Forays into Swedish

I enjoyed Sweden. I enjoyed Swedish, and Dick’s patient lessons in what I came to see as a jigsaw language. I mean that as a compliment. For example I learnt that sick was sjuk and house was hus, so hospital was sjukhus. A mental hospital thus became mentalsjukhus. Hmm, so Huvud was head…where could I go from there?

I tried it one miserable night after trying to get drunk on two beers. A blond giant bumped into me. "Dumhuvud," I snarled.

He looked down at me, puzzled and benign.

"Did you mean to say that?" he said

I looked up at his chest.

"No," I said. "I don’t think I did."

The key to all this stems from the Scandinavian Diaspora of the C9th and C10th when much of North East England was ruled by Viking warlords with exotic names like Ivar the boneless and Harold Bluetooth – (who devastated the North with his Wi Fi axe.)

The Swedish words for Beer is Öl. The umlaut over the O gives it an ‘erl’ sound, and then and now, a thousand years later, a northern pub will sell you a pint of ale, the word pronounced much as it is in Sweden today. Skalle and skull are pronounced much the same, and I still prefer blek to bleak.

The two weeks went quickly and I ate well, but drank little. On the one occasion I bought two bottles of beer from an off-license I felt like a pervert. I carried them gingerly in their brown paper bag. On the bus I nestled them close to me but still the damn things clinked. A Swedish face can be both bland and disapproving, a very neat trick.

Eat when there's food

Copenhagen















I was visiting my friend Dick, and learnt two important lessons, one I should have learnt already.

Dick Skinner lives in Sweden. He went there to teach English as a Foreign Language but somehow got side-tracked. He became a doctor through the medium of Swedish, married a beautiful woman called Asa and then, to cement his happiness, invited me over.

I took the ferry to Copenhagen. Searching for my cabin, I caught a glimpse of the dining-room, its tables laden with plates of ham and fish and all manner of food that made me weak in the stomach. I salivated, wiping the dribble from my chin, and made for the bar. A drink first, maybe.

At the bar a middle-aged lush grabbed my attention, well, he bought me a drink. He was a man that would make anyone standing near enough drunk, paralytic if you breathed in his fumes. ‘The buffet’s always there,’ he said. ‘Have another drink.’

Oh, easily led man, gull and buffoon. I believed him until my stomach rebelled. I had to eat! Five strong lagers on an empty stomach, rolling on the swell of an equally hungry sea…I had to eat!

I burst through the dining room door to find it empty and dark. It had a savoury smell, taunting me, rubbing home my foolishness. ‘Just think of breakfast’ the guy said when I returned to the bar in search of crisp, a fragment of nut. I did, going to bed and dreaming of cured herring and whole hams, salmon and white crusty rolls.

At first light I dived out of bed and raced to the dining room. Things looked good. It was open at least…only instead of the feast that had been there that night I was offered five different kinds of cereal and a choice of two fruit drinks.

I spent a day in Copenhagen, which is a very pretty city, but cold. A thin strip of water separated me from Sweden, more particularly Malmo where Dick then lived. There was a ferry that would take me over, which I just managed to get on. I couldn’t believe it. How could any ship be so packed? People were hanging on to gunwales, ropes, life-boats…clinging and drinking at the same time – some of them vomiting – managing all three. It was like a scene from hell, a circle that Dante had never got round to describe, and there was me, clutching my suitcase in case anyone tried to steal it for a seat or a bed.

The Malmo ferry























What I found out, too late, was that there were only five ferries to Copenhagen and everyone wanted the last one back. Denmark may have been cold, but Sweden was ‘dry’ and thirsty Swedes went to Copenhagen where they followed a circular route from bar to bar until, by the end of the day, they found themselves back at the dock in time for the last ferry.

Dick explained all this to me. Sweden had a reputation for permissiveness that stopped at alcohol. Very high prices turned a pint into a considered luxury, and though off-licenses were allowed, there was usually only one to a town, and drink, once bought, had to be hidden in brown paper bags.

Just then however, I would have been happy to find solace in a brown paper bag - live there - gnawing cured ham, salmon and crusty white rolls.

How do you lose a tunnel?

Newport has a rich underground life with cellars, many interconnected stretching from street to street.

None of these cellars, basements and tunnels are as yet inhabited by werewolves, vampires or ghouls but the premises are there, desirable and vacant to let.

One of the more interesting and persistent legends are those focused on the supposed secret passages in and around Newport Castle. One went under the river Usk to the parish of Christchurch. Who built it, or why is not explained, nor has the tunnel been found.

One tunnel was, however, and then subsequently lost. Only in Newport could you lose a tunnel.
Between 1890 and 1899 Newport castle was a Lloyd and Yorath brewery. Its water came from an old well in the old castle grounds but by 1891 its water had all but disappeared.

