by Marc Morris
The Hundred Years War, therefore, explains how Dallingridge and others like him (for example, John Falstolf who built Caister in Norfolk, and the Beauchamps who rebuilt Warwick) were able to pay for their castles. It also explains how, despite his fairly humble origins, he was able to justify it. The turning tide of the war in the 1370s and the attacks on the south coast of England provided the crafty knight with an ample excuse. But what the war cannot adequately explain is why Sir Edward wanted a castle. As their licences to crenellate suggest, Dallingridge and his neighbours wanted castles for social reasons rather than military ones. Castles were noble homes, and this alone made them desirable for upwardly mobile knights. But this, by itself, hardly seems sufficient explanation for the sudden burst of castle-building that occurred in southern England in the 1380s.
In fact, there seems to have been a quite specific reason for the boom. Men like Dallingridge might not have feared the French, but they did have good grounds for concern about an enemy closer to home. Ever since the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, English peasants had been getting uppity. The great plague had wiped out a third of the population more or less overnight, and the result was massive social upheaval in the decades that followed. Labour was suddenly in short supply, and peasants therefore found themselves in a much stronger bargaining position. Landowners found it increasingly difficult to enforce their traditional demands for unpaid ‘customary’ services – though the resistance they encountered did not, of course, stop them trying. In 1381, the situation exploded. The peasants of Essex, Kent and Sussex rose up against their superiors. Manor houses and castles were attacked, agricultural tools were destroyed, and manorial accounts were burned. This was the famous Peasants’ Revolt – the biggest mass uprising in the English Middle Ages.
The Peasants’ Revolt confirmed what the governing classes of England had been suspecting for a long time – that society was going to the dogs. The French war was going badly, the peasants were getting ideas above their station, and the proper order of things was starting to collapse. Men like Dallingridge responded by helping to put down the rebellions in 1381, and keeping a watchful eye on their communities in the years that followed.
It is arguable, however, that they thought that this in itself was not enough. What they needed to do was actively reassert the fundamental order of society, to stress their authority and their right to rule. So, when they invested in buildings, they went not for manor houses, but castles – a deliberate ‘back to basics’ in architectural terms. Portcullises, gatehouses and crenellations might not be necessary to keep the peasants out, but they were essential as traditional symbols of power. The peasants were supposed to understand that people who possessed such homes were their natural superiors, and entitled to a bit more respect than they had been getting of late. Of course, whether the peasants themselves actually fell for such unsubtle propaganda is another matter. The rather desperate protestations of public utility that John de Cobham tacked on to the front of his gatehouse suggest that the people in his neighbourhood saw right through him and his new castle.
Bodiam may, therefore, have been part of a general trend among the minor aristocracy of southeast England as they struggled to reassert their authority in the wake of the Peasants’ Revolt. There is no direct evidence to suggest that Dallingridge’s own property was attacked during the uprising, but there can be little doubt that, as a substantial landowner, he must have suffered losses. Sir Edward was certainly active in putting down the revolt in East Sussex, and like others he may have thought a castle would send out the right kind of signal to the peasants in his locale. But he may also have had a much more specific and personal reason for wanting a castle in 1385. Rather than being directed downwards at the peasants, Edward’s message seems to have been aimed considerably higher. Dallingridge may have made a fortune by 1385, but his relentless rise had also made him an enemy, in the shape of a man called John of Gaunt.
Gaunt was the Duke of Lancaster – a very rich magnate in the super-league of English landowners, and this fact alone made him a force to be reckoned with. He was also a man with an international reputation. A younger son of King Edward III, he had royal blood flowing in his veins. By the 1370s, he had acquired a crown of his own; his marriage to a Spanish princess gave him a claim to be king of Spain. Most importantly, when his royal father died in 1377 and the English crown passed to the young Richard II, Gaunt became the power behind the throne. As uncle to the ten-year-old king, it was Gaunt who held the strings of power; he was arguably the most important person in the kingdom.
