In future, to save myself some duplication, the latest news of developments in Gatehouse will be published as a pdf file.

Newsletter 1

A couple of new books, of similar format, have been published in the last few months. Buckton Castle and the castles of the North West England and The Castles of Bedfordshire. Both, by teams of authors, have introductory chapters on castles (always the weakest part of such books), detailed summaries of recent archaeological work of one castle - Buckton and Bedford castles respectively - of real value and import and a gazetteer of castles in the local area of some interest. In The Castles of Bedfordshire, James Petre identifies a number of 'reject site' and a 'ringwork' not previously in Gatehouse - although this is also dubious.

An old book, Derek Renn's Norman Castles of Britain, was looked at some years ago in the early days of the Gatehouse website. It has now been much more carefully examined with a broader understanding of medieval fortifications. Although the 'castellology' content is somewhat dated the historical sources cited (something archaeologists are often weak at) generally remain valid and these references (usually to earliest mention) have been added to the Gatehouse records. Fortunately many of the transcription made by C19 scholars of the primary sources are now available online and where this is so links have been added.

A few sites mentioned by Renn had been missed in the earlier reading and these have now been added. Also missed was a licence to 'fortify his house of Stokes' (firmandi domum suam de Stokes) granted to Geoffrey fitz Peter in 1202. Renn suggested Stokesay castle in Shropshire as a possibly location for this house. Tenurially this does not seem possibly and more likely would be a house at Stoke Manderville, Buckinghamshire, where Geoffrey, a career civil servant of relatively humble origins but who was regent at times in John's reign, gained the sub tenancy of one of the two manor's there when he married the Manderville heiress. Stoke Manderville is a DMV (The modern village lies north of the original site) but the surviving earthworks are not clear. Presumably the original Manderville manor house was moated and Geoffrey may have intended greater work but it does not seem that a substantial house was constructed. This was a Liberate Roll entry, equivalent to Close Roll entry in practice, so arguably not a licence to crenellate but clearly of a similar interest. A record has been added to the List of Licences to Crenellate.

The records for Devon have been checked, updated and brought up to standard. The Devon and Dartmoor HER has been part of Heritage Gateway for a while but revised and improved entries from the HER have been added to HG in the last couple of months so the revision of these record has been particularly timely and they are generally much improved.

New sites

From Petre

• Ridgemont Castle Hill - reject
• Seymour's Mount, Steppingley - accepted as a ringwork by Petre - considered dubious by Gatehouse.
• Roxton Round Hill - reject

• Abbot of Ely's fortified house in Norwich
• Lower Slaughter Church, Gloucestershire - used as a siege work in 1139-48
• Rye Strong House, Sussex
• A record for Stoke Manderville is added.

Andrew Herrett kindly let me know of a reputed motte near Strelley, Nottinghamshire. This is a quarry mound bit is still though to be a motte by some locals.

A short news report for what seems to have been quite a bit of work.

The records for Cumberland have been brought up to standard, with fuller and more clearly attributed descriptions and with mapping references checked and improved. However, as I went through these records, it became clear it was a long time since I looked at Denis Perriam  and John Robinson The Medieval Fortified Buildings of Cumbria, which is a major source, and I will need to reexamine that text and review the records further sometime in the future.

Much time has been spent on adding bibliographical references. Notable are references in early Castle Studies Group Newsletters (available online in the Castle Studies Group Website) and Paul Davis's The Forgotten Castles of Wales (Logaston Press, 2011), although numerous other references have also been added, particularly for Cumberland. The general bibliographies of the site have been extended by some 10% and slightly redesigned to make the bibliographic references a little more consistent over the site. The page giving guidance on finding copies of referenced texts has been expanded to more clearly acknowledge the importance of John Kenyon's work. A slight design change to the individual page description of the general bibliography adds a link to Amazon.co.uk. A small section on palaeographic sources has been added to the page on Primary Sources although I continue to highly recommend Chris Philips's Some notes on medieval English Genealogy website for finding online copies of primary source calendars etc. and I don't intend to duplicate his work.

One reason for a need to review Perriam and Robinson is the confusion is some records between bastles and 'bastle derivates'. The term 'bastle derivative' is used by Peter Ryder to mean thin walled, non defensive, houses of C17 and later date with residential rooms on the first floor over livestock or storage space and which he considers to be derived from the bastle building tradition. However, some authors seem also to use the term to mean later houses built on the site of and incorporation parts of (or at least foundations of) actual bastles. The situation is messy and Gatehouse records of bastles need further work to properly identify bastles, bastle derivatives and even things like bastle derivatives built on the foundations of bastles! I hope, at some point, to use the Gatehouse database to get a survey of such sites and show some light on this issue.

The work on Cumberland has resulted in new records - although further changes are likely to occur.

and in Northumberland

The records for Warwickshire have been brought up to standard, with extended descriptions, better latitude/longitude references and some extensions to bibliographies.

A couple of very slight design changes will hopefully improve usability.

The Journals page has been updated. The Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society join the increasing number of journals with back issues fully available to freely download. Please do let me know if I'm missing anything of interest.

I've hopefully resolved a problem with broken links to scanned copies of texts available from Internet Archive, who had slightly changed their urls for some reason.

