And best of all, it is about the destruction of castles.
In 2022 I signed a contract with Liverpool University Press to turn my PhD into a book on castle slighting so it’s official. There will be a book, and it will be a real page turner. The Destruction of Castles in the Middle Ages: The Archaeology of Slighting and Power.
I was at a conference at the start of December and someone asked if I was still doing research so I realised it’s high time I say what I’m up to.
It’s fun to be back in the saddle
This topic has been on my mind since 2010. I did my Master’s thesis on slighting and had settled on the subject before I’d been formally accepted onto the course. I wrapped my PhD back in 2018. I’m tempted to say that I needed some time away from thinking about slighting to refresh and recharge, but that’s not really true. I kept with it. I wrote a summary paper for The Archaeological Journal and I worked for English Heritage on the reinterpretation of Pevensey Castle and wrote an article about a case of possible slighting there.
This is helpful
Life over the next few years was busy and it’s nice to have another major goal in sight. After my PhD, my research went in slightly different directions, and this book is a chance to tie it back together.
And I have a research assistant this time (a cat).
The temptation to make this enormous is real
What’s Stonehenge doing in a post about castles? Photo by Diego Delso, CC-BY-SA 4.0.
My plan was simple. Check the archaeological literature for new cases of slighting, read up on some recent publications to do with authority and power and use that to inform the book. If I’m revisiting the topic, it needs to be updated and take into account new work.
When I started researching slighting, I anchored my work firmly in the Middle Ages but made reference to other cases of deliberate destruction for comparison, from ancient Rome to the modern day. I keep finding myself drawn into these other periods. Hugh Willmott’s The Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and Wales and Matthew Knight’s Fragments of the Bronze Age were both published in the last few years, and Giulia Bellato finished her PhD on the destruction of houses in medieval Italy. That alone would be enough to really enhance the discussion, but I’m coming across older stuff that I wasn’t looking for previously. It turns out there’s a theory that Stonehenge was slighted.
So organised
I’d love to include all of this in my book, and something on the destruction of hillforts, but I’m reminding myself that the focus is castles. There’s so much to keep track of I’ve started a Trello board for all my notes. It feels way more organised than when I put everything in a Word document titled ‘notes’ for my PhD and has better gif support. Who knows, maybe there’s a sequel.
There is new stuff
Ah Knepp Castle, that makes sense
In my PhD I identified 60 slighted castles, and in the years since this has increased by a handful of sites. On top of that, excavations at Sheffield Castle have been property written up and published in an open access book. New fieldwork at Knepp Castle and Pevensey in Sussex gives me a chance to introduce new sites to the discussion that sit in the grey area. Were they slighted and if not what does that tell us about royal authority? And at some point I want to consult the excavation archives on Barnstaple Castle. The fringe sites have a lot to offer.
It’s going to be a while before it’s published, but watch this space. I’ve got a lot of writing to crack on with this year.
If you read the review and want to know more of what I thought about the book, then you are in luck because here are two things which I didn’t include in the review because they are either super specific and only really of interest to me. But it’s the internet, so there’s space here.
The Round Mounds Project is really cool
The Round Mounds Project involved boring holes into 20 castle mottes to determine the chronology of their development. The project began with Marlborough, which ties the castles into a pretty important project – aside from the exciting result that what appeared to be a medieval motte was in fact a Neolithic monument that was later adapted into a castle. 70% of the mottes were built in the Middle Ages which is a really useful result. A couple were post-medieval, and some were earlier.
I really enjoyed learning more about this project and how it came about. It’s a straightforward and very effective approach to dating castle sites. It started me wondering how many more castles could be usefully explored in this way. When I was reading the book at the start of the year, I was preparing to give a talk on Knepp Castle in Sussex. The mound is natural according to the Victoria County History, and since its name derives from Old English it may have been a significant part of the landscape before the Normans. As a way of investigating the site further without massive disturbance, taking a core sample or two has potential especially as at the talk I gave on Knepp someone speculated the mound could be prehistoric.
Great Somerford castle might have been slighted
I’m currently turning my PhD into a book with Liverpool University Press, and that means looking for new fieldwork at slighted castles. Every so often I find a thread which leads to a site I wasn’t aware of. This has happened a couple of times, but so far it’s mostly been a case of old excavations getting a write up. What I wasn’t expecting was to read about Great Somerford Castle in a book about Marlborough Castle.
The motte at Great Somerford which was excavated in 1811 and 1910, and a 1930 write-up by Edward Goddard in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine gives some detail but is pretty confusing. The motte sits on an unidentified structure, possibly of the 12th century. The 1811 digging found ash and charcoal, and the earlier building might have been burned. Whether this was deliberate is up for debate, as is what that building was. Was it an earlier phase of the castle with a motte raised later? Was it a church as Oliver Creighton suggests, or something else entirely? Ultimately, there probably isn’t enough information to declare that this was a slighted castle but I might end up mentioning it in the book as an example of the challenges faced when identifying slighting.
Great Somerford gets a passing mention in the book – I’ve written more here about my confusion than the castle gets in the book – so if you pick up a copy hoping to read more about this motte-and-bailey you will be disappointed. The coverage of Marlborough Castle is good though, so get it for that reason instead.
