Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  Later in the same document, there are elaborate clauses as to how this restitution of wealth and salving of injured pride is to be achieved. The really interesting part, however, comes in the middle. Here, both sides are anxious to spell out that the decision to stop fighting is mutual. Neither side has been pressured into the agreement by some greater power, like a judge, bishop or king. Both the Grants and the Farquharsons, it says, were acting ‘in themselves; neither induced by force nor fear, uncompelled and unconstrained, of their own mere and free wills’.

  Agreements such as this were quite common, and prove that there was more to feuding than just fighting. Feuding was also about doing justice, even though to us the whole concept might sound very unjust. A system like this often meant that no one was punished for a particular crime; you could quite easily get away with murder. Without a higher authority waving the sword of justice, you could not expect judgement and demand retribution. The best that both parties could hope for was that the balance would be restored to society, and that the losses on each side would be compensated.

  This could result in arrangements that sound quite astounding to modern ears, such as the oft-quoted example of Catherine Patrick. Placed at a disadvantage when her father was murdered in a feud, she was eventually compensated by being married to the murderer’s son. It sounds almost farcical, but the fact of the matter was that an agreement like this was conceived to heal divisions between two kin groups. Catherine had to look on it not so much as losing a father as gaining a husband.

  On the one hand, the example of Catherine Patrick shows that, at a very basic level, the victims of crime could expect some form of justice. On the other hand, the justice was rough, and the fact that her father was murdered by one of his neighbours can only indicate that late medieval Scotland was not an especially peaceful place to live. John Grant of Freuchie, having fought with the MacDonalds and feuded with the Farquharsons, could also have told you as much. At the same time, however, he could also have told you about his efforts to combat disorder and bring stability to the region around his castle. As a judge, he sat in the courtroom of his great hall, handing down verdicts with an authority delegated to him by the king. As a powerful individual in his own right, he often acted as an impartial arbiter, bringing an end to the feuds of others. As a man who ultimately wanted peace for his friends, family and tenants, he buried the hatchet with his neighbours, and swore to try and live in peace.

  Men like Grant built castles like Urquhart in anticipation of troubled times ahead. But the warlike appearance of these buildings can also blind us to the fact that many of them were built in a spirit of co-operation. Constructed with encouragement from the Crown, they are evidence that both the Stewarts and their nobles desired a more peaceful and prosperous society. Scotland in the late Middle Ages was not the romantic but anarchic wasteland depicted by Sir Walter Scott; neither was it a society that never knew peace. When Sir John Grant accepted James IV’s gift of Urquhart, he not only proved that kings and nobles could be perfect partners; he also accepted responsibility to administer justice in the region – to act as policeman, judge and peacemaker. In the words of the charter that the king gave him, he was there ‘to protect the lands and the people’.

  There was one area of Scotland, however, where one could always count on violence in the late Middle Ages, and that was the border with England. This was not, as it is today, a neatly drawn line on a map – it was a frontier zone where two countries collided. Even when the governments of England and Scotland were nominally at peace, the Borders were a lawless region. Attacks were expected and dreaded; banditry and cattle rustling were a way of life.

  This had not always been the case. Throughout the thirteenth century the English and Scots had actually got on rather well, and this was reflected in their domestic architecture. Recent research has shown that, throughout the century, the dwellings in both northern England and southern Scotland were becoming steadily less defensible, and by the century’s end the preferred form of building was the first-floor (or even ground-floor) hall.

  All this changed when Edward I attempted to conquer Scotland from 1296. The peaceful conditions that had been developing for decades were shattered, and the bloody struggle that followed lasted half a century. The physical effects reduced an area that had only just started to enjoy the benefits of peace into a desolate wasteland. The psychological effects, of course, lasted a lot longer – thanks to Edward I, the English and the Scots quickly learnt to hate each other again. When the wars came to an end in the second half of the thirteenth century, a slow economic recovery began in the Borders, but the mutual hostility between the lowland Scots and northern English lasted for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. There was no question of building halls – for both sides, towers were the only option.

  The difference came to lie in the types of towers they built. While lowland Scots built tower houses of high quality, it seems that their counterparts in northern England could only afford a humbler type of tower, called a ‘bastle’ or a ‘pele’. Why there was such a marked division is unclear. It has been suggested that most Scots nobles were richer because they managed their land directly, whereas many farmers in northern England were obliged to pay rent to the Crown. It could equally be that the Scots had the best of the fighting and made off with more of the moveable wealth. A third possibility is that bastles and peles were once more numerous on the Scottish side of the border, but have since been destroyed. A cluster of Scottish bastles remains around the town of Jedburgh, with an especially well-preserved example at Mervinslaw.

  Mervinslaw Pele.

