Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  Just eighteen months later, Master James of St Georges, the genius behind the king’s Welsh castles and one of the greatest architects of the European Middle Ages, followed his employer to the grave. Neither Caernarfon nor Beaumaris was ever finished. Work at both castles ground on for another two decades, but the vast river of money no longer flowed as freely. By the 1320s, it had slowed to a tiny trickle, and ten years later it stopped completely: building on both sites was abandoned forever. Today the castles still stand incomplete, their appearance much as it was seven centuries ago. At Caernarfon, the majestic outer walls conceal an interior only half-realized. The royal apartments intended for the upper ward were never built, and the gatehouses, so imposing from the outside, have the feel of a movie set when viewed from behind. At Beaumaris, the inner walls, which had grown to about half their intended height, simply stop at the same horizontal level. You can almost picture the workmen packing up their tools and going home.

  In one sense, Edward’s great chain of castles did their job. As tools of conquest, they were supremely successful. The Welsh never drove the English out, and their country continued to be ruled by foreigners. As royal palaces, however, Edward’s castles can only be viewed as failures. Their great halls, intended for feasting and revelry, stood empty. Their suites of chambers, designed for luxurious living, were never finished. The king had imagined royal visits on a grand scale; Beaumaris was to have accommodation enough for five separate royal households. But future kings and queens of England stayed away, preferring their comfortable homes in southern England to Edward’s windswept white elephants in north-west Wales. Within a few generations, the castles were falling into ruin, reduced to the role of administrative outposts in a failing English empire. Ultimately, despite spending enormous sums of money on huge armies and spectacular castles, Edward’s dreams died with him.

  Never again would a king of England attempt to build a castle on the scale of Caernarfon. In the fourteenth century, Edward’s successors learnt to accept that, in reality, their power in Britain stopped at England’s borders. Instead of expanding northwards and westwards, they turned their attentions south and east, and began once again to exercise their ambitions on the Continent. The result was endless war in France, unbroken peace at home – and a brand new breed of castle.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME

  BODIAM CASTLE IS one of the most famous, most photogenic and most visited castles in Britain. One look at it and it is easy to see why: it is what you might call a pin-up castle. Ravishing good looks have made it a firm favourite with calendar compilers and magazine picture editors; it has charmed its way onto the cover of many a book. A stunning setting in the middle of a mirror-like moat, especially magical on cold mornings when the mist hangs round the walls, has guaranteed top billing in pop videos, TV series and Hollywood feature films. Some castles can look tough, others can look homely, but few can manage both at the same time. Bodiam can, but then Bodiam has star quality – it’s a true celebrity.

  All this attention would have much gratified the castle’s builder, Sir Edward Dallingridge, who, in his own day, was just as much of a celebrity as his castle is now. Just as Bodiam is a great example of a castle from the late Middle Ages, so Edward Dallingridge is a perfect example of a late medieval castle-builder. castles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tended to be built not by kings, dukes and earls – who, after all, had plenty of them already – but by men like Sir Edward: individuals who stood on the lower rungs of the aristocracy, but were determined to climb higher.

  Bodiam and Dallingridge belong, essentially, to Chaucer’s England. It is an age we associate with good times, largely because of the lively characters, vivid colours and bawdy humour of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s England is ‘Merrie England’ – a golden age, yet to be tarnished by the dynastic struggles of the fifteenth century, or the religious upheavals of the Tudor period. Yet in fact, these times were far from trouble-free. The story of Dallingridge and Bodiam is played out against a backdrop of invasion threats, revolting peasants and rebellion against the king.

  More importantly, Edward Dallingridge was not a fuzzy idealized character like Chaucer’s knight in the Canterbury Tales. He was a real flesh-and-blood individual, with genuine ambitions and legitimate anxieties. He and his friends and family lived in an age which has left: a rich seam of documentary evidence, enabling us to view their lives inside and outside the castle in a way that is impossible for earlier periods. We know not only what they ate and drank, but the exact recipes they followed, the actual songs they sang, even some of the things they believed in.

  In some respects, Bodiam is similar to the castles featured in the previous chapter. Both Edward Dallingridge and Edward I asked for castles built to an enclosure design; at Bodiam, as at Beaumaris, there is no trace of a keep. There is, however, one very important difference, and it springs from the contrasting priorities of the two Edwards. The king’s castles were constructed as weapons of conquest, and it is quite clear that military considerations were uppermost in the master mason’s mind. Caernarfon, Conway and Harlech were made all the mightier by being built to fit platforms of rock. All three castles therefore have irregular ground plans and, as a result, some rather unusually shaped rooms. Take, for example, the great hall at Conway Castle, which is banana shaped. This peculiar layout, one imagines, was not an essential part of Edward’s design brief. Clearly what happened was that the castle’s exterior wall was given top priority, and the great hall was built to follow a predetermined curvy profile. At the king’s other castles, the halls and chambers were similarly squeezed inside restrictive military straitjackets.