Two points and both linked back to my own research? You can see why these ramblings weren’t included in the review!
I am writing a book based on my PhD thesis. I’m fitting this around my full-time work so it’s going to take several years. Along the way, I will be using this blog to share some thoughts related to the book as a way of organising my thoughts and perhaps leaving notes to myself.
When I began researching slighting in 2010 my interest in the subject was explicitly from the direction of castle studies. There are plenty of examples of castles being deliberately destroyed in the Middle Ages to keep a researcher or five busy for years. All the same, over time curiosity has sometimes led me to look at destruction in other time periods, or at things which aren’t castles. These can make useful comparisons for castle slighting, and the differences can help understand some of the challenges in understanding slighting.
I’m not a prehistorian and don’t go looking for newly published works in prehistoric archaeology – my reading list is long enough already. But in mid-2020 I came across a book called Economies of Destruction: How the systematic destruction of valuables created value in Bronze Age Europe, c. 2300-500 BC. The abstract posed an interesting questions: why were people disposing of a valuable resource? The mention of value stood out to me as that was part of how I explained the decisions behind slighting. A similar question lies behind the destruction of castles: why would people damage a valuable resource when it could be reused? The idea of symbolic or social value is a useful counterpart to economic or even military value.
I still haven’t got my hands on a hard copy of the book yet, but the Bard Graduate Centre has a talk from author, David Fontijn, on the same subject.
What struck me is the difference in scale – these objects are much smaller than buildings, and much more common than castles. Whereas I’ve been able to identify archaeological evidence for about 61 castles that were slighted in the Middle Ages in England, Wales, and Scotland hundreds of thousands of gold and bronze objects were deliberately deposited in the landscape. They are very different groups and you can take very different approaches as a result.
It’s also worth saying that for an object ‘destruction’ can mean losing it, like depositing a bronze sword river, putting it out of reach.
Despite that stark difference, there is a common question which links slighting and the destruction of Bronze Age objects: how do we tell the difference between deliberate damage and accidental or incidental damage or loss? Matthew Knight has presented a framework to help archaeologists answer that question. Weapons might be damaged during use, so there needs to be a way to tell the difference between incidental damage and intentional damage. The same applies to castles since they could be damaged during a siege and then slighted, but I would argue that in the former the damage is incidental to the main aim (taking control of the castle) whereas with slighting the process of damage is to reduce the value of the castle. The damage itself is the aim. While I explain this in my work, seeing Knight do a good job of explaining his approach makes me think I may need to more clearly explain mine around slighting.
The Rudham Dirk, a Bronze Age dirk found in Norfolk. The severe angle of the bend indicates that the damage was intentional, as outlined in Matthew Knight’s damage framework. Photo by Garry Crace via the Portable Antiquities Scheme, licensed CC-BY-SA 2.0. The Economies of Destruction website has more examples.
So while the motivation behind destroying gold or bronze items in the Bronze Age may have little bearing on the motivations of destroying castles in the Middle Ages, there are similarities in the underlying questions. Shifting your viewpoint to look at something in a different way can be very helpful.
I am writing a book based on my PhD thesis. I’m fitting this around my full-time work so it’s going to take several years. Along the way, I will be using this blog to share some thoughts related to the book as a way of organising my thoughts and perhaps leaving notes to myself.
Spurred by recent success in using Google Translate to read a 2021 article on the slighting of castles belonging to the Teutonic Knights, I thought I’d have a go at another article I’ve been meaning to get to. ‘Die muslimische Strategie der Schleifung fränkischen Festungen und Städte in der Levante’ (trans. ‘The Muslim Strategy of Demolishing Frankish Fortresses and Towns in the Levant’) by Hannes Möhring was published in Burgen und Schloesser in 2009. Helpfully, the German Castles Institute that publishes the journal has digitised and put their back catalogue online.
The first thing that struck me was that Google Translate had a harder time dealing with German to English than Polish to English. Not being a linguist, I have no idea why this is, but it made for slower reading, and reminded me to exercise caution especially with specialist terminology.
In terms of the content, Möhring gives a largely chronological overview of slighted castles, towns, and cities in the Holy Land in the context of the crusades, beginning with Saladin’s response to the Third Crusade and finishing with the end of the Crusader states in 1291.
The Chateau Pelerin was captured and slighted in 1291 along with other fortifications that had been used by the Crusader states. Photo by Iliakriv, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
As explain by Möhring, the cases of deliberate destruction here fall firmly in the category of denying your enemy the use of a fortification. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the context of the crusades, Möhring sees slighting almost exclusively through the lens of military need. Even so, there are often other considerations which may be secondary and while they are sometimes hinted at in this article they’re not explored further. When explaining the Saladin’s decision to not slight the port city of Acre in 1188, Möhring doesn’t consider the issue of authority. He suggests that leaving Acre intact was the sensible move unless Saladin was prepared to destroy all coastal ports. Economically speaking, this would have been devastating and at this stage demolishing a major city would have been a public statement of a lack of confidence in standing against the Crusaders, undermining his personal authority.