Steve Hobbs was kind enough to let me know of his historic research at Hartland in North Devon. His website www.hartlandforum.co.uk/ has a vast amount on Hartland, and is a fine example of what a local historian can do. The medieval landscape survey asks the question "So where is the castle?" Looking at this made it clear to me it is unlikely that the domum unam in terra sua de Hertiland' (one house in the land of Hartland) for which Alan "de H'tiland'" was granted licence to crenellate in 1201 (one of the first documented licences) was at or near Blegberry Farm as had been assumed by a previous local historian R.P. Chope. A much more likely location for the house was 'on the perimeter of the present settlement of Hartland' next to a deer park. See the record for Hartland Castle.

Mr Hobbs's work has convinced me Alan of Hartland was a member of the Dinham family (I'd previously dismissed this on the bases of the inaccurate genealogy available), who had a complex family structure at this time. This new (to me) information turns the 1201 licence from one which is seemingly a straightforward example of royal consent for a fortified building specifically built because of the pirate William de Marisco into a document with a hidden agenda about an ownership dispute between difference branches of the Dinham family and some complex relationship between this family of growing importance and the local magnate William Briwer (granted some licences himself the previous year). See the record for the 1201 licence.

Although the farm at Blegberry can be dismissed as the location for Hartland Castle it was a house with C17 gunloops These loops may actually be from 1606 and represent a defence against pirates and, if so, this makes this a defensible building of the same date as northern bastles, although of a somewhat different form and at the higher end of the social scale for such defensible buildings. A new record for Blegberry has been created.

British Television programme TimeTeam has visited several sites listed in Gatehouse this season. These programmes have shown the best and worst of this programme. A dig at Kenfig, Glamorgan, confirmed the town defences were a timber pallisade. The dig at Croft Castle, near Crewkerne, Somerset was very important and found the foundations of a late C12 great tower (probably unfinished) previously unknown. However, the dig at King John's Palace, Clipstone, Nottingham, whilst having some limited content of interest, had some gross distortions (including stating they had got the site scheduled - it has been scheduled for many years although the scheduling area may have been increased) and completely failed to acknowledge the recent work by Andy Gaunt and James Wright (who's work was much more likely to be the bases for any change in scheduling than anything done by TimeTeam). The Gatehouse records for these sites have been updated (majorly so for Croft Castle) to reflect the reported findings, although we need to await the Wessex Archaeology reports for the real details of the TimeTeam evaluation digs.

There has been much discussion as to the future TimeTeam, much focused on personalities, (see the last couple of issues of British Archaeology) although I'm much more interest in the archaeology than the gender of the presenter. TimeTeam is at its best when it allows the site and excavations to tell the story. It is appalling when the producers arrive with a pre-conceived story and try to fit the excavations into that story, particularly the 'story' of TimeTeam "rescuing" a "neglected" site, when this is done in a way which dismisses the work of others to an extent amounting to plagiarism. Gatehouse again thanks James Wright who has been most generous in sharing his knowledge over the last few years and who, along with Andy Gaunt, deserved very much better treatment from TimeTeam.

In preparation for this years conference of the Castle Studies Group in Durham the records for the old county of Durham, including the North Bishoprick (Norhamshire, Islandshire and Bedlingtonshire), have been brought up to standard. The records have been reviewed, description improved, extended and more clearly attributed. Bibliographies have been extended and many more links to online scans copies of texts added and weblinks have been checked with some new additions and corrections. The extended bibliography effects many Northumberland records but full revision of these records is, at the moment, confined to Tyne and Wear. Neil Guy has, once again, provided some links and references particularly for Newcastle Castle.

The annual Heritage at Risk Register was published by English Heritage in October 2011 but slipped my mind until now. 288 Gatehouse listed sites are on the register. This is up from 279 in 2010 although this reflects changes to Gatehouse records as much as additions to (and some deletions from) from the register. Links to the online copy of the Register have been added in the 'other sources' part of site bibliographies.

A national programme of surveys of historic towns (sometimes called the extensive urban survey) has been underway since 1992 with the support of English Heritage. This is far from complete but many of the surveys have been done and published online, either by county councils or through ADS, and are often most useful. Gatehouse had given links to some of these before now but a more systemtic attempt to give references and links has now been done.

A few websites have been added to the links page under a subheading of 'General Archaeology Resources', these are mainly duplicates of links in other sections but new is Past Horizons adventures in archaeology a commerical outlet for archaeology equipment containing a good number of articles, news and opinion reports and videos of quality and interest.