  At Bodiam, however, the thinking was the other way round. Far from being a peculiar shape, the castle is very regular and symmetrical; seen from above, it looks almost perfectly square (in fact, it’s rectangular – the east and west walls are 10 per cent longer than the north and south). The chambers, hall and chapel are all well proportioned, and arranged to serve each other perfectly. It therefore seems that more importance has been attached to the accommodation than to the exterior walls. The starting point was a well-ordered courtyard, and the castle walls were simply wrapped around the outside. In fact, if you look at the plan of Bodiam, and ignore the gatehouse, towers and turrets, it starts to look very much like a courtyard house.

  The courtyard design originated in the fourteenth century, and was first used by the builders of manor houses and colleges. It soon became the most popular shape for castle designers too, and in this respect Bodiam can claim to be a ‘typical’ castle of its time. There were, however, plenty of alternative models for castle-builders to follow. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, masons were having so much fun experimenting with form that it becomes very difficult to generalize about their designs at all. We find courtyard castles up and down the country, at places like Maxstoke (Warwickshire), Sheriff Hutton (Yorkshire), and Cooling (Kent); they are especially common in the south of England. We also find great towers making a spectacular come-back at places like Tattershall (Lincolnshire), Ashby de la Zouche (Leicestershire) and Raglan (Monmouthshire – see Chapter Six). Other castles built in this period simply defy classification; try as we might, it is impossible to pigeon-hole castles like Nunney (Somerset), Old Wardour (Wiltshire) and Warkworth (Northumbria). Bodiam belongs to an age of great variety and individualism.

  However, the big question that has been raised about many of these castles is this: are they really castles at all? Bodiam itself has been one of the main battlegrounds for debate. For more than a century now, the building has taken a heavy pounding from harsh critics, who have sought to expose its weaknesses and undermine its military reputation. At the same time, it has been staunchly defended by legions of doughty admirers. If you are writing about Bodiam, therefore, you have no choice – you must strap on your armour, and step bravely into the fray.

  On first inspection, the castle’s defenders seem to have the uppe
r hand. Bodiam, surely, must be a castle. After all, it appears to have everything: towers on every corner, a fine pair of gatehouses, battlements along every wall, and, of course, a splendid moat. If you made a list of features you might expect to see in a castle, Bodiam would get a tick in almost every box.

  Ah, yes, say the critics, but do these features work? If you take a circular stroll around the castle and, like a hostile attacker, look for weak spots, they are many and obvious. The southern and eastern walls of the castle are punctuated by two huge windows – equal in size to the palatial windows at Conway but, crucially, on the outside. Nor are they the only weak points. The rest of the windows may look small in comparison (perhaps suggesting a concern with defence), but they are windows nonetheless, not arrow-loops. Arrow- or crossbow-loops are conspicuously lacking at Bodiam: there is little sense of the castle taking the fight to the enemy, as there is at Caernarfon. Bodiam does not even score very highly when it comes to passive defence. The walls are nowhere more than a few feet thick, and the parapets, with a thickness of barely twelve inches, are positively weedy.

  It is the castle’s moat, however, which has been the focus of the critics’ attack. Moats of an earlier age were conceived as defensive barriers – intended, as at Caerphilly and Beaumaris, to impede access to the walls and to frustrate attempts at undermining. The moat at Bodiam is a less convincing obstacle. At six feet deep, it is no puddle, and looks sufficiently broad to deter the average medieval house-breaker; but in fact, it would have been far easier to deal with than the massive water defences of thirteenth-century castles. The chief problem is that it could be easily drained. The castle is built on sloping ground, which fells away from north to south, and the moat is held in place by a man-made bank at the southern end. This bank is all that stops the water flowing away to join the River Rother at the bottom of the hill. As barriers go, it is not particularly thick or strong; the sides are not reinforced with stonework. It is argued, therefore, that a small group of men working with picks and shovels could have cut through it in the space of a day (or a long night, if they wanted cover of darkness). Deprived of its moat, the castle would be an easy (if rather muddy) target. Mud, however, was not really much of a hindrance – using tree-branches and planking, an organized attacker could quickly lay a carpet of makeshift duckboards and create a path to the foot of the walls.

  So is there anything to be said for Bodiam’s defences? The castle, seen from the north, would certainly have us think so. While getting into the building today is literally straightforward (a wooden bridge runs directly from the north bank of the moat right up to the gatehouse), in the Middle Ages it was a good deal more complicated. Medieval visitors had to start on the west bank and cross a long bridge in front of the castle. This led to a small octagonal island where they turned through ninety degrees to face the castle directly. The approach was, however, protected by a barbican (an outer gatehouse). Only having passed through this could visitors proceed towards the castle’s main gate.

  A gun-loop in Bodiam’s main gatehouse.

  This gatehouse, on first inspection, has all the paraphernalia of military might that we saw at Caernarfon – oak doors, portcullises (three of them) and murder-holes. What’s more, because it was built a hundred years after Edward’s great Welsh castles, it also has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. In the first place, there are gun-loops. Guns and gunpowder arrived in western Europe in the fourteenth century, and Bodiam is one of the earliest English castles to make provision for this new type of weapon. The castle’s other up-to-date feature is at the top of the gatehouse. Here the masonry stands proud from the wall, as if the building is wearing a crown. It is a feature known as ‘machicolation’, and is a stone version of the wooden hoardings that were built around the tops of earlier towers. Rather like murder-holes, machicolation offered the defenders another vantage point from which to drop things on to the heads of people standing underneath.

