Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  The other major stumbling block to a more mellow interpretation of Threave is its present appearance. Even if we grudgingly allow that Archibald the Grim had a jolly time on the island, we have to account for the fact that, at some point after his death (he died at Threave on Christmas Eve, 1400), someone felt the need to demolish the more peaceable parts of the castle, dig a great ditch around the tower, and build a stone platform designed to withstand and carry guns.

  That someone, it is now believed, was either William Douglas or his younger brother, James. They were the last of Archibald the Grim’s descendants, the so-called Black Douglases. After Archibald’s day, the power of his family grew greater and greater, making them by far the most powerful noble family in Scotland. In 1440, William Douglas inherited lands all over southern Scotland, as well as several highland estates. This was good news – until an especially nasty Stewart king decided it was time to take the Douglases down a peg or two.

  King James II was a little younger than Earl William. He was only seven years old when he ascended to the Scottish throne in 1437, and it was not until 1449 that he came to rule in his own right; and then the trouble began. At the time, there were plenty of public professions of goodwill between the new king and his greatest subject. Douglas declared himself ready to be ‘ever servabile’ to his lord and master, while James declared himself delighted with the earl’s ‘singular favour, love and zeal’. Behind the smiles and the handshakes, however, the rot had already set in. Driven by a greed for more land, and encouraged by the anti-Douglas members of his council, James took advantage of William’s absence on pilgrimage and led a military progress through the earl’s lands. He aimed to undermine the Douglas family’s power and win away their supporters but, much to his annoyance, the earl returned and successfully reasserted himself. For a brief while it was all false smiles again. In February 1452, however, the king hit upon a new idea. He invited William to dinner at Stirling Castle and, after a hearty supper and a few glasses of wine, personally stabbed him to death.

  James Douglas, suddenly and unexpectedly made earl, was less than impressed. His brother had been promised a safe conduct by the king, only to be literally stabbed in the back. He responded by mounting a show of defiance in Stirling, the site of his brother’s murder, taking six hundred men to burn the town, and parading the king’s letter of safe conduct in contempt. There followed a tense three-year stand-off between the king and the new earl, the one trying to muster enough support to finish the Douglases off once and for all, the other trying to rebuild his late brother’s shattered lordship.

  It was around this time that Threave Castle was altered out of all recognition. The wooden domestic buildings were pulled down, and the great stone hall and chapel buildings were levelled. In their place, using the same stone, the artillery platform was built around the tower house. Somewhat frustratingly, it is not clear which of the two Douglas brothers actually instigated the rebuilding. The archaeological dig in the seventies revealed evidence to suggest the artillery platform dated to around 1450, but we can’t be sure exactly when. It could have been William Douglas before his death in 1452, sensing that the wind was beginning to blow against him. Equally, it may have been the work of James Douglas, a defiant response to his brother’s death and a preparation for a final showdown. Certainly one of the two Douglas boys changed Threave from a cosy community to a fortress intended to withstand cannon.

  Mons Meg.

  And with good reason. James II, in addition to his obvious flair for other forms of violence, was especially into guns. Artillery had come a long way since its introduction in the early fourteenth century, and James, as well as having a good many smaller, anti-personnel guns, was in possession of the latest in gunpowder technology. These were huge great things called bombards – guns designed and built expressly for the purpose of destroying castle walls. The best example in Britain is Mons Meg, a present to James II from his father-in-law (and fellow gun-enthusiast), the Duke of Burgundy. Meg, now residing in Edinburgh Castle, did not arrive in Scotland until after the king’s battle with the Douglases, but the king had plenty of other cannon of equivalent size that were quite capable of wreaking similar havoc and destruction.