• Houghall, near Durham, was described as 'once a strong place with fortifications' in 1905. Some scant traces of a once broad moat survive in a college of Durham University. The evidence for fortifications seems slight and this suggested fortified house in the early and not particularly impressive earthworks chapter of the VCH does not seem to have been taken up by later writers but this was a house of the wealthy Prior of Durham, in a county where martial architecture had particular kudos.
• Cornhill Tower. Reading the PastScape record for Cornhill Castle made me realise there was some contention as to the location of a tower recorded at Cornhill in several 16th century surveys. General, it seems, this is assumed to be the same site as Cornhill Castle a castle recorded as taken and demolished by the Scots in 1385 and now represented by damaged earthworks. However, according to the PastScape records John Dodds, writing in 1999, 'says that the tower and barmkin were built in 1382 (sic) half a mile to the South-East in Cornhill village to guard a new ford across the river'. In his 1825 View of the County of Northumberland Mackenzie writes of Cornhill 'The street, from the church, forms a wide avenue, at the foot of which stands the ancient seat of the Collingwood family. It is an old house, built in form of a cross'. This give a distinct suggestion that the Collingwoods built a small tower house in a form mirroring the then new keep at Warkworth castle. Was this the work of John Lewyn or one of his students/associates?

The main news is that, because of decisions beyond my control, Gatehouse is having to change internet server and, consequently, its url.

The old http://homepage.mac.com/philipdavis site will remain online until June but please change your bookmarks and links as soon as possible. If you have links to individual pages of the Gatehouse website the ends of the urls will remain the same (i.e. the url for the page for Dover Castle changes from http://homepage.mac.com/philipdavis/English%20sites/1612.html to http://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/English%20sites/1612.html). With well over 6000 pages it's not possible for me to check every page of Gatehouse on the new website so if you do come across errors, or display problems, on the new site I will be most grateful if you can let me know of these.

Neil Guy  has pointed out to me some developments on John Goodall's website The English Castle including online copies of articles John has written for Country Life. Links to these have been added. Neil also suggested I look at the antiquarian writings of Celia Fiennes and I was able to find an online transcription of her Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary at the Vision of Britain site. In reality she seems to have more interest in the cost of food in local markets than in architecture but for some sites, particular Wolseley Hall in Staffordshire (licensed in 1469), she does give valuable insight and evidence. Also at Neil's suggestion I've added links to some YouTube videos for some sites, although the number of online videos that meaningfully add anything is pretty limited and I didn't spend too many days looking at jerky family visits. Please do let me know of any other such resource that adds value to Gatehouse as an academic resource.

A resource that certainly has much academic value, although one nearly as difficult to use and navigate is the Greater London HER. A very simply version of this was available from the Archaeological Data Service but a fuller version, with bibliographical references and better site descriptions is now part of Heritage Gateway. The Greater London HER is pretty massive, complex and not always very well indexed so searching for records within it can be tedious and sometimes requires considerable imagination. The Oxford Urban Database has also been added to Heritage Gateway. Links to the online records to these have been added to the Gatehouse records.

The Gatehouse records for Middlesex, Essex and the City of London were reviewed some months ago but the examination of the Greater London HER made it seem worthwhile to review and bring up to standard the Gatehouse records for Surrey and Kent. All the records for these two historic counties have been reviewed, description improved, extended and more clearly attributed. Bibliographies have been extended and many more links to online scans copies or transcriptions of texts added and weblinks have been checked with some new additions and corrections.

Checking out Abinger Castle lead to the discovery that the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland hold the Brian Hope-Taylor archives. I've been aware of the Commissions excellent Canmore site for some years but hadn't expected to find an entry for Abinger Castle, Surrey in a Scottish archaeological database but there is one which indexes Hope-Taylor's excavation notes and site photographs with a number of these digitised and available to view. Further checking found Hope-Taylor's work at Old Windsor, Preston Hawe, Wakefield Low Hill and Bamburgh is also available from Canmore.

An even earlier archaeologist who's archives are being made even more accessible is Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers in the England: The Other Within site

Looking for a tiny bit more on the obscure Goseford Castle lead to the discovery that Derek Renn wrote a short piece in 1968 entitled 'The castle at Goseford' in the Bulletin of the Surrey Archaeological Society (Vol. 41 p. 3). The Surrey Archaeological Society has a fine website and has made their journal of record Surrey Archaeological Collections available via ADS. However the Bulletin is only available for recent years and is not the sort of thing I'm likely to find in any library available to me. If anyway can let me know what Derek wrote in 1968 I'd be most grateful.

Regarding journals I've checked the Gatehouse Journals page updating links and added a couple more. As always if anyone has suggestion for other this page please do let me know.

• Going through the Greater London HER brought about a reference to several late C16 (Elizabethan) artillery works on the Thames with a reference to a map Thamesis Descriptio Anno 1588 (Available to view from the British Library). I'm not entirely sure if this represented actual works or was a proposal plan but records are added for Blackwell Point, Middlesex and, Erith, Lee Ness, Greenhithe and Northfleet in Kent.
• A doubtful reference to an earlier Inn of the Bishop of Ely in the New Temple is added.
• Reading John Goodall's Country Life article lead to me realising I didn't have a record for the rather fabulous Layer Marney Tower in Essex.
• Polton Manor Kent, surviving only as a shallow depression was described by Hasted as 'being castellated and surrounded with a moat'
• Trying to resolve an identity for the a 'Barnard Castle, Kent' listed by James Moore lead to several possiblities. A manor in Milstead was in the possession of a John Barnard in the C16 who may have done some building work although there is no evidence to suggest the site ever had a 'castle' name. More probably is that the Barnard Castle is a mistranscribing or typographical for Bayford Castle. In modern print these may seem clearly different but in gothic print or manuscript, read by candlelight, such a transcription error is entirely possible. The identity of Bayford Castle is, itself, not entirely clear and is further obscured by an association with a danish war camp recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Some earthworks of a moated site survive at Bayford Court, previously recorded in Gatehouse but a lost earthwork close by sometimes called Bayford Castle is added as a doubtful site.
• Trying to clarify the situation with the various Henrician artillery forts at Dover lead to looking at a whole series of C16 plans for Dover available to view at the British Library website. It then became clear that some artillery forts were at least planned for the ends of the Dover Port piers. Indeed the Kent HER records that some remains are said to have survived and to have been found in archaeological circumstances (but references are pretty sketchy). It seems the vulnerable position does mean these forts were rapidly lost to the action of the sea.
• A once scheduled moated site Wilmington Manor, Boughton Aluph which was bulldozed in 1974/5 and subject to a 'rescue' excavation was described by Brian Philp as 'fortified' although more generally this had been described as a 'homestead' moat.
• Eastry Court, on the site of a palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury was, unfortunately, missed before now.

