The Secrets Of Bamburgh Castle - How Castles Shaped British History

Castles. For centuries they've loomed over the landscape of Britain. From their beginnings as Iron Age hill forts, through Alfred the Great's defensive burrs, to William the Conqueror's powerful Norman fortresses, from the medieval homes of kings and queens, to modern day tourist attractions. Join me as I explore some of our greatest castles, investigate how their histories forged England, learn their greatest stories, and discover how you build a castle, as well as how you tear one down. I'm starting with an awe-inspiring citadel. When you think about a castle, you probably think of somewhere like this, Bambera Castle. This is a living, breathing building that sits on a spot that's been occupied and fought over for millennia. It dominates the landscape and the sea today, just as it once dominated the people who lived in its shadow. It tells us so much about the ways castles are constructed, the ways they're used, the functions they performed throughout history, that it's the perfect place for us to start to explore the castles that made Britain. Bambera Castle is on the northeastern coast of England, just 25 miles from the current border with Scotland, and so far from London, a king might struggle to make his authority felt here. It sits on top of an ancient lump of volcanic rock. So solid, it's impossible to undermine, and high enough above the surrounding land to provide a view for miles. It's no wonder the site has been coveted for thousands of years. The sea provided natural protection on one side, but also access to trade routes and supplies, not only from England, but from the continent too. 1,500 years ago, the sea was much closer than it is today, and Bambera could plug directly into a growing network of international trade. So you've got a great location, what are the key elements you need for a castle? The powerful features on show here at Bambera were added after the Norman conquest, and one of the most important structures you need is your keep. The core of your castle will be your keep. This huge pile of stone in the middle that's designed to be the last resort, the place that you will defend yourself and your family when everything else has been overrun. It's designed to be tall, imposing, thick walls. Virtually all Norman castles have a keep, and virtually all of them look incredibly similar. It's a big square or rectangular chunk of stone that's plonked in the most defensible spot. This is also about projecting your power and your dominance over the local countryside. The keep was originally known as a donjon, and this is where important prisoners and valuables were kept, eventually giving us the word dungeon. Bambera gives us a real insight into what went into making a medieval castle's keep, because this staircase goes right through the wall, so the outside of the keep wall starts here, and we can step all the way through this, through the four meters of deep stone that was meant to keep people out, and we're still walking through the walls. The end of the keep wall is here. Four meters of solid stone between you, if you're in here for your protection, and anyone out there who wants to try and get you. So once you've built your keep, you're going to need something around that to protect, and the first bits that you're going to get next are your baileys. Now, a bailey is just a big open area that surrounds your keep. It's something that you would want to defend, but in a medieval castle, this is also packed with life. Imagine wooden buildings leaning against all of these brick walls, the clink of the blacksmith beating at horseshoes, the sound of animals coming in and out, butchers working, kitchen hands running backwards and forwards, perhaps even someone brewing their own beer for the castle to be used in here. This would be full of life, an absolute hum all day, every day. This is the blood vessels of the castle around its beating heart. Some castles have more than one bailey. There are three here, the inner, east and west baileys. They provide extra layers of defense, either concentric circles or, as here at Banborough, a series of barriers to defend from attackers. Baileys like this that are arranged in a row would normally face the town where you would expect an attack to come from, and the idea would be that everybody can come inside the walls of the castle, they can take refuge in these baileys, and then they provide obstacles, layers that the attackers have to get through. Even if an attacker has made it into the west bailey, they still need to get through these meters and meters of thick stone walls and gates still designed to keep you out. Your work has barely begun if you've made it into here. Looming over the surrounding populations was another line of defense, the castle walls. To protect all of that you want big, thick, tall walls that nobody's going to be able to scale over or batter their way through too easily. These would need to surround everywhere important in your castle, and of course walls perform two functions because they're about protecting what's inside but they're also about projecting power and dominance to the outside. The last key ingredient of your castle is going to be your towers. These provide much needed space for accommodation for family and friends, storage space, but also all of those soldiers who are walking your walls protecting your castle need somewhere to rest and sleep. They also provide another structure from which