  In 1455 James II turned his guns on the castles of the Earl of Douglas. At the start of March he laid siege to the castle of Inveravon, and soon reduced it to rubble. The following month he reached the castle of Abercorn, which held out for a month before falling in the face of the king’s assault. James personally conducted these sieges, and clearly enjoyed the experience immensely; he wrote a letter to the Duke of Burgundy, giving him a blow-by-blow account of his artillery bombardment. By the start of the summer, the royal army had drawn up outside Threave, now the Douglas family’s last remaining castle. James arrived ahead of his artillery train – for all their devastating power, bombards were cumbersome beasts and moved extremely slowly, never more than three or four miles a day. Although the siege lasted over two months, it was all over before the king’s greatest guns had arrived. Probably bribed into submission with the king’s gold (and no doubt also encouraged by the imminent arrival of his artillery), the garrison inside the castle decide to cut their losses and surrender. The Earl of Douglas, who was not present at the siege, fled to England. He never returned to Scotland again, and ended his days in exile.

  The story of the struggle between the Black Douglases and the Crown demonstrates the enduring theme of Scottish history in the first half of the fifteenth century. A sorry tale of treachery, stabbing, bombardment and exile, it could be (and for centuries has been) taken as good evidence that the lot of the Scottish nobility had become far worse by this time. James II was far from being the only dangerously violent Stewart king. For most of the century, Scotland was ruled by extremely unpleasant men of dubious character. James II’s father (James I) was no less greedy and vindictive than his megalomaniac son. Having spent the first twenty years of his life in captivity in England, he returned to Scotland in 1424 with a colossal chip on his shoulder. Holding his cousins, the Albany Stewarts, chiefly responsible for his lengthy sojourn south of the border, he began his reign with a jolly round of family executions. A short, fat, pushy man, his rule came to a sudden end when a member of the royal household stabbed him to death in 1437. Later in the century, James II’s son (James III) was, if possible, an even less likeable individual. Irresponsible, vengeful and above all just plain lazy, the third King James hoarded money and debased the coinage to pay for his ill-conceived foreign policy schemes. Imperious and unjust in dealing with his subjects, he had so alienated his nobles by 1488 that they defeated him in battle and hacked him to death. And if, incidentally, you are wondering what became of James II, you may be pleased to know that he also got a fitting comeuppance. Laying siege (for a change) to the border town of Roxburgh in 1460, the king stood far too close to one of his great guns. The bombard exploded on firing, and the king was killed instantly.

  Borthwick Castle.

  Surely with such rascals on the throne, the canny nobleman would look to his own protection and build a castle? Such an idea seems to find support in the explosion of castle building that took place in the fifteenth century. More tower houses were built during the reigns of Jameses I, II and III than in any other period. Some of them, moreover, were positively enormous. Take Borthwick Castle, which stands on a spur of land some twelve miles south-east of Edinburgh. At an exceedingly lofty 108 feet tall, it is the biggest and best-preserved tower house in Scotland. Significantly, perhaps, there is absolutely no question of any other buildings surrounding the castle, as was once the case at Threave: at Borthwick, all the domestic space is packed inside the tower. Surely, then, the lord who built it was deliberately shutting himself away, no doubt in the expectation of troubled times ahead?

  Well, probably not. The lord in question, Sir William Borthwick, even though he lived during the reigns of James I and James II, seems to have had other things on his mind. Take a look at the licence he was granted in
1430, and watch for the twist in the tale:

  The King [James I] grants to William Borthwick, knight, special licence to build a castle in the place which is commonly called the Motte of Lochorwart, near Edinburgh, and permission to erect and fortify the same castle or fortress, to surround it with walls and ditches, to make a door of bronze or iron, and at the top to have defensive ornaments (ornamentis defensivis).

  And there you have it. For all its fighting talk of walls, ditches and doors, the licence recognized that the castle’s wall-head defences were going to be purely ornamental. Whereas the top of the tower at Threave was provided with post-holes to enable the construction of wooden hoarding (a proper fighting platform), Borthwick is decked out with eye-catching machicolations in the latest fifteenth-century fashion. As defences, they are almost entirely useless, because they come at the expense of crenellations – there are no battlements on the top of the tower to offer any cover to a defender. So the machicolations, for all that they look pretty, actually compromise the castle’s defensibility.