  At first sight, Mervinslaw Pele seems quite grim. It lies well off the beaten track in the middle of a field of sheep, and from a distance you might mistake it for a large cowshed or at best a deserted farm building. It is hard to imagine human beings living comfortably inside. However, this dilapidated little tower was once quite homely, and has fundamental similarities to other grander members of the tower house family. It is a two-storey building and, as with larger towers, the main entrance was on the first floor, accessible via a vanished wooden stair or ladder. The main room on this level was hardly luxurious, but a pair of windows on the south side allowed it to be lit during the daytime. While there is no trace of a fireplace, it is possible that flagstones were once placed against the wall at the opposite end of the room, and that a degree of heartiness was therefore also achievable. Like larger tower houses, the pele at Mervinslaw did not stand alone – it is surrounded by the foundations of other buildings, which were probably the homes of tenants. The ground floor of the tower was used for storage, and probably for locking up the most expensive livestock at night. The doorway at this level was once heavily secured: there are holes in the stonework to indicate that the door could be barred twice, bolted, and may have also been reinforced by an iron yett (the poor man’s portcullis). Mervinslaw lies just a mile from the English border, so such high levels of security made sense if you wanted to hang on to that prize bull.

  In its own humble way, therefore, a pele tower was probably up to the job of protecting a man, his wife and their favourite cow, if they had the questionable good fortune to live on the Scottish border five hundred years ago. Nevertheless, one can only imagine how frightening it must have been to hear a warning cry go up, or perhaps glimpse horsemen on the horizon, and know that a raid was about to take place. If you acted quickly, you might just have time to pen up the sheep, drag Billy the Bull inside and lock yourself and your family upstairs. As you sat there and awaited the inevitable, anxiously fingering your pistol and wondering if your tiny stone tower was as strong and secure as you hoped, you could cling doggedly to one cheery thought: come the morning, your friends and neighbours would be round, helping you to assess the losses and repair the damages – and get ready to offset both with a raid into England the following evening.

  For such was life on the borders. ‘Contynuall intercoorse of winninge and loosinge of goods do ebb and flowe l
ike the sea’, wrote one sixteenth-century English border commissioner. Raiding and rustling (‘reiving’ as it was known locally) was the norm, and the situation looked unlikely to change so long as England and Scotland remained rival nations.

  From 1603, however, this was suddenly no longer the case. In that year, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England as well. With the two governments co-operating at last, a conscious effort was made to police the borders properly, and it was highly successful. Levels of cattle rustling fell away almost overnight. Very soon bandits and border reivers were the stuff of song and legend.

  Nor was it just the Borders that benefited during the reign of James VI. This was something of a golden age for Scotland as a whole, and a welcome relief at the end of a disastrous sixteenth century. Things had got off to an exceedingly bad start in 1513, when the popular James IV had confidently marched a united nobility to meet an English army at Flodden, only to experience the most cataclysmic military defeat in Scottish history. By the end of the day, not only the king but most of the Scottish aristocracy lay dead in the field. James was succeeded by his son, James V, then a strapping lad of eighteen months. By the time he reached adulthood there was just enough time for him to repeat his father’s mistake. After a crushing defeat in battle in 1542, James died a broken man, realizing that his throne would descend to his only heir, a baby girl called Mary. As the hopelessly romantic Queen of Scots, Mary has generated more column inches than any other Stewart, but no amount of sympathetic guff can disguise the fact that she was actually just plain hopeless. Her reign saw the collapse of the Scottish Church and the temporary eclipse of the monarchy. For most of the remainder of the century Scotland became a political football for England and France, with warring pro-English and pro-French factions struggling for control at the Scottish court.

  It is hardly surprising that, during these dark days, very few new tower houses were built. As we have seen throughout this chapter, people rarely began major building projects during periods of civil unrest. It was not, in fact, until the last decades of the sixteenth century, when the political situation began to improve, that castle construction was resumed on any scale.

  The adult rule of James VI ushered in a new age of peace and prosperity. Even the ancient practice of feuding began to die out during his reign. One effect of the Scottish Reformation was a condemnation of the notion that peace could be restored by compensation. Murder was increasingly seen as a crime and a sin that should be punished by the state and the Church; the individual offender found he could no longer make amends with an offer of money, goods or marriage. Infused with a new sense of morality, Scottish nobles stopped reaching for their swords and guns, and began instead to attack each other with lawyers. Under James VI, Scotland had never had it so good, and his reign saw a wide-scale resumption of the building of tower houses.

  Craigievar Castle, near Aberdeen, is the finest of this last generation of Scottish tower houses. Built towards the end of James VI’s reign, between 1610 and 1625, it was the work of a man called William Forbes. As a younger son, William did not stand to inherit much from his father’s estate, and therefore had to make his own way in the world. He set himself up in the pine tree business, and began trading with Germany and Scandinavia. This earned him a nickname – Danzig Willie, they started to call him – and ultimately a huge fortune. Like so many of the other self-made men in this book, he decided that he needed a grand new home to mark his new-found importance. In his day and age, there was still only one option for a man who wanted to announce to the world that he had arrived: he was going to build a castle.