The contrast later on when Saladin embarks on extensive slighting to focus resources on Jerusalem is stark; slighting in this instance was inherently a defensive act. Interestingly, Möhring suggests that slighting Jaffa led to Richard I spending time there to repair its defences which could have been used to capture Jerusalem. After slighting, there are choices to be made about how a site is used – should it be abandoned? Is it worth repairing? Can it continue it a broken-down state?
In contrast to Szczupak’s work, Möhring doesn’t include much specific detail about how places were slighted. Context is given to explain how it comes about, but there is no interrogation of the extent of slighting or the approach taken. In part this may be because the source material doesn’t include that kind of information, but occasionally there are snippets which hint at more – like the destruction of waterpipes along with the fortifications when emir al-Mu’azzam Isa slighted Jerusalem, or the way the Egyptians left the mosque at Damietta intact when the city was slighted.
It’s an interesting and thought-provoking piece, and there is clearly scope for a deeper dive into slighting in the Holy Land. The extent of slighting would make for a good comparison with the approach taken by Robert Bruce during his campaign to expel the English from Scotland.
Recently I finally got round to reading an article that had been on my ‘must read’ list for more than a year. The title of Dominika Szczupak’s article, ‘The technique of the demolition of Teutonic Order fortresses in the Middle Ages‘, makes it clear why it’s relevant to my own research on slighting (the deliberate destruction of high-status buildings).
I can’t quite remember how I can across it – probably via Google Scholar. As well being curious about new research into slighting I was very excited to be broadening my own horizons. The focus of my PhD and subsequent research has been on the castles of England, Scotland, and Wales. That is largely due to linguistic limitations. The English abstract made it clear that this would be an important article, and I took a punt on Google Translate. It seems to have done a pretty good job and I was able to read the article in full.
The bibliography is a useful resource and I’ve picked out a couple of articles I’ll try to track down. Crossing one thing off your reading list just ends up with more taking its place! I remember when skimming the article last year that I had a worrying moment when Szczupak mentioned the work of Hannes Möhring discussing slighting. Luckily, it was a case of my memory falling short as I’d referenced the same work in my PhD (though I think it was a case of indicating there is someone else who has engaged with the topic, rather than critically addressing the content).
There is a lot of detail in the article and it really repays a close read, but there are two points in particular that stand out.
The site of the castle ruins in Mała Nieszawka. Though overgrown, photos show there are some bricks above ground. As is typical of the sites that seem to pique my interest, it’s not a lot to look at! Photo by Mateuszgdynia, CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Firstly, the issues Szczupak mentions are familiar to the context I work in. Specifically the author highlights that demolition is often treated as a discrete event with little discussion of the context, and there have been no large-scale systemic studies of the phenomenon in Poland. That resonates with my view of the understanding of slighting in England, Scotland, and Wales in 2010 when I started on this topic.
Secondly, the case studies Szczupak uses are fascinating. They fall into a typical template of slighting of being linked to conflicts and assertions or rejections of authority. The historical sources are especially rich and the details of the slighting of the Teutonic Order’s castle at Mała Nieszawka is a brilliant case study. There are details of back and forth between the parties involved discussing how extensive the slighting should be – should be it be total, or should the outer walls be reduced to a fixed height? What about the internal buildings and structures? All of that and more contributes to a very rich picture which I’m sure I’ll be referring back to in the future.
Anyway, here’s hoping that Dominika Szczupak’s work in this area continues!
In 2018–19 English Heritage undertook a programme of reinterpretation at Pevensey Castle. A new guidebook was written, the museum displays were replaced, reconstruction drawings were commissioned, and teaching kits for schools were prepared. The Roman fort and medieval castle had last seen major interpretative work in the 1990s – with some interventions by Archaeology South East in 2017 as part of a conservation programme.
Historic England carried out a topographical survey of the site on English Heritage’s behalf, complementing the new interpretation. There is a very good report from Historic England, and now two of the team who carried out the fieldwork are peer-reviewed publishing articles. This is excellent news because it brings the new understanding of Pevensey into the academic mainstream. I was the Properties Historian working on the Pevensey project in 2018, and the deeper examination of the site prompted my own paper, which will be published in Sussex Archaeological Collections.
So when the latest SAC volume arrived in December it was exciting to see a piece on Pevensey: “ ‘At Pevensey doth a ruin’d Castle stand’: the development of the post-Norman castle”. I immediately skimmed to see what it says about slighting, which is what my own work focuses on, before then giving it a closer read.
The inner bailey was the main focus of Norman activity at Pevensey. Photo by Vicki Burton, licensed CC-BY-SA 2.0.
What you need to know
It looks like there are going to be a few peer-reviewed papers resulting from English Heritage’s reinterpretation work at Pevensey. This paper, written by Mark Bowden and Allan Brodie, references another one they’ve written on Pevensey and the Norman Conquest: ‘Ad Pevensey: Pevensey Castle and the Norman Conquest’. In it they will look at how William the Conqueror’s co-option of Pevensey and how it was used to link him to Julius Caesar. In time, I’ll publish a paper on the events of 1216 exploring whether King John slighted the castle. This particular paper, “ ‘At Pevensey doth a ruin’d Castle stand’: the development of the post-Norman castle” focuses on the late 12th and 13th century castle.
