Gardens fit for a queen
IN its prime 400 years ago, the garden at Kenilworth Castle was a magnificent sight fit for Queen Elizabeth I.
Now, thanks to two years of hard work by a team of Northamptonshire archaeologists, the elaborate garden across the border is to be restored as part of a 2.5m project.
Kenilworth Castle, reputedly the largest ruined castle in England, was the home of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.
Dudley was a favourite of Elizabeth I, and in 1575 he created the splendid garden for her royal visit. The Queen famously visited Kenilworth in July and was entertained for 19 days with extravagant feasting, fireworks, hunting, acrobats, music and dancing. This visit is thought to have inspired William Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night's Dream.
For centuries the garden was thought lost, but when Northamptonshire Archaeology were called in to examine the site they were able to uncover the 16th century remains. Now, after two seasons of excavation, English Heritage has enough information to begin reconstruction of the garden.
Project officer Joe Prentice said they had started off in 2004 with very small hand-dug test pits.
"In the 1970s some previous archaeology took place to look for this famous Elizabethan garden, but it came to the conclusion that it had all been destroyed, so the garden was laid out based on a 1656 engraving," he explained.
To the untrained eye the reconstructed 17th century garden, with its box and yew hedges and topiary, probably looked quite authentic, but Mr Prentice said it had been totally wrong for the style of the castle.
"It wasn't what an Elizabethan garden should look like so English Heritage decided, to their credit, to do some trial trenching to see if we could find anything and fairly quickly we established that there were two layers," he said.
"The one major feature of the garden we knew about was an octagonal fountain, and we thought this should be in the centre because in the Elizabethan period you expect it to be laid out symmetrically.
"The problem that Robert Dudley had at Kenilworth was that he had a 12th century castle with 14th century additions, with a garden on the north side, so trying to fit the latest fashion into that was quite tricky."
Using their expertise the team determined a likely position on an axis with the house and immediately struck gold.
"As soon as we looked in the right spot we found the foundations of the marble fountain, which was very exciting," said Mr Prentice.
"On the basis of that the decision was made to excavate the whole garden."
After doing the initial investigations the team then won the contract to carry out the work on the entire site.
"The advantage Northamptonshire Archaeology has is that we are probably the best unit for garden archaeology in the country," said Mr Prentice.
"We have worked at Hampton Court and for the National Trust at Stowe and at Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire, so we have built a good reputation over the past 15 years."
After the topsoil was removed by diggers, the seven-strong team began the painstaking task of excavating the 100m by 55m site by hand. Kenilworth Castle remained open to the public throughout the excavation, which only gave them two hours from 8am before they were on constant display.
"Twice a day we would do tours around the excavations, and sometimes that was interesting for us as well as the public," said Mr Prentice.
"For example, one unusual thing we found were three big animal skeletons. You expect cats and dogs to be buried in gardens but this was two cows and a horse from the 19th century.
"Initially this seemed a little bit odd but we mentioned it during one of the tours and a little old lady remembered that her father, who had a market garden in Wiltshire, told her that he had buried a donkey to help with his grape vines.
"We then found references in 19th century kitchen garden books to this as a standard Victorian practice to provide nutrients."
A key part of the excavation was uncovering the central fountain, the focal point of the garden. But they soon realised there was little more to discover.
"A big pit had been dug in the 19th century which destroyed all the Elizabethan stonework," explained Mr Prentice.
"Interestingly, when we were searching the drains, we found 13 tiny bits of gold thread, and initial analysis suggests they have come from a very high quality piece of clothing or tapestry.
"We also found three fragments of white marble but they were very tiny, which suggests that the fountain was carefully dismantled and taken somewhere else.
"The frustration is that, usually, country houses have records showing where pieces of sculpture go and we can trace them, but this seems to have just disappeared.
"The marble was the finest quality, from northern Italy, and it would have been tremendously expensive to bring it to Kenilworth."
But the team did have one stroke of luck – they were able to glean a rough idea of the garden layout from a letter written in 1575 by Robert Laneham, who was Robert Dudley's usher. Laneham described the Queen's visit in full and gave an extensive description of the extravagant garden.
"We only really have this tiny snapshot in time, which is really tantalising," said Mr Prentice. "It is extremely rare to have such a detailed description from this period. Later it became common to have views painted of country houses but at that time it was very unusual.
"Laneham only mentions five plants, because you were just beginning to get people travelling across the world and bringing them back. He describes lavender, strawberry and cherry, pears and apples all in fruit together. The most likely explanation is that papier mache fruits had probably been tied on to the trees for the Queen's visit.
"The whole thing is very theatrical – it is Elizabethan high theatre at its best."
Project supervisor Carol Simmonds added that Laneham, who was writing to a friend in London, had chronicled the entire 19 days of the Queen's visit.
"The Queen was greeted with trumpets and people reciting poems and there were lavish entertainments each day," she said. "She went hunting and there was feasting, dancing and fireworks.
"He even says that the clock on the tower was stopped in the presence of the Virgin Queen, which seems funny to us, but all that kind of flattery and pomp was how the court worked in the Elizabethan period."
Despite this assistance, Mr Prentice admitted that the Kenilworth excavation had been full of challenges.
"It was a very frustrating site because, apart from the fountain, all the other bits had been destroyed by later work," he said.
"During the Civil War, rather irritatingly, they dug a big defensive ditch along the south side of the garden, so we have lost any evidence of the steps coming down from the terrace. There is no way the Queen of England would have skidded down a grassy slope but we have nothing to tell us where the steps were.
"There was also a great, gilded wooden aviary decorated to look bejewelled, but because it was timber no evidence remains.
"Later the gardens were cultivated as vegetable gardens and orchards by the people who lived in the gatehouse until the 1930s.
"In terms of objects we found very little, which is what you would expect because you don't do your gardening in your best clothes and jewels.
"So we mostly found broken flowerpots, broken tools and a lot of broken 13th to 15th century pottery. There were some musket balls from the Civil War, a piece of Elizabethan balustrade and a piece of 17th century coloured window glass still in its lead casing."
Other discoveries included a silver penny of Edward I, bronze belt buckles from the 14th century and clay pipes from the 17th to 19th centuries.
After Dudley died, broke, in 1588 the estate reverted to the Crown. During James I's reign Ben Jonson staged plays in the garden and Charles I stayed a night there in 1644, but after the Civil War the castle was deliberately ruined so it could not be used defensively again.
"We stick firmly to the facts when we write our reports but imagination does play a part when you are on site and you can get carried away imagining what might have been," added Mr Prentice.
"We are all passionate about history and archaeology, and when you are standing in the grounds of a castle which has been there for almost 800 years, you can't help thinking of the hundreds and thousands of lives that have been through that place, from the poorest servant to the Queen of England.
"When you are digging a prehistoric or Roman site you have no idea who lived there, but here we had people and names and could start to imagine their lives, because we felt we knew quite a lot about them."
Northamptonshire Archaeology's work at the site is now done, but it is hoped the gardens will be restored by next year.
"It was quite an achievement to carry out this work because it was such a high profile site, but our part of the job is done now," said Mr Prentice.
"It's just nice to feel that we were the first people to get it right."
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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