He was, in short, not a man to cross lightly; as Edward Dallingridge must have appreciated – before he set out to do just that. In 1372, Gaunt acquired large estates in Sussex, which made him the overlord of a number of Sussex gentry, including Dallingridge. This, at first, may have served to bring the two men closer together – the following year, Edward participated in a notorious expedition through France under the duke’s command. However, their relationship deteriorated rapidly. Unlike the previous landowner, Gaunt proved to be a very strict overlord in Sussex, and his officials were zealous in their interpretation of their master’s rights. Dallingridge, who had flourished in the east of the county precisely because he had been free from this kind of interference, found his ascendancy blocked and his existing rights under attack.
The audacious Sir Edward therefore began a campaign of intimidation to try to persuade the duke’s agents to back down. He seems to have started off on a small scale. In 1377, he began to trespass on Gaunt’s estates, deliberately hunting in his parks and poaching his deer. This tactic apparently had little effect, and so from the early 1380s Edward really began to up the ante. His principal target throughout the dispute was a private court that Gaunt had revived in the Dallingridge heartlands; as far as Edward could see, this, more than anything else, was undermining his own authority. In May 1381, he burst into the court while it was in session, seized the court rolls, and forcibly compelled the duke’s steward to swear never to hold the court again. Once again, however, Gaunt was prepared to turn a blind eye to the matter. Although he was powerful, he did not enjoy much support in Sussex, and Dallingridge was able to pose as a local hero resisting the pretensions of an interfering outsider.
Then, in March 1384, things came to a head when Dallingridge was involved in an attack which ended in murder. The victim, one William Mouse, was Gaunt’s sub-forester in Ashdown Forest. Gaunt retaliated by taking Dallingridge to court (which is how we know about all this, because the court records have survived). The duke used his influence to get the jury rigged in his favour, and Dallingridge responded to this obvious bias with a brilliantly theatrical performance. On two separate occasions during the proceedings he threw down his gauntlet, challenging his accusers and one of the witnesses to a duel. Refusing to plead to the charges against him, he was found in contempt, and committed to the Sheriff of Sussex for imprisonment.
So this is how we find Sir Edward Dallingridge on the eve of applying for his licence to crenellate in 1385: faced with imprisonment – which, in the event, was only temporary. However, it was still a nasty knock-back for a man trying to achieve respectability. Physically, Dallingridge had emerged from his run-in with Gaunt unscathed; his lands and livelihood were still intact. His reputation, however, had been left badly bruised.
Bodiam Castle, therefore, may well have been Edward Dallingridge’s response to his experiences in 1384. The castle was a fine way to announce that, despite his defeat in court, he was still top dog in Sussex. In wishing to make a statement by building a castle, of course, Sir Edward was no different to generations of men who had come before him. William the Conqueror, Aubrey de Vere, Henry II, Edward I – just about everybody in this book, in fact, wanted castles in order to say something about their power, authority and standing. However, the difference in the case of men like Dallingridge is that, because of the peaceful times in which they lived, they did not have to worry about building castles th
at actually worked. However much Sir Edward might have relished the prospect of a straight fight with John of Gaunt, he knew the duke was not going to turn up at his house with siege engines; there was simply no point wasting money on huge defences such as those at Beaumaris, Rochester and the Tower of London. All he needed was a building that looked the business – and Bodiam is certainly that.
Dallingridge’s run-in with Gaunt is a temptingly specific explanation of his sudden desire for a castle; it seems to fit perfectly with the known facts about his life, and also the flamboyant but weedy castle that he eventually built. However, even if we are wrong in making Edward’s wounded ego the main reason for building Bodiam, the Gaunt episode can nevertheless help us to understand the nature of the castle he constructed.
