in Tudor time as domestic offices, this had a new lease of life in 1905. For William Waldorf, Astor kitted it out with this extravagant Elizabethan-style panelling, made from oak and holly. This is the room where Astor would have schmoozed many of his famous friends.
We know that Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were among his guests. You can picture the scene in here. Astor here with all his pals, a few dukes, a few earls, all drinking champagne, gin and tonics perhaps, and all making... lots of hearty jokes. A whale of a time in fact.
They were entertained lavishly and I'm sure they were impressed by Astor's little surprise behind this door. He transformed the medieval turret into his very own drink cupboard. Bottoms up. After a few bottles of champagne, Astor brought his guests into the dining room. In Tudor times, this was the great hall, initially opened right up to the roof rafters.
The Boleyns would have dined in this room, and it was here that they entertained Henry VIII and his retinue. My favourite thing in this room is this impressive gilt lock. This belonged to Henry VIII. The king was so paranoid about assassination, he always travelled with a locksmith, and it was this lock... that was fitted to his bedroom wherever he stayed and then removed when the royal party moved on.
Now, if there's one lesson you must take away from a visit to Hever Castle, it's that you must never run up the stairs for some of these steps, like this one, are different depths. This wasn't because it was poorly designed or hurriedly built. This was, like in many medieval castles, an ingenious safety feature. The idea was that if you lived here, you would know which steps were the odd ones, but for invaders they would be thrown off balance, trip up and give the defenders a crucial advantage.
The next stop on the tour is my favourite room of the whole castle, Anne Boleyn's bedroom. Anne Boleyn was probably born in 1501 and she spent her childhood here at Hever Castle, and historians think that this was probably her bedroom. It seems that Anne was fond of Hever. Even when she was a young woman and courting Henry VIII, Anne would often return here.
In fact, seven of the king's love letters were sent to Anne while she was staying at Hever in 1528. And here she is. Wearing her famous bee pendant, she has a daring French-style hood revealing her dark hair. As a young woman, Anne was considered to be intelligent and witty, if not traditionally beautiful. The Venetian ambassador described Anne as, not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, with a swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the king's great appetite and her eyes which are black.
and beautiful. Some of Anne's most personal possessions are on display here at Hever Castle. In this room you can see two beautifully illuminated prayer books which were signed and annotated by Anne herself. These kind of personal prayer books were popular in England from the 13th century until the reformation. They earned the name the Book of Hours from the short services to the Virgin Mary which were read at eight fixed hours during the day including matins and vespers.
It's incredible to imagine Anne Boleyn walking these corridors. And of course, Henry would have visited on several occasions as they were courting. As Henry would have been given the grandest rooms available, he probably stayed in this room when he came to visit.
So, after being lavishly fed and watered by the Boleyn family, with a great feast of pies, game, roasted meats, custards and jellies, King Henry would have probably climbed into this bed and snuggled up to sleep. streaming of Anne Boleyn or Glorie in France and probably snoring quite a lot I imagine. Hey that's private!
This bed dates from 1540 and it's a tester bed. The term derives from the Latin word tester meaning head because these beds were headed by the solid wooden canopy suspended above it. Cozy! Look I do love green sleeves but can you play Wonderwall? Next up, we're heading to the Staircase Gallery, built in around 1506 by Thomas Boleyn.
The gem in this room is this portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, in mourning. This portrait was recently discovered in France and is believed to have come from the studio of François Clouet, a French Renaissance miniaturist and painter. It's thought that Mary's white mourning gowns were because of the recent death of three close family members.
This is probably Hever Castle's most... famous room, the Long Gallery. It was built in the 16th century and extends across the entire width of the castle.
Here the Blinns might have entertained guests, displayed art collections and even taken exercise. The panelling in this room dates from the 16th century but the meringue like ceiling was another Astor addition. It was made in London and brought to Hever on a steam train.
Astor even had the train tracks extended just so the ceiling could be installed. The most exciting thing about this room though are the 18 original portraits on the wall. These tell the epic saga from the Wars of the Roses all the way through to the Reformation, aka a lot of family drama.
Most of what we see at Hever is really the work of William Waldorf Astor and he spent a lot of time on re-landscaping the gardens too. From these dizzying heights you can see all the re-landscaping that Astor did in the early 1900s. You can see the maze just next to the castle and beyond that the Italian garden. He had 800 men contracted to excavate the 38-acre lake and they were instructed in December 1904 to carry on the works regularly and continuously by day and night except on Sundays when so ordered. So there you have it the magnificent history of Hever Castle in a nutshell.
Ever since William the Conqueror came here almost a thousand years ago, Windsor, on the banks of the River Thames, has been home to a castle. Windsor Castle isn't just one of the Queen's favourite palaces, it is absolutely central to the monarchy. It has been a royal palace for longer than any other building in Europe.
The story begins around a thousand years ago, the Normans arrived here, they conquered England in 1066 and they chose this spot next to a strategic river crossing over the Thames and dominating London to the west as a place for a stronghold. They built this artificial mound, they put a tower on top of it, and since then kings and queens have enlarged and invested on a gigantic scale. Edward III turned this into one of the great royal residences, spending more money on this than any other secular project of the time. And as a result today it is magnificent. To get an exclusive tour, I'm meeting curator Kate Hurd.
Hello Kate, how are you? Hello, hello. Thanks for having me in your castle. Now, I always think of Windsor as a sort of medieval fortress, but actually it's like a palatial stately home, isn't it?
It is. Whose fault is that? Well, it's a medieval castle, but the castle you see today is large.
the work of George IV, who was king from 1820. And he turned it into a sort of modern house. He did. He inherited a castle which had been changed from the medieval castle in the 17th century.
His parents had made some changes and for him it didn't. work as a modern royal residence so he set about this huge program of rebuilding and reconstructing and redesigning. This is just wonderful this is his original entrance hall so he opened it up so his visitors would come through that door and would be able to walk into this magnificent space.
But this feels a little bit to me like a 19th century Gothic which we think of being later in the century do we? It is absolutely it's and it was always the entrance to the castle. but it was a smaller entrance.
George III had had a staircase coming up, but George IV opens it up, but he's so aware of the medieval history of the castle, he does it in that Gothic style. So for people who don't know what I'm talking about, it's kind of fake, really. It's reimagined Gothic. Fake in a sense, but reimagined. They were very consciously looking back to particularly the reign of Edward III, who was another great builder at the castle.
Crepes is amazing. vaulting system. It's stunning isn't it? And yet, and so I guess visitors come here and think oh medieval, in fact it's only 150, 200 years old. Absolutely, George IV had been wanting to get his hands on Windsor for so long and he really goes to town with this medieval history when he does.
You say that, is that because Windsor is in some ways the sort of spiritual core of the English and British monarchy? It's the medieval fortress, he's very interested in medieval history and it's possibly possibly the most imposing residence. Remember Buckingham Palace, which is now really grand. When he inherited it, it was quite a small townhouse his mother had lived in.
So this is the grandest and most imposing of the royal residences. And I guess it's the one associated with Edward III that they all love. Absolutely, absolutely.
Charles II was very fond of it here as well. He'd also lived here as a boy. I mean, remember, it's his family home as Prince of Wales.
So he has a great fondness for the place. So this is their, are they allowed to say, but is this their sort of... of premier residence?
I think for George IV it is the one that he becomes most interested in, it's the one that he really, we know that he spends hours poring over the redesigns, he becomes really occupied by it, so I think for him it is the castle that he, or the castle, the residence that he spends the most time on. And what about the subsequent ones you've got, what about Victoria, his niece, what did she make of it? Well Queen Victoria inherited it, she also made great changes to the castle, so the space that we're in, you can hear it echoing, you can hear the size of it. it she bricks it off because she changes the staircase again she bricks it off she doesn't want this grand entrance um and it's only now that it's been opened up again and we can appreciate that great vision of of george the fourth who wanted his guests to come up that wonderful approach the long walk and through those through those doors definitely why did victor break it off i think she just again it's a different time the castle has different needs you know each each generation needs something different from it amazing right where are we off to next i think let's go to the state department let's do it This is the grandest staircase I've ever seen in my life Isn't it wonderful? It's the entrance to the State Apartments With George IV looking over it Looking at all the visitors to his new rooms Absolutely, yes And a huge amount of weapons, arms and armour Yes from the Royal Collection, that historic collection that goes right the way back.
But George IV is a big collector of arms and armour as well. He's obsessed with the military, isn't he? Absolutely. Everything he can do, he's not allowed to fight, but he forms this incredible collection. And even more muskets.
and swords here? Absolutely, in the medieval castle this space would have formed a guard chain, it would have protected the State Apartments so that this displays reflect that function. And I'm trying to think, Windsor Castle, I think it was threatened when during the Civil War at King John when Prince Louis came over, was it besieged at the time? No other besiegers as it were, Henry VIII I know during the Pilgrimage of Grace was here and there was a worry that it would be besieged but it wasn't. So now which room is this?
Just this way. Isn't it stunning? Wow.
This is the Waterloo Chamber, which holds this incredible series of portraits, largely by Sir Thomas Lawrence, of the men who were responsible for the defeat of Napoleon in the early 19th century. We've got Wellington up there. Absolutely.
Commander at Waterloo. Blucher, his key ally at Waterloo. Yeah. Wow.
It's an incredible series of portraits. Emperor of Austria. Yes. So George IV is very kind to let his dad go above the mantelpiece.
George III is the monarch who is ruling the country, so at that point our George is Prince Regent, so he acknowledges his father's role, but he puts himself in very clear second place. because this is basically all the crowned heads and the leading aristocratic military of Europe, all for whom Napoleon represented an existential threat. So this is a giant celebration.
Yes, and this commission starts before the Battle of Waterloo. It dates from 1840. when they thought that Napoleon had been defeated and George sends Thomas Lawrence out to make these incredible paintings. And the half-lengths of the statesman as well.
He's acknowledging the role of statesmanship in creating that piece after Waterloo, after the fall of Napoleon. Was this room always a sort of banqueting hall? No, in the medieval castle, you're standing in the open air. So you're in one of Edward III's courtyards in the middle of a run of apartments. And George IV had...
commissioned these incredible paintings, he wants a Waterloo gallery and this space is earmarked for it but it's not really finished until after his death so it's roofed over and then these wonderful lights are added and it's not really finished until the reign of Queen Victoria. How funny, I always think of a very modern idea which you take your big atrium, your big courtyards and turn them into an atrium but actually we're doing it in the 19th century. Absolutely, it's a wonderful use of the space and the space also looks back to the earlier castle, to the 17th century castle, you can see these wonderful... pieces of wood carving and they're taken from Charles the Second's chapel there by Grindling Gibbons, reused in this space and they work wonderfully here.