While it has a specific focus, the paper includes a very useful summary of the castle’s history before and after the main period under discussion. It’s detailed and well-researched, which is exactly what you’d expect from Historic England, especially if you’ve come across the earlier report.
The article discusses some important topics: the development of the stone castle (ie: particularly the inner bailey) the dating of the keep; phases of building in the inner bailey; and the date of the chapel. There aren’t always firm answers, but that reflects the nature of the evidence. There’s a tantalising suggestion that the keep may have been commissioned by William the Conqueror, but we’ll have to wait for the paper on Pevensey and the Norman Conquest to dig into that topic.
The base of the unusual Norman keep at Pevensey. Photo by Prioryman, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0.
What I’m interested in
At first glance, there was a passing mention of slighting which boiled down to a statement that it is uncertain whether King John’s orders to demolish Pevensey in 1216 were followed. I’ve written a paper on the subject which isn’t out yet and discusses the issue; and if I had to summarise the situation in a sentence that’s pretty close to how I’d do it (though I lean towards the orders not having been followed). The journey to discovery is much more fun than one sentence!
The problem is that the evidence is circumstantial. The inner bailey was largely built in the mid 13th century, after the events of 1216, so a lot of evidence one way or another can’t be accounted for.
One thing in the article did stand out to me: Bowden and Brodie suggest an alternative date for the gatehouse to the inner bailey.
It’s often been dated to somewhere around 1190–1220. Bowden and Brodie differ here. It stood out most in their phased plan of the inner bailey where the gatehouse is described as mid 13th century. It’s a spongey term, but could be anywhere from 1230 to 1270 if we’re being broad. And while numbers aren’t put on that range ‘mid 13th century’ definitely sounds later than 1220.
Why does this matter? If the gatehouse was built around the time of most of the inner bailey, rather than a couple of decades earlier, it means the mid-13th century building programme was even more substantial than already appreciated. For my own interests, whether the gatehouse was built before or after 1216 effects whether we should be scrutinising it for evidence of slighting.
I haven’t fully absorbed the text so my thoughts here are subject to change! The article acknowledges there is uncertainty about dating and is less firm about what the date of the gatehouse may be. The key issue seems to be that the documentary sources don’t specify when it was built (a recurring challenge for understanding castles); it was under royal control for periods and documents record spending but there’s not an obvious date that can be pointed to for the gatehouse’s construction.
The article identifies four phases of construction to the inner bailey, and suggest the gatehouse is later than the south wall and South Tower. Bowden and Brodie note that while “Various authors have suggested that the main gatehouse may date from the 1190s or c1220” (p.146). Anthony Chapman in his study of the gatehouse suggests it is earlier than the curtain wall as the wall abuts the north tower of the gatehouse rather than being keyed into it (p.102); the south tower hardly survives above basement level so it’s not possible to see if there was a similar arrangement there. Chapman assumes it would have been the same there, but Bowden and Brodie are less sure. The main issue seems to be that the “work of the 1190s seems to have been focused on the postern gate” (p, 146) so they don’t think the main gatehouse would be that early, and instead suggest the enclosure was built clockwise from the postern gate, and so the south curtain wall predates the gatehouse.
What makes the situation more complicated is that stylistically, Pevensey’s gatehouse is typical of the late 12th or early 13th century. If it dates to the 1190s it’s an early example of gatehouse two twin D-shaped towers. A similar layout was used at Beeston, Chartley, and Bollingbroke in the 1220s, so Pevensey’s could post-date 1216 quite happily. Architectural historian John Goodall, who wrote the 1999 guidebook, suggests a date of around 1190. Trying to put a narrow date on a particular feature is tricky, and there are good reasons to use terms which span decades or even centuries.
In my paper on the purported slighting of Pevensey, I discuss the gatehouse as one of the possible features extant in 1216. The evidence for slighting is equivocal, so to be honest adding in a bit more ambiguity doesn’t throw off my conclusions!
Most importantly, it’s encouraging to see new research into Pevensey get published. It’s such a rich site, with so much to explore and I’m excited to see Bowden and Brodie’s other papers.
In November, the latest volume of the Castle Studies Group Journal arrived through my front door, and I was very excited to see that there were not one but two articles on gatehouses. This was one of the first topics I explored properly in castle studies, and it’s one which still fascinates me. I even approached gatehouses as a distinct category of building in my PhD to understand if they were treated any differently to other parts of slighted castles.
David Mercer’s ‘Early Norman Castle Gateways in Britain’ especially caught my eye because it’s a survey article, drawing together information from many sites to interrogate the evidence and draw new conclusions. It’s an approach that works, and one that has a lot to offer for gates. It’s well worth the time to read through. I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about the article here, mostly for my own benefit but also because there are some important points that bear repeating.