As well as having powerful enemies by 1385, Dallingridge had powerful friends. Even as he was squaring up to John of Gaunt, Edward was snuggling up to another great magnate – Richard Fitz Alan, Earl of Arundel. The connection between the Dallingridges and the Fitz Alans had been established a generation earlier – Edward’s father had been a leading servant of the previous earl. Edward, however, continued to build on the family tradition. From 1376, when Richard succeeded his father as earl, Edward was frequently in his service. Like Gaunt, Arundel was a major landowner, with large amounts of property not only in southern England but also in the Welsh marches, and castles at Lewes and Shrawardine, as well as Arundel itself. In the 1380s the earl put Dallingridge in charge of his Welsh estates, and in 1385 Edward accompanied him in an expedition against the Scots. Both in war and peace, Dallingridge proved to be indispensable to Arundel.
And, in the event, the earl proved to be indispensable to Sir Edward. There was no way that Arundel could intervene directly when Dallingridge was duelling with Gaunt. The earl was rich – possibly the richest man in the country – but he lacked Gaunt’s political influence, and also the control the duke exercised over the young king. However, shortly after Edward’s imprisonment, Gaunt left England for France to negotiate a peace treaty, and his absence gave Arundel an opportunity to intervene. The earl invited the king to stay at Arundel Castle, and it seems highly likely that he used the opportunity to have a quiet word on behalf of his imprisoned friend. Soon afterwards, Edward Dallingridge was once again at large, restored to his place at the top of Sussex society.
So, Sir Edward seems to have got off the hook because he was well connected. His liberty was not due to any retrial or review of the evidence; it was entirely down to the patronage of the Earl of Arundel. With friends in high places, you could go far in the fourteenth century. When Edward Dallingridge began to build Bodiam castle the following year, it was not as a serious fortification to keep out the French. Nor was it just a symbol of his right to rule, a bold claim in the face of challenges from peasants and dukes. It was a tool to help him play the patronage game. It was a place to entertain his friends and delight his betters – men like Arundel and perhaps, one day, the king.
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As we established at the start, Bodiam is built much like a courtyard house, or the quadrangle of an Oxbridge college. Rather than being dotted around a bailey area, all the rooms necessary for a medieval household (or a college community) are packed around the four walls, and cleverly arranged in order to serve and supply each other. Today, Bodiam’s interior is quite ruinous, but careful examination reveals the purpose of each room, and the way they functioned together to provide for the Dallingridge household.
The screens passage at Bodiam.
As in the twelfth century, the biggest problem with an aristocratic household was keeping it fed. At Bodiam, food and drink came in via the back door – it made much more sense to use the shorter and more direct route into the castle. Stepping out from the tower of the rear gatehouse, you would have found yourself in a narrow passageway known as the ‘screens passage’, and so called because of the wooden and stone screens that stood on either side. The wooden screen that would have been on the right is no longer there. The stone screen, however, has survived. As you can see from the picture below, it was provided with three doors. The one on the left led into a small room called the pantry, used for storing bread (and derived from the French word for bread, pain). If having a whole room reserved just for bread sounds rather excessive, bear in mind that Dallingridge had a large household to feed, and everyone, from his immediately family down to the lowliest servant, needed their daily bread. Even the dogs of the household would have been fed large quantities as part of their diet, and quite often thick, dried slices of bread, known as trenchers, were used instead of plates.
A groundplan of Bodiam Castle.
The doorway on the right of the screens passage led into a similar-sized room called the buttery, used for storing the other absolute necessity – no, not butter, but alcohol in the form of wine and ale (it derives from the word bottle). Since it was quite unsafe to drink water, these were drunk with every meal. It was still possible to ride a horse in a straight line afterwards: the alcohol content of the regular ale (known as small beer) was low. It was drunk by the whole household, and was made on site (although perhaps not inside the castle). Just as bread had to baked every few days, so ale had to be brewed regularly to keep it fresh. Wine, on the other hand, kept indefinitely, and was as potent then as it is now. It would normally have been reserved for Edward’s immediate family and friends, and typically imported from southern France.