Wow. This is St George's Hall which is... The world famous.
Fantastic and has always had the function of a great hall for meetings, for feastings, for great occasions. And this was a medieval hall? Originally this space was Edward III's. We still have Edward III's under Croft Beneath, which is just recently opened up for the first time. It becomes under Charles II a very baroque space.
It looks very different with wall paintings. Under George IV, it's turned again into a medieval-looking space, a Gothic space, and he lengthens the hall by essentially knocking the chapel and the hall together. But it's not entirely successful. His ceiling, his Gothic ceiling, is quite low, and everything is plaster, essentially a plaster fake for a medieval building.
The 1992 fire affected this space very badly. So what you see again is the reconstruction in 1992 of this great Gothic space. space, this amazing hammer beam ceiling roof designed by Giles Downes, it's in green oak, it's a masterpiece of craftsmanship which the Hall has always been all that way back. It's amazing, it's something so British about this that it's a reconstruction of a reimagining of a...
and yet so it's both very historic and very long but also ever-changing. Ever-changing but always grounded in history and it reflects the importance of the castle as the seat of the order. of the garter which is the oldest order of chivalry founded again by Edward III in 1348 and so the shields you can see decorating the space are the shields of the knights of the garter all the way back. Really?
Yes. That's a remarkable continuity isn't it? It's stunning. A lot of arms and armour on the walls again I'm noticing a theme here.
Yes. And what's that? That's a very fine one up there. That's wonderful that is the champion's armour which was last used at the coronation of George IV.
What's that? That is is traditionally going all the way back to the Middle Ages, a champion defends the king's honor after he's been crowned and issues a challenge to anyone who may want to challenge the new king and throws down his gauntlet. And that is the armor that's worn by the champion.
It's a hereditary office. Really? Whoever that was and his father and his grandfather would ride through the coronation? It's the Dimmock family, absolutely.
George IV is the last person to have had the champion appear at his coronation. And so he rides a horse through the... party and throws down the gauntlet.
He does indeed. Through the coronation banquet for George IV in Westminster Hall, the horse rides in as part of the ceremony. What happens if grandson Dimmock was a bit of a softy?
He still gets to do it. And they still have functions in there? Still used as a space that is for feasting, for state occasions. It's still used in the way that Edward III would have been familiar with.
And as we leave, there's George IV. There's our George again. Yes. Looking down on what he's built. It's a nice little room, isn't it?
Isn't it fantastic, that octagon? Looking back again to the medieval precedent, places like Ely Cathedral with the octagon there. And who's this?
Is this Henry VIII? This is Henry VIII, yes. I don't believe it, that's so cool. You get that sense of...
the figure, don't you? Really imposing presence, just amazing. He must have had to let that out slightly, has he? Yes, well I think it was probably made for him in his maturing years. And then we've got all the silver and the...
Some of that wonderful... Yeah, silver and gilt from the Royal Collection, really stunning pieces. I suppose this just accumulated over hundreds of years.
Absolutely, just added to by each generation. That's amazing. That's unique, the continuity of the British state and its royal tradition means that you must just have centuries and centuries of all these treasures. Absolutely, yes.
Each monarch is also aware of the history, so you get George IV looking back to the Middle Ages and looking back to the Middle Ages. to the Baroque period and building on that when he's building his own collection. So you get that awareness of the layers too.
Where next? This way. So this is the really wonderful Crimson Drawing Room.
Wow, this is peak George IV. It's just so opulent and gorgeous, isn't it? It is, it was one of his private apartments.
It was one of his major reception rooms, so he would have private guests here, but it's one of his... So do you think we're getting close to his tastes and his... I think we're right in the middle of his taste here.
It's very different from the rest of the castle. It's in this French neoclassical taste that he loved all his life. It's a stunning space. And it's this French...
these objects that he purchased are now so famous at Buckingham Palace and everywhere else because he just hoovered this stuff up, didn't he? Absolutely. I mean, all this wonderful furniture was commissioned by him to furnish. Obviously, he's got a small residence as prince and then he gains Buckingham Palace, he gains Windsor Castle, he needs all this furniture to fill it up.
So he commissions these wonderful suites of furniture. Just stunning. I just love the gilding detail on these doors. Yes. Some of the gilding on the doors was brought from Carlton House again.
and so he brings quite a bit of material from Carlton House. The fireplace actually dates from 1807, before this room was established, and is from Carlton House and was brought here when Carlton House's London residence was demolished. And did this room survive the Great Fire in the 19th century? No, very sadly this room was very badly damaged, but it was reconstructed using the original documents from George IV's reign.
When George IV... is planning this room. A set of really magnificent watercolours are made for him to show what the room might look like and that archive he uses in planning his spaces has been reused in the 1990s for planning this space and it's beautiful. He would have felt very at home in this room even though it is largely reconstructed.
So in the centre of this gigantic royal palace, administrative headquarters, medieval, you think this is kind of George IV's post. personal space. I think this is where we meet him most of all. The place where he would have relaxed. He's got his portraits of his sisters on the wall.
I think he would have enjoyed this space. And he was a sad man in many ways. He was extraordinarily infirm with a variety of illnesses towards the end of his life. It's strange to think of him sitting here in those declares when he was almost a recluse, wasn't he? He was a recluse.
He didn't like people looking at him. He'd been tortured by satirists. He really did withdraw during... his reign, that ten-year reign, but he surrounded himself with these incredible objects he'd collected, and he clearly takes such pleasure in craftsmanship and beauty and this beautiful sort of skill in creating things in textures and colour, so you can imagine him very happy in these rooms.
Isn't it funny that he probably felt insecure because compared to, say, George II or the Duke of Cumberland, you know, his martial relatives, he'd never fought on the battlefield, and yet actually, what the... modern world looks for now is a collector and interior designer. So his reputation is probably higher than ever. We can appreciate him now for these amazing things he left us, this incredible collection he formed. This is one of the most magnificent medieval strongholds, well probably anywhere in Western Europe, certainly in England.
It's Arundel Castle. It's been home to the Dukes of Norfolk now for generations. The original piece of the castle, founded and built just after the Norman Conquest in about 1067, is this motte here, man-made hill to provide defence, and on top of it a round keep.
Originally that would have been wooden, and in the... In the 12th century they replaced it with stone and that was the beginnings of a castle that expanded and expanded until it became one of the largest and most noble residences anywhere in the UK. This castle has been pretty much in the same family since the 12th century. Since the Dorbigny family took it over 800 years ago it's passed down from father to son and occasionally from father to daughter as well.
So the place to start this... look around the castle clearly the reason it's here in the first place is this mighty keep up here done a lot of climbing and i'm not even at the keep yet to keep the highest strongest point of this castle built on top of the norman These medieval castles weren't built for people of my height, that's for sure. It's always so exciting up a spiral staircase.
And this is a great view. Look at this. The keep, the stone keep, the beating heart of the castle.
This was the absolute strong point. Built out of stone about 1140. There was a keep here, but it was made out of wood in William the Conqueror's time, the early Norman conquest. And this is on the highest point of ground you can see for miles around here. This ultimately is where the defenders would come.
and make their final stand when they were besieged. And the castle was besieged three times in its long history. The keep had good strong walls, one heavily guarded entrance. The entrance is right under my feet now, and these were called brettice doors.
So they were a place where you'd, as people were trying to get into the castle, get into this final ring of defence, you'd be able to hurl down projectiles. You'd throw down all sorts of stuff. You'd throw down human mess.
You'd throw down sticks, stones, spears, javelins. But... Also, you'd throw down boiling water, not oil. These aren't waste oil, it was too valuable, very useful. Boiling water did the job just as well.
Think about it, inflicting terrible damage on the people down below. The attackers trying to get in. But come round here, let's keep having a look at this round keep.
Perfectly round keep, quite unusual. One of the things that makes Arundel Castle particularly famous. So you get the sea along all that way.
You control all this countryside. You can see the sea down there. And then up there you can see north into the south down zone.
And I say there are... Norman castles that way as well. So you've got the whole country on an interconnecting grid of castles.
But come over here. This is the important point. Everyone always asks you, where did people go to the toilet in the Middle Ages?
Well, the answer is right here. This is called the Garderobe. It was a toilet. Come on, if you come and have a look right in there, you'll see today there's some mesh and some bars across it. You don't fall down, but you're the human.
The wees and the poos all went down there where they lay, particularly in the summer, they lay in a big stinky part at the bottom which was big smelly and attracted lots of flies as well. But let's keep going round the edge of this keep. There's a wonderful well down there, burrowed 45 metres through the motte on which this castle sits.
And you can see why this is basically what you have to build when your neighbours absolutely hate you. The Norman conquerors came here and with only a few thousand people, several thousand people, they managed to maintain control over a country of a couple of million people. And they did that by using force multipliers, by using stone and cement to erect these virtually impenetrable castles.
So relatively small numbers of knights could gather in these castles, maintain their food, maintain their strength, and then sally forth into the countryside to nip any rebellion in the bud. It was often said in the post-conquest period that the... English were off to control the countryside. They could swarm around, they could cause trouble, but the Normans controlled the castles and they could restore order.
It might be long and bloody, but eventually they would do it. Right, let's try and head right up to the tower. Just climbing up onto the roof here. It never gets boring exploring castles like this and being given the access to all the little rooftops.
Look at this view, it's extraordinary. There you can see the round keep right beneath us. This is the highest point of Arundel Castle, round keep there.
And outside that you get the North Bailey. This castle's unusual for having two Baileys. So you've got the motte in the middle with the castle on top, the keep on top, and these Baileys which are like big fortified yards outside.
And this one stretches right the way over there. So you can see multiple layers of defence. That made this castle such a...
Effective defensive proposition. And what I like about being up here is when you just get this sense of transition from the coast, the sea, the flat lands by the shore, up into the slightly more wild, higher ground of the South Downs. And you can see this was the challenge that this area presented to the Normans.
As they advanced inland from the coast, that's Normandy that way, the ships could be in Normandy in a day. Although it seems like a long way away now, actually the English Channel was the link. It was that that was the difficult land to traverse up there and the Normans went through this country building a network of castles every few miles, making sure that there was no important area of this new kingdom that they were trying to stamp their control over that didn't have a castle, a strong point.
