Source: History Today
Publication date: 2009-06-01

It has long been thought that the first castle ever built in England was in existence before September 1051, when the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle records that 'the Frenchmen had built aene castel in Herefordshire'. Yet until now we have been no closer to unravelling the many mysteries surrounding this historic fortress. Its physical structure long lost to us, we can only try to reconstruct it and the circumstances of its creation from obscure 1 1 th-century sources. But these are still sufficient to enable us to discern a good deal about a building which occupies a unique place in England's history. Several annals written by Anglo-Saxon monastic chroniclers in 1051- 52 make clear that the castle was built in the territory of the Earl of Hereford by a previously unknown Norman named Osbern, who occupied it for about a year. The Domesday Book showed him holding two manors in the midlands county on the English side of the border with Wales. Who Osbern was, however, why he built this castle, where exactly it was built and what form its construction took are questions that the chroniclers do not answer.

Another mystery is how a Norman castle came to be built in England 1 5 years before the Norman Conquest of 1066. And, since we are saying that this was the first castle to be built here, despite the existence of sites of much greater antiquity which take the name 'castle' - such as Cadbury Hill Fort in Somerset - we also need to look at the whole question of what constitutes a 'castle'.

By the 19th century, historians had agreed that a castle was a defensive building with walls and a roof, which ruled out hill forts with earthwork defences that were essentially natural features developed for defence. But there was no agreement on who first built castles, with some scholars claiming that honour for the Anglo- Saxons. The question was largely decided by Ella S. Armitage, whose book The Early Norman Castles of the British Ishs, first published in 1912, remains a standard work. Armitage made function or use of a building the key factor. Anglo-Saxons, she pointed out, built communal defences such as their many defensive towns, or burhs, fortified against Viking raids, especially in the central kingdom of Mercia. Norman castles were purely private defensive sites protecting the chosen few. English castles, she insisted, were therefore a Norman innovation, a view broadly accepted ever since.

This explains why Osbern's castle was unique, as the first recorded castle built by a Norman in England, but it does not explain what he was doing in England 1 5 years before the Battle of Hastings.

That he was in England before the Conquest is actually not as unusual as it might seem, since the then king, Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-66), was half-Norman and had spent most of his life in the Duchy of Normandy before returning to England in 1041 with his part- Norman nephew Ralph and trusted Norman cleric Robert of Jumieges. The Victorian view that Edward brought a large contingent of Normans with him to England was disproved by 20th-century historians but by summer 1051 Robert of Jumieges was Archbishop of Canterbury and within a year there were likely to have been three Norman castles in England, all in the border county of Herefordshire.

Of course, this still does not explain what Osbern was doing here but the most compelling evidence about his role in mid- 1 1 th- century England is that he was initially unknown to the chroniclers. Had he been a leading landowner or royal official he would have been known to them by September 1051, which he clearly was not since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred only to 'the Frenchmen'. Most likely, Osbern was one of a number of young Norman knights, barely in their 20s, who were exported across the known world by the duchy in the 1 1 th century; younger sons with no option but to go abroad to seek their fortunes by the sword. He would have needed a lord to serve and the king's part-Norman nephew, Ralph, a young man himself, would have been the ideal candidate, having become an earl by 1050, probably of an area adjoining Herefordshire.

So Osbern is likely to have been a young soldier of fortune, perhaps serving the king's nephew, from which we can reasonably infer that he could not have built a castle in Herefordshire and established himself in two manors there without the authority of his lord or the king. This is significant. Despite the efforts of the feuding Victorian medieval historians E.A. Freeman (1823-92), author of the His- tory of the Norman Conquest (1867-76) and J. H. Round (1854-1928), best known for his study Feudal EngUnd (1892), we have no definite evidence of where or why Osbern built his castle, but we do know which manors he held.

The adjacent Herefordshire manors of Burghill and Brinsop lie a few miles west of the city of Hereford, beside the River Wye, which for centuries marked the boundary between England and Wales and had to be forded by Welsh raiders, whose incursions into the rich Herefordshire farmland were a lamented but inevitable feature of life in the Marches. The choice of these two adjoining manors was significant because of their relation to the road system.

The Anglo-Saxons were a gifted people with many skills, but road building was not among them and so the road system in use in the 1 lth century was that left behind by the Romans. This meant that the main road running north from Wales through Herefordshire did not pass through Hereford, which was founded by the Anglo-Saxons, but rather a few miles to the west, where it ran exactly between Osbern's two manors. There seems little doubt, therefore, that Osbern was given the task of defending the Herefordshire border against Welsh raiders at a time of civil strife in England. Of his two manors, Burghill, standing between the river crossing and Hereford and boasting existing earthworks at an Anglo-Saxon burh on a site beside the present village church, would have been an ideal location for his castle.

Archaeology cannot differentiate immediately pre- and post- Conquest castle sites and may never do so, but the evidence of the chroniclers and Osbern's landholdings, coupled with the Welsh threat, the turmoil of the times and the political geography of 1 1 th-century Herefordshire, strongly suggest Burghill in Herefordshire as the site where the young Norman built England's first castle.

Copyright History Today Ltd. Jun 2009

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