  So it seems that full marks go to Bodiam’s architect for making the main gate secure. Or do they? A more careful inspection of this impressive entrance raises all kinds of questions. For example, looking at the gatehouse from outside, you might think the gap between the bridge and the castle was crossed by means of a drawbridge. I certainly assumed as much on my first visit to the castle, because the front of the gatehouse is recessed as if to accommodate a drawbridge in the upright position. Look closely, however, and you discover that there are no holes in the stonework for the all-important drawbridge chains. Look closer still, and you realize that there is no room in the gatehouse to house a drawbridge mechanism. The gap, we are forced to conclude, must have been bridged by something much less elaborate and much weaker – a simple removable wooden gantry.

  The drawbridge problem is merely the clearest example of how the gatehouse’s swagger in fact conceals a weak design. Other features are similarly duplicitous. The masonry only allows for thin wooden doors, and provides no means for effectively barring them. The murder-holes look rather too small and mannered to be effective, and would hardly deter a determined intruder. The gun-loops and the machicolation might have offered some protection, but, importantly, they only defend the gatehouse itself – the rest of the castle remains totally unprotected.

  What really undermines our confidence in the main gatehouse, however, is its smaller counterpart on the opposite side of the castle. The rear entrance not only shows the same structural weaknesses – no drawbridge, thin doors, and puny murder-holes; it doesn’t even bother with the elaboration of the main gate. The bridge ran directly up to the doorway, there is only room for one portcullis, and there are no gun-loops at all. This is the real clincher – why go to all the trouble of securing the front door if you are going to leave the back door unlocked? We can only conclude that all the elaborate features on the north of the castle, including the complex bridge arrangements, were intended not to keep out undesirables but to impress distinguished guests.

  In this respect, there is no doubt that Bodiam must have worked a treat. For all its apparent weaknesses, the gatehouse is very impressive – tall, dramatic and menacing. Despite its evident vulnerability, the moat still glistens and shimmers in the sunshine, and the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its reflection in the water. The walls and towers may be thin and indefensible, but they are tall and sheer, their height exaggerated by a host of tiny battlemented turrets and chimneys. Moreover, Bodiam’s determination to strike a pose extends beyond its walls and moat. The castle once stood at the centre of a carefully planned and skilfully sculpted landscape of gardens and ponds. The ponds have now disappeared, their banks long since broken. Recent topographical surveys, however, have revealed their true extent – an elaborate series of water features, created to increase the castle’s dramatic effect.

  The lack of viable defences at Bodiam is quite typical of late medieval castles. So why were they so weedy? It was, in part, because of a change in military tactics. When politics in England broke down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the first response on all sides was to rush to castles and try to hold them against the enemy. Warfare revolved around castles, and resulted in spectacular sieges like Rochester (1215), Dover (1216) and Kenilworth (1266). By the fourteenth century, however, the goalposts had shifted. With advances in siege technology, fewer and fewer commanders were willing to put their trust in castles, however strong they might appear. Instead, they preferred to fight pitched battles in the open field. Such encounters were liable to be far more decisive than before, because they had become far more bloody. By the start of the fourteenth century, the chivalric taboo on killing a defeated opponent had been quietly forgotten (largely thanks to Edward I, if you ask me).

  The biggest reason, however, for the decline of serious fortification in England is that there was not really much fighting going on. Although the fourteenth century got off to a disastrous start during the reign of Edward II, and despite the bad press it has often received, late medieval England was fundamentally a pe
aceful place to live. In such circumstances, huge, elaborate and expensive fortifications became unnecessary.

  Bodiam, then, might talk tough, but it would not have been much good in a real fight. It is a castle that is more concerned with dazzling us with its good looks than it is with keeping us out.

  Does this mean, then, that we should not describe it as a castle? As I said in the Introduction, I really don’t think so. Bodiam’s status only becomes a problem if we adhere to the old-fashioned view that a castle must be built with defence in mind. If, on the other hand, we pay less attention to our own definitions, and ask what contemporaries thought, the problem disappears. Edward Dallingridge clearly believed he had built a castle and, more importantly, so did his contemporaries. It hardly mattered to them whether or not Bodiam’s defences ‘worked’. The fact that it had them was enough.

  However, this does beg a whole host of other questions. If defences were becoming unnecessary, why bother building them? Why construct a castle, when you could have had a nice little courtyard house or, for that matter, a grand palace? The answers to these questions are tougher and more complicated. The best way to answer them is to look at the needs, lifestyles and personalities of late medieval aristocrats, and try to work out why they still wanted to build castles.

  By 1385, Sir Edward Dallingridge wanted to build a castle. He was around forty years old, and had just about everything else he could possibly want – a rich wife, a strapping young son, bags of money and plenty of political influence. A prosperous Sussex knight, he mixed with the great and the good in his county, and was beginning to make his mark on the national stage. All he needed now, he reasoned, was a fabulous new home, and so that year he began to build Bodiam.