So Norman knights could ride out, they could see a lot, they had a huge advantage of sight, they could see the neighbouring villages, they could see if there was trouble. They could ride out within a day on their horses and then ride back and there would always be a castle which they could retreat to Uh in the evening. It's an awesome Method of control from up here looking to the southwest we can see one of arundel's other architectural treasures the Roman catholic cathedral up there on the other piece of high ground now.
It looks like it's about 700 years old It's a magnificent example of french Gothic architecture. In fact, it's quite recent. It was only commissioned in the 1860s by the Duke of Norfolk here, who was Britain's premier Roman Catholic.
When it became safe enough for the Roman Catholics to celebrate their religion again in public, he commissioned this vast cathedral, which is really far too big for this, well, village or small town. But it's designed to show that Catholics were back in the UK. And he got to design it, he got the designer, a man called Joseph Hanson.
who also built handsome cabs in London. So it looks like a high medieval cathedral. In fact, it's a triumph of Victorian neo-Gothic architectural fashion.
This is fascinating here. This is an example of a deliberate hole that's been left in these defences of the keep itself. It's like a chimney.
It's a way of... It's called a sally port. It's a way of a young, excited volunteer heading out. being lowered down on a rope, climbing down onto the mot, which is the big mound of earth this keep is built on, and then scurrying around, having a look at the besiegers' positions, their health, their supplies, just doing a general reconnoiter. Then when he's finished doing that, he can come back here, rope be lowered down, he'd be pulled back up.
So you try and leave as few ways of getting in and out of the keep as possible, but this was a vital one because it was secret and it was almost impenetrable. You'd never, as an attacking force, there'd be no way of getting up here, a knight in full armour. Fascinating. Medieval life of Arundel Castle, if you like, came to an end in 1643 when parliamentary forces managed to capture the castle when the water supply ran out and the defenders surrendered. After that the victorious parliamentarian side in the Civil War, destroyed many of the great aristocratic and royal castles of England, thinking they would be potential nuclei for rebellion against the parliamentary regime.
For about 150 years after that... like so many other castles around England and Wales, this was a ruin. But then the family, who maintained their ownership of it, came into money during the Industrial Revolution.
They owned a huge amount of land in the north, they owned most of the land on which Sheffield is now built, so they sold Sheffield and renovated this castle. And in doing so gave Arundel Castle an entirely new lease of life, which is why it's not just a Norman, Plantagenet, medieval castle to this day, but it's actually a magnificent 19th century stately home. as well and nowhere shows that more clearly than this chapel.
This is a very special place, it's full of symbolism because this chapel is one of the most perfect examples of Catholic revivalism in 19th century Britain. Catholicism had been almost outlawed, Catholics had been effectively banned from public life through much of the previous century since the Reformation but now in the 19th century many of those punitive restrictions were lifted and people could again celebrate being Catholics. and the Duke of Norfolk, who was the most prominent Catholic in England at the time, he decided he would build this magnificent chapel, echoing back to the days when Catholicism had been the state religion, echoing some of the most magnificent architecture, places like Lincoln Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.
He even used marble from the same quarries that were providing marble for those medieval cathedrals around England. This is about the rebirth of Catholicism. Catholicism in England. Now this terrifying looking weapon here, this double-edged massive broadsword, is in the castle's armoury and allegedly belonged to Mr Beavis, who was the castle's caretaker, if you like. He was said to be so tall he could stroll across the Isle of Wight at low tide.
He was a sort of semi-mythical figure. But I imagine a giant man wielding this sword would have been a fairly impressive gatekeeper. I Of the many treasures in Arundel Castle, this one is regarded by everyone here as the most precious because it is the golden rosary beads of Mary, Queen of Scots.
She was executed by Elizabeth Tudor for being Catholic and being, well, having a slightly better claim for the throne than Elizabeth Tudor had, arguably. And she was killed in 1587, but she had a relationship with this family. The fourth Duke of Norfolk had proposed... marriage to Mary Queen of Scots which was tantamount to declaring an interest in the English throne so he'd been executed by the Tudors as well so when she died she asked for some of her personal possessions to be left to his heirs so to the the family and that's how they're still in the possession of the modern Duke of Norfolk including this rather beautiful necklace here little fleur-de-lis showing that Mary Queen of Scots had also previously been the Queen of France as well should be married to the French King.
These are, to a history geek like me, priceless. Of the many glorious rooms in this castle, none is more special than this. The library, 34 meters long, 10,000 books, built at the very end of the 18th century. One father and son team who said be the best wood carvers in all the land came down from Cumbria in the north of England and did this all the magnificent carving here it took about just over 15 years to build it is the oldest of the rooms in this new sort of stately home part of the castle it was such a glorious room that when they came to refurbish the rest of the 19th century they they left this room pretty much alone and you can see why This is one of the most extraordinary rooms you'll ever see, the Barons Hall.
Designed to look like a giant medieval hall, standing on the spot the medieval hall used to be on before it was destroyed during the Civil War. Given a glorious new life right at the end of the 19th century so it's not actually that old, or it looks old, it's not actually that old, but designed to, like so much the rest of this restoration, evoke. in its architecture a high medieval period. Look at the 15 meters up beautiful ham bean roof all from oak trees growing on the estate, 40 meter long room portraits of the Dukes of Norfolk on the wall, stained glass windows featuring scenes from the family history of this remarkably long line of earls and dukes who still, the family of which still own the castle.
I think the 19th century Duke of Norfolk is trying to build a giant monument, a sort of shrine, for his vision of a medieval period. A medieval world in which noble families like his own ruled Britain and noble families like his own owed their wealth, their status and their land. Headingham is wonderful for any number of reasons, but one of the them is that it's an almost arch-typical example of Norman-style castles. There's two things going on here.
The first is that this is a perfect example of what we call a Mott and Bailey defensive structure. So a bunch of people from the local area, probably serfs, would have been forced to come dig out a bunch of ground and build these foundations themselves in a defensive structure. Then on top of that you have the bailey, in this case the keep that you can see here.
What we're unfortunately missing here would be what we call a curtain wall. So it would have been a defensive wall on top of the motte itself around the edges. That would be where you would defend a castle in the first instance. If everything goes wrong you then retreat inside the bailey itself with the entire household.
Mott and Baileys also have other features that sort of help when you're attempting to violently subjugate a bunch of people, and one of them is that it's very difficult to get into. By very virtue of the Mott, you've got to get in over a bridge, of which this is a really fine example. Technically, this is not a Norman bridge, it's Tudor. But what it shows us is how well Mott & Bailey architecture works. Even half a millennium later, you still need to build bridges in order to get over it.
It's a really, really great way of controlling access and egress to your castle and making sure that no other armies or violent mobs can sneak up on you. These windows are extremely exciting not just because they're a great example of Norman Romanesque architecture, which they certainly are, but because they also have some cool little architectural details. So you'll notice on all of them that they have little columns off to either side. And these are something that we call a false arcade. It's meant to remind you specifically of Roman architecture.
They want you thinking of the big ionic and Doric pillars that you would see in a Roman villa. But the other thing you'll see going on is at the very top level here, you'll see that zigzag pattern over the arch. This is called a chevron, and it's specific to English Norman architecture in particular.
You're not going to find that back on the continent in France now. It's only here, and it's only brought over by the Normans when they invaded. You'll also notice that all of the windows are different.
So here at ground level, you just have these slits in the wall, and all that's doing is letting light into the interior. That's because the people on the very bottom level of the castle are the very most common people who are just servants. essentially. Further up, that's our guard room. It's got a larger window, but it's still not huge.
Above that, that's the banqueting hall. So it's got pretty large windows that they're meant to impress everyone on inside. And then at the top of that, you have these really magnificent chevrons because that's what you'll see from over the curtain wall when you're approaching the Mott & Bailey as a specific example of Norman elegance.
It lets everybody know who's approaching the castle, who's in control, and that the land is under new management. As impressive as this keep is, and it undoubtedly is, we can see a few clues that there used to be a lot more here than there currently is. We've got a broken archway here, which is what used to be the chapel, and up Up on top of the keep, you can see where there used to be roof lines. First, there was a flat one directly over the grand entrance door.
And then there are some zigzag ones on top of that. They might have upgraded at a point in time. And all of these are great reminders of the fact that castle is actually a collective noun.
And it refers to all of the buildings that would have been inside the curtain wall. So what kind of buildings are we talking about? Well, you've got chapels that see to the religious needs of the community living in the castle. But you also have things like stables where you would keep all of your horses, cows, pigs, sheep, whatever it is you need.
You'd also have stuff like a blacksmith smithy. If you're making a lot of armor for any kind of military guys that live inside a castle, well, that's where you make it. But the other big thing that you have is your kitchens.
One of the major ways that we lose castles is fires. And so you want to keep any kind of cooking that is done with huge fires, when you're cooking for a large number of people, outside of your main kitchen. keep. You want to make sure that you're not introducing any way that you can burn the entire thing down.
This also introduces a really difficult level for cooking in the castle. If you're bringing a huge banquet up to the banqueting floor, which is on the second floor, you need to make sure that it's piping hot in order to get across the yard, up the stairs, and into the keep itself. These stairs wouldn't have actually been extant in the medieval period and you You can kind of tell from what is missing. As we can see from the extant roof lines along there, there would have been buildings here, so there's no way you could have had a staircase up as well.
This was, however, supposed to be the main entrance to the castle. We can tell that because, again, you see these great chevrons over the door. It's very fancy. It's really elaborate.
It's meant to impress you as you come inside. The other thing that we can see here is this rounded roofline, and that's from a later edition chapel that would have been put here. Well, why would you need two chapels? Sometimes people just like to build extra chapels if they have a specific devotion to a saint.
So, for example, one sort of chapel that people really like to add on later are Marian chapels. They're specifically devoted to the Virgin Mary, and they're for people who feel really piously moved by one individual in particular. Or, if you're just a really pious person in general, maybe you want to make your own mark on the family's castle. You want a new architectural style added, so you put your chapel on the ground. later to remind everyone that you were here.
So how does one become a member of the nobility? As a very, very general rule of thumb, someone gets land and power or titles as member of the nobility in exchange for military service to the king. This is particularly true here in England after the Norman conquests. When the new king comes over from Normandy, in the first place, you need a whole army to fight off the people already living here, and in the second place, the Normans are involved in a in a violent military occupation of a fairly hostile country.
You need lots of armed members of the nobility to establish that there's a new king and that there's also a new culture that's taking over in England. This is the case of the de Vere family who we're going to be talking about today. Aubrey de Vere I comes over with the Norman conquests and we first see records of him in 1089 in the Domesday Book.
