Studying medieval Sheffield is a bit like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. It’s almost there. We can see some of it. But no matter how hard we try, we’ll never be able to see the full picture.
The few history books we do have tells us some basic facts. There are comprehensive genealogies of the noble men and their women who first founded Sheffield. For example, the first mention of this region in any document is in the Domesday Book of 1086, a great survey of England and Wales conducted at the behest of William the Conqueror. Domesday records the “Aula of Hallan” (Hall of Hallam) as the former dominion of Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, an Anglo Saxon nobleman who married William the Conqueror’s niece but then rebelled against him and was executed for his pains.
After Waltheof, the historical record continues; the de Lovetots, the de Furnivals, the Nevills and the Talbots. All commanded this remote part of Yorkshire between the early 12th century and the mid-17th century. But the historical record isn’t a neutral, objective version of the past. It obscures as much as it enlightens and it’s biased along lines of power, class and wealth. As such, while I started out this story wanting to tell the story of the birth of Sheffield, I soon found that the reality of piecing together history is much more challenging.
The scant records that do exist are not just records of the exercise of power, they are also the means through which power was exercised. And if knowing much about the powerful people of the time is difficult, knowing anything about ordinary people is nigh on impossible. But that hasn’t stopped people trying. It’s funny, really, when you consider the focus generally given to Sheffield’s recent history — whether it’s depicted on screen or in books, it skews squarely working-class. “Everyone thinks of Sheffield as the Steel City, as if it was born in the industrial revolution,” says Professor John Moreland from the University of Sheffield, a genial Irishman who has spent much of his academic career studying the medieval history of the city. “But that obscures this really rich history.”
Moreland and I are standing on the edge of a huge hole in Sheffield city centre where several heavy duty diggers are scraping the ground and lifting earth, concrete and metal into large mounds. The hole is what was left when the Castle Market was demolished 10 years ago, and if all goes to plan, in two years’ time it will be home to Sheaf Field Park, a plan paid for with Levelling Up money Sheffield Council won in 2021. Around the diggers buzz half a dozen people in high-viz clothing watching the earth being churned up by the heavy machinery. Earlier this month a full scale archaeological dig began and they have until June to find what they can from the site before construction begins.
As we watch the diggers and archaeologists work, Professor Moreland explains the difficulty of ever truly being able to know what medieval Sheffield was like. Does it make him feel sad, I ask, that we will never fully understand what it looked like, sounded like, smelt like or tasted like? Like many historians, he admits to a modicum of melancholy that he can’t simply transport himself back to the 12th century to take a look, but quickly adds that there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. “That’s where archaeology comes in,” he says.
From our vantage point on Exchange Street, Moreland explains that we’re looking at 1,000 years of Sheffield’s history. There is nothing left of the Aula of Hallan (indeed no one has ever conclusively proved where it was), but everything beyond that is before our very eyes. In the early 12th century, this area comes under the yoke of Anglo-Norman Baron William de Lovetot who builds a motte-and-bailey castle (to you or me, that’s a fortified keep of wood or stone on top of a man-made hill with an enclosed courtyard surrounded by wooden stakes below) in around 1120. We can be so precise about this date thanks to a previous dig in 2018 which found the motte, successfully carbon dating it to the exact decade.
Quite why this wild place was chosen for the site of a castle is a matter of some debate. Normally castles are considered defensive structures, but choosing what is the lowest point in the area would indicate it didn’t principally have a defensive purpose. The Harrying of the North, a series of military campaigns to subjugate northern England, had taken place in the years following the Norman Conquest, but by the time Sheffield’s first castle was built this was old news. Instead, Moreland believes that rather than being a military outpost, Sheffield Castle became the centrepiece of a planned Norman town, with a market outside the gates (in the area where Castle Square is now), a series of allotments near what is now Chapel Walk and, at the top of the hill, the parish church (now Sheffield Cathedral).