Scope
The article looks at gates from the 11th and 12th centuries, up to about the point at which twin towered gatehouses became fashionable. When casting the net as broadly as Britain, it makes sense to establish a limit to prevent the evidence base from becoming unwieldy. In my paper on castle gatehouses in North West England, the relatively small number of sites meant I could extend the period across the whole of the Middle Ages.
I would say that while the title is Britain, most of the examples are from England with a small number from Wales – about 37 to 6 by my reckoning – and none from Scotland. It makes for a more cumbersome title, but I would substitute ‘Britain’ for ‘England and Wales’.
Mercer makes it clear that this is not a gazetteer of every Norman gate in England and Wales, but a selection to illustrate his case. It’s very well done and with more than 40 sites considered is a substantial body of work to interrogate. That is a valid and sensible approach, but one site I think could have been usefully included is Castle Tower Penmaen in Wales. Excavated by Leslie Alcock in 1960 and 1961, the write up was one of the earliest to explore the challenges of understanding timber gateways and included a number of comparisons.
Mercer acknowledges an Anglo-centric bias to the material since ‘regrettably we know very little about either the prototype gateways from pre-Conquest France’. It seems this can’t be helped as in his 1981 paper ‘La fortification des portes avant la Guerre de Cent Ans’, Jean Mesqui looks to examples from England to discuss late 11th and early 12th century gateways.
Challenging questions
David opens by asking why there hasn’t been more interest in writing about castle gates. There probably isn’t an entirely adequate answer, but it does mean like papers likely this are gold dust. Later in the paper he notes that posterns have not been treated in an academic study as a discrete class yet. Perhaps they’re just not glamorous enough to grab attention? Regardless, it is a gap in our knowledge.
The postern gate at Pevensey Castle. Photo by Nilfanion, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The upshot is that literature about gates hasn’t moved on beyond the issue of defensive use vs display. Mercer explicitly sets out to challenge this status quo and explores a range of motives for building gates. The importance of this approach is especially clear when he reassesses the Norman gate at Richmond. He shows that earlier historians described the entrance as a ‘simple doorway’ but points out similarities with cathedral architecture. Interpreting castle elements solely on their defensive capabilities misses out other important aspects. As Mercer says, ‘This wide opening … was clearly designed more for display than defence’.
The Norman doorway at Richmond Castle. Photo by alh1, licensed CC-BY-ND 2.0.
This point about display is very interesting. Mercer’s focus is of course on gateways, but I think there may be an interesting comparison to make to keeps as monumental forms of architecture which display strength and status. Off the top of my head Pamela Marshall’s work on doors and large openings in the upper floors of keeps (‘Making an appearance: some thoughts on the phenomenon of multiple doorways and large upper openings in Romanesque donjons in western France and Britain’, Chateau Gillard) may be a useful comparison.
Chester’s Agricola Tower
Since I’m more familiar with gatehouses in North West England, Mercer’s discussion of Chester especially stood out. The Agricola Tower is describes by English Heritage as the castle’s original gateway, and the Victoria County History also describes it as a gatehouse. Mercer rejects this identification, instead suggesting that the Flag Tower was a gateway.
This is a substantial change in interpretation, and Mercer’s familiarity with the source material and gates as demonstrated through this paper means it should be given significant consideration. I do think there are unanswered questions, and my own photos of the Agricola Tower sadly don’t answer them. I regret not taking the chance for a closer look when I was there in autumn!
Mercer’s point is that ‘topographical drawings of the interior of the Agricola Tower suggest that the relieving arch visible on the exterior may have been merely for a window opening’ and ‘The former gatetower in the Flag Tower still can be traced, this suggests that the Agricola Tower could not have so functioned as originally built’.
My photos of the interior of the Agricola tower aren’t especially helpful. I assume the relieving arch Mercer refers to is the one blocked on the north-east face. It looks to me like the buttresses may be later, but I’d need a closer took to be sure. Perhaps a comparison of the size of the blocked opening on the north-east side with that on the south-west would shed light on whether it was a window or door.
The Flag Tower as the only gateway in the inner bailey gateway seems a bit odd to me as it would have meant there was no access between the inner and outer bailey. It may be I have got the wrong end of the stick here and may need to re-read the paper!
Left to right: the Agricola Tower viewed from the south-west; the north-east face of the tower, with buttresses; a blocked opening at ground level between two buttresses (which appear to be later additions).
Cool bits and pieces
Mercer’s approach of bringing together a lot of evidence and seeing what patterns emerge is one that appeals to me (and apologies to David if I have vastly over simplified the work involved). The presence of covered passages is rather fun, and not something much in evidence at castles in the North West. So at South Mimms the there was a passage through the motte and at Old Sarum a tunnel goes through a bank of the ringwork.
One especially interesting point is that Norman gateways typically didn’t have fireplaces or latrines. There are notable exceptions, but it therefore appears that in the 11th and 12th century any accommodation here would not have been high status. This relates to a broad issue of establishing uses for the rooms in the upper floors of gateways. Chapels often have distinctive architectural features, but other uses seem to leave fewer traces.