Aubrey de Vere is called Aubrey the Chamberlain, which means that he's specifically tied up with the king's retinue itself. A chamberlain is the sort of person who will help the king by overseeing any deeds that he signs or any charters. If you see any major royal medieval charter, down the bottom there'll be a list of names of various nobility who have witnessed whatever it is that the king does. The other thing that they do is make sure that everyone outside in that kingdom understands that this has come to pass. As such close proximity to the king indicates, The De Vere family are extremely important.
And soon enough, they have land in nine different counties throughout England. In particular, they have huge holdings in Essex and in Oxfordshire. So, come on, let's go inside and see what life would have been like for the De Veres.
As we come in through the main entrance, this is the first room that anyone would enter. And in fact, it's actually the only room that the great majority of people who come to visit the De Vere's are ever going to enter. This is the guards room. And as the name indicates, it's where all of the knights...
the guards of the De Vere family would hang out. There's a reason for that. If you're coming into the castle, the De Vere's want you to see their military power right away.
They want you to see how many people that they have in their army and they want you to understand that they have a great deal of power. over the land. Before you get to them, you're going to have to get past their army, quite literally. As you can probably tell, this room is currently undergoing some renovations. This isn't particularly far off from what you would have seen in the medieval period.
We've got a brand new timber floor that's just been put down, and indeed you would have a timber floor in the period. The major difference is over the top we would probably see some rushes on the floor, and the rushes do two things. One of the things they do is baffle sound.
So if you're So if you've got, you know, what's essentially a private army of men hanging out in your basement, you probably want to help keep that down. The other thing that they do is help to keep it warmer. As you can see from the giant fireplace behind me, and you can probably tell from a large stone room this big, it would be quite cold in the winter.
So you're going to want any extra help that you can get. The new floors in here are actually a great reminder of how powerful and rich the Devere family were. When you build a castle, it doesn't just stay pristine.
You have to have a lot of people. You have to constantly be updating it and renewing parts of it, especially when you have hundreds of people coming and going through it. There's wear and tear that's extremely costly to keep up, and only an extremely wealthy and powerful family like the de Verres would be able to do that. From the guard room, we can continue through the castle via the staircase here. Staircase can take us into one of two places.
We can go downstairs into the cellars and into the dungeons, or if we're particularly important, lucky. or in some kind of legal trouble, we can go upstairs to the main bank reading table. table and into the presence of the Deveres. A big thing that nobles do is get involved in war. Almost everyone who is involved in the Norman conquest fought alongside the king when the king came here.
But members of nobility are also saying that they're willing to get involved with any sort of military conflicts in the future. In the medieval period, there can be a lot of fighting and forth between various royal houses. This can happen because the way that inheritance works is very complicated. Especially if you're a group of Normans who come from what we call now France and are controlling things in England, France is an extremely well- wealthy place. It's got a lot of money.
So you're going to be interested in making sure that you continue to control that even if the center of your power is here in England. So in exchange for beating people up, the nobility get huge tracts of land wherever it is the king might have them. Since they are having all of their needs met by the peasants that they oversee, they can spend all of their leisure time training for military purposes.
This means that they are training in sword combat from a very, very early age. and they also are trained in chivalry. The term chivalry comes from the French word chevalerie, and it has specifically to do with chevals, horses, and what people who are going around on the medieval equivalent of tanks should do in order to be polite to the people around them.
When we talk about chivalry, a lot of the time what we're talking about is what knights consider to be their duties to God, to their local lord, and to each other. For knights, one of the best things about war is you have an opportunity to cast. capture other knights. Because once you do, you can take him back home and ransom him for all of the money that his family has.
So one way of thinking about medieval warfare is thinking about it like rich guy tag. So knights often have a great deal of respect for each other, even if they're on opposite sides of the battle lines. Not just because they're some chivalric ideal of respect. but because there are real monetary benefits to being next to guys that you take advantage of.
This is just another way that noble life is completely different to the life of commoners. As you come up the stairs here, you will notice that it's a long way up from the guards room, and this is kind of on purpose. When you come into the presence of the de Vere's here in the main banqueting hall, they want you to be a little off-put. You'll be out of breath and you'll be slightly discombobulated by the grandeur that you're coming into.
Why are you coming in to see the de Vere's here? Well, it might be for any kind of jurisdictional or legal proceeding. The de Vere's are the earls of Oxford by the time that Aubrey III is on the throne here.
They also own most of the land from here all the way to the seacoast. There is Oxford itself, and there are also lots of parcels of land scattered across England in general. And if you get in trouble or you need any property dispute taken care of, you need to come here to Heddingham and have the De Vere's sorted out. So what's it like to be in the banqueting hall here and in the presence of the De Vere's?
It's kind of overwhelming. If you look above us, that's a minstrels gallery. So as you come in, you might be hearing wonderful music by all the musicians and the employ of the De Vere's. You'll see the beautiful paintings on all the walls. Look at all the chevron work over every one of these windows.
And look how many windows there are. That's incredibly expensive. How many masons were working on that? Say you're looking. enough to be at one of the De Vere's banquets.
You're sitting here enjoying wonderful food that's come from the kitchens outside, down two flights of stairs, and across the yard. How many people does it take to cook that and then bring it up and serve it? This is an absolutely huge house that the De Vere's are running.
And the De Vere's are letting you know when you're at a banquet how powerful they are, how rich they are, and exactly how many people are in their employ and their command. As extremely grand as this room obviously is right now. This isn't quite what it would have looked like in the medieval period.
Medieval castles were actually very brightly painted, so all the stonework that you can see coming through the plaster here wouldn't have been seen. All the plaster work over the top would have been painted with bright geometric shapes. They're not unlike the chevrons that we see over the arches here. Medieval people loved color and they loved patterns, so when we think about castles now we tend to think of them as a little bit dark and a little bit dingy, but nothing could be further from the truth, they were actually really fond of color in ways that we would find a little bit gaudy ourselves. One of the most incredibly exciting things about this room is this glorious Norman arch here.
In fact, this is thought to be the largest still extant Norman arch in existence. existence. It's about 28 feet wide. This is an incredible feat of architecture and just this arch is responsible for holding up almost the entire weight of the castle.
Think about what that means about 900 years ago. The architecture that needs to go into that, the engineering, and all of this has been made without any kind of calculators. It's all done by hand and it's all done by actual hand tools. The amount of money and influence that it takes to get something like this built is absolutely incredible, and we're really lucky that it's still standing.
So the great majority of the banqueting hall is about display, but also there are some little secrets and things you aren't supposed to see. So say you've come to see the DeVeers on a legal matter, and maybe you're not in the best mood. You come up the stairs, you're over, overawed by everything you see, and there they are on either side of the fire. Part of that is because they don't want you to notice that this is where the guards are. That's specifically at your eyeline, and you won't be able to turn around and see it.
So say things don't go your way, way illegally and you decide you're going to take matters into your own hand. If you rush the DeVeers, their guards will come out of this niche and they will block any kind of violent attack. Guard spaces like this are extremely important because when you're this powerful and rich, you don't always make a lot of friends.
A lot of the DeVeers find out the hard way what happens when you come up against common people who don't have your interests at heart. When you're enforcing your power through violence, it engenders violent. reactions.
People like this need guards on hand all the time because they're doing violent things and it means that ordinary people oftentimes feel like they have no recourse other than violence themselves. All of this money and all of this power, however, doesn't necessarily insulate you from everything that happens in the world. If you're involved in very violent things and you are a devout Christian, which, again, most Europeans are at the time, you might be worried about... the state of your soul when you die. The de Verres do this with the Colne Priory in Essex.
There they endow an entire group of monks to pray for their family's souls later on. It's a bit of a win-win. The monks get somewhere to live, the de Verres don't have to worry so much about all the violence that they do in life. The second Aubrey de Vere is killed at the hands of a London mob in 1141. His body, however, is taken back to the Colne Priory, and he's buried there along with his father, and his soul is prayed to into perpetuity by the monks. The de Vere story does not stop there, however.
The third Aubrey de Vere is named the Earl of Oxford by the king. This is an indication of how entwined the house of de Vere is with the kings here in England. Earls are a particularly high up section of the nobility.
So this means that the de Verres have come up even further in the world than they were before. As a general rule of thumb, the further up you go in a castle, the closer you are to the inner circle of the family who lives there. Certainly true of the de Verres. But because the de Verres are so incredibly wealthy, while you're on the way to their private chamber, you've got one stop on the way, and that's the Minstrel Gallery.
This particularly ornate Norman stonework is a kind of medieval signage. It lets you know that you're still in a public place. It's so incredibly intricate that it lets you...
know, this is still something for the average person. Anything beyond this is going to be private and strictly for the de Vere family themselves. From up here in the minstrel gallery we get a really cool idea of what it looks like down in the banqueting hall.
But we also have a really interesting way of looking at arches. You might notice that here in the banqueting hall the exact opposite thing is true from the windows outside. Outside, we have the chevron windows up at the very top of the castle where everyone will see them.
Here, the chevron arches are at the bottom and closer to your eyeline. And we have the simpler arches with just the columns up near the top where you're less likely to... looking when you're at a banquet.
As we exit the Minstrel Gallery, we can go up the stairs again. Our first stop ordinarily would be the De Vere family rooms. They are undergoing construction right now, which is actually great news because it means that we can prime to their private lives for generations to come once that's done.
But even more exciting, we can go up one more again and get onto the roof of the castle. Look at the view! I haven't just brought you up to the top of Castle Haddingham to look at the view, however. I want to talk a little bit about the roof, and that's because it's just kind of close to what we would expect to see from a medieval castle roof.
It would probably... be lined with lead, which helps keep the rain off. We probably would see some major ridging like this to keep the water flowing down.
This gives you an idea of how responsive medieval architecture can be to its place. You wouldn't guess on a day like this, but obviously, can be very rainy. Things like channeling water to the right place really means something if you have a huge stone building like this. You need to make sure that water gets off of the roof and ideally as far away as you can possibly get from the foundations itself.
This will keep you nice and dry once you've spent a bunch of money on a really expensive building. One of the differences that we see here from the medieval period is actually all this great woodland. In the medieval period you wouldn't want this much wood around for a number of reasons. The first is is if you're noble and all of the money that you make to keep stuff like your great castle going comes from the countryside, you need that to be farmland and you want it to be working.
Castles aren't just somewhere to live and they're not just a fortification for somewhere to bring armies out of. They're also a really potent and powerful symbol of who controls the land. You can see how high up we are here even in the 21st century. In the 11th century, this is a huge building.