to fight, so the roof will provide a flat platform from which to look down on the enemy and to oversee what's happening all around you. Towers are often interspersed with arrow slits so that archers inside can take aim from within the safety of the towers to attack those who are laying siege to your castle. But they also bring their own problems, they can be structural weak points, they can provide soft spots in a castle's outer shell. One of the key things you need to think about when you're designing your towers is what shape you'd like them to be, and that depends on the job you need them to do. Rectangular towers provide plenty of internal space but flat walls are targets for trebuchet attacks and corners are vulnerable to undermining. Round towers like we see at Conwy, also known as drum towers, address some of those vulnerabilities so they make sense at the outside where you might expect an attack. There are no corners to undermine and missiles should deflect off the curved surface more effectively, but that sacrifices internal space. Horseshoe towers like these at Bambara were a compromise, offering a rounded defensive front facing outward and a square back within the castle to provide more space. These towers also provided a larger fighting platform on the roof, so when you see a tower, look at the shape. Everything about it was chosen carefully to perform a specific role in that place. Bambara began life long before these stone fortifications were built. It had been the site of an Iron Age fort. The Romans had built fortifications across Britain that resembled castles, and then it became an Anglo-Saxon burr, a system of communal defences used by the Anglo-Saxons to defend against marauding Vikings. Burrs were often constructed out of wood at sites long coveted and fought over. Some reused Roman sites like Chester, which had long fallen into disrepair. Others, like Bambara, were constructed on carefully selected geographical strongpoints that had been identified as defensible positions for generations. These burrs were ideal strongholds within which a population under attack could take refuge. Located in the northernmost Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria and bordering Scotland, Bambara is a site of huge significance. It was the kingdom's capital, it attracted saintly figures who helped spread Christianity amongst the pagan peoples, and it was the centre of a national and international trade network. While it was owned by King Æthelfred of Northumbria, he gave this land to his wife, Bebba. The burr was Queen Bebba's Burr and became known as Bebon Burr. Fans of Bernard Cornwell's books and the TV adaptation, The Last Kingdom, will spot how the writers used the name to make Bebon Burr in that series. It's in these burrs that we can begin to trace the origins of castles in this country, but what do we know about the people who lived within them? Archaeologists at Bambara Castle have made some astounding discoveries over the years, including amongst these dunes an Anglo-Saxon graveyard with remains dating back more than a millennium. By the 8th century, Bambara was a cosmopolitan centre with people travelling from across Europe. They were pilgrims seeking out saints like Saint Oswald, a former king of Northumbria, who left a permanent mark on this land. Saint Oswald was made famous by the medieval chronicler Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in the 8th century. Oswald was an Anglo-Saxon king of Northumbria from 634 to 642, but he was raised in exile on the island of Iona, west of Scotland, by Irish monks. As king, he wielded political power from his capital at Bambara, but he was concerned for the souls of his people as well as their bodies. He was determined to bring the Celtic Christianity that had so influenced his own life to his new realm. He established the monastery on Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, just 5 miles north by sea and visible from Bambara. He worked with Saint Aidan, the first bishop there, to send missionaries all over the communities of northern England. Between them, they embedded Christianity permanently in the region and changed British history and religion forever. Bambara was the political and military arm of Lindisfarne's religious outreach. Bambara's strength was key to the success of their project. Astonishing archaeological finds at Bambara shed light on the lives of people here 1,500 years ago and on the impact Oswald's determination had. The Bambara research project began an excavation in the late 90s among the sand dunes in the shadow of Bambara Castle. This dig revealed incredible secrets about the burr and uncovered artefacts and bodies which tell the stories of some of the people who lived within it and how the castle might have looked in the Anglo-Saxon period. Who were these people and what were they doing here at Bambara? To find out more, I'm talking to archaeologist and director of the project, Graeme Young. Do we know what time period those graves come from? We think the cemetery site basically is in use from around the early 6th century into the 7th into the 8th century. Do we know anything about those people? Well, again, we can only go with the evidence we know so far. None of them seem to have gone hungry. They're quite physically robust stature. Their teeth are in an awful condition which suggests that they're living a little bit too well. So everything about both the skeletons themselves and what we know of them and their location