  Borthwick, in fact, has no functional military hardware at all – no arrow-loops, no gun-loops, no murder-holes. Most tellingly, where the architect had the opportunity to capitalize on the defensive advantages of his design, he conspicuously chose to ignore them. Consider, for example, the castle’s wings. From the start of the fifteenth century, it became increasingly common for tower houses, rather than being simple, single blocks (like Threave), to have one or more additional wings. Such buildings are commonly referred to as L-plan or Z-plan tower houses, because of the shape of their floor plans.

  A conventional (blood-and-guts) theory of castle development would say that such wings were developed in order to provide flanking fire across the castle’s entrance. According to this logic, the best place for the entrance at Borthwick would be on the west side, nestled safely between the two great wings (unusually, both wings at Borthwick are on the same side of the tower). The builder, however, completely ignored the defensive opportunity this presented. Instead, he located the doorway on the castle’s north face, in a completely exposed position.

  To be fair, Borthwick Castle does have a certain inherent strength because of its height – when a building is this tall, you need thick walls to support the weight of the floors above. But it is impossible to read Borthwick as an overtly warlike building, constructed in the face of hostile threat from a dangerous dynasty of bad kings. Apart from anything else, it was the king who gave Sir William permission to build in the first place. What the royal licence tells us (with unusual explicitness) is that contemporaries, including the king, recognized that anyone building a castle in fifteenth-century Scotland was likely to have motives other than defence, and that ornamentation (showing off) was a crucial factor. William Borthwick was, in fact, a man in much the same mould as that other castle-builder, royal licensee and all-round show-off, Sir Edward Dallingridge. Like Dallingridge, Borthwick wanted a castle because he wished to stress his new-found importance, rather than because he lived in constant fear of attack. The son of a reasonably well-to-do knight, Sir William amassed a small fortune after succeeding to his father’s estate in 1414, perhaps as a result of being the king’s customs collector early in his career. Later a rising star at the Scottish court, what he needed was a grand building in which to offer the king hospitality, rather than a fortress to keep him out.

  When it came to accommodating people, Borthwick was well up to the job. The wings of the castle serve not to flank the entrance, but to provide more rooms for guests. This is quite apparent to anyone who pays a visit to Borthwick today; the castle now functions as a hotel. Inside the castle, the walls, which may once have been plastered or painted, now stand stark and bare. This reveals the outstanding quality of the castle’s construction. Inside and out it is finished with blocks of top-quality ashlar, each piece laboriously cut and shaped by a stonemason before being assembled. This is good evidence of how wealthy William Borthwick must have been, but the stonework also provides other clues about the nature of Borthwick Castle.

  In the Middle Ages, stonemasons would leave a mark on every block they cut – not as any mysterious sign, just as a useful way for workmen and their employers to keep tabs on productivity. Mason’s marks are normally visible to some degree on almost any castle you care to visit. I don’t think, however, I have ever visited a castle with so many marks on display as Borthwick. The only obstacle to comparing them is the castle’s present décor – most of the wall-space is covered with pictures, swords and suits of armour – but if you persist, the results are very illuminating. Painstaking investigation of the castle has revealed over sixty different masons’ marks, which means that sixty different masons were working on the project (not counting carpenters, glaziers, smiths, quarriers, general labourers and other assorted skivvies). Interestingly, identical marks are found on fireplaces, lintels, curved blocks and flat ones, which suggests that the masons didn’t specialize – each one was actually very versatile. Most importantly, however, comparing the marks reveals identical sets spread right throughout the building, from the basement to the rooftop. The workforce, then, was the same for the whole building project – individuals might come and go, but by and large the men who started the project were also present when the final blocks were heaved into place.