It's monumentally large. This reminds all of the peasants in the... the surrounding countryside, who controls you and who's watching over you.
We've come into the Georgian House on the grounds here of Heddingham Castle to have a look at some of the documents associated with it. This wonderful document right here is a 19th century scroll showing the lineage of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. And very interestingly, it shows us one of the ways that you can become very important to the king's court. So up top we can see the de Vere family itself but here with the two lions is William the Conqueror and we can see on here that his sister Beatrice gets married to Aubrey de Vere. Great way to to make sure that you are part of the king's inner circle, just marry into it.
This is a really interesting document because it shows us how noble houses like the de Verres can track their lineage in a really intricate way over centuries. That's because if you're as important as the de Verres, you tend to stay important. It's really difficult to alienate wealth like that from a family.
This is exactly the opposite of what we see from the peasant families, however. Your family can lose everything in just a decade if you have a poor enough harvest and you get into debt. That's not something that happens with families like the de Verres.
What we've got here is a really lovely rendering of what the castle grounds would have been like in the medieval period. So as you can see, see there's a lot less forest and everything is essentially cultivated. Each one of those strips would represent a particular family's holding for the peasantry. This is a really exciting document because it shows us the lands around the castle itself. So in the middle we see the castle, but up here we see the great park and over here we see the little park.
And in particular, one of noble people's favorite aspects of owning a castle. The multiple deer parks and hunting lodges. A huge way of spending your time when you're a noble is to go deer hunting. And all of the deer in those parks would be protected and earmarked for you. Having ready access to venison is a really big deal at the time.
And it's also just essentially a very popular sport. The interesting thing about the Aubrey's Devere is that I can say that to you, the Aubrey's Devere. And there's a reason why you continue to name your son exactly the same thing.
What these names are doing is underlying the generalized power of this specific household. It can mean that we sort of forget the individual intricacies of one person's life over another. And this is kind of ironic because these are the people that we know the most about.
When we come to places like Heddingham, it's easy to forget about any aspect of medieval society other than the nobility. That's pretty much by design. The de Vere family only wants you to think about them, their power, and their authority when you see this building. However, it's not just the DeVeers who live here. Let's not forget that there are clergy members who are working at the two chapels here on the property, as well as at the Cone Priory further away here in Essex.
All of this power and privilege is also maintained off of the work that peasants are doing in the countryside. It's the peasants working in fields, paying their taxes, and paying their rent to the de Vere's that allows them to live such an incredibly lavish lifestyle. All of the luxury goods inside of a castle like Heddingham will be supplied by people who are working in what will become guilds in the 14th century. All of those tapestries, all of the fine cloth, all of that is as a result of very skilled people who are the best at what they do.
When we think about the medieval period, it's easy to think it was a landscape that was entirely populated by knights who live in castles and nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that castles are one of the few remaining physical symbols of a world that it's really difficult to see at times. The thing to take away from a place like Heddingham is not just that the de Vere's are an incredibly important family but it's that their prestige is made possible by thousands of people that we don't see whose lives were every bit as important.
I've come to Lincoln which is one of the most important settlements of Roman and medieval Britain. It's got a cathedral there which used to be the tallest structure on planet Earth. It took over from the Great Pyramid at Giza and during the Second World War the bombers used to fly out from Lincoln and that building was the last thing they saw and the first thing they saw coming back safely as well. But I'm here today to explore the castle which was once one of the most important strongholds in the kingdom.
From up here on top of the castle, from on top of the highest tower, you can see just how powerful the position of this castle is. But it's also incredibly strategic, and this is why. Down there is the Trent Valley.
The Trent is one of the mightiest rivers of England, vital for trade. since long before the Romans, but became an important Roman port. That is the main north-south road of Roman Britain.
And it here at Lincoln is where it joins another vital road which goes south-west all the way down to the West Country. So this is the main... crossroads of this part of the world. Then when the Vikings arrive in the early Middle Ages, they use the Trent as an artery right into the heart of Britain. The great heathen army, the one that topples Mercia and even threatens Wessex, enter England this way.
So when William the Conqueror takes over in 1066, Lincoln is one of his absolute priorities. He needs to fortify this place as much as possible. He needs to deal with the Viking threat to the northeast, east, and he needs to control...
all the surrounding terrain here and the Trent. And so he builds a remarkable castle. It's one of only two castles in Britain with a double mot. I'm standing on one, and the other one is just down there. Makes it pretty much unique.
The more cool thing about Lincoln Castle is it did the job that was required of it at least twice in its long history. It acted as a... impregnable bastion from which forces were able to counter-attack and swoop the enemy from the field.
The first time that happened was in about 1141, where the Empress, the claimant to the throne, Matilda, was able to defeat her cousin King Stephen during the Civil War known as the Anarchy. But the story that I love in Lincoln's history is the Great Battle of 1217, the forgotten French invasion. Prince Louis had advanced up from the south of England, he'd conquered basically two-thirds of England, his troops controlled this town here.
But the English maintained control of this castle and that allowed them to counterattack spectacularly. The castle had withstood a long siege. The commander was Nicola de la Haye.
She was a woman who the French had nicknamed the Hag, which seemed pretty popular with her own troops. But even she was running out of time. Luckily for her, a relieving force was marching. marching north under Plantagenet England's greatest knight, William the Marshal.
He headed right up here from Newark, but instead of taking the main road straight into Lincoln, he decided to skirt round this side of the castle, the west side of the castle, to punch through the besieging... force where it was weakest, over there. He then entered the castle and then together with Nicola's troops he was able to leave the castle through this east gate and crash down into the main body of besieging forces. It was a rout. The French and rebel troops were scattered.
It was a slaughter and England... had been saved. This was the decisive battle.
The throne of the young prince, Henry III, was secure. When William the Conqueror built the castle here, security was obviously up most in his mind, but the castle had another important function and that was administering the king's justice. And that function, nearly a thousand years later, is still being carried out right here in the castle. This is still the Lincoln magistrates courts where Lincoln criminals are brought, tried and sentenced.
In the late 19th century Some of the cases tried in here were capital cases. People who were found guilty could be executed. And that's where the remarkable William Marwood comes into the story. He was just a cobbler, a shoemaker from a local town, Horncastle. And yet he came and persuaded the governor of the castle, the governor of the prison here, that he had a new and fantastically humane way of executing prisoners.
He had perfected the long drop, a gallows that would snap a man's neck rather than strangle him painfully to death. It was so successful that after... Becoming executioner here, he got the job in London and executed some of Victorian England's most notorious criminals.
Once the criminals had been sentenced by the magistrate, they could then be locked up here in a gleaming, very innovative Victorian prison. This might seem a little old school to us now, but it was a lot better. than what had gone before when Georgian prisoners would be crammed into a big communal cell, preying on each other. This prison was based on a very different idea. Individuals would be kept in individual cells.
They'd be isolated from each other based on the idea that criminality was... somehow contagious. They'd spend hours alone in quiet contemplation of their sins or receiving religious instruction to try and improve them.
Men and women were imprisoned in separate wings and even the chapel was segregated. Some of the prisoners in here were children. They were as young as eight and they were in for petty criminality to say the least, sometimes just stealing a loaf of bread. But all of them faced the prospect of transportation. That's being sent in chains aboard ship to Australia for life, never to see their homes again.
It's always a treat to come to a building that's seen nearly a thousand years of continuous use. All here, like Lincoln Castle, has played such a powerful role in British history. That is why Magna Carta is here and the Forest Charter, these two foundational documents of the British Constitution. This castle has played a central part throughout the British national story.
This is an ancient borderland. For centuries it was ruled by hard men. Violence was a way of life.
The scars left by the brutal conflicts played out here are never very far away. In these green hills along these gentle rivers, men and their fortunes could be made and broken. Hay Castle once stood as a testament to the friction never far below the surface in this bitterly disputed region. a staging post for English expansion.
It was also a target for Welsh assaults. I've always been fascinated by the rugged and tough landscape of the Welsh marches. I've come here today to discover more about this castle's bloody past on a frontier between nations and to explore some of the stories of the men and women who sought their fortunes here. Today, Hay-on-Wye is a small, quiet, rural town in southern Wales, surrounded by green hills and rivers. But all of this peace and tranquillity hides a brutal past.
This was once part of the Welsh Marches, a lawless region between England and Wales, infamous for its brutality and frequent violent unrest. This turbulent reputation dates back more than a millennium. In the 8th century, Offa, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, would build a giant earthwork to mark the border of his authority. And it runs right through Hay. Offa's dike symbolically cut Wales off from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
And there's evidence of that rough frontier. Right here with Hay Castle. When William the Conqueror took the crown of England in 1066, he found he could push his authority no further west than the old Offa's Dyke.
The Welsh weren't to be conquered so easily. That put Hay right on the new frontier between Normans and Welsh. It's the reason we have Hay Castle here. and the whole string of castles all along the Welsh marches. It's all about the Normans trying to maintain and then push forward their frontier as the Welsh defended theirs.
In private hands for 900 years, no one's had the chance to study this castle and see what it can reveal about its turbulent origins. But in 2011, the castle was bought by a local charity. The new owners were intent on preserving it. and opening it to the public for the first time in its long history.
Now, with the restoration complete, what new evidence can it reveal about life in these troubled borderlands? I'm meeting Mary Ford. the learning and activities manager here, who's been involved in the preservation and restoration of Hay Castle and who knows all of its secrets. What's it been like trying to restore a castle like this for the last decade?
It's been an amazing privilege to be involved in it, actually. It all started back in 2011 when Richard Booth put the place on the market and a trust was formed to purchase it and keep it as a charity so that it could be open to the public. But it's been a long process, all that time finding the funding, going through the planning, getting the builders in, everything like that. It takes a long time. Was there a lot of restoration work to be done to the structure because people had been living in it?
A huge amount actually because this poor building has suffered two fires. So we had one in 1939 that destroyed the east section here and then another fire in 1977 that took hold of the west mansion over there. And what's it like being in a castle like this?
that's not been open to the public before. What have you been able to discover and uncover restoring this place? It's been amazing, actually, because we've found out all kinds of things that we didn't know before.
We've found artefacts, we've discovered dates that we didn't know when parts of it were built, all kinds of things that we never knew before. So it's been brilliant. So what can you tell us about the buildings that surround us here at Hay Castle? So we're standing in good position here, actually, because we can travel back through time.
