MONTGOMERY CASTLE.
IT is by a singular chance that a rude and artificial mound of earth, in an obscure part of a foreign province, should have given its name to a British county and to the town that forms its capital. The proper names of places in Britain are usually either British or English. Once given in the latter tongue, they have but seldom been changed. New creations, as Battle and Jervaulx, and some other ecclesiastical houses, bear, indeed, new names; but these do not appear to have displaced any already existing. Pontefract is a name probably derived from an accidental circumstance; but Richmond and Montgomery are solitary instances of a shire or a capital town deriving its name from the inheritance of a Norman lord.
The castle of Montgomery is registered by that name in the Domesday survey, and placed in the hundred of Wintentrue, in the county of Salop. “Ad castellum de Montgomeri habet comes iiii carucas et vi libras denariorum. habet de uno fine de Walis pertinente ad ipsam castellariam. Rogerius [Corbet] habet ibi ij carucas, et de Walis, cum fratre suo habet xl. solidos.” And further on, “Ipse comes construxit castrum, Muntgumeri vocatum. Ad quod adjacent lii. hidæ et dimidia quas tenuere Seuuar, Oslac, Azor, de rege Edwardo, quietas ab omni geldo; ad venandum eas habuere.” Here, then, we have the name of the castle, its inclusion in an English county, its castelry, its chief lord, Earl Roger, and the fact that in the time of the Confessor, three Englishmen held 52½ hides about it as a hunting-ground. The Englishmen are entered, a few lines on, as Thanes. Seuuar was, no doubt, like Siward, a very great, as was Azor a considerable, landowner in the same county. “De fine de Walis” shows that Earl Roger’s territory included Welshmen with his English tenants, just as the names of places, and especially of parishes, in the district, show a great and early establishment of English there. The castelry included twenty-two members, at no great distance from the castle rock, and the castle was one of about fourteen strong places mentioned in Domesday as then existing in Hereford, Monmouth, and Salop. It only differed from most others, and especially from such as Clun, Ludlow, Caus, Oswestry, or Whittington, in being held by the earl himself, and not by one of his secondary barons.
Earl Roger, the “comes” of the above entry, upon the fall of Morkere, added Shropshire to his Sussex earldom, and to him, with powers equal in many respects to those of royalty, was committed the safety of the middle march, with its extensive but imperilled English settlement there. On the site of the British Pengwern and of the Saxon Shrobsbury, folded securely within a remarkable convolution of the Severn, he established his chief seat upon, and at the base of, the English mound, which still looks down upon the deep and wide river; and with its connected fragment of the ancient city wall forms a striking contrast to the bustle and action carried out upon the railway and within its ephemeral buildings at the foot of the slope. There is a tradition, founded, however, upon error, that the earl’s lieutenant in the more advanced frontier of his dangerous territory, was a certain Baldwin, whose name is preserved in the Welsh appellation of Tre-Faldwin for the town and castle, and of Frydd-Faldwin for a remarkable encampment on the summit of an adjacent hill. But Baldwin, though not an uncommon name with the Normans, does not occur in Shropshire among either the tenants-in-chief or the under-tenants, in Domesday. There was indeed a William Fitz-Baldwin, Lord of Rhydcors, in the reign of Rufus, but he was a South Wales man, and unconnected with Earl Roger. But whether as Tre-Faldwin or Montgomery, whether named from the hand or the head, it is clear that the castle stood in a position most offensive to the pride and patriotic feelings of the Welsh. The vale of the Severn from Welsh Pool to a little short of Llanidloes, had for centuries been a field of bitter contest. The Roman, the Dane, and the Englishman had done violence to the “virgin daughter of Locrine,” and stained her molten crystal with blood. Its broad band of flat and fertile meadow made Powys-land a prize of great value, and the steep and lofty hills between which it was contained, were highly favourable to both the sudden attack and safe retreat of the Welsh. The plain and its lower eminences, traversed by the dyke of Offa, are thickly studded with moated mounds and earthworks, thrown up in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, and which show how far-reaching was, even in that remote period, the Mercian and English power. The mound thrown up by Æthelflaed in 916, at Chirbury, is destroyed; but those of Moat Lane, of Newtown, of Hên-domen, of Kerry, and Nant-cribba, remain, and are as large and as well-defined as that of Shrewsbury itself, and of the very type of those more famous royal residences in Elmete and at Laughton-en-le-Morthen, or of the works near Livarot, whence Earl Roger derived his name, and which have survived all subsequent additions in stone and lime.