The third doorway in the screens passage led to a narrow corridor between the pantry and the buttery, which opened out on to the kitchen. Bodiam’s kitchen is quite cleverly arranged, making ingenious use of the space available. A great fireplace for cooking is built into the thickness of the exterior wall and connected to a crenellated chimney on the roof (yes, he even did the chimneys). In one corner of the room a stairway led down to the bottom of the southwest tower, where there was a well – of sorts. Today it is filled with water from the moat, but this can’t have been the case in the fourteenth century; apart from anything else, the moat serves as a sewer for the castle’s many toilets. One possible solution is that the ‘well’ was in fact a water tank, lined with lead to isolate it from the moat, and actually filled with rainwater from the roof. At the top of the same tower was another feature designed to keep the kitchen supplied. It was once a dovecote, and you can still see the hundreds of little holes where the doves would have nested – before they were baked into pies.
Kitchen, buttery and pantry therefore stood on one side of the screens passage. Together, their job was to supply food and drink to the room that stood on the other side: the castle’s great hall. As great halls go, Bodiam’s is quite dinky, measuring only twenty-four feet wide and forty feet in length. It could probably seat only around fifteen or twenty people, which gives us some idea of the size of the Dallingridge household. Nevertheless, the room is laid out according to all the conventions expected in Sir Edward’s day (which are also still preserved in many Oxbridge colleges). Two long tables ran lengthways down the hall, where the ordinary members of the Dallingridge household (like the students in a college) would have sat. With benches on one side only, diners faced one another across the hall, and the servants enjoyed unrestricted access to the inside of the tables as they approached with plates of food. At the far end of the room, raised off the ground by a small platform to emphasize its importance, was a third table. This, the high table, was where Sir Edward, his family and his most distinguished guests would have sat (a role fulfilled today by the fellows of a college). In all probability, they would have sat not on benches but individual chairs. In keeping with its high status, this end of the hall was lit by a very large, south-facing window. Interestingly, the room has no fireplaces, despite the fact that there are dozens of others throughout the castle. Instead, the hall was lit by an open hearth in the centre, with a vent in the roof above to allow the smoke out. This arrangement – having a great fire in the middle of the hall, providing light and warmth to the whole household – can be traced ri
ght back to the Dark Ages, and continued to be used well beyond Dallingridge’s day.
While some traditions were preserved, however, others were gradually being abandoned. By the late fourteenth century, for example, aristocratic households were beginning to spend less time travelling. As a market economy continued to develop, noblemen could rely on getting a greater percentage of their produce locally. Indeed, they might even take steps to encourage the process. In 1383, Dallingridge obtained permission from the king to hold a weekly market in the village of Bodiam, as well as an annual fair. In addition, a knight like Sir Edward would have kept his own stocks of animals in order to feed his household. Meat of all kinds was expensive and high-status food, and therefore formed the principal part of an aristocratic diet. As well as keeping herds of animals for grazing, Dallingridge and his family would have supplemented their diet by hunting. Precisely because they were beasts associated with the chase, deer and expensive game birds like pheasants and partridges were regarded as especially noble dishes. They could be especially delicious too – Dallingridge’s venison would have tasted twice as nice if he had personally poached it from under John of Gaunt’s nose.
Of course, the bad thing about medieval aristocrats, as everybody knows, is that they did not eat their vegetables. Stuff that came out the ground was the food of peasants, and therefore not highly prized by well-to-do knights. Dallingridge would probably have turned up his nose had you offered him cheese, too, unless it was of a particularly fine variety. Fish, however, came a close second to meat as a dish of distinction, and was also an essential alternative to meat during Lent. It could be stored salted or pickled in barrels, but Dallingridge had plenty of ponds round and about the castle to keep him supplied with freshwater fish on a day-to-day basis. He might have splashed out from time to time for something a bit more fancy if the occasion demanded it: larger fish like pike or bream were viewed as suitable delicacies for top table. And if Sir Edward had a hankering for a bit of fresh seafood – well, that was hardly going to be a problem. After all, Bodiam (as he no doubt reminded whichever skivvy he sent to fetch the shopping) was right next to the sea.