So we start there in about 1830 with the coach house. That goes along to a little drainpipe and there's a service wing from 1700. Then we've got the big Jacobean mansion dated to about 1640. Then here we've got a little secret Tudor mansion and then our main Norman section which is this tower, the gate and the curtain wall. So what do we know about this oldest part of the castle? When does that date from? Well we think this tower dates to about 1160, 1170. And what we've discovered through this project is that it was probably actually a gateway tower to begin with, so there was a gate going through there and then they've added this gateway a little bit later.
We're not sure why, whether it was aesthetics or whether it was attacked and they needed something more defensive, and even this gate has different eras represented in it. See the lower flatter arch and then a much pointer arch. Yeah and you can see the development in that archway there. There's one, two, three, four different arches over there. Does that show us developing architecture, taste or a need to defend the castle again?
I think, once again, it's both. And I think that what's happened is there's been original arches built and then they've had a design change and then they've had to alter it. So that's why we see the slightly pointier arch there. And that is a later addition, which was the portcullis.
And I think that originally it didn't have a portcullis on it, and then they realised that they needed it, so they've added it on. And it's actually quite a separate construction on the front of the gatehouse. So the big iron slamming the gate shut is going to be about defending the castle.
So, I mean, these steps that go up to the wall, I guess, are additional defences. You can get right above the gates and attack anybody who's threatening your gates. Yeah, and I think it's that really interesting thing between... it being both a domestic setting and also a very defensive setting as well, because this was an area of huge amounts of fighting and battles. And they were trying to make inroads into Wales and the Welsh princes were fighting back.
So, yeah, we saw a lot going on around here. Defending the border was easier said than done. William I handed the job to three of his most trusted men. Hugh Davranche became Earl of Chester in the north. Roger de Montgomery was made Earl of Shrewsbury in the centre and William Fitz Osborne was created Earl of Hereford to control the southern borders.
Their job was to keep the Welsh out and drive Norman influence west. Both tasks would prove more than a little tricky. In a change of tactics Normans were offered smaller lordships in the border region. These parcels of land promised wealth, influence, freedom.
and power. All they had to do was go and win them. The promise of land and the transformation of a family's fortunes meant there was no shortage of enthusiastic and brutal knights swarming into the Welsh marches at places like Hay. They probably found more than they bargained for here.
Even if they managed to snatch some land, the real question was whether they could hold on to it. So we're down here at the gates. Do they give us any hint of the kind of attacks that the castle might have suffered over time? Yeah, they do.
We've got little bits of lead shot so you can find them in here. And when the kind of restoration work was done on them, they found huge amounts of it. So it's absolutely littered with bits of lead shot.
Fascinating. You see odd bits of it peppering the door all the way through. So do we know when those lead shots date from or do we know when this door dates from?
Well, this side we did dendrochronology on. and the date that came back for this was 1640, but the dendrochronology didn't give us any dates for that side. So then we did carbon dating, and the carbon dating for that side came back as around about 1340. So that side is much older than this side.
So another three centuries' worth of door here, just touching a 700-year-old door over this side. But they look very similar on the front. I know. It's really interesting.
They've made them look the same on the front from the town side, but when you come round the back... The back of this one looks very different to that one. So you can see there's this lattice work. That's amazing. So fascinating to see a 700 year old door still here.
Someone was carving all of this into this fascinating lattice work. But incredible to think a 700 year old door on an 800 year old gatehouse, which suggests that there was another door here, at least one door, 100 years before that. The fact that that could have been destroyed and that this was built to replace it in the 1340s speaks again to the turbulent past of this whole area in the Welsh Marches, that there was constant churning warfare all the time.
There was always the threat of attack. The violent lifestyles and constant state of war guaranteed that these jobs attracted a certain kind of man. They could have more freedom from the crown than others in England, but they'd have to be ready to fight to the death to defend the land they'd taken at a moment's notice.
Part of the attraction of marcher life for those marcher lords was the freedom that it gave them from royal control. They were still subjects of the English crown, but the royal writ never really ran in the marches. Lords here were free to set taxation and levy justice. As they saw fit. That was the payoff for a lifetime on a brutal frontier.
Here, around Hay, was England's medieval Wild West. There was a castle in Hay by the end of the 11th century. William I and his sons, William II and Henry I, continued to try to push their authority west.
During the anarchy, when King Stephen and Empress Matilda fought for the crown, Hay belonged to Miles of Gloucester, one of Empress Matilda's leading supporters. When the Empress's son became King Henry II, Wales remained a focus for expansion. Under his sons, Richard I and then King John, the de Brieux's family came to control Hay and rose in power locally and nationally.
If Marcher Lords had to be brutal, ruthless men, William de Breuys, who was head of the family by the late 12th century, fitted the bill perfectly. The oldest remaining parts of Hay Castle date from the time of the de Breuys family. They were Normans who came over and made their home here on this rough Welsh frontier land on the Marches.
By the end of the 12th century, the head of the family was William de Breuys. He'd been present in France with Richard I when the king had been killed, and he became a close servant of King John too. William also had a nickname.
He was known as the Ogre of Abergavenny. He also owned Abergavenny Castle, which is about 20 miles south of Hay. And at Christmas 1175, William invited barons and princes from across Gwent to come to a reconciliation feast, once he'd got them all inside the Great Hall, not unlike this one here at Hay.
He closed the doors and had them all slaughtered to a man. He claimed it was in vengeance for a murdered uncle. March of Hospitality had a sharp edge.
There's no artefacts that belonged to the de Brieux's family remaining here, but William's wife, Matilda, is steeped in legend connected to the castle. This is a modern depiction of Matilda de Brieux's, and this begins her connection with Hay Castle. when she becomes the Lady of Hay.
And it plays into an old Welsh lore called Ty Unos, which said that if you could build a house in one day on common land, it was yours. The freehold was yours and you could keep the house. And so a legend sprang up that Matilda was part giantess and that she built all of Hay Castle in one night, carrying the stones here in her apron.
One part of the legend tells that she dropped a boulder on her foot and was so annoyed... that she threw it miles away to the local church. It's almost certain that Matilda didn't build Hay Castle in a night, but the message to the surrounding lands who could see this castle would have been loud and clear.
The de Bruises were here and they were here to stay. They were using Welsh law to take Welsh land. But the family's luck would soon turn and they would get a taste of their own bitter medicine. John and William... William...
fell out for reasons that remain frustratingly unclear. John called in vast debts he claimed the family owed him and demanded they hand over their sons as hostages. When Matilda refused, the king flew into a rage.
He confiscated lands and titles and pursued them as they fled to Ireland. William escaped to France, but Matilda and their oldest son, also called William, were captured. William managed to escape.
and lived as an exile in France until his death a couple of years later. But Matilda and their oldest son, William, tried to flee to France, but were captured on the way. John imprisoned them in a tower.
He set their ransom at an exorbitant 40,000 marks, which they either couldn't or wouldn't pay. And so John ordered mother and son to be starved to death. On the 11th day, the mother was found dead between her son's legs. still upright but leaning back against her son's chest as a dead woman. The son, who was also dead, sat upright, leaning against the wall as a dead man.
So desperate was the mother that she had eaten her son's cheeks. When William de Brieuse, who was in Paris, heard this news, he died soon afterwards, many asserting that it was through grief. So that's the account that the anonymous of Bethune has left for us. How true it is? We maybe don't know, but it's certainly the sort of thing that people believed King John was capable of and the reason that people were turning against him in their droves.
Matilda must have outlived her son and been driven by desperate hunger to try to eat parts of his face to stay alive. William died in Paris shortly afterwards, devastated by the news of the fate shared by his wife and oldest son. There's even a chance that Matilda and her son's sorry fate played into some of the clauses in Magna Carta, the great charter that was imposed on King John in 1215. Clause 39 sought to ensure no man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed, banished or in any way destroyed, nor... will we proceed against or prosecute him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
Clause 40 added, to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice. And those were the very things that John had done to Matilda de Breuys and her son William. The de Breuys family were restored by John in 1216 and kept control of Hay Castle.
One new find, uncovered as part of the work to restore the castle, speaks to the problems William and Matilda's descendants would face just a couple of generations later. We've got a very special item in here. Up there, we've got a trebuchet ball.
Wow. That was thrown at this castle? We believe so, yeah.
Do we know when the trebuchet board is likely to originate from? We have an idea that it was associated with Simon de Montfort, so that would be around about 1260. There's another castle just down further into Wales, in West Wales, Drissloin, and they found very similar size and weight trebuchet boards there. I think they have about seven of them. So we weighed it, compared it, so we think it might have been from the same trebuchet engineers that were travelling down through Wales. So this is probably thrown as part of maybe the Second Baron's War in the 1260s when Simon de Montfort is rebelling against Henry III and potentially trying to jostle for castles along the Welsh marches to gain the upper hand in this region and someone, one side or the other, has attacked Hay Castle during this period.
It would be amazing to find out more about it. This is the only little artefact that we have from that time and the only indication that it was attacked in this way so it was very exciting when we found it. Was it found here in the Matilda Tower?
No, it wasn't found in this tower. It was actually found in the Great Hall just through there. The archaeologists were doing some excavations underneath where the stairs are now and they were excavating the walls of the Tudor house that they discovered and then under the foundations of that they found this trebuchet ball and it was just lying there.
It looked like it had just been discovered where it had fallen and had just lain there for so many hundreds of years. It was quite an amazing find. It's a real tangible testament to Hay's violent past, I guess, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. Visiting Hay today, it's hard to reconcile this tranquil riverside town in the rolling Welsh hills with its history of violence, with men like William de Brieus, the Ogre of Abergavenny. Yet the castle still stands here as a testament to that brutal past.
It's so incredible that this castle is now open to the public after 900 years and it's teaching us new lessons about all kinds of periods on the lawless Welsh marches. The marches would remain a pretty lawless frontier until the middle of the 16th century really, when Wales was properly incorporated into England. It's a place where Normans would come to seek their fortune, to push the border ever west.
to grab land for themselves. But the Welsh weren't to be conquered so easily and they found life every bit as tough, brutal and unfair, trying to protect their land from the Norman invaders. Haycastle stands here today as a testament to those centuries of turbulent frontier life on England's medieval wild west. This time I've come to one of my favourite places in the world.
Now I know I'm given to hyperbole, but this time you can trust me, I promise. Because my mum was born just over there, in the shadow of the mist-shrouded mountains of Snowdonia. This is Gwynedd in North Wales, one of the world's most beautiful and special places.
My family have lived there for centuries, but I have more than just ancestral reasons to love this place, because there is also the most spectacular history here. Not least... World heritage sites like this harlech castle, one of the most imposing, impressive and beautiful castles built anywhere in Europe at this time in the late 13th century.