Harry Jones, the brewery foreman, went down the well to investigate, and there he discovered a stone-walled tunnel heading in the direction of Shaftsbury Street. With only a candle to guide them, Jones and another man explored the tunnel, wading through a fast flowing stream to its source at a well in Thomas Street.

In 1901 the last of the town’s wells (Baneswell) was closed and sealed. The water would have had a meaty taste because the well was clogged with dead rats. Rats not ghouls infested Newport’s underground. In 1920 16,000 rats were trapped or killed in the town. Three years later several babies were bitten in their prams by rats, probably in revenge.

But that didn’t stop the search for the ‘lost tunnel’.

In 1931 an employee of the Borough Engineers Department rediscovered the tunnel whilst draining an overfull well. His tunnel forked, with one branch going on to Thomas Street and the other going left towards the Old Green Hotel which then stood on the corner of High Street and Dock Street.

Again, who built the tunnels and why, have never been discovered, but at this point the question becomes academic because the tunnels were once again mislaid. Busy roads now surround the castle, but during their building no tunnels were found. In 1951 eighty five year old Harry Jones was asked to relocate the tunnels, but too old perhaps, he failed.
For those interested, Haydn Davis has written several interesting chronicles on Newport's history, all available in Newport Library. But my brief survey has now ended, probably not before time. Its only validity in what is essentially a record of one baffled spirit is that History is a consuming interest, along with the arcane. In Newport you have both.



Find the tunnel!

Where the ghosts are placed

If I live in a place, I like to know where the ghosts are placed. If I lived in anyone of the three houses numbered, 27 to 29 Stow Park Avenue I’d like to know I was drinking my coffee on the site of the Motte and Bailey Castle that Robert Fitzhamon first built there shortly after 1093; look out my window and see my fifteen serfs and cottars cultivating my surrounding 150 acres of arable land. Further down I’d glimpse the brown river that periodically engulfed the land, dismal mudflats and marsh as far as the eye could see.

Walking down Stow Hill I’d join the ghosts of C19th Chartists who, without any clear plan of action, allowed themselves to be dispersed by gun fire from the West Gate Hotel, remember that Eddy Curran’s grandfather was working on the newly build St Mary’s Catholic Church as the Chartists passed.

In the main street I’d imagine the 247 burgages, cattle pens, fish ponds and allotments; see the more substantial castle guarding a ford on the River Usk along with the four major roads leading to it. Now it hums with traffic, then it held five watchmen, six mounted and ten un-mounted soldiers with a larger force of three hundred men held in reserve. Without buildings to hinder my vision I’d see Robert de Hais’ estate at nearby Basseleg and my other knight’s estates at Maesglas, St Mellons and St Brides, know that each of them along with others owed me forty days of castle service, mounted and in full armour.

Despite a population of less than 600, it would have been a busy place. Protected by a castle and positioned at an important crossroad, Newport was a natural market town. Pedlars were encouraged to set up shops which in time became the present High Street. The main market was held once a week, each stall holder paying a tax to the Lord of the Manor, and an annual 15 day fair was held the 15th of August – the Feast of the Assumption.

As the market became more established the Normans decided that the ford, the main access point to the market, was no longer good enough. A bridge was needed.
The first bridge was very narrow, just wide enough for two carts to pass. The timber would have creaked and groaned along the full length of its 500 ft span under the tremendous tidal stresses it faced. It also seems to have been burnt or damaged on a fairly regular basis.
















In 1377, Hugh, the second Earl of Stafford granted land between Stow Hill and the River Usk shoreline to the Hermits of St. Augustine. They were called the Austin Friars and from that time on the people of Newport got used to the black gowned and hooded friars wandering around their streets. Pastry, shoe, and sportswear shops, the occasional pub, now occupy where their small abbey once stood. It was a place of refuge for the sick and blind, the homeless. The ghosts of the friars are still there amongst the pushchairs and shopping bags, the nightly drunks.














Perhaps, too, is the ghost of Henry II, Henry Plantagenet, ruler of an empire stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Originally Duke of Anjou he inherited England and Normandy from this maternal grandfather William the Conqueror, swallowed up Brittany, and after snaffling up Eleanor on Aquitaine in marriage, controlled more of France than the French king himself. On hearing the legend that a freckled king who lost his freckles in the River Usk would one day rule all of Wales, he put the legend to the test, washing his face vigorously in the turgid river. His freckles remained but he seemed fairly philosophical with the result and Wales remained relatively free.

Ghosts however don’t have freckles so it seems unlikely that the turbulent king is still cleansing his face in the river, not when he has the Occitan to haunt. Newport is magical and seedy. It is also often wet and over crowded with ghosts.