Concluding thoughts
In moving away from an artificial dichotomy of defence vs display David Mercer has created a valuable paper for understanding gateways. He makes it clear that they are complex and varied buildings. There is a lot to explore here, and one read through probably isn’t enough to pull out all the useful details. As someone interested in gatehouses, I’m delighted that someone has picked up this subject and driven it on and I’ll be referring to this in the future.
Gateways are about access and controlling who enters. They were the point at which visitors entered the lord’s space, moving from viewing the castle from the outside to experiencing it in a different way. Within castles there are different social spaces and areas which would have been accessible to some people and out of bounds to others, demarked by physical barriers – sometimes gateways. They are a physical expression of the social hierarchy. It therefore makes sense that even a ‘simple doorway’ as the one at Richmond would have high-status architecture. The understanding of these spaces is much richer when the first question isn’t ‘how would this have functioned as a defence?’
Header image: engraving of Clitheroe Castle c.1650
Since 2017, the Women’s Classical Committee have organised regular sessions where they collaborate to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of female classicists. The WCCwiki initiative began because the English Wikipedia’s coverage of women in the field of classics was, frankly, abysmal. Their work has transformed the English Wikipedia’s coverage. Over the course of five years, the number of biographies of female classicists had multiplied by a factor of 13. As a result of their considerable efforts, the initiative was named Partnership of the Year at the 2022 UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards.
Wikipedia’s policies can sometimes replicate biases in source material, but because it is an open platform active participation can redress the balance. WCCwiki write about notable subjects – those with coverage in independent, reliable sources and therefore should have Wikipedia pages. This applies to people working in the field currently and in the past, as well as figures from classical history. WCCwiki is an example of how a group of people can support each other, learn new, skills, and contribute to one of the world’s most widely used digital resources.
The people involved in WCCwiki have gone out of their way to welcome new people to their group, and share their experiences of working on Wikipedia with colleagues in academia. Being able to demystify Wikipedia and how it works is enormously useful.
In this post I will explore the numbers behind WCCwiki since July 2021, drawing on information from Wikidata which helps work out what is in Wikipedia. Numbers help tell the broad picture of the work volunteers put into WCCwiki, but it is only part of the story. Before 2020, WCCwiki had trialled online events. As a network of researchers across the UK, and across countries, meeting in-person wasn’t particularly easy to coordinate so monthly online meetings were the way to go. Initially these took place over IRC – an old school chat website – but in 2020 as the world got to grips with remote working they made greater use of tools like Zoom to connect and work together. The way WCCwiki have adapted and continued their work since 2020 has shown resilience and commitment to share information.
This post comes shortly after the English Wikipedia reached the landmark of 500 biographies about women classicists. I would like to pretend that was intentional, but I’ve been thinking about this blog post since July, which would have been one year on from when I last posted about the stats. Before I published the stats in December, so maybe this will be the resumption of regular programming.
The work in context
It’s fun to see how many articles WCCwiki have created because it’s a huge number. Creating new articles is an important part of WCCwiki’s work, but it isn’t the limit of what they do. On Wikipedia they update existing pages on Wikipedia, share images, curate what already exists, and add women’s scholarship to relevant articles. What this means is I am going to have to start finding new ways of showing the impact of their work. Collectively, WCCwiki have improved more than 600 pages on the English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is enormous: English is the largest edition with more than 6 million entries, but there are a lots of other language editions with more than a million articles. It’s not a matter of quantity over quality though, as you can tell from a look at Wikipedia’s guidelines about what to include and how to write pages. There are also internal review processes which recognise Wikipedia’s best content. On the English Wikipedia anyone can submit an article to the good Article process, though it’s best if you have been involved in writing it so that you can respond to feedback. This process involves an uninvolved Wikipedian coming along and assessing the article against a set of criteria including judging whether an article is well written and has no significant gaps in coverage.
Depending on how complex a topic it, it can take weeks or months to prepare a page to Good Article standard, and the process itself can take a similar length of time. So it is especially impressive that since July last year, the WCCwiki have seen seven article they have worked on promoted Good Article status:
Jacquetta Hawkes
Anna Apostolaki
Alice Kober
Kathleen Freeman (classicist)
Elizabeth Pierce Blegen
CIL 4.5296
Mary Renault
At the other end of the scale, stub articles are the shortest entries on Wikipedia and generally in need of more detail. They can be just a couple of sentences long with a reference or two. Typically, that’s how a Wikipedia article starts off and it grows over time. Of the 642 articles under the auspices of WCCwiki as of December 2022, 46 (7.2%) are recognised as stub entries. In July 2021, the proportion was slightly higher at 7.9%, so while the number of articles the project looks after grew over the last seventeen months the overall quality improved.
WCCwiki are closing the gap between coverage of women in classics and coverage of women in general on the English Wikipedia.
Last year I checked how Wikipedia’s coverage in English compared to German, French, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Arabic in terms of numbers of biographies. Since July last year 214 biographies of classicists were created on the English Wikipedia; the proportion of 22% was the highest of any of the compared language editions of Wikipedia. Some languages, notably French, found that the coverage worsened as a proportion. Without WCCwiki’s intervention, it is very likely that English Wikipedia would be counted amongst these.