• Regarding Court at Street near Lympne Hasted writes "In the 10th year of king Edward II. John de Hadloe had licence to fortify and embattle his house here, among others belonging to him." Hasted is generally a careful and reliable historian who does seem to have had direct access to various primary sources so such a reference does require proper investigation. However, this entry is problematic. Nothing seems to be in the various calendars which is hardly surprising since what is calendared is the post-mortem inquisition for John Haudlo who died in the 9th year of Edward II. I suspect a dating error (possibly 10th year of Edward I) rather than Hasted misreading the post-mortem inquisition warrant (this survives and is damaged and rather dirty but not to such an extent as to make misinterpretation likely). I will continue with researching this but suggestions are welcome.

Over the last few weeks I've been working on completing the updates of the records for Yorkshire, specifically the West Riding. This has included a visit to the West Yorkshire Archaeological Advisory Service, who hold the Historic Environment Records for West Yorkshire. I have to thank Jason Dodds for his help with the HER.

This has resulted in much improved records for most sites and the addition of;
Ghyll Grange, a possible site of a peel tower.
Sitlington Castle Gate placename. A placename with no other evidence of being a castle site (only interesting in showing how modern sensibilities have changed this placename).
Whitley Castelgate placename is another probably irrelevant placename.
The licence to crenellate for Wodhall in Metheley, granted in 1410, has been attributed to a couple of sites possibly on the bases of misconceptions as to what licences were. However, there was a modest manor and manor house called Woodhall in Methley which has not been previously been suggested as the site for this licence despite have the right tenurial history. The house in Methley survived until the early 1960s but seems to have had no discernible defensive features. A new record makes this clearer and details the lost house.
Crosland Hall may sit on the site of the C14 Hall of Sir Robert Beaumont which was said to have been moated and to have a drawbridge.
My record for Temple Newsam was somewhat confused and has no been split into two one to cover the Templar preceptory and another for the C16 house both of which may have had some fortifications.
Looking at the Pilkington family history lead to Stand Old Hall near Bury in Lancashire, another house demolished in the 1960's. This has some comment on being defensible but doesn't actually seem to have been.

I've changed the OS getamap button to link to the new version of the site which has many additional features (some only available to subscribers) and larger screen display but which does take longer to load and which needs you to click on the 'Leisure' button to get to the actual OS map.

A small design change has been made to the individual sites page which I've made a little more tidy and I've now embedded a thumbnail air photo into the page. This is mainly done to makes these pages a little more visually interesting and for real study of air photos the button links to Bing and Google remain given access to their fully features websites. However this thumbnail is included in the print page view. I tend to find myself printing out a page before a site visit and the thumbnail will be a useful visual aide memoir for the more careful air photo examination I usually do.

Unfortunately the constant upgrading of software leads to remarkable quick obsolesce. This has resulted in me no longer being able to offer the Gatehouse databases for download in Excel format. FilemakerPro and tab delimited ascii versions contain to be available from the download page.

A new website that came to my notice is Open Domesday (or Domesdaymap) which uses the Domesday data created by Professor John Palmer of the University of Hull. This is a project  'working to make a copyright-free, full-text Latin and English version of Domesday Book available to the public.' The site is a work in progress but does contain scans of the Phillimore facsimile of Great Domesday and links have been provided in Gatehouse, under the primary sources section of the bibliography, to the relevant pages for (some of?) those castles mentioned in Domesday such as Peveril Castle.

Chris Bond very helpfully corrected my record for Cayl Castle, Cornwall, a site mention by John Leland. I hadn't identified a site for this myself and speculated it might be a reference to Crane Godrevy. In fact this can be identified as Kayle Castle, an scheduled Iron Age round. I've rejected this as a medieval fortification although it may have been a medieval sub-manorial centre. Chris's place name research on this site can be seen at http://cornish-place-names.wikidot.com/kayle-phillack.

Catherine Bancroft, who has an interest in medieval houses of the northern marches, was kind enough to send me a copy of the SMR report for Bancroft House which allowed that record to be much improved and for the house to be recorded as a certain bastle. Catherine's web site http://www.scarrowhill.co.uk/  is well worth a visit as a fine example of quality of historical and building research although of a post medieval domestic house.