I’ve long been fascinated by who William de Lovetot actually was. I find the idea that a rudimentary castle he built in the early 1100s transformed over the next 900 years into the modern city of Sheffield a mind-boggling thing to behold. He is depicted in a stained-glass window in Sheffield Cathedral and there is even a road named after him in Attercliffe, but other than that information about him is somewhat scant.
According to the 19th-century antiquarian Joseph Hunter in his book Hallamshire: The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York, it’s possible that de Lovetot was descended from the Norman baron Ricardus Surdus (who was born in Normandy in around 1045). I found an online transcription of “The Battle Abbey Roll Vol. III” by the Duchess of Cleveland which gave me rather more insights: that de Lovetot (or “de Louvetot”, according to this transcript) had formerly been a baron in Huntingdonshire and had “made the castle they [de Lovetot] had built at Sheffield their chief residence; and the new town—then a rude collection of huts and smithies—grew and prospered under its [the castle’s] protection. One of their first cares had been to plant churches throughout their territory, where in Saxon times there were none; and they built a hospital, a corn-mill, and a bridge ‘where one was most wanted’ over the Don.”
Speaking to a medieval historian I reckon I must be in with a chance of finding out more, but not for the last time in our 90-minute conversation, Moreland taps a metaphorical “we don’t really know” sign and I have to accept that thinking like a journalist about events that took place 800 years ago is of limited use. It’s only in the 14th century that better written records arrive, meaning much before that is based on genealogies and a tiny number of contemporary texts.
The five Ws of reporting (who, what, where, when and why) don’t really apply when the only way of sharing information on things like tax records, court rulings and property ownership was by copying out the text by hand. What we do know is that the motte-and-bailey castle stood for around 150 years, by which time it had passed by marriage into the ownership of the de Furnival family. Unfortunately for them, they chose the wrong side in the Second Barons’ War (1264-1267), and the castle was destroyed by the wonderfully named anti-monarchy baron John de Eyvill. In 1270, Thomas de Furnival was given a licence to build on the same site a “stone castle and fortify and crenellate it” (to crenellate something means to give it castle-like battlements).
It’s this castle that can be seen in the photos from the 50s, when the foundations for the Castle Market were being laid. The images give a sense of the sheer scale of this second castle, with huge bastions standing either side of the gatehouse which guarded the entrance. Moreland says Kenneth Steel’s famous painting is a pretty good approximation of what it must have looked like, even if Steel has taken a hefty dose of poetic licence as well.
When I ask Ashley Tuck, who is leading the dig for Wessex Archaeology, if he finds it almost sacrilegious that a huge concrete building was built over such an important historic site, he’s sanguine. “Every act of destruction is also an act of creation,” he says. Moreland agrees. “You’ve got a time capsule here which shows the history of Sheffield from the 12th century to the 1960s,” he says. “In the 60s there was talk of taking more time with the archaeology but many more people wanted them to get on with it as Sheffield desperately needed a new market.”
Thomas de Furnival’s stronghold would dominate Sheffield for the best part of four centuries. As David Hey notes in his A History of Sheffield, no plans or illustrations survive, but later maps indicate that the castle probably stretched from the River Sheaf to Waingate and the River Don to Dixon Lane, an area of around 4.2 acres. Now, the only reminder of the de Furnival family name are a few road names including Furnival Gate in Sheffield city centre.
By the early 15th century the castle landed by marriage into the Talbot family. John Talbot, the first Earl of Shrewsbury, was a nobleman who is lavishly praised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Act I as "Valiant Lord Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, Created, for his rare success in arms" and “the Frenchmen’s only scourge”. Talbot’s heirs would command the castle for the next 200 years, and for 14 years in the late 16th century it acted as a gilded cage for Mary Queen of Scots when she was imprisoned there by Elizabeth I. However, after the Talbots backed the Royalist side in the English Civil War, and lost, the castle was ordered to be destroyed by Parliament in 1646.
Stone from the castle ended up being used in various buildings across the city including Bishops' House, Carbrook Hall and Norton Hall. After the castle had been completely razed, the site later became an orchard and following that a bowling green. By the 19th century it was a steelworks, and in the 20th century it became a place for retail, first in the form of the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society store in the 1930s, and from the 1960s the Castle Market, which itself was demolished in 2014.