which is looking straight back at the palace and quite shielded from the village makes us think we're looking at the population of the palace rather than the wider community. We ended up with about eight out of a hundred odd people coming local to Bambara. Everyone else is from the wider British Isles or from wider Europe so we're looking at quite a cosmopolitan population. Are we thinking about potentially Northumbrian royalty being buried here? You're dealing with very high status individuals but we're in the first Christian phase so they're not buried with goods or treasure so whether the royalty had a separate burial ground or not we don't know so they could be here but we have no way of discerning it. One of the most interesting things here is that all of the burials appear to majority facing east west with the head at the west end. The belief was that on the day of judgment the dead would sit up in their graves and should be facing east towards Jerusalem. Oswald might only have ruled here for eight years but Christianity remained and those who came after him had Christian burials showing the power of Oswald's determination and faith. So it becomes associated with St Oswald who is one of the kings who becomes a saint whose cult was was quite well known in Europe. He's mostly forgotten these days but he had cult centers here at Bambara where some of his relics were stored and on the continent so he must have been a pull of tourists and pilgrims. We're looking at a royal court that's going to be present intermittently. Also there's probably trading links and all of that suggests that this is the reason that people are coming here to Bambara. How would the Wooden Burr have looked in the 7th and 8th centuries when these people were alive here? It would look more dramatic then. The fortress has always been there because it sits on the rock so you can't really move it. So today we have this stone fortress which is a medieval castle rebuilt in the post-medieval period so if you shorten it a little bit and build it out of timber and fill it with structures probably very well decorated and likely garishly painted that would have been our fortress and we also have evidence from the archaeology that in the lifetime of the cemetery we go from timber structures that would still have looked very palatial and well built into stone buildings so that must be a deliberate reference of power. Basically they're looking how impressive they are that they can build in stone so it's one of the earliest secular stone building traditions that we think we're seeing. These high status individuals from the castle now have a rather special resting place in the church at Bambara where the crypt was in use in the Anglo-Saxon period. When we did the excavation of the cemetery site we did want to put the burials back in the village community from which they'd come from but we couldn't really do that by putting them back on the cemetery site because it's a triple SI but fortunately the crypt here in the church at Bambara, the church that its origins date back to the same period of our cemetery site, has a crypt which has a partial divide so we're standing in two-thirds of it and the other third behind the wall next to us. So they're all behind this wall now in separate ossuary boxes? Yeah every individual we identify goes into an ossuary box so we're looking at over 100 individuals in the end when we've finished the excavation and analysis. And what do we know about those 100 people in terms of the community that live there? Is there a range of ages? Well it is a community so obviously when you think of a you often think of sort of warriors and kings but we have complete family groups so we have all age ranges from basically babies all the way through to very elderly individuals and we have a mix of male and female as far as we can tell from their biology and of course the bones themselves have stories to tell because particularly if you've lived a long life, diseases, overindulgence and work that you do habitually will leave artefacts and marks on the bones for us to discover. So I mean one of the individuals we have died very violently because we have a weapon trauma on the bone but thankfully that seems to be very rare. Each skeleton was given a name by the Bambra Bones Project that reflected something of its story. Skeleton number 131 was called offslane, an old English word meaning to cut off, strike down or destroy. He was excavated here. Unlike most skeletons found at the boll hole site, he's one of the only skeletons that we have clear evidence for a cause of death. He was struck when he was only about 20 years old by a sharp weapon that cut through the left side of his body. The absence of skeletons with war wounds could tell us that there wasn't a lot of Most of what we see is just artefacts of life and including some very interesting little insights into what people are doing. Terrible teeth is a consequence of perhaps overindulging in mead and feasting but we do have a number of female skeletons that have tiny little notches on the front teeth and it's basically they're using their mouth as a third hand and they're just holding gripping thread which if you can imagine if you how many times you have to do that to actually wear away a little groove in the tooth. So this is someone who's working with cloth sewing, perhaps tapestry work, probably for their entirety of their adult life leaving this little artefact behind them. You can see this impact on the body of