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♪ [music playing throughout] ♪♪
I'm Baily Young professor of history at Eastern Illinois
University since 1994 and before that I taught in Chicago
for a bit, I taught in Massachusetts for a bit,
and before that I taught for about 10 years in France.
How did I get to France?
How did I become a medieval archeologist?
It started when I was a graduate student at the University
of Pennsylvania, and I went over to England and to Ireland
where I excavated an Iron Age early Christian site with my
professor Bernard Wales.
And when I went to France to work on my dissertation,
I wanted to work on how archeology helps us understand
the story of the end of the Roman empire,
and the development of Christianity.
So, I got into contact with French archeologists and before
you knew it, there I was excavating in Paris, I was
excavating down around in front of Notre Dame, I was excavating
on top of Montmartre, where there was an important
pilgrimage site connected with the cult of San Danie.
I became close to Patrick Paran who was reinventing Merovingian
archeology and to this day we often work together.
I've just come back from a conference at the
National Museum of Archeology of which he is now the director.
So, in the 1970s and 1980s I was involved in a number of
excavations in France, in the south of France near
Mont Perrier.
I've worked with a team near Williams College,
my undergraduate work was at Williams excavating a medieval
abbey called Sal Modie, and this was really a wonderful
picturesque place but watch out, mosquitos bite you at night
and no-see-ums bite you during the day.
It's a swampy region.
I worked with Christian Sapa who is France's leading medieval
religious architecture scholars today in the French National
Science Research Center.
Christian and I excavated a number of sites in Burgundy,
particularly the site of a church in Otan, you go there
today it looks like a barn, because that's what it became at
the French Revolution.
But we were able to show that it's one of the very oldest
Christian sites in France that goes all the way back to before
the emperor Constantine when the place was called gall.
And I excavated quite a number of burials there.
When I came to Eastern, and Professor Lasky asks me to set
up a program for honors students to be able to excavate
in Europe, I got in touch with my old friend Raymond Brulee
also a very well known Merovingian archeologist who
directs the National Archeology Center for Belgium,
for the French speaking part of Belgium Wallonie,
at the University of Luvan.
And he suggested that Herb and I come over and he would show
us a potential site.
This proved to be the site of Walland Castle.
This is just a wonderful site, we have the ruins of
a 12th century round tower that goes back to the days
of Richard the Lionheart.
Standing up you can actually go inside and walk up the stairs.
But it also had the site of the medieval estate center what's
called the outer bailey which was completely accessible for
excavation, granting that you got the permission of the land
owner who's a farmer who was using it as a pasture
for his cows.
So we came to an agreement he would move his cows elsewhere
for the month it takes us to excavate and we would fill in
the trenches afterwards so the cows could come back
for the winter.
So we got this program off the ground in 1998, and it has
an important pedagogical aspect, we are teaching students about
how to approach history both through historical sources
and through scientific methodology and we're actually
sending them to work to do the excavation.
But, this is not just a practice thing, this is a real
research excavation.
Dr. Brulee and I, and Dr. Lahont Vasleep who is now professor of
archeology at [unclear dialogue] and who is about to succeed
Professor Brulee as director of the National Research Center.
He and I sat down and came up with a plan to study
the evolution of this site from the very earliest times.
We checked the historical records that were available
and we discovered that the site was mentioned in a number
of charters as belonging to a lord who was an important vassal
of the Count of Burbont in the 1100s and 1200s.
What was intriguing here was that the round tower which is
the oldest part that you can see dates to around 1200.
We know this because it has the same shape as the tower that
the king of France, Phillip Augustus, built in his palace
at the Louvre, which you can see now if you go to the Louvre,
they've excavated the foundations and you can
walk around them.
Before that they didn't build these round towers so much they
built square ones.
But we know that there was a Lord of Walland as far back as
the year 1000, so what was going on on the site for the 200 years
or so where we don't have standing remains?
Could it have been that there was an earlier wooden
architecture phase which we could find traces of
if we excavated?
Well that was our early hypothesis, and as we dug
in the area of our outer bailey we found first of all,
that this was very much built up around the time
of Queen Elizabeth, around 1500 when historical sources tell us
that the site belonged to one of the great figures in the court
of the holy Roman Emperor Charles the 5th.
But we were relieved to see that underneath these early modern
vessages of probably a great kind of stable for horses
we found remains of the medieval farming estate that
we were looking for.
And we found that the terrace above the flood plane that
the outer bailey was built on, it wasn't a natural elevation
much of it was deliberately built up the way a mound like
Monks Mound Cahokia was deliberately built up
and the person who established that for sure is Bill Woods who
excavated Monks Mound of Cahokia.
So you know that I'm taking it from a good source.
So we did a lot of excavation out there in the outer bailey
in the first years of our project and we were able to show
that the castle was a result of extraordinarily sophisticated
earth engineering to which masonry, stone masonry
construction was then added.
The original stone tower, as I said, dates to around 1200,
but between 12 and 1300 a fortified courtyard was added
with a great big fortified stone gate, a drawbridge,
three corner towers, and this involved extraordinary resources
so it shows us that the people who were building Walland,
and I say the people, but we know the names of the lords
in those days from the charters.
People like Lord Arnold the 5th, clearly they were highly
successful, very powerful, local figures who were trusted by and
working closely with the great feudal lord the Duke of Brebon.
Then, about 1310, Arnold the 5th died without a male heir
and work at the castle stopped for some time, the castle
became the property of his daughter who married into
a different family and moved away.
So the castle was neglected for sometime, and during this time
it's military usefulness became negligible as kinds of warfare
changed, now you had armies using artillery and highly
professional soldiers, a little castle like this was nothing,
but as an estate center, as a country residence it was still
very desirable and that's why about 1450 Antwan Degleam
bought it, bought the land, bought the lordship,
bought the rights over the peasants and so forth,
and we have these engravings that were done sometime after
this that show the wonderful mansion that he had built
in the old castle.
We know something about it from these iconographical sources,
we know something about it from account books
that have survived.
Antwan and his successors kept very careful records of
the money they spent and these a lot of them have survived
and we've been able to study them.
So, one of the exciting things about our project as a research
project is that we can bring together what we learn about
the site from looking at historical records with what we
learn about the site from excavating, from strategraphy,
from analysis of the soil to find out what kinds of plants
were being grown and so forth.
We've already done a preliminary report for the Belgium
authorities more than 400 pages with great strategraphies in it.
And now we're working on the next one, the first report
focused on the outer bailey, the next will focus
on the excavations we've been doing since 2005 in the inner
fortified courtyard and most recently we've been
concentrating on the remains of the 15th century mansion.
[no dialogue].