Female bios (Jul ’21)
Female bios (Dec ’22)
Total bios of classicists (Dec ‘22)
Change
As a proportion of bios in that period
English
454 (17.69%)
503 (18.09%)
2780
49
21.88%
German
376 (10.40%)
416 (10.54%)
3947
40
12.01%
French
106 (9.64%)
114 (8.96%)
1273
8
4.62%
Arabic
74 (13.88%)
77 (13.53%)
569
3
8.33%
Russian
54 (6.84%)
66 (7.15%)
923
12
8.96%
Italian
53 (5.95%)
63 (6.22%)
1013
10
9.43%
Swedish
14 (2.43%)
18 (2.93%)
615
4
10.00%
Archaeology
Archaeology
Classics has lots of different specialisms, but I’ve kept an eye on archaeology over the years since that is my own interest. As with the overall work on classics biographies, the work here is continuing in the right direction and a nice little landmark to pass: the ratio of biographies about women and men is now 1:2. Over the last 17 months, more biographies of women classical archaeologists were created in English than of men.
Language Wikipedia
Female
% female
Male
Total
English, 14 Dec 2018
37
19.2%
156
193
English, 6 Dec 2019
85
29.1%
207
292
English, 28 Jul 2021
109
32.3%
228
337
English, 20 Dec 2022
119
33.7%
234
353
As with previous years I’ve also kept an eye on medieval archaeologists as that is my area of specialism. The overall numbers remain small compared to classics, but 13 biographies on men and 16 on women is a good state of affairs.
Last time I looked at data like this there were questions about the fields of industrial archaeology, post-medieval archaeology, and industrial archaeology. The issue back then is that the underlying data was incomplete. In the intervening period, that hasn’t changed much. Of these three the one meaningful area to look at is industrial archaeology but the English Wikipedia only has 11 biographies for this specialism, and just two are of women (Marilyn Palmer and Kate Clark).
Making an impact
Groups such as the Women’s Classical Committee have enormous potential to positively effect Wikipedia, and the online knowledge ecosystem it ties into. By documenting the work of women in classics – writing biographies of notable figures, citing their work – #WCCwiki is helping preserve their legacy and spotlighting the work of contemporary scholars. If you want to help the Women’s Classical Committee, you can find out more including details of upcoming online events on their project page.
With the Women’s Classical Committee’s 50th Wikipedia editing event taking place today(!) now seemed like a good time to crunch some numbers and see how things are going.
Usually, I’d try to do this in December but the Denelezh gender gap analysis tool I’ve used in the past and which does a lot of the heavy lifting was down in December. It’s back online now, but the most recent data it has is from September 2020, and has been replaced by WDCM: Biases. It seems to run in a similar way by querying Wikidata around gender, occupation, and different wiki projects but seems to have fewer ways to explore the data. For example, I can find information on gender gap by profession of wiki project, but not how the two intersect. So I’ll be trying running a few manual queries to showcase the gender gap and recording the results here. As the queries are working from the live data, the figures will eventually drift what what is written in this blog.
Number of biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia as of 28 July 2021
So as of 28 July 2021, the English Wikipedia has 454 biographies of female classicists, which is 17.7% of the total. This is progress from December 2019 when the 384 biographies of female classicists made contributed 16.3% over the overall biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia and the proportion continues to climb.
It’s worth noting that Wikidata can accommodate information on different genders – it’s not just binary – but verifying that can be tricky. For modern classicists, this information may be highly sensitive and for historical classicists many of the sources won’t address the issue. Hence, there may be a gap as a result.
Number of biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia over time
Change since December 2019
The last 19 months has been a time unlike any other we’ve lived through as for most of that time we’ve had to deal with a pandemic. The Women’s Classical Committee already ran monthly online editing events, so were well placed to continue those. The potential difficulty is that Wikipedia editing is largely extra-curricula, and when you’re dealing with a crisis non-essential activities can naturally contract.
#WCCwiki persevered and continued to make a different which is all the more important give how much academics have had to deal with due to the shift to online teaching, and not to mention the general precarcity of academia.
Female
% female
Male
Total
English Wikipedia
70
33.8%
137
207
By comparison, in the whole of 2019 there were 271 new biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia, and 42.8% were about women. That was an excellent result, and the progress made in 2020 and 2021 represents the resilience of #WCCwiki.
Other languages
I miss the Denelezh tool. It made this bit so easy. Where it gives you an overview by Wikipedia language, I have to run a query for each. I’ll focus on the languages which had more than 450 biographies of classicists in December 2019. Apologies for the monster table below.
Dec-19
Dec-19
Dec-19
Dec-19
Jul-21
Jul-21
Jul-21
Jul-21
Change
Change
Change
Change
Wikipedia
Female
% female
Male
Total
Female
% female
Male
Total
Female
% female
Male
Total
German
322
10%
2973
3295
376
10%
3238
3614
54
17%
265
319
English
384
16%
1975
2359
454
18%
2112
2566
70
34%
137
207
French
92
9%
885
977
106
10%
994
1100
14
11%
109
123
Italian
42
5%
737
779
53
6%
854
907
11
9%
117
128
Russian
42
6%
658
700
54
7%
735
789
12
13%
77
89
Swedish
10
2%
536
546
14
2%
561
575
4
14%
25
29
Arabic
68
14%
423
491
74
14%
459
533
6
14%
36
42
The important bit is how the change in the English Wikipedia compares to other languages. 34% of the new articles about classicists on the English Wikipedia were about women. This is twice that of the German Wikipedia, and triple that of French. It shows very clearly what that without the efforts of the Women’s Classical Committee new Wikipedia biographies would have a much stronger male bias.