Dr John Jenkins, who's doctoral thesis was on Torre Abbey in Devon, has, most kindly, sent me the details of a licence to crenellate for that Abbey granted in 1348. For some reason this is not enrolled but survives in the cartulary of the Abbey. John feels the Abbey gatehouse was defensive so a Gatehouse record has been created and the LC has been added to the licences list. John's thesis is available for download via ORA (the Oxford University Research Archive) and those interested in the broader issue of monastic defences may want to look out for article John is currently writing on 'on the defensive functions of monasteries in England in the Hundred Years War' to be published in Southern History next year.

The 150 records for the historic North Riding of Yorkshire had all been reviewed, with fuller and more clearly attributed descriptions,  more accurate locations and better bibliographies with an increased number of links to scanned copies of books and journals. During this review the entry for a Bolton Pele in Wycliffe within Thorpe that occurs in PastScape was incorrect. This specious record occurred because a map reference given in David King's Castellarium Anglicanum had been mistranscribed. King's reference was to a 'pile' at Bolton in Northumberland (see Bolton Hospital). PastScape informs me they will be removing their record and the Gatehouse record has been deleted.

The records for Herefordshire have been brought up to standard with manually checked lat/long map references and fuller, better attributed, site descriptions. Nothing new has been added after the additions made in June although a number of site confidence labels have been changed to better reflect the full site descriptions.

A couple of personal visits to Humber Archaeology to view the East Riding of Yorkshire and Kingston upon Hull SMR proved most interesting. My thanks go to Victoria Brown and David Evans for their help. These visits have resulted in much improved bibliographies and some improved site identification. Gatehouse records have been brought up to standard for Yorkshire (East Riding).

Two sites have been added as a result of examining the SMR. Giants Hill in Swine was called a motte by a field investigator despite it being a ditchless mound. It has been excavated but remains somewhat mysterious but seems most probably to be a medieval landscape mound associated with hunting. Rejected as a motte in Gatehouse.

More intriguing is supposedly artificially scarped mound in Bridlington. This was suggested as a moot hill in 1884 and as a possible castle site in a letter to a local free newspaper in 1986. Neither source being perhaps the most scholarly source. However the location, now called Bridlington Quay was called Castleburn in the 13th century and continued to have that name until the early 16th century. So this is a site with a castle placename and an earthwork that some people have seen as artificial (The site is now probably to built over to really be sure). Tenurially the site seems to have been granted to Bridlington Priory by King Stephen in 1135 but doesn’t seems to have been royal demense. Added as a questionable site.

Among the Humber Archaeology records I came across a 1980 paper by Edmund King 'The parish of Warter and the castle of Galchlin' (Yorkshire Archaeological Journal Vol. 52 p. 55-8) with an interesting discussion on the castle of Galchlin (aka Gaultney, Galclint) mentioned by John of Hexham as existing c. 1140. An entry has been added to Gatehouse with a summary of Dr King’s paper and the several suggested sites including a new record for Dr King’s suggestion of Gildersdale.

My apology for the delay in this issue of the newsletter. I’m afraid finding a natural break in the work was rather difficult and this means a rather long newsletter this time.

• I’ve done a further redesign of the site mainly in moving the navigation menu from a fixed position on the top of the page to a floating menu on the left hand side. Hopefully this will make navigation easier, particularly when going through numerous pages. The look is designed to work in modern browsers supporting CSS3 but does vary slightly across browsers, perhaps looking best in Google Chrome, but should work in all browsers. The redesign has also included a check and edit of many pages on the site including updating the statistics pages. Added to the map buttons is a site called ‘Where’s the path’ which has the nice feature of side by side air photos and OS maps.
• Four fairly small Historic Environment Records have gone online as part of English Heritages Heritage Gateway. These are the HERs for Wolverhampton and Walsall, Coventry, West Berkshire and South Yorkshire. All have been checked and links added to the relevant sites.
• An attempt to get the whole historic Staffordshire listing up to the best standard has been thwarted by the fact that the Heritage Gateway urls for the Staffordshire HER have changed in a rather inconsiderate way. I’m awaiting Heritage Gateways response to this problem (which originates at Stafford not Swindon). However, during the initial work I did come across a rather excellent web site called Staffordshire Past-track with has numerous early photos and some drawings of Staffordshire castles and houses. Links have been added.
• Bibliographical page references for individual sites have been added from;
  • John Goodall, 2011, The English Castle 1066-1650
  • Sue Margeson et al, 1994, The Normans in Norfolk
  • Ron Shoesmith, 2009 revised edition, Castles and moated sites of Herefordshire
  • Malcolm Airs and P.S. Barnwell (eds), 2011, The Medieval Great House
• From these sources, and from the online HERs above, numerous other references have been derived and added. Also a few other similar references such as links to online copies of Northumberland Urban Survey.
• The excellent resource Welsh Journal online has made available many more journals and I’ve added links to the online copies the relevant articles from the Flintshire Historical Society Journal and Montgomeryshire Collections and will be adding further links shortly. However, I’ve not had the time to do a systematic search of these journals so these are links only to previously cited references. It should be noted that coming soon will be Archaeologia Cambrensis.
• Links to web site have been somewhat changed to reduce the amount of raw urls and give web site names with hypertext links. This may be most notable for the sites in the care of English Heritage where I’ve also added a link to the Portico pages for sites where available.