Now this castle has been besieged many times, but three of those sieges have gone down as three of the most epic sieges in the whole of British history. I call the greatest castles. The geography of Harlech is central to its identity.
It's on something called the Harlech Dome, which is a spur of rock 200 feet high, surrounded by the sea. Down there, that flatland there was sea in medieval times, so it's an incredibly powerful position. It could be reinforced by sea, so it was a strong point looking towards these Welsh mountains, a bastion of English power.
Then we come in through here to the gatehouse, one of the most remarkable gatehouses. It was palatial, it was actually the royal apartments up there, but down here was a killing field. You came through one portcullis, heavy door, another portcullis, heavy doors, arrow loops here, so this whole area could be turned into a deadly area of crossfire, people throwing projectiles down on you from above, through the rest of the gatehouse, more gates, and out into the inner ward of the castle, its heart.
You get a sense of the... Gatehouse from the back looks very different from the front because here you can see big windows, palatial rooms. This was designed to house a royal court and we know that the kings of England came here.
We also know that the last Prince of Wales, Owen Glyndwr, who led much of Wales in a battle against Henry IV, he held court, he had a parliament here. So you're looking here at a military but also an official and residential building as well. Then you come around here and look out over the...
Irish Sea. And this was central to the castle because it was from the sea that this castle was going to be sustained during its great sieges. That's the sea out there.
It used to come all the way to these buildings down here. So this fortress could be resupplied from the sea, well, effectively and definitely, either from the Plantagenet lands in Ireland, from Cornwall and South Wales that way, or from Lancashire and Cheshire just around and out. to the right, to the north over there. And that, the strength of this castle and its ability to be resupplied from the sea made sure that it could survive some of the longest, most epic sieges in British history.
Heading up to the battlements now. It's a concentric castle this, so there's layers of defence, no central keep, there's just layers of defence and that's why the gatehouse, which you can see there, is such an imposing structure and that kind of acts as a central defensive point if you like but from up here you get a really good sense of why this is such a powerful castle. It is no accident that in three of the great civil wars that this country has endured over the last 600 or so years This castle, in each of those three wars, was the last stronghold to fall.
Back in the early 15th century, in the early 1400s, Owen Glyndwr rose up against the English King Henry IV, and he managed to besiege and capture many of the English castles in North Wales, and for a while established a kind of independent entity that was Wales. The English came back at them, and there were years of attritional fighting. Young Prince Henry, who would become the legendary warrior Henry V, personally took charge of a siege at this castle, bombarding it with cannon, one of some of the earliest use of cannon in British history.
It actually held out until it became finally the last castle of Owen Glyndwr's to fall as the garrison basically starved to death. But there was more to come in the Walls of the Roses. This was the last Lancastrian castle to fall.
It held out for years against Yorkist siege. And in the Civil War as well, the 1640s, this was also the last royalist castle in mainland Britain to hold out against parliamentarian forces. That, I think, those three sieges just bear testament to the awesome strength and importance of Harlech Castle.
What a view! From up here, the highest tower, you can see Edward's plan really that each of these castles would be dotted around the coast of North Wales and thereby control this wild mountainous interior. From here you could see Crickith Castle just over there so there could be mutual support as well.
Harlech has remained central to Welsh and British identity ever since it was built in the 19th century it became a A place painted by Turner and other romantic artists. Poets love coming here. And it saw its last bit of military service during the Second World War when it was a base for the local Home Guard and they used to do rifle practice in the ward here. Thankfully nowadays, Harlech's time on the front line has come to an end and instead it just hosts armies of tourists. If I were to say the words haunted castle to you, your mind would probably conjure up an image something like this.
This is Chillingham Castle. And even the name sounds like something fantastic I've made up specifically to talk about ghosts. But I assure you this location has a long and storied history.
In the 12th century, it was the home to a monastery. By the 13th century, because of increasing incursions from Scottish forces, this castle was built. Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, led his Scottish campaigns from this location.
Over the years, it's been host to royals, been home to several noble families, but now it's probably best known as the home to dozens of ghosts. But unlike other medieval ghost stories, these ones come to us from a little later in time. The first recorded accounts of the ghosts of Chillingham Castle were penned by Lady Leonora Tankerville.
She moved here from the US after marrying the Earl of Tankerville in 1895, during what was something of a golden age for ghost stories. Imagine, an American interested in medieval ghosts. The Victorian and Edwardian eras were a time of great modernization and secularism, with major shifts away from religious explanations of the natural world. But...
The flip side of all this worldly rationalism was that it actually increased interest in the occult and spiritualism. Ghost stories were a hugely popular part of fiction, as people became increasingly interested in the paranormal, seances, and finding different ways of interacting with the dead. Places like Chillingham found themselves in the middle of the spiritualist revival.
Sherlock Holmes author and notable believer in the supernatural, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote to Lady Tankerville to commend her reports of the Chillingham ghosts. From the 15th century onwards, the castle had been a seat of the Gray, Bennett and later Tankerville families. I met with its current owner, married to a member of the original Gray family, Sir Humphrey, who has taken great care in the castle renovations.
This great castle was built really to keep the Scots out of England. It began being one strong tower, and in the 1200s, 1300s, they built three more towers, and then they built between the towers. For the king to come and stay, to make it into a worthwhile palace.
And so in this room here, you see ancient tower there, ancient tower there. And this room just built between for the king and the rooms above. So it's been like that ever since, really. You know, with so much battle and action and so much back and forth, you know, on the Scottish borders here, it's really no wonder, I think, that we get so many reports of ghosts.
In the 18th century, there was a figure who spent his time wailing and moaning. and shimmering in blue. Digging between the castle walls, join up two rooms, they find the bones of a child and they buried it. And that solved that problem. But when I restored that room, my guests kept saying, you must have electric fault there because there's a flash of blue on the edge of the door.
Well, there's no electrics there at all. We must have left a toe bone or a knee bone. When I first came here, it had a reputation as a haunted place.
There was a lovely priest. ...was one of the family. He said, well, look, I go all around the country getting rid of ghosts, so I'll do that.
Yeah. And so he came along, and next morning he said, there's too many, I can't deal with them. So that sounds fairly creepy. And it seems that the ghosts Leonora documented over a hundred years ago are still hanging around and causing trouble for today's residents.
I wanted to hear more about the ghosts that Leonora wrote about when she lived here, so I've gone to meet Richard. Chillingham's resident ghost hunter. So we are here in this absolutely gorgeous medieval castle. I hear that it is allegedly one of the most haunted castles in England, if not Europe. I would agree.
About how many ghosts do we think are here in Chillingham? About 50 that I know of. 50, okay, that's a lot. What periods do we think that they come from?
A lot of the ghosts in here go back to medieval times, and indeed it became the home of the torturers back in the day. I can't tell if I'm excited or scared, but one way or another, can you show me? Absolutely.
Let's go. So we're here in this gorgeous little medieval chapel. I've noticed these wonderful little medieval oxen who are holding up the roof beams. You've got this really interesting kind of carving in the wall back here. But it's a chapel and you're telling me there's ghosts here.
The famous ghost in this chapel is a young girl. Oh ...years old. Her bones were found under the floor.
When she was buried, this wasn't consecrated, because the original chapel moved in the castle from one side to another. Oh, so she got buried here. It later became a chapel. Ah, I see.
Okay, so that is very medieval of her. It's very medieval of her. I love that! Moving through the castle, we enter the Grand Hall.
Welcome to our lovely medieval great hall. I love this room. If I was a medieval ghost, this is exactly where I would be hanging out. In here, in the top corner, we often get Lady Mary Barclay.
She likes to walk the top part of this hall, and she manifests herself with the smell of roses. And if you're really lucky, a little wafting chill to go with it. Heading further up into the tower, we come to a room with a more regal appearance.
This is where King Edward I stayed on his way to engage with William Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298. The wonderful Gothic window behind me, that was installed for Edward I's visit. You can really see that this kind of is a room fit for a king. You've got gorgeous natural light, you've got really high ceilings, incredibly detailed woodwork.
You know, it feels really royal. Oh, indeed. You know, Richard, I've been looking a lot lately at these medieval accounts of ghosts. And so obviously medieval people really feel the need to explain ghosts, they want to record them, they need to get out into the world the fact that these ghosts exist.
So ghost hunting certainly has existed for quite some time but obviously the way that we do it now is a lot different to you know waiting for a damned soul to come and ask their brother-in-law for help people have been pretty much ghost hunting since the dawn of time there's always been an interest when you look at different cultures around the world it's an absolutely fascinating subject I want to find out how Richard finds these ghosts. So he shows me some of the tools of the ghost hunting trade. These are divining rods or dowsing rods. This is a term I know. What you do with them I have no idea.
I have a pair especially for you. Amazing! Okay. Take all of the rods.
Okay, now what you need the rods to do, keep them about 10 inches or so apart, nice and level. Okay. Ask the spirits in the room to move the rods for you, see what happens.
Okay, if there's any spirits in the room who want to move the rods for me, give me a go. Oh girl, don't. There's the right one going.
No, it's scary. There's the right one going. Maybe I didn't want to know this. Spirits, should I stay here tonight? Look, they're both moving.
They're both moving. Oh, look at this. Look at this.
These guys. I'm slightly freaked out now. Um, thank you, Spirits. That was very kind of you to chat.
I'm not 100% sold on the dowsing rods, but in using them, Richard is upholding a hundreds-of-years-old practice that wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows in the Middle Ages, before it was banned by the church in the 1500s. With the permission to stay the night from my phantom hosts, I prepare to settle in for a night in Britain's most haunted castle. And hopefully no more encounters from beyond the grave. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it's clear that a natural fear of the supernatural has haunted us through the ages. The ghost stories I've explored from the medieval period bear an eerie resemblance to our own.
They were used to uphold establishment values and sway political contests. From stark reminders of the death that is to come, to the importance of good behavior and proper burial to ward off the undead. It's no surprise that the Victorians and Edwardians had a love of medieval ghosts to rival my own. And lurking below the surface of these spooky tales lies a fascinating window into society's changing norms and values. Well, it was a bit of a restless night, I will admit it, but I didn't see any ghosts.
Even though Richard did give me a bit of a fright. However, we did learn a lot about medieval society. For medieval people, ghosts do a really specific thing. They're a reminder to live your life correctly.
In a world that's dedicated to Christian theology, if you end up coming back from beyond the grave, it means something very seriously has gone wrong. Either you need help yourself, or you're warning someone else about how they need to live their life correctly. It makes sense that this isn't how we see ghosts anymore, because our society is very different from that in the medieval period.