That Earl Roger, between his acquisition of the earldom and the year of the Domesday survey had built a castle, is on record, but what sort of a castle may be a question. Norman towers were plain, solid, of durable design, and excellent workmanship, too stout and too useful to be intentionally pulled down, and usually, as at Wattlesborough, outlasting all later additions; but assuredly there is now no trace of any work of Earl Roger on the castle rock, nor anywhere near it; for it has been supposed, without shadow of probability, that his castle was placed, not upon the rock, but somewhere in its neighbourhood. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that Earl Roger’s castle was of a less durable character than is usually supposed, and that this will account for its quick destruction in 1095, two years after his death, by the Welsh, accompanied by the slaughter of his successor’s (Earl Hugh) garrison. This was the event that brought Rufus into the district, to the earl’s aid, in 1096, when, though he did but little, he seems to have recovered the site of the castle, and to have given the earl an opportunity of rebuilding or restoring it. Earl Hugh is said to have done so, but however this may have been, Montgomery is not mentioned among the castles held by his elder brother, but successor, Robert de Belesme, the wicked earl, on his ruin and banishment in 1102. Here, again, the probability is that any castle then standing was of a light and not very durable character, not worthy of being mentioned with Shrewsbury or Bridgenorth.
With the fall of the house of Montgomery, the earldom escheated to the Crown, and with it its castle and castelry. Henry I. upon this remodelled the hundreds of Salop, and raised Montgomery into an Honour or barony, throwing into it the greater part of the adjacent seignory of Chirbury, and several other manors. The valuable, and, on the whole, compact territory thus constituted was at once granted by Henry to a certain Baldwin de Bollers, who was the husband “Sibillæ nepotis regis,” whatever relationship, legitimate or illegitimate, that word may indicate. This lady is also designated, possibly from her mother, as “Sibil de Faleise.” All that is known of Baldwin is that he already held five knight’s-fees of the honour of Warden. He held the new Honour, in capite, of the king, per baroniam; his under-tenants holding of him, most of them, as set forth in the Hundred Rolls, by castle guard. Baldwin began his reign by the very necessary act of building a castle, though what he actually constructed is uncertain, for there is no existing masonry that can be attributed to him or his immediate successors. Still, he is reported to have built a castle, and that he did so is probably just as certain that it is his name, and not that of any lieutenant of Earl Roger, that is identified with the rock by the Welsh. It is also reported that while Baldwin was preparing this castle, he occupied the British camp above, known, in consequence, as Ffrydd-Faldwin. This is most improbable. The camp, a very large and very fine specimen of a British work, would hold five or six thousand men, and could not well be defended by less than a third of that number, for its front is extensive, and its slopes, though steep, are by no means so steep as to stop, or materially to check the onset of a tribe of light-armed mountaineers. Baldwin’s force was more likely to be 500 than 5,000 men, and no doubt depended for its power far more upon its arms and discipline than upon its numerical strength. The castle rock would have held such a force with great security while the operations of a castle were in progress, and probably did so.
The descendants of De Bollers, incorrectly given by Dugdale, have been disentangled by Mr. Eyton, the real historian of Montgomery, with his usual patience and skill, and seem to be as follows:—
Baldwin de Bollers, Lord of Montgomery, 1121, married, (1) Sibil de Faleise, and had also a second wife. By Sibil he had Stephen de Bollers, 1160, Lord of Montgomery, who married Maria, and had Robert, who died young. Matilda, Sibil’s daughter, married Richard Fitz-Urse, 1130–58, and had Reginald Fitz-Urse, one of Becket’s murderers, and Margery.
On Stephen’s death the Honour seems to have passed to Almeric de Bollers, probably a son or descendant of Baldwin, by his second wife, and who had it in 1162. He was succeeded by Robert de Bollers, 1176–1203, who died childless, but left a widow, Hilaria Trusbut, who had dower till 1241. The heir was Robert’s brother, Baldwin, 1203–7, who also died childless, and whose widow, Wenllian Tet, had dower till 1243. This ended the male line.