skeleton number 360 called Winsome which means Joy who was found here. The evidence found on her body highlights that she was in good health and had a long life for the period, dying in late adulthood. Along with the notches in her teeth she had poor dental hygiene. The people living at Bambera were wealthy, their teeth were decaying through their rich diet and their access to sugar. It's just one of those instances where you get this wonderful little insight into what the life that people lived. Burrs then weren't just places where people could seek protection, they became gathering points for communities, focal points for religious reforms, homes to kings and they developed an economy of their own. These burrs weren't what we might call castles yet but they were the roots from which castles would grow. Bebbers Burr here wouldn't last for long though, it was destroyed in a viking attack in 933. Within a century England would have a viking king in Canute the Great. Burrs had worked for a time but their days were numbered. Bambera lay in ashes but like a phoenix it would rise again in a blaze of glory and become subject to another viking master. The Anglo-Saxon rule of England would end violently and abruptly at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Norman duke William the Conqueror had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold and claimed the crown of England as his prize. William was a descendant of viking settlers in France and he now began the violent process of subjugating his new peoples. But how does one go about suppressing a hostile country on a permanent basis? Wood was problematic and wouldn't last forever. Luckily for William the French had come up with a rather ingenious solution. They called it the castle. Mott and Bailey castles were almost unheard of in England. They were wooden towers on a high mound encircled with a palisade and they sprang up in England in the aftermath of the conquest. Sites like Bambera were perfect locations to plant these new terrifying instruments of oppression. Wood was temporary though and the Normans wanted to make it clear that they were here to stay. In the stone castle William found the perfect answer. Masons were employed to build Norman dominance into the towns and countryside. Bambera's blocks came from a quarry in the of the village. That's why it doesn't have a village green today. But building stone castles was a mammoth undertaking for a king getting to grips with ruling his new kingdom and it was dangerous work for those tasked with making it happen. The stone would be brought up from local quarries hewn into these big blocks and glued together with lime mortar. Now lime was crushed and heated to 800 degrees C for days to break it down into quicklime which was caustic and flammable. It would burn your skin if you came into contact with it. That would then be soaked in water which creates slaked lime and slaked lime is what goes into the mortar that holds these bricks together. It provides strength but as a working material quicklime was dangerous. So dangerous in fact that in medieval times it was used as a weapon, a form of chemical warfare. You could throw handfuls of lime up into the air in the wind and get blown into the enemy and anywhere that it made contact with damp places it would burn. All of this would stop you from being able to fight. Emerging from all this hard hazardous work as a stone fortress on top of a volcanic outcrop, Bambera continued to have a key role. Monarchs stayed here. Important prisoners were kept within these walls and during the Wars of the Roses Bambera was besieged and fell into ruin. It remained in a state of disrepair until it was revamped in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's why much of what we see today bolts Georgian and Victorian renovation onto the medieval heart of the castle and there's one place where this work can be seen in all its glory. This is the magnificent King's Hall at Bambera Castle. You'd be forgiven for thinking we were in a genuine medieval hall. Look at the hammered beamed roof, the stone blocks of the walls, the wood panelling, tapestries hanging, weapons up on the wall. It is all just a trick though. The Victorians built this in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was created on the spot where the King's Hall originally stood but with no pictures or archives to work with, it was an architect's best guess at what a medieval hall might have looked like. I think it still looks pretty spectacular to me. Bambera has been a stronghold and a refuge for millennia. Its secrets reveal a history as an international trading port, a hub of cultural exchange and the crucible in which northern Christianity was forged. Castles have never been about one thing. Their location and the way they're built might reflect military concerns but the side effect of their presence has always been the creation of communities, connections and an economic hub. In the medieval period there was peace more often than there was war, even if the shadow of violence was never too far away and castles had to find their place in that world. Ebersburg provided protection to the region. Oswald entrenched Christianity from it. Merchants, pilgrims and diplomats came here by land and by sea. After 1066, Bambera became an obvious place for a conquering king to build a stone megalith to dominate the area. As peace settled, it became and remains a home into which we're invited to enjoy centuries of Bambera's history.