Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  How terrible, then, that just as its age of castles was drawing to a close, Scotland was the flashpoint for the bloodiest war ever fought on British soil. The decades of peace that had graced the start of the seventeenth century were suddenly shattered, and the resultant conflagration engulfed the whole of Britain in a catastrophic civil war. Above the entrance hall at Craigievar Castle, Danzig Willie’s grandson added his badge to the original plastered ceiling. ‘Doe not vaken sleiping dogs’, his motto reads. In 1637, however, the dogs of war were woken.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE CASTLE’S LAST STAND

  WHEN WE VISIT a ruined castle, its former beauty is often difficult to picture. To see the whitewashed walls gleaming and the flags fluttering in the breeze, we have to screw up our eyes and work our imaginations hard. However noble and refined the interior may once have been, chances are it now seems crude and Spartan. We constantly have to remind ourselves that, despite the dripping rainwater, grassy floors and mossy walls, castles were once sophisticated, sumptuous buildings, full of light, warmth and good cheer.

  Raglan Castle, however, is an exception. Hidden in the hills of south Wales, this magnificent building is one of the grandest ruins in Britain, where every inch of stonework speaks of past splendour. Heraldic devices and coats of arms still adorn the walls; gargoyles grimace at us over the gate. The stained glass is gone from the windows, but the fine stone tracery remains intact. Everything seeks to persuade us that this was once the most splendid place imaginable.

  With a great tower and a moat, two courtyards and gatehouses, and built on the site of an earlier motte and bailey, Raglan is almost overqualified as a castle. Yet for all its bona fide credentials, it feels more like an Oxford college or an Inn of Court, suddenly abandoned after some unforeseen tragedy. The evidence of past luxury only reminds us of its present absence, and suffuses the castle with a terrible sense of loss. How did it happen, the curious visitor will want to ask, that this wonderful place, where the walls still whisper of former glories, became so desperately sad?

  Travel back, for a moment, to the year 1640, and meet Raglan’s owner: Henry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester. At sixty-four years old, he is a man in the autumn of his life, and as such he has seen a lot of water flow under the bridge. Looking back to his boyhood, he can still remember the dark days when the Spanish Armada threatened England with invasion. He can also recollect happier times; his teenage years at Oxford, and his early twenties reading law at the Middle Temple. Most of all, he is able to reflect with some satisfaction on a long and successful career as a loyal servant of the Crown. Henry has been a courtier to no less than three successive monarchs: Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I.

  Now, however, he has more or less withdrawn from public life, to spend more time with his family. His long marriage to Countess Anne, celebrated forty summers ago, came to an end with her death the previous year. All that remains to him now is the prospect of playing out his final years at Raglan, surrounded by his many children and grandchildren, safe in the knowledge that, in the fullness of time, they will inherit his castle and fortune. To him, these seem modest hopes and ambitions. After all, his ancestors built the castle some two hundred years ago, and his family have enjoyed its custody ever since – he can see no reason why they should not go on enjoying it for another two hundred. England is the most peaceful place in Europe. No one alive can remember having to defend a castle in war.

  The marquis does not know it, but war is just around the corner – the bloodiest war ever fought on British soil. Castles everywhere are about to dragged back into military service. From Corfe to Conway, from Pembroke to Pontefract, sieges are about to take place on a scale unseen for centuries. This time, however, castles will not be up against the trebuchets and crossbows of former times, but the latest and deadliest technologies of the age – the cannon and the mortar. And these killing machines will eventually come in record numbers to Raglan, to take part in one of the biggest, longest and hardest-fought sieges of the entire conflict.1

  This conflict was the English Civil War, as it is still generally known, despite its Scottish and Irish dimensions and the fact that the fighting also extended into Wales. Raglan Castle owes its present appearance to its experiences during the war, and the decisions taken by Henry Somerset in the summer of 1646.

  The castle has an importance independent of its role during the 1640s, for it was one of the last great castles to be built in England (or Wales). Its massive scale and strength reflects the wealth and ambitions of its builders, a father and son team who, in classic late-medieval style, found fame and fortune on the battlefields of France. William ap Thomas (Henry Somerset’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather) was a man very much in the mould of Sir Edward Dallingridge. Despite his fairly humble gentry background, he distinguished himself in the Hundred Years War (fighting alongside Henry V at Agincourt), prospered in the service of a great magnate (in this case, the Duke of York), and married a rich lady called Elizabeth. Because she was a widow, with sons by a previous marriage, William only acquired a life interest in her estate. In 1432, however, he purchased the manor of Raglan from his stepson for £666, and began to build the castle.

  In 1445, William ap Thomas died, and his son, also William, picked up the building programme where his father had left off. Also a veteran of the French wars, William junior further increased his family’s fortunes by investing heavily in the wine trade and supporting the Duke of York in his bid for the English throne. In 1468, the duke, now king, rewarded William’s loyalty by making him Earl of Pembroke. The speed of the earl’s rise was outstripped only by the rapidity of his fall. Within a year both he and his career had been abruptly cut short – when the Yorkists lost the battle of Edgecote, he was beheaded.

  By this stage, however, Raglan Castle was almost finished, and was more or less the same size and shape that it is today. Most of the castle is the work of the younger William, whose investment was longer and heavier than that of his father. The contribution of William senior, however, was by no means negligible. In particular, he was responsible for Raglan’s most prominent and distinctive feature – its huge, isolated great tower. Even today, though sadly much reduced, this part of the castle dwarfs the other buildings; when it was first built it stood five storeys and over a hundred feet high.

  Between them, the two Williams had built a castle in the very latest French fashion. With its hexagonal towers, prominent machicolations (currently only visible over the gatehouse and the closet tower, but probably once crowning the top of the great tower, too) and ‘bascule’ drawbridges, Raglan has close affinities with contemporary castles in Brittany and along the River Loire. As with other late medieval castles, such flamboyant design features raise the question of style over substance. Evidently there was a desire on the part of the builders to create a castle that was pleasing to the eye; if you look carefully at the machicolations on the top of the gatehouse, you will see gargoyles grinning back down at you. Such decorative features are more common on churches and colleges than castles. In addition, some of the military hardware seems either spurious or, at best, ill conceived. For example, the gun-loops in the gatehouse, like those at Bodiam, have been judged ineffective by some modern commentators, since they do not offer a comprehensive field of fire.

  But the defensibility of Raglan is not really in doubt. The drawbridges, now replaced by spans of stone, were once fully operational. The portcullises, now also vanished, patently worked. Although the castle is not concerned with protecting itself to the same degree as, say, Caernarfon, it nevertheless has a passive strength that puts it on a par with castles of an earlier age. The great tower, in particular, has walls that are ten feet thick.

  The big question that hangs over Raglan Castle is not whether its defences ‘work’ (to the extent that it had them, they worked just fine), but why its owners bothered to build them in the first place. By the time of the younger William’s death in 1469, few people in England were building castle
s any more. The country had been mostly peaceful for well over a century, largely as a result of sending its warlike young men to fight in France. True, when the Hundred Years War finally clattered to a halt in 1453, there was trouble at home. For the next thirty years, England witnessed a series of domestic conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses. These, however