New site records added

England
John Goodall’s extension of the definition of the castle may cause disquiet for some and I’ve maintained my cut off date of 1600 rather than John’s 1650 so his Jacobean ‘castles’ won’t appear in Gatehouse unless they are on the site of an earlier potential fortified site. However, I have added the Elizabethan ‘castle like’ houses. Generally I’ve classified these as ‘possible’ fortified manor houses although such a classification is problematic. However I do agree with John in seeing 'fortification' as an architectural style rather than 'military' functional aspect of 'castles'. Anyway please do download the Gatehouse databases and edit and alter these to suit your own definitions and needs.
Jon Shoesmith’s revised edition of Castle and Moated sites of Herefordshire has also produced a number of new records on Gatehouse. Most of these are dubious place name evidence or amorphous earthworks some of which I reject outright and others grade as ‘questionable’ however three sites are worth considering as potential sites of fortified houses of manorial status. The survey of the online HERs mentioned above produced four dubious site.

Berry Ring, Billington, Staffordshire - Reject
Knaves Castle, Staffordshire - Questionable
Wolverhampton town defences, Staffordshire - R
Giffords Hall, Suffolk - Possible
Hengrave Hall, Suffolk P
Torksey Castle, Lincolnshire P
Deanery Tower, Hadleigh, Suffolk P
Laughton Place, Sussex P
East Barsham Manor, Norfolk P
Coughton Court, Warwickshire P
Sherborne New Castle, Dorset P
Chatsworth House, Derbyshire P
Rycote House, Oxfordshire P
Standon Lordship, Hertfordshire P
Burghley House, Northamptonshire (Soke of Peterborough) P
Stiffkey Old Hall, Norfolk P
Howley Hall, Yorkshire West Riding P
Thorpe Hall, Thorpe Salvin, Yorkshire West Riding P
Brereton Hall, Cheshire P
Tixall, The Gatehouse, Staffordshire P
Beckingham Hall, Essex P
Hardwick New Hall, Derbyshire P
Buxton Tower, Derbyshire P
Barlborough Old Hall, Derbyshire P
Longford Castle, Wiltshire P
Newark Park, Ozleworth, Gloucestershire P
Chatsworth Hunting Tower, Derbyshire P
Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire P
Barlborough Hall, Derbyshire P
Sheffield Castle Dykes, Yorkshire West Riding Q
Buckcastle, Bridstow, Herefordshire Q
Plastre Tump, Herefordshire Q
Brockhampton enclosure(s), Herefordshire Q
Bollingham mound, Herefordshire Q
Woodsheaves 'mound', Herefordshire Q
Eastnor Castle Ditch, Herefordshire P
Holme Lacy earthworks, Herefordshire Q
Kenchester Court Farm, Herefordshire Q
Crabs Castle, Kentchurch, Herefordshire Q
Kingstone Castle Meadow, Herefordshire Q
Madley Castle Field place names, Herefordshire R
Michaelchurch Escley Castel Farm, Herefordshire Q
Much Dewchurch, Charity Castle place name, Herefordshire R
Much Dewchurch, Condie Castle place name, Herefordshire R
Much Dewchurch, The Castle place name, Herefordshire R
Orcop Little Hill, Herefordshire Q
St Margarets Castle Farm place name, Herefordshire R
St Margarets Castle(h)ibo Farm place name, Herefordshire Q
Caer Caradoc, Herefordshire P
Birtley possible castle site, Herefordshire P
Mound west of Wigmore Castle, Herefordshire Q
Sutton Walls Herefordshire R

Wales

Pen y foel - an Iron Age fort misidentified as the medieval castle of Caereinion in a paper in the 1902 issue of Montgomeryshire Collections.

Licence to Crenellate.

In the English Castle John mentions a licence to crenellate granted to Thomas Kitson for Hengrave Hall in 1525. This was previously unknown to me and I’m most grateful to John for taking the time to correspond with me regarding this. His source was Gage, J., 1822, The History & Antiquities of Hengrave (London) p. 16 where Gage quotes fully the warrant for this licence (I don’t know if this still exists) not the licence itself but does not actually give a date. He does make that statement that licences were required to build fortified houses and carefully dates the building programme of Hengrave as starting in 1525 and ended in 1538. However, in his later book Gage, J., 1838, History & Antiquities of Suffolk, Thingoe Hundred p. 214 he just mentions the licence but does give a reference to the actual licence enrollment. This he does with a footnoted regnal year rather hiding the disconcerting fact for his belief that a licence was a legal requirement that the licence was actually granted in 1540, two years after the building was supposedly finished.
It is, in fact, enrolled but calendared rather obscurely in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII Vol. 15 p. 177 No. 436.74 in a complex grant of lands as “with liberties”. This rather does rather raise the question as to if other licences to crenellate are also being missed from the calendars. However, the calendars for Henry VIII are rather different than that for other medieval monarchs and I believe the problem is restricted just to the reign of Henry VIII and should be limited. However proper and extensive searching of the original rolls is the only way to resolve this problem and I am unlikely to be able to do this in the near future.