Percentage of biographies on different Wikipedia about classicists that are female. The graph is my own work based on data in denelezh and queries run on 28 July 2021.
The field of classics on Wikipedia was in a bad state at the start of 2017. While it has been gradually improving since, it still languishes behind the overall gender gap on Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia’s proportion of biographies about women has outpaced any other Wikipedia. Arabic Wikipedia had a remarkable 2019, but at the other end of the scale the Swedish Wikipedia has a lot of ground to cover. Worryingly, Italian and French appear to have a downward trend.
Archaeology
In 2018 and 2019 I included some figures on classical archaeologists, and for some effort of completeness here they are with an update:
Language Wikipedia
Female
% female
Male
Total
English, 14 Dec 2018
37
19.2%
156
193
English, 6 Dec 2019
85
29.1%
207
292
English, 28 Jul 2021
109
32.3%
228
337
In 2019 there was a roughly even split between the number of new biographies of men and women who are classical archaeologists, and since December 2019 the new biographies of women have slightly outnumbered those of men. It was already tracking above classical scholars as a whole, so this is very encouraging. As it’s a small group, progress can be much quicker.
Though it’s not specifically about classics I’m happy that the number of medieval archaeologists with biographies has increased from 4 in December 2019 (1 male, 3 female) to 23 in July 2021 (9 male, 14 female), but at least part of this must be due to the underlying data being improved rather than brand new articles.
Conclusion
The Women’s Classical Committee have been working together to improve Wikipedia for several years. They are an outstanding example of what can be accomplished, and longevity. Way back in 2016, the data I had indicated that 7% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies of classical scholars were about women, and in absolute terms that meant fewer than articles. The data above makes it clear that the intervention of #WCCwiki has enriched Wikipedia.
This only scratches the surface as it doesn’t take quality into account. As well as creating new pages, #WCCwiki revisit pages and update them, quantity and quality going hand-in-hand.
I visited a castle today for the first time in ten months, and even better it was for some fieldwork. Knepp Castle in Sussex is off the beaten track, but in the middle of a rewilding area it’s a beautiful spot and it was lovely to talk to the occasional visitor about what we were doing.
Since I finished my PhD on slighting, I’ve been looking for ways to carry on the research, looking at different sites, trying to find new ways of looking at the information. Knepp is a site which cropped up in my research back in 2011 as royal documents from 1216 record an order to destroy it. Well, a couple of orders really – one of which specified the castle should be burnt – which opens up questions about whether any of them were followed.
Until today, there hadn’t been any archaeological investigations at Knepp – no excavations, not building survey, no topographical survey, and no geophysics. Conducting a geophysical survey seemed like a good way to find out the extent of the castle and see if there were any structural remains related to the tower. So I managed to secure a research grant from the Society for Medieval Archaeology to do some fieldwork.
At this point, I should mention that I thought it best to involve someone with more experience of geophysical survey than me. Scott Chaussée is doing the hard work, and also carried out a survey at Pevensey Castle, another place which John gave orders to slight in 1216. Today and tomorrow we (mostly Scott) are conducting a gradiometer survey. This should give us an idea of structural remains, and just maybe it will have something to say about whether the castle was burned – but that’s a secondary objective, there’s a lot more to learn about Knepp.
I made strategic use of the shade and look contemplative which Scott ran the gradiometer over the site.
Looking at photos and maps never does a place justice, and to be honest I’d been wondering just how substantial the ‘motte’ really was. It’s at least partly natural, and is actually quite impressive close up. It doesn’t tower above you, but it is noticeably steep in some places, and from on top of it you get a good view of the area.
Looking at the tower from the other end of the motte
The more I looked at the tower, the more confusing it seemed. From a distance, it looks like a simple wall from a rectangular tower, but it has some quirks. It survives pretty much to its full height, but the question is how far did it extend to either side. Both ends look like they are could be corners, so this would be an almost intact face, but at one end the wall batters inwards so perhaps I’m missing something. The point of this fieldwork is to see what survives beneath the surface, and I don’t think I’ll be able to work out what’s going on with the tower at this stage.
This is the triangular bit. I wondered if it was added later, to reinforce the tower but looking again I think it was part of the original design.
I’ve no idea what the data will show. Hopefully there’s something out there as King John liked visiting Knepp Castle, and since he and his queen stayed here several times there must have been decent accommodation for them. It could have been the tower, but I wonder if it might have been a cosy for them.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to another day’s fieldwork tomorrow (thank you Scott) and the prospect of ground penetrating radar at some point when the grass is a bit shorter.
Richard the Castellan 
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