Welsh Journals

Dafydd Benwyn and a date for Trostre Court A. G. Mein & R. F. Olding Members of the Monmouthsire Antiquarian Association under the direction of AGM have for the past four years been excavating a site on the ridge west of Trostre Court Farm, about 2 miles north-east of Usk. Lying 100 yards or so south-west of Trostre Church, Bradney adopts the name "Trostrey Castle" and shows a plan of what was visible in the 1920s.1 Thought, before excavation started, to be of one phase only, namely a medieval moated manor house, the past four years have changed this view radically. A window has been opened on the pre-history and the history of the Trostre Court valley which it is not appropriate to discuss here beyond noting that the exploitation of the area started with hunters in the Mesolithic and that by the Late Bronze Age the field beside the present church was part of a farm with at least one ploughed field and with a settled population. Whether the two successive wooden, thatched round-houses which have been excavated were the homes of the Bronze Age farmers, rather than those of their Iron Age descendants, may remain beyond proof, but it seems likely that they were so. Overlying these two huts, and therefore later, was a third round house of a different type of construction but, at 25 feet in diameter, of about the same size. This may not be the only house of this type in the immediate area, another of comparable type having come to light in the last few weeks. What is significant about this type of hut is that we now have a date for its construction, by the Carbon 14 method, of about 950 ad. It may be therefore that we have here a pre-Norman Welsh settlement or "tref", or least part of one. It appears permissible to suggest that this was part of the settlement of Trostre Hen, or Old Trostre, which is recorded by that name in 1295, no doubt to distinguish it from the contemporary New Trostre or Trostre Newydd. This reference, in the inquisition post mortem of Gilbert "the Red" de Clare, is the first of several to the two settlements. In 1295 Trostre was held by Philip le Mareschal by a quarter of a knight's service out of Usk Castle and was therefore apparently a manor in its own right at that date as it was presumably in 1314 when it was held by Geoffrey Marshall, perhaps Philip's son. The occasion for that record was the death at Bannockburn of Gilbert V de Clare and the consequent inquisition into his vast estates. The settlements are mentioned again in the next ten years or so but by this time they appear in the Minister's Accounts for the Manor of