4.13.6 Windsor Castle, Berkshire

West Gable Of St. Georges Hall.

The recording of the fire-damaged areas was completed in March, although a watching brief is being maintained until the completion of the reconstruction of the castle in November 1997. The main focus of our work continued to be the vaulted undercroft below St George's Hall, where evidence grew for the twelfth to thirteenth-century range, and how it was adapted in fourteenth century. The west and north walls of the range contained the earliest fabric, and a small doorway in the west wall was found at ground floor level. The doorway had been cut away on one side by the insertion of the fourteenth-century vaulting, and on the other by the insertion of a seventeenth-century doorway. It adds to the number of thirteenth-century architectural features now known from this elevation.

With the construction of the vault in the fourteenth century, the floor level was deepened by more than 1m, exposing the rubble foundations of earlier work. This created a much loftier vault than has previously been appreciated, and shows that St John Hope was wrong in suggesting that these floors had been lowered in the nineteenth century; in fact they had been raised by over 1m. Medieval flooring was represented by a layer of mortar exposed in several places, and evidence for a brick drain set into this floor was also found, but this sequence could only be explored through gaps in a later stone floor. Alterations to the fabric of the undercroft included the fifteenth-century insertion of windows in the north elevation of Servants' Hall, facing the horn court. Most of these had been widened in the nineteenth century, but one had been blocked in the seventeenth century, and this retained evidence for its two cinque-foil lights.

Plan of 17th Century Floor showing wear patterns and evidence of partitions.

The whole of the undercroft was radically altered in the late seventeenth century, with the insertion of a wine cellar at the east end. The western part of the range, now known as the Servants' Hall, was resurfaced with a stone floor, made up of reused Purbeck marble slabs. A longitudinal drain set in the surface of this floor led into a sub-floor drain channel through a pierced stone drain cover. Wear patterns in the floor matched the evidence from the fabric for timber partitions; the southern half of the vault remained an open area, but the northern half was divided up into a series of small rooms, each one bay wide. This arrangement did not extend into the two westernmost bays, which were divided into four small rooms by brick partitions, paved in paments (brick-shaped paving tiles) and reused square late medieval tiles. Two of the room floors contained integral drains leading into pots set in the floor,

Pottery sump

which were clearly designed as sumps to collect material rather than as soakaways. The working hypothesis is that these were lamp rooms (oil lamps were in use at Windsor in the late seventeenth century) but further parallels will be sought in analysis.

The remainder of the post-medieval partitions in the undercroft proved to have a complex construction history, with a number of alterations and rebuilds between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The sequence of these walls has been determined by a combination of brick typology and the analysis of historic plans. An interesting feature of the late seventeenth-century work was the burial of metal objects, presumably as charms, below thresholds. Two of these were found; an ormolu strip from a piece of furniture, and a gold angel of Edward IV.

Coin from Windsor Castle

The site archive from the Fire Project is now complete, and the completion of the digitising work has allowed us to re-examine the evidence recorded earlier in the project. One discovery from this process is that the 'Norman' Tower, one of a pair of towers (with Prince of Wales Tower) which clasped the north-western corner of the Upper Ward, preserved a great deal more medieval fabric than had been realised. The outer part of the tower was replaced by Wyatville's Brunswick Tower in the nineteenth century, but both the western and eastern walls survive, and appear to be of fourteenth-century construction. This tower was later known to have been used as the bakehouse, and was thought to have been remodelled in the late seventeenth century for this purpose. However, it is now possible that it had been used as the bakehouse since the medieval period.

The Fire and Round Tower projects are now being assessed together, and analysis will follow from 1998-2000.