One point of interest in the warrant quoted by Gage was the occurence of the terms ‘turres et muros illos batellare tannlare. karnellare et machicollare’ and ‘battellat. vel tannelatos karnellat. et machicolat.’ This is similar to the terms ‘muros et turres illos batellare vel tinellare kernellare et marchecollare’ and ‘batellatos vel tinellatos, kernellatos aut marchecollatos’ mentioned in the 1533 licence to Cowdray House. Quite what was actually written is a bit of a question. Transcribing hand written abbreviated latin is not easy and I suspect neither transcriber was familliar with the tannlare/tinellare word and may have been guessing somewhat. Neither will have had the advantage of having at hand Lathem’s Revised Medieval Latin Word-List (my thanks to John for filling a great gap in my education by letting me know of this source). None of the four versions of this word appear, as such, in Lathem however for tanell/e, -o Lathem writes see tenacula which give for tenello, tanello, ‘to make loop-holes in walls 1628’. The root given is pincers or tongs and the keyhole loop does have the general shape of the iron workers tongs although the loops in the gatehouse of Cowdray are cross loops with round holes on four ends. The terminology of licences do tend to get more complex and repetitive over the centuries although the basic form is pretty stable and tenello doesn’t seem to appear in earlier licences although few have good full transcriptions of the original latin readily available.
The full details are added at LOC/15400325.html

There have been a few changes to the design and features of Gatehouse.

• Many pages are now available in a format designed for hard copy printing. Simply click the print link, marked with a small printer icon, to open your browsers print page. I have tried to test this feature but please do let me know if there are problems. The over complex menu 'fortifications' has been cut to a link to the lists page. The hypertext format has been changed to something a little more visually intrusive.
• The National Heritage List for England was released online at the beginning of April. This is a new listing of historic buildings and monuments under various statutory protection such as listing building status and scheduled monuments. Gatehouse has had tried to record legal status for sites for some years and has provided links to the Images of England website which had a 2005 version of the buildings list. More recently English Heritage produced a current version of the buildings list online as Listed Buildings online but this site has been superseded by NHLE. Unfortunately the record numbers for these two list are different and this required making new fields in the gatehouse databases although English Heritage did provide me with a copy of a spreadsheet which greatly eased the number generation (my thanks to Clare Hughes, Heritage Gateway & Access to Designation Data Manager). The listing button has updated although English Heritage has retain Images of England and I've retained a link to that site which, sometimes, has pictures of the listed building.
• For scheduled monuments Gatehouses recording of this was a bit hit and miss. I recently discovered that the MAGIC website had scheduled monuments mapped and sometimes had a version of the scheduling report. I was gradually working through MAGIC to identify scheduled monuments and I've continued and finished this with the NHLE map search facility. I've introduced a new button which takes you the HNLE record but kept the MAGIC button which opens up a map. It should be noted that many scheduling records have not yet been digitalised and that all that may be available from both NHLE and MAGIC is the name of the site and a map of the scheduled area.
• NB. I record listed building which are built on the site of medieval fortification, particularly if the listing report notes the historical significance of the site. This is not clear without reading the list report and it should not be assumed that a site I record as listed has any upstanding medieval building. For scheduled monument it may well be that the scheduling records the site as something other than medieval; A bastle built within a Roman milefort will be scheduled as Roman not medieval. Also note Gatehouse records sites which are doubtful or have been rejected as medieval so a number of scheduled round barrows are within the Gatehouse records.

With the kind help of Bill Woodburn I've added a full transcription of the licence to empark and crenellate Cowdray House. This very late licence is quite perplexing. Although Cowdray was a house brought by Sir William fitzWilliam, one of the major minister of Henry VIII regime, the licence is, in fact, granted to a number of men who were his feoffees. Another perplexing aspect of the licence is the house is licenced for muros et turres illos batellare vel tinellare kernellare et marchecollare (walls and towers ... with battlements or 'tinellare' crenellations and machiolations). What was a 'tinellare' crenellation? I'm no latin scholar but the closest translation to tinellare I can get is 'cowlstaff' a pole used to carry loads between two men. Was this some form of crenellation where the battlements were supported on projecting machiolations? Has anyone come across this term before or can add any information?

I've added, as a dubious site, the scheduled moated site at Bewick in Holderness suggested as a possible site for the, probably fanciful, castle of Aldbrough. Although not a castle site Bewick is an example of a lordly moated residence although it doesn't seem to have ever have been described fortified.

The link to the MAGIC website has been revised. This now opens a map at 1:2000 scale with scheduled monuments and a few other carefully selected levels as default, simplifying use. Within the Magic window it is sometimes possible to get an extract from the scheduling report for some English monuments. I am now working at recording the scheduled monument number and directly linking to this extract. About half of 1600 or so scheduled monuments have now been done although not all these have an online scheduling report. The remainer should be complete by the end of April.