  The tower that Willie built at Craigievar, however, is a world away from its distant ancestor at Threave. Built from pretty pink granite, it is more Walt Disney than Archibald the Grim. The tower is all about ornamentation; just a quick glance is enough to tell you that defence was not very high on Willie’s list of priorities. The castle is liberally studded with windows, more numerous at the top, but also noticeably vulnerable and accessible at lower levels. The doorway, although reinforced with the traditional iron yett, is at ground-floor level; even tiny Mervinslaw is stronger in this regard. The biggest difference, however, is at the top. When they came to construct the last generation of tower houses, builders dispensed with the battlements and machicolations of yesteryear. Instead they chose to crown their creations with gabled roofs and rounded turrets. Masons and patrons alike were evidently enamoured of the effect produced by ‘corbelling’ – building the rooms and turrets so that they stood proud of the main tower. It is easy to see why. The effect is strikingly beautiful – Craigievar bursts out at the top like a flower in bloom.

  From the point of view of defence, however, such architecture is useless, since it leaves the defender with no access to the wall-head. The only place to stand in the open at Craigievar is on a small balcony right at the very top. This, however, as its rather incongruous Renaissance balustrade suggests, is not a fighting platform, but a spot to take in the view: a place for Danzig Willie to stand, whisky in hand, gazing out over his estate.

  The concern with display is carried over into the inside of the castle, where some aspects of the original interior decoration survive in perfect condition. Were he to view the hall today, Danzig Willie might be dazzled by the light pouring in through the big nineteenth-century windows, and puzzled by the riot of twentieth-century tartan. He would, however, recognize many features in the room. The table that now stands in the centre is thought to date from the early seventeenth century, and the carved wooden panelling is also part of the hall’s original décor. But the most striking aspect of the castle’s interior is its ceilings, which are decorated throughout with ornamental plasterwork. The effect is best appreciated in the hall, where the vaulted ceiling begins at eye level and invites you to follow its arches inwards and upwards. Roman emperors as well as heraldic beasts stare back down – like the balcony on the roof, they are a reminder that this is a post-Renaissance castle. Had he got the decorators in just a few years earlier, Willie would have had to make do with painted ceilings, like the wonderful examples that survive at nearby Crathes Castle. As luck would have it, however, good timing offered him a whole new way to show off his wealth. Plastered ceilings were the very latest thing when he had them installed in 1626 (the date appears in the design). Only a few examples pre-date Craigievar, beginning with those created for James VI at Edinburgh in 1617. Willie was rich enough to employ the king’s plasterers, and to follow the fashions of royalty to the letter.

  Stunning décor aside, the most impressive thing about Craigievar is not the plasterwork or the carved wood panelling, but the design of the building itself. The castle was built by a family of masons called Bell, who produced several similar towers in the Aberdeenshire region in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century – Craigievar has close relations at Crathes, Midmar and Castle Fraser. Danzig Willie’s tower, however, is generally reckoned to be the best of the bunch. Such was the ingenuity of the master mason that, without in any way compromising the slender and elegant shape of the tower, he nevertheless contrived to include all the domestic features that one could only reasonably expect in a horizontal layout. Take, for example, the service arrangements in the castle’s hall. The designer has managed to include a screens passage and minstrels gallery (both of which survive, though the gallery has been chopped in half by the insertion of a large window). A door on the left leads to the tiniest of pantries, while a door on the right opens to reveal a spiral stair winding down to the buttery below. In other words, the conventional service arrangement that we saw at Bodiam has been achieved by an ingenious vertical deployment of the rooms. Moreover, having the buttery on the floor below naturally means it can be far bigger, which is never a bad thing for a wine cellar. No less cunning, the top floor at Craigievar boasts a long gallery (see Chapter Six for more on these). This really is the most ridiculous proposition in a tower house – from the outside, the tower had to look tall and slender, b
ut contemporary fashion now demanded an interior room that was as long as possible. Somehow, however, the mason at Craigievar managed to reconcile these contradictory demands, and executed a quite remarkable architectural balancing act. Danzig Willie obviously wanted the best of both worlds – a castle built in the grand Scottish tower house tradition, but cleverly contrived so that he could live the life of an early-modern Scottish gentleman. He must have been very pleased with what he got.

  Craigievar Castle marks the end of a three hundred-year tradition that can be traced right back through Urquhart and Borthwick to Threave. All four buildings, of course, are castles, built with defence in mind; sometimes, as with Threave, their defences were tested to the limit. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that just because Scotland has a lot of castles, it was a place where violence was an everyday occurrence. A closer reading of these towers suggests otherwise, as do the lives of their owners. The Stewart kings may have led violent lives and come to sticky ends, but Archibald the Grim, William Borthwick, John Grant of Freuchie and Danzig Willie all lived to be old men, and died peaceful deaths.

  Tower houses flourished in Scotland because it was a different type of society, one where power was exercised locally rather than concentrated centrally with the king. Communities were regulated by feuds rather than royal edicts, but this did not mean that they were forever fighting; on the contrary, the feud could be a means of achieving peace. Of course, violence was always a possibility, and towers and tower houses therefore remained popular right down to the start of the seventeenth century; but by the middle of this century, the possibility was fast diminishing. James VI’s reign had seen the widespread decline of feuding in the lowlands. The rule of law had been introduced to the Borders. The king’s succession to the throne of England seemed to remove the ancient and abiding threat of war with ‘the Auld Enemy’.