  The conclusions drawn from the masons’ marks, the design of the castle, the wording of the licence and the position of William Borthwick invite us to reflect on Borthwick castle as a whole. For a start, as the grandest tower house in Scotland, it cannot have been built in a hurry. Even with sixty masons on the job, it would have taken at least a decade, and possibly a lot longer, to complete. The quality of its construction, as well as its scale, indicate a huge investment of capital over a long period. The castle is far more preoccupied with ornamentation and display than it is with defence. Now, it may sound obvious, but people do not normally pour money into building undefended houses unless they can be reasonably certain that they will get a return on their investment. Borthwick was part of a major building boom, and building booms rarely occur in war-zones. Sir William’s tower house is an expression of confidence – a project prompted not by feelings of insecurity, but by the expectation of a secure future ahead.

  So it seems that at mighty Borthwick, as at Threave, first appearances can be deceptive. Both buildings, when subjected to close scrutiny, start to tell a different story about late medieval Scotland. Tower houses did not always stand alone, and were not built in opposition to the Crown. They could stand at the centre of communities during peacetime, and could be built with the king’s permission. As much ornate status symbols as fortresses, they must have required many years of peace and stability to construct in the first place.

  So where, you may be wondering, does this leave the dastardly Stewart kings or, for that matter, their good-for-nothing nobles? The history books tell us that they were always at each others’ throats, stabbing each other to death and getting killed by exploding cannons. Surely we can’t explain them away so easily?

  All Scottish castles have to have at least one legend (apparently the Tourist Board is very strict about this). Ghosts are an obvious favourite for pulling in the punters; bloody battles and grisly murders come a close second. Borthwick is blessed with two such tall tales. Its ghost story is remarkably humdrum (local girl, pregnant by laird, killed with sword, still wails at night, and so on – the only true mystery is why she was never mentioned before the late twentieth century). The other legend, however, is wonderfully inventive, and makes cunning use of the castle’s unusual architecture. In the Middle Ages (that is, the Bad Old Days), the lords of Borthwick Castle were a contemptible bunch. When they were not out getting the locals lasses in trouble, and felt unable to face another game of backgammon, they would amuse themselves by playing with their prisoners. These poor wretches, held captive in the bowels of the castle for reasons that history does not relate, were from time to time led to the top of the tower. Once up on the roof,
allowed a taste and a view of liberty, they were offered a cruel choice by their gloating captors. They could, if they wished, leap across the gap between the two wings of the castle – a yawning chasm some twelve feet wide, and once apparently complemented by a set of iron spikes at the bottom (with a drop of over a hundred feet, this seems a trifle unnecessary; no doubt the Borthwicks reasoned that, if you’re going to be villainous, you may as well go the whole hog). Since the prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs, the odds were stacked heavily against success and strongly in favour of a major cleaning job. If, however, they succeeded in making this death-defying leap, they were rewarded with that prize most treasured by legendary medieval Scots – their freedom!

  It must have been fun to be the kind of mischievous Victorian grandfather who made up stories like this (I for one certainly look forward to the day when I can inflict lasting trauma on my own grandchildren with such gruesome tales). When such yarns are presented to us, freed from the constraints of evidence and probability, we are able to recognize them as the work of inspired inventors, and distinguish them from the narrative of proper history. Or are we? What if such tales are woven into the history of a nation, and have become so ingrained, so well known and so self-evident, that questioning their authenticity seems tantamount to heresy?

  In actual fact, many of the stories told about the Stewart kings belong to the same category of old wives’ tales. Only recently have historians started to unpick the strands of truth from the rich tapestry of history and legend. For example, the idea that for centuries on end, the Stewarts were locked in an epic struggle for supremacy with their leading subjects has been shown to be false. How, then, you may ask, did we end up with the idea that it ever happened in the first place? Step forward, if you please, storytelling grandfather extraordinaire, Sir Walter Scott.