The scheduled monuments and listed buildings scheme are being revised and brough under one umbrella as the National Heritage List for England. This new online resource was launched on 4 April 2011 and has ' new unified numbering system but will also have the old listing or scheduling numbers as legacy reference numbers' (Robin Page, English Heritage). At first glimpse this is not particularly attractive and does not seem to add anything much to the English Heritage Listed Buildings Online site or the scheduling extracts from MAGIC and certainly does not replace PastScape. However, over time it is likely to develope and will ultimately replace these other resources. The new NHLE numbers will be added to Gatehouse in the next month or two.

Records for the historic counties of Leicestershire, Rutland, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly have been checked and revised.

• Groby Castle Hill was the site of a TimeTeam excavtion broadcast on 20 March 2011 and its record has been updated to reference this.
• Reading the Leicestershire VCH earthworks chapter has resulted in adding a highly dubious site at Husband's Bosworth described in terms suggesting a fortified manor house.
• Reading the Rutland VCH earthworks chapter has lead to the addition of a rather more certain fortified manor house at Empingham Hall Close.

Other recent Time Team programmes have included;

• Mont Orgueil Castle, Jersey where revising the record lead to a link to the 2008, Conservation Plan for Mont Orguiel, Jersey by the Jersey Heritage Trust which is an exceptional full report on the castle.
• Llancaiach Fawr Manor House, Glamorgan. This was described in the programme as 'fortified' and on examination of the HER record was found to be described as 'semi-fortified' there so a new record for this site has been added. However since the TimeTeam excavation showed the house was new built c. 1550 on a green field site without a moat or gatehouse quite what was meant by fortified is rather a mystery to me. The suggestion that some interior doors with draw bars and a back stairs described as an "escape" route showed the family were "paranoid" seemed to have more to do with modern fantasy than historical reality. Why should such simple domestic defences, probably fairly common at all levels of society, be called fortifications?

All the downloadable databases have been undated and republished.

The big visual difference regular user of Gatehouse will notice is the addition of several more links buttons.

• The 'listing button' is now turned into 2 buttons. L.B.O. goes to the English Heritage Listed Buildings Online site (in practice you need to click this button confirm agreement to the terms and then go back to the gatehouse page and click the button again to get to the right record.). This gives the must up to date version of the listing description. I.O.E. goes to the English Heritage Images of England site which sometimes has photographs and has the pre 2001 listing description (although in practice these are usually the same)
• New buttons added are;
  • Magic - the UK governmental Multi Agency Geographic Information for the Countryside website. This is a complex website that takes time to fully appreciate and which can be laboriously slow but has considerable useful content (including showing the area of scheduled monuments, ancient woodlands, registered battlefields, soilscape) Unfortunately, although a UK government site most of the information available relates only to England. However the very high scale of OS map available on the site makes it useful for Wales as well.
  • Vision of Britain - links to A vision of Britain through time 'A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001. Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions.' Which has a 1st edition 1" OS map and usually transcription from nineteenth century Gazetteers.
  • EarthTools - uses the Google maps/air photo but adds a few useful features including elevations and local sunrise/sunset times (if you must have that sun rising over the castle keep photograph.)
  • Getmapping is a commercial site selling their own air photos. Since, for cropmarks different photos may show better details these can be useful and in addition the previews of some sites in the south east included 1940's RAF photos which may be useful for reading the medieval landscape of developed areas.
  • Flickr the photosharing website may be useful but searches based on site names may give very variable results. In practice it may be useful for major masonry castles but unlikely to be of much use for earthworks.
  • Panoramio is like Geograph a photosharing site based of geographical location which may well have photos of a site but will often, at least, show the nature of the landscape.

The records for Buckinghamshire and Cheshire have been reviewed. The lat/long figures have been manually corrected on Google Maps to 5 decimal accuracy and links to online copies of older journals added. For Cheshire links to George Ormerod's History of the County Palatine and city of Chester have been added. As with Blomefield for Norfolk this is nearly 200 years old but remains a good source for tenurial histories and does have some site descriptions. For some lost sites, such as the original castle at Macclesfield, Ormerod is the sole authority.

The review clarified two licences to crenellate.

1. I found a source reference for the 1336 LC for Aston Mullins, Buckinghamshire which I'd previously missed in the Calendar of Charter Rolls. The full details of this licence, to John Mullins and his wife 'Giles' are now given (Giles is the transcription given in the calendar although the name is most usually given as Egidia). The record for this licence has been changed from possible to certain.
2. The supposed LC for Warmingham, Cheshire reportedly given in 1349 (a exceptional date at the height of the Black Death) is now rejected as a misreporting of the licence granted to Kibbleston, Staffs in 1338. The origin of this report seems to be a misreading of an awkward sentence in William Dugdale's The Antiquities of Warwickshire by Ormerod followed by a further transcription error by Anthony Emery working from Ormerod. The record for this licence has been changed from possible to reject.

In other work
A new record has been added for Southampton Kings House. There does seem to have been supplementary royal accommodation to the castle at Southampton although the identification of this with the surviving ruins of the merchants house called 'King John's Palace' is probably specious.
Several additions to the bibliographies, mainly from older volumes of the Castle Studies Group Journals.

The downloadable England Databases have been undated and republished.