The dispersal of the Chartists in C19th Newport

Owain Glyndwr - even worse than the plague

It was the black rat that spread the plague, but this rat, I think you'll agree, has attitude.














The best accounts of how the Black Death affected Gwent come from manorial rolls. These show that the Manors of Abergavenny, Monmouth, Usk and Caldicot suffered particularly badly with rent receipts less than a third of a normal year. There is no written evidence of how the Plague affected the small marsh settlement of Newport, then about 30 houses. What is of interest is that despite all the excavations and rebuilding of Newport, no plague pits have ever been discovered. This is either because so few people lived in Newport and/or we simply threw the dead bodies into the strong tidal waters of the Usk.

If there were only thirty or so houses in 1348 it was a different story in 1386 when Newport boasted between 200 – 300 burgages. Having said that, the whole town was only worth about £21 (32 dollars) in rent, and that included the mill and fisheries as well as the two hundred burgages, so rents must have been low.

But there were still further heights to climb. By 1400 Newport enjoyed a rental value of £57 (80 dollars).

A year or two later, the rental value of the town was assessed as nil.

The reason: Owain Glyndwr.






















Owain's strategy was to burn and destroy anything owned by, or of use to, the English, and to leave nothing on the land to help a pursuing army. As a result ordinary people suffered badly, both from the violence and the local famine that always followed.

In the Summer of 1402 the Glyndwr hordes entered Gwent from the North and scorched the earth through out the Usk valley. After laying waste to Crickhowell and Abergavenny they arrived at Newport. Within the day they destroyed the castle, the mill, and the bridge.

They badly damaged St, Woolos cathedral and the Austin Friary, drove off all the livestock and burned acres of standing crops. Every church in the moors of Caldicot and the Wentloog levels were similarly destroyed. The townspeople who had hidden in the forests returned to find the town a blackened ruin. Owain was the torch of freedom for many in Wales. He was just a torch for Newport – a curse worse far worse than plague.

When in 1403 King Henry IV's army was billeted in Newport the king found conditions so dreadful that he sent messengers to Bristol ordering ships to be loaded with flour, ale, wine, and salt fish for the starving people of Newport.




for Newport, Duerer's The Apocalpyse might apply more to Glyndwr than the plague it is more usually associated with.

Choose your friends carefully Part 2

After realising who his real friends were, i.e. those who held power, Gilbert de Clare achieved great things. In 1290 and in his forties, he married a twelve year old girl. She was Joan of Acre and the daughter of Edward I. Unfortunately Gilbert died five years later leaving behind a four year old son also called…Gilbert de Clare, along with an unresolved war with Morgan ap Meredydd of Machen and a devastated Newport.

Worse, the boy’s mother went on to scandalise both king and court.

Having delivered four children, and still an attractive teenager, Joan of Acre fell in love with a squire and secretly married him. Things turned out reasonably well. In 1307 both Joan and her father, the king of England died, and Gilbert de Clare junior, now sixteen years old, inherited the earldom of Gloucester and the Newport estates.

Gilbert de Clare junior was also rubbish in choosing his friends but unlike his father he was never given the chance to learn from his mistakes. The new king of England, Edward II, was Gilbert’s uncle but was only a few years older than Gilbert and the two men had grown up as boys together in the Royal Household. They became close friends and as Gilbert developed into a brave and daring warrior it is not surprising that the king found him useful.



The problem was, the new king was basically stupid. Just before the battle of Bannockburn Gilbert told the king that his men needed rest. The Scots were comfortable and well dug in. The English however were desperately tired from days of heavy marching. The king would have none of it. He accused his old friend of cowardice, and the furious Gilbert led his men into a suicidal charge that ended in his death. Probably the two men were as stupid as each other.

It took three years for the king to work out what to do with the Gloucester estates. They were divided out between Gilbert’s three sisters. Eleanor, who was married to the king’s favourite, Hugh Despenser, was given Glamorgan. Margaret, married to Hugh de Audley received Lower Gwent together with Newport, whilst Elizabeth and her husband Roger Damory gained the Lordship of Usk.

The king may have been stupid but Hugh Despenser was consumed by greed and used his power over a sexually ambiguous king. As friends go he was the most dangerous of all, persuading Edward to take the Newport lands from his brother-in-law and give them to him. Then he started ‘stealing’ other baronial estates so causing a major rebellion.



Hugh Despenser, who looks kind of sweet rather than powerful or sexy; but note how he's filched the de Clare coat of arms bottom right corner.













