Excavations at Berkeley Castle

Talk by Dr Stuart Prior, Reader in Archaeological Practice, University of Bristol, on 9 April 2024

Report by Stephen Griffiths

Here’s a brain teaser. Where can you find Sir Francis Drake’s bed, the tent of Henry VIII, and a complete art deco bathroom from the New York Waldorf Astoria? The answer, of course, is at Berkeley Castle, but I’ll delay explanations until the end.

The castle is such a fascinating place that it was clearly a distraction to our guest, Dr. Stuart Prior, who was supposed to keep his eyes on the ground during archaeological digs in Berkeley. You will recognise Stuart from the BBC’s Digging for Britain programme. He’s the one who gets the interesting experimental jobs like making various tools and weapons from molten metal, and he came to the Society’s April meeting to fill us in.

One day, back in 2003, Stuart and professors Mark Horton and the sadly missed Mick Aston had a rummage around Berkeley. They soon decided there must be a Roman fort followed in turn by an Anglo-Saxon minster, Anglo-Saxon burgh, and Norman new town. The only way to prove the hypothesis was to dig, but it took a little more than three days. In fact, nearly 15 years. They dug by the castle, by the church, in Jenner’s garden and tennis court, in the garden of the Berkeley Arms (a little haphazardly), and various other gardens around the town.

The last to turn up in the trenches was the Roman stuff, including a rutted Roman road, but no buildings. Stuart is convinced that the Roman buildings must lie under Jenner’s and surrounding houses. In the large paddock before the church they found plenty of evidence for the Anglo-Saxon minster, including a scriptorium (where the scribes wrote books) built from reused Roman blocks. The floor levels contained an astel (page turner) and a whetstone for sharpening penknives used to cut quills.

St. Mary’s church in Berkeley reuses a wall of an earlier Anglo-Saxon church, which would have been used by the monks of the minster. The minster also housed nuns, who would have had their own church for worship. The strangely separate tower to the north of St. Mary’s in fact belonged to the nun’s church, as confirmed by digging just outside this tower. The nuns would have been carefully segregated from the monks, but where there’s a will ... in the 11th century the minster was dissolved due to the surprisingly high number of virgin births amongst the nuns.

Near the scriptorium were found the remains of a substantial early Norman house fronting the High Street. This was likely the house of Robert Fitzharding, a wealthy Bristol merchant, who in 1153 gained permission from the king to rebuild the original castle and develop the town along the High Street. Digging near the castle revealed the footprint of a huge square Norman keep or donjon, the remaining wall of which forms part of the existing shell keep. Part of this latter was destroyed in the Civil War by cannon balls fired from atop the church. The wall damage still exists because the family were only allowed to hold onto the castle if they promised never to repair the gap. Bullet holes and an embedded musket ball can still be seen around the church door.

The thing about a home that has been in the same family for 900 years is that they’ve collected quite a lot of stuff, including an archive of twenty thousand documents, that bed, and the tent of Henry VIII from the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which has been recycled as wallpaper. The bathroom was brought over by the 8th earl’s American heiress wife, who on examining the castle plumbing would have her New York bathroom or go home.