People have been trying to ascertain the exact location of Sheffield castle (or more accurately Sheffield’s castles) since the 18th century — after the second castle was destroyed after the Civil War it was covered over by subsequent developments. While historians knew broadly where it was as street names gave them clues (Castle Street, Castle Green, etc.), the exact dimensions of the castle remained a mystery. But it was only in the early 20th century that serious archaeological investigation began. The first major dig took place in the late 1920s before the construction of the Co-op, which was subsequently destroyed in the Blitz. In 2018, four years after the Castle Market was torn down, Wessex Archaeology led a dig which finally found William de Lovetot’s motte-and-bailey castle.
The leader of the current dig Ashley Tuck tells me this time they will be undertaking a much more comprehensive survey of the site, mindful it could well be their last chance to do so. In 2018 they dug 11 narrow trenches but this time, with the help of an army of volunteers, they will be able to look in much greater detail at the remains.
However, even during the first couple of weeks when they have just been monitoring the diggers, they have already turned up interesting finds. Principal among these is a previously unknown well which cuts through what they know is the motte. They don't yet know exactly when it dates from but are hopeful it could be medieval. Amazingly, the 12-metre deep well still has water in it, which they saw glinting at them through the darkness when they removed a cap which had been built over it in the 19th century. “It would have been quite dangerous for them,” says Tuck of the people who first dug the 40 foot deep well, which would have meant that the castle could still receive water even if it had been under siege. “It was a moving moment”.
The current dig is a “unique, once in a lifetime” chance to further complete the story of Sheffield, he adds. “It’s crucial because it tells us the origins of the city and what it means to be somebody that lives or works here,” he says. “It's absolutely essential to the story of who we are. In terms of archaeology it’s so important for Sheffield because we’ve got the whole sequence from the founding of the settlement right through to the present day.”
Some of the first volunteers to dig on the site were there this week. David Clarke, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, says he remembers visiting the Castle Market as a child to look at the few bits of the structure that you could still see. “You had to tap on a little window and this bloke would come out and take you down a ladder backwards into this chamber where you could see some of the castle,” he laughs.
On Wednesday, David and his fellow volunteers were digging and scraping through the brick foundations of the early 19th century steel furnaces, which in turn were built on much older structures of sandstone. “You can see where they have laid the bricks on older walls,” says Clarke. The responsibility for digging further down through these layers and deeper into the past will be taken up by more volunteers over the next six weeks.
When the dig winds up sometime this summer, the site will slowly become Sheaf Field Park. A key part of the design is to recreate the moat and the gatehouse to give people a sense of how the castle looked for 400 years before it was destroyed after the Civil War. For Moreland, he understands why the designers have done this, but he is more interested in the lives of ordinary people who used the site. Items found in the past include shoes, clay pipes, belt buckles, keys, knives, pins and even a metal ear scoop, some of which were found in the moat which surrounded the castle.
“The moat and the gatehouse is about the nobility,” says Moreland. While these are clearly important to any understanding of the site, he finds the more quotidian objects he has found much more compelling. At a recent event at Portland Works he talked about 10 of his favourite finds from the castle site, including the shoes found in the moat. Whose were they? Why did they throw them in the moat? These tantalising finds and snippets are all part of the incomplete jigsaw puzzle that is Sheffield Castle. But for Moreland, the fact we can’t know everything about it increases rather than diminishes his fascination with it. History works as much in the imagination as it does on the page.
Further reading:
Sheffield Castle: Archaeology, Archives, Regeneration 1927–2018 by John Moreland and Dawn Hadley
Hallamshire. The History and Topography of the Parish of Sheffield in the County of York by Joseph Hunter
The History of Sheffield by David Hey
Sadly, all the volunteer places on the archaeological dig are now taken up. However, you will be able to observe their work from Exchange Street for the next two months.
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