We now change focus from the broad context of the castles in the landscape of Wessex to the specific case of Marlborough. Where does Marlborough stand in the hierarchy of royal residences, and what features does it share with other contemporary royal castles? Was it militarily effective or simply for show? How frequently was it used by the kings? And how did it evolve between its creation in the eleventh century and the beginning of its decay in the late fourteenth century?

The recent discovery that the mounds at Marlborough and Silbury are almost twins is a contrast to their appearances today. Silbury rises out of its solitary valley, sharply outlined against the surrounding landscape, while Marlborough is hemmed in by buildings, and until recently was almost entirely masked by trees. Yet until the Norman Conquest their histories were very similar. The Romans settled near Silbury, but the mound seems to have played no particular part in the life of the small village at its foot. At Marlborough likewise, the mound was simply a feature of the surroundings for the small borough which had grown up next to it by the eleventh century, at the centre of a small royal estate.

After 1066, Silbury remained undisturbed. In Domesday Book, Marlborough is not listed among the towns held by the king, though one-third of the taxes raised there were paid to the royal exchequer. This implies that it may have been a fief, rather than being held directly by the king, though it is not among the fiefs listed for Wiltshire. The charter in 1204 by which King John granted the growing settlement at Marlborough the right to hold markets twice weekly, and an annual fair at the end of August, is addressed to the ‘borough and burgesses of Marlborough’. It also details the right of the borough to jurisdiction and liberties similar to that of towns such as Winchester and Oxford. The borough had become an independent, if ill-defined, entity, and the ‘men of Marlborough’ paid an annual fee to the treasury. What is certain is that the status and wealth of the town in the thirteenth century was closely linked to the development of the castle.

The obvious question that arises from the dating work at the Marlborough Mound is: how many other ‘Norman’ mottes up and down the country were also constructed in the prehistoric period? Their supposed medieval date is actually largely speculation – an idea put forward in the early twentieth century by castle scholars like Ella Armitage – when in fact no-one has ever attempted to date castle mounds archaeologically; they are too large to excavate and too expensive to tunnel into, not to mention the damage work like this would cause to the sites themselves. Seen in this light, could other large prehistoric monumental mounds exist, fossilised as later medieval mottes? Can we at least put rough dates on these huge and much-loved monuments?

In order to answer these questions a project, known as the Round Mounds Project and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was set up. This was a two-anda- half-year initiative with one simple central aim: to identify mottes in England with prehistoric potential and, through a programme of targeted, minimally intrusive investigation, determine their date of construction, how they developed, and the environmental context in which they were built.

Funding to investigate twenty mottes across England was provided, so careful research and a detailed review of existing information related to castle mottes, examining national data sets, published works, grey-literature reports and topographic data, was undertaken first. Key search criteria were developed using information from Silbury Hill, the Hatfield Barrow and the Marlborough Mound, and included each monument’s scale, topographic setting, relationship to known monuments and other archaeological evidence. From nearly nine hundred mottes or motte-and-bailey castles recorded on the Historic England NRHE (National Record of the Historic Environment), a database of 154 mounds with prehistoric potential was created and, from these, forty-six were shortlisted for field reconnaissance.

This second phase involved visiting each shortlisted site to assess the mound in its landscape context. The prehistoric potential of each mound was evaluated, as well as the fieldwork strategy and site logistics that would be involved in investigating it further, along with compiling photographs, details of any previous archaeological investigations and local geological data. This provided huge amounts of new information to add to the project and, based on these details, twenty were selected.

Constables of Marlborough Castle

The Mound Trust was the idea of Eric Elstob, who was at the College from 1956–60. It was established in January 2000, and its objective was defined as being ‘to restore, conserve, preserve and maintain the Mound at Marlborough College and its immediate curtilage as a place of historic and public interest’, and ‘to educate the public about the archaeological and historical significance and merits of the Mound including organised access by prior appointment.’

These objectives were described in more detail in a strategy paper in 2003, which set out the agenda for the Trust’s activities. It began with a statement of what was known about the Mound at that point, which makes interesting reading in the light of subsequent events.

The strategy proposed for the Trust was then divided into three headings: conservation, restoration and exploration. All of these activities are still ongoing, and what follows is a brief survey of progress to date.

Conservation

Throughout the work on the Mound, there has always been an underlying concern about the stability of its structure, in the light of instances where interventions or natural occurrences have led to substantial damage to similar sites. The subsidence at Silbury Hill in 2000 as the result of earlier excavations and the collapse of part of Oxford castle motte in 2007 were very much in mind. One of the first projects was the installation of stability monitors, which fortunately have shown that the Marlborough Mound is not inherently in danger.