A huge force of over 11,000 men attacked Newport on the 4th of May 1321. They took the castle in 4 days causing immense damage in the area. The repair bill for the damaged castle was £600, a considerable sum in 1326. The corn crop was again destroyed, and the fact that 300 oak trees from Caerleon forest were needed for local repairs suggests that Newport bridge had also to be repaired.
Under pressure, the king banished Hugh Despenser but the following year, the love-sick king reinstated him, defeating the rebellious Barons in North Yorkshire at the battle of Boroughbridge.

Roger Damory, lord of Usk was sentenced to death but was spared because he was married to the King's niece. Another leading rebel, Roger Mortimer, was imprisoned whilst the king decided what to do with him. Such a mistake.



Isabella coming back from France















Roger Mortimer was the queen’s lover. (If Braveheart is to be believed, William Wallace preceded him.) Isabella, passionate, strong, and known as the ‘She-Wolf of France’ with good reason, loathed her husband along with the men he preferred to her. Escaping from prison Roger joined Isabella in France, along with her son, the future Edward III. Returning to England with 700 men they sparked off an even more serious rebellion. The king, along with the Despenser family fled west into Wales.
Hugh Despenser’s 90 year old father was ordered to defend his castle in Bristol but his soldiers rebelled against him. They handed him over to the rebels and the aged man was executed, whilst standing in full armour.
















Knowing the game was up, Hugh Despenser and the king crossed the river Wye in an attempt to reach Chepstow where they hoped to sail for Ireland or France. Unfortunately strong winds blew them back and they landed at Neath where they were captured. Despenser was hung drawn and quartered on a fifty foot high gibbet – one of the highest ever built for an execution.



There's a wonderfully quiet quality to this picture, almost as though a small crowd is gathering to watch a wall painting rather than a man being disembowelled.
















Edward suffered a more painful but less public fate. In Berkeley Castle he was pushed face down on to a table and his breeches ripped off. A hollowed bone was rammed up his back-side followed by a red hot poker. The guide at Berkeley recounts how his screams could be heard from over five miles away, which I believe because she looks old enough to have witnessed it.

Edward learnt the painful way the necessity of choosing your friends carefully, but I’m sure the ghost of Gilbert de Clare laughed merrily that night.

Choose your friends wisely, Part One.

The Red Baron

Gilbert de Clare inherited Newport and surrounding lands in a roundabout fashion. They initially belonged to the Countess Isabel, Grand-daughter of William, Earl of Gloucester. She can be excused for marrying King John; choice didn’t really come into it. King John however, despite his unexpected sagacity in granting Liverpool its first Town Charter, was not a woman’s man. He divorced Isabel but kept Newport. (wise choice)

When King John died, Newport along with other land around Gloucester was returned to Isabel, who bequeathed them to a close relative – Richard and, in turn, his son Gilbert de Clare.

Gilbert de Clare had a great way with names, beating Manfred von Richthofen to the title of the ‘Red Baron’. He showed less judgement in his choice of friends, but at least had the sense to change sides when the need arose.

The friend in question was Simon de Montfort who led a serious rebellion against John’s son, Henry III. For a time Simon de Montfort became one of the most powerful men in the realm, beating Henry in battle and imprisoning his son in Hereford castle. It was then he began making plans to take over Gilbert de Clare’s Welsh lands.

Simon was greedy and Gilbert was miffed. He changed sides, joining with Roger Mortimer to rescue the King’s son, the young Prince Edward. From Ludlow they raised forces loyal to the king and drove Simon de Montfort into Gwent where he captured Newport castle. By this time de Montfort was so desperate he was reduced to seeking help from the Welsh.

Llywelyn ap Gruffyd was happy to oblige, taking advantage of English troubles to increase Welsh power. Both men were disappointed. Simon de Montford was forced to retreat across the River Severn. Unfortunately his ships, crossing from Bristol to Usk, were ambushed by the Royal fleet, and de Montford, waiting to be picked up from Goldcliffe beach saw his rescue ships sunk.


















Simon de Montford’s tired, demoralised army were forced to retreat up the river Usk, wade through treacherous marshland, all the time pursued by Prince Edward’s army.






In one final pique of revenge, de Montfort re-captured Newport, burnt its small wooden bridge, seized all of its livestock and destroyed its crops. He left behind fire and starvation in the lands of his old friend Gilbert de Clare, but revenge is sweet. In the battle of Evesham that followed (1265) de Montfort was killed. His body was cut up and different parts sent to the Lords who had accomplished the most. We don’t know who got the testicles, but his head was sent to Roger de Mortimer who gave it as a gift to his wife, Maud. She held a great feast that very night to celebrate and. De Montfort's head was raised in the Great Hall, still attached to the point of the lance.













Meanwhile, Newport, too, got something from de Montfort’s defeat. It may have lost it’s bridge and suffered hardship and starvation, but St. Woolos got its first little stumpy tower from a grateful king.