Now, by and large, if we think about someone being a ghost, it's because a terrible tragedy has befallen them. For medieval people, Oftentimes, a ghost would be responsible for that tragedy. Even if I didn't see any ghosts today, one of the things I think we can all agree on is that by and large, we're all haunted, just by societal expectations.
Before sunrise, freezing cold winter's morning, got ice on the kayak, but I'm heading out in these perfect conditions to take a look at one of the more remarkable coastal fortifications in Britain. It's called Hearst Castle and it's recently suffered a devastating collapse into the sea. Part of its structure has been undermined by the time and tide.
So I'm going to check it out. You don't see the Solent this flat many days of the year. This is very special.
The perfect day to go and investigate some Henrician fortifications, the so-called device forts. By the 16th century a new piece of military technology was changing everything really, it was changing the way battles were fought but it was also changing the way defences were built and that was the cannon, a gunpowder weapon capable of firing a projectile, a cannonball, hundreds of meters. So for the first time it became a realistic possibility that you could actually defend the coast. You could stop people landing by having a series of forts, castles, blockhouses, all armed with cannon and they would keep any ship away.
from the shore and stop them landing troops. And in the 1530s and 1540s, King Henry VIII of England needed that technology because he had enraged the two greatest powers of Europe, Catholic powers, France and the Holy Roman Empire, by divorcing his wife. The powers of Europe threatened to invade England and in response, Henry, his coffers full from the dissolution of the monastery, the wealth that he took from the great Catholic monastic houses around England, with that wealth he built a series of forts, of castles.
And Hurst Castle, I'm coming up to now, is one of the more famous. I'm just coming up here now, I can start to see the damage that has been caused by the terrible effect of the wind, the frost, the tide and the waves. It's pretty significant. I suppose if there is good news it's that perhaps it's worth remembering that this is the collapse has taken place in the Victorian section.
In the late 19th century there was another invasion scare and very much like Henry VIII they spent a vast amount of money on coastal fortifications. This castle was massively expanded at the start of that section that has collapsed. What a shame. It's a pretty bad collapse. Well I've come around here just to the west of the collapse now and the bad news is is that it's very badly undermined right the way along here underneath the parts of this Victorian fort which are still standing.
It's only a matter of time before this collapses, I mean I can see about a meter at least in under the foundations. Oh dear, it's gonna need some really serious emergency shoring up. The reality of these Henrician forts is one or two of them already disappeared into the sea over the centuries and if you build things this close to the English Channel it'll get you in the end.
So this castle was built in the early 1540s. There's the Henrician bit, you can see the rounded... They do almost look more like a medieval castle, you can see the architectural tradition that the builders are grown up in, you can see the sort of rounded bastions and sort of castle-like towers, and then next to it these slightly more brutal squat Victorian gun positions.
The arches, you can see the arches, the reinforced ceiling so that they could take the weight of the artillery pieces above. Like many expensive defence projects, this never really saw service in the way that it was intended. The war with France and the Holy Roman Empire was over really before any serious attempt to invade was launched.
French forces entered the Channel, the famous incident where the Mary Rose capsized. There was a naval battle, but these forts didn't play a huge part. And it was in later centuries that the fort was added onto. One interesting thing about this fort is that King Charles I was imprisoned here, Hearst Castle. So like all British castles, this one's had a long and very varied history.
One that couldn't possibly have been imagined by the man who commissioned it, Henry VIII. And it saw service in the First and Second World War. It was improved. Anti-aircraft guns were put on it to protect Southampton, Portsmouth from attack, which is...
Two big important cities, ports just down there. You can certainly see why he built this fort here. It's the narrowest point of the Solent, a very important stretch of water in the south of England, the middle of the south of England.
So Hearst Castle was on this spit to try and block off this western entrance to the Solent, a hugely important stretch of water for the English crown. And it remained so for 400 years. Now one of the problems with this new bit of technology, this cannon, was that you could fire a few hundred meters but you couldn't just build one big central fort and block off the whole of the Solent. It wasn't like a few hundred years later when big artillery pieces were capable of firing 10-15 miles. So to really try and protect the Solent from enemy fleet you had to build not just one of these castles, but lots of them.
So I'm going to go and check out a few more. Some of them, very obvious. Some of them have disappeared over the years, some of them are still there, but hidden. Hi Captain, can I have a lift? In the middle of the most dangerous stretch.
Easy on the boat. OK. Next stop, Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight.
This is Yarmouth Castle. It was built about 1544 and fascinatingly, a bit of a metaphor, it wasn't just built with money that Henry had got from dissolving the monasteries, but it was literally built with stone quarried from a nearby monastery that was no longer in use. So Henry turned monasteries, in this case, into castles.
Yarmouth Castle is much smaller than Hurst Castle, as you can see. It remains the size it was when it was built by Henry VIII. It never was expanded by the Victorians. About 20 people, a garrison of about 20 people there, the head of the castle lived in it and his garrison lived in the town. They had about six cannon and those were never really fired in anger.
These Henrician forts never fulfilled the task that the king had hoped they would, which was blocking the Solent to an enemy fleet sailing up here. It's like most coastal fortifications ever since. You're much better off spending the money in battleships out at sea that can stop an enemy fleet far off your shore.
than waiting until they get this close and trying to sink them with cannons. It's the first castle of its kind in the UK. It has a special arrow-shaped bastion sticking out on the landward side, a brand new development, cutting-edge technology from Europe, which meant that defenders had better fields of fire and they could shoot muskets and artillery at any attacking force. So, even...
This little castle here, hidden away on the Isle of Wight, is actually an essential piece of engineering history. Classic British scene this, I love it. In towns and villages all around the country you get these remarkable bits of history, a vitally important Henrician fortification in this case, wedged between a ferry terminal and the George Hotel. In the middle there, the castle, it's a tourist attraction. Now we head along the coast of the Isle of Wight, the port town of cows.
Here at the mouth of the Medina River, one of Henry VIII's castles is hiding in plain sight. It has morphed over the last 150 years into becoming one of the most famous, iconic buildings in the world of sailing. This. It used to be West Cowes Castle, it is now the Royal Yacht Squadron. Henry VIII's castle, built here on the west side of the Medina to protect the river heading into the Isle of Wight.
It fell into disuse, only fired its guns we think in... Anger once during the Civil War in the 1640s. Then it fell into disuse and it was rented in the 19th century by a sailing club, the Royal Yacht Squadron, and since then it's been the HQ of Cowes Week, one of the most famous...
regattas on earth. A place where once Kaiser Wilhelm himself of Germany would come and race his uncle, Edward VII in these waters off cows. And now it's been transformed almost beyond recognition, but you can still see round the base that half-moon shaped outer wall with gaps left for the cannon. It's just recognisably one of Henry VIII's castles.
For our last Henry Sheen castle. We're heading back to the mainland and I'm getting back in the kayak. This is Cal Shot Castle.
Built on a spit of land that sits at the bottom of Southampton Water, the narrow inlet that goes up to the city of Southampton. One of the great ports of England, remains so to this day, hence the big container ships and tankers. coming up behind me.
Southampton was the port from which Henry V left to invade France for the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It's the port from which hundreds of thousands of men left in the Second World War to take... part in the amphibious landing on Normandy D-Day and so it's always been a hugely important place in the English national story. It's the place closest to the ancient Anglo-Saxon capital at Winchester as well which is just up beyond Southampton up in Hampshire.
So this is a really really important waterway here and so at the very mouth of it, the narrowest point, Henry VIII built this fort here, Calshot. Very powerful, you can see why. it must have been such exciting technology. They thought for the first time in human history, you could actually deny, it was like an area denial weapon on a big scale. These cannons pointing out here could reach almost across to the other bank, the other shore over there, almost, not quite, and they could actually stop an enemy fleet from threatening Southampton at all.
And Southampton through the Middle Ages had been raided several times by an enemy force, the French. came up here in the 14th century and burned Southampton to the ground and enslaved and killed its people. This threat was real, and Henry VIII was spending a vast amount of money on a hugely ambitious national plan to protect England's shores.
Nothing like this really had been attempted since the Romans. It shows the scale of the crisis he faced, the two great superpowers of Europe, both allied with each other, determined to invade England. But it also shows the...
the increasing ambition of the early English state, that Henry VIII thought he could spend this vast amount of money to build a national network protecting his shores. These buildings must have been so futuristic in the 16th century, and the giant bronze and iron cannon sitting on their battlements must have seemed like... Miracle weapons.
You could try and stop a fleet entering this stretch of water at ranges that hitherto would have been impossible. Cannonballs can skip across the water and they can, well they can still do damage at 500 metres, so this castle here could almost close this stretch of water to an enemy fleet, protecting Southampton and protecting Winchester beyond. Calshot Castle was a permanent garrison of around 15. It had 36 guns by the late 1540s, so I imagine that local militia, local levies, would have come in to help fire those guns in the event of an invasion, in the event of a crisis. Like Yarmouth Castle, like Cowes, the stones, the building blocks for Calshot were actually often taken from the abbeys, the buildings that Henry VIII was dissolving.
He took their treasure to help pay for the castles, and he took the very fabric of their walls and their buildings to help build his castles. These castles don't just symbolise Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church, his refusal to obey the Pope in Rome, but they embody it. The very structure of these buildings, their walls, their masonry, the stone, is torn from the Catholic monasteries that Henry ripped down. The really amazing thing about Calshot is that it remained in service then until the mid-20th century up to and beyond the Second World War. It became an important seaplane base in the First World War, the perfect place for float planes to take off and keep U-boats away from this important part of the coast and this stretch of the channel.
After the war it became the base where very fast aircraft, the ancestors of the Spitfire, were first raced down here as seaplanes. And so Henry VIII's military fortification saw over 400 years of service. It's one of my favourite castles this one, I love it. Still very recognisable, although it's been changed of course, that original Tudor shape in Jaws. It's in a magnificent position, guarding the Narrows.
And it's played its part in so many subsequent parts of history, not just the 16th century but later periods when the threat had changed beyond all recognition. Anti-submarine patrols were based out of here, early aviation has played its part over more than 400 years. And this is the way to see it from the water. It's been a real treat getting a sea view of these four extraordinary castles. All part of Henry's grand plan, yet each one unique.
Some of them have gained a new life, whilst others are fighting a losing battle against the elements. I just hope that we can find a way to protect them for the next five centuries. Thanks for watching this video on the History Hit YouTube channel.
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