Hardly a vestige of Marlborough Castle, the medieval stronghold, remains – above ground. What may still be concealed under the trees of the Wilderness is another matter; something in the way of foundations has already been revealed by our Archaeological Section in one of its periodic revivals, but that discovery, made during the War, told us nothing definite, and the attitude of successive Bursars to the resulting hole has been pardonably lacking in cordiality. When some of the larger trees fall, as they are likely to do soon, we may learn more. In the meantime some digging in the Mound suggests that at least the dimensions of the Keep may be recovered, though there again successive alterations make it difficult to reach certain conclusions.

If some familiar, like Mr Bligh Bond’s Brother Johannes, would impart the information we stand in need of, the task of reconstructing the Castle – at least for the mind’s eye – might be simpler. But Marlborough, for all its Arthurian associations, has been less fortunate than Glastonbury. If the thing could be done, there are a number of men who might be invited to testify. Long contact with their activities, as heralded in Letters Patent, enjoined in Letters Close, acknowledged on the Liberate Rolls or recorded in various Ministers’ Accounts, has made them almost friends. Alexander Barentin, the King’s butler, might tell us much about the wine-cellars; William the balestier, who had charge of the King’s artillery, could explain a great deal that must for ever remain obscure in the domestic and military arrangements of the High Tower; and Simon Horn, sent down in 1222 to remodel the farm-management of the Barton, stayed long enough in these parts to see the greater part of the remodeling of the Castle as well. But if any man of the thirteenth century might be induced to revisit the glimpses of the moon, my choice would be a certain Keeper of the King’s wardrobe. It is true he went on to higher things, but he was here in those brave but anxious middle years of his century, and, if he could tell us little else, he might at least reveal something of the personality of a man who could rise to positions of dignity and honour though his name was – Peter Chacepork.

Writing in the late twelfth century, the chronicler William of Newburgh famously described England’s royal castles as forming ‘the bones of the kingdom’, reflecting their strategic and symbolic roles as the scaffold around which royal authority was constructed. If castles were the bones of Norman England, then Wessex was its heart. This chapter considers the structures, distribution and landscape contexts of castles in Wessex generally, and the region around Marlborough more specifically, in order to illuminate something of the wider pattern of castle-building in the eleventh and twelfth centuries within which Marlborough castle can most appropriately be understood. From the start, however, it is important to emphasise that, in terms of the historical and archaeological study of fortification, Wessex is a region far more closely associated with Anglo-Saxon defence, in the form of burhs (or fortified centres) like Cricklade, Oxford, Wallingford and Wareham, than Norman fortresses. We often think, talk and write about ‘Norman castles’ – like burhs – as if they were a single species of fortification when this is far from the truth. Just as modern archaeological scholarship is revealing the variety of burhs and other types of fortification that dotted the landscape of Anglo-Saxon Wessex, including private thegnly (or aristocratic) burhs, tower-naves and civil defence infrastructure such as beacons and military roads, then so too are we now much more aware of the greater number and variety of Norman castles than previously recognised, and also the myriad functions that these sites served beyond their military roles.

Frequently bracketed together and explained away as the means by which an incoming alien elite conquered and dominated a hostile population, the Norman castles of Wessex have been characterised by historians and archaeologists alike as essentially military features of the landscape. In the Archaeological Research Framework for South-West England, published in 2007, for example, castles are subsumed under the sub-heading ‘Defence and Warfare’, underlining our continuing obsession with viewing these sites through the lens of military history and architecture. This chapter takes a rather different approach and stresses that we should pay equal, if not greater, attention to the day-to-day roles of Norman castles as high-status residences and estate centres and to their symbolic importance as emblems of authority and lordship.

Chapter 5 introduces the reader to the remarkable world of the Neandertal, discussing some of the most controversial issues relating to this species of Homo: its emergence, lifeways and ultimate extinction. It introduces cutting-edge ideas about how the probable encounters between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans, also present in the same timeframe and territories, might have been.

Remains of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) have been reported from more than 200 localities in the mainland of Japan. The Pleistocene fossil records of Japanese macaques clearly indicates that they had become indigenous to the Japanese islands before the arrival of Japanese Paleolithic humans, but there is no direct evidence to show the relationship between Japanese macaques and humans in the Pleistocene. Japanese macaques were one of the targets for human diets in the early Holocene, based on the records of remains and bone artifacts from many Jomon shell mounds. The habitat distribution of Japanese macaques has not changed drastically through the Holocene, while morphological variation in dental size was observed in some local populations. Future studies will focus on clarifying if the size variation of Japanese macaques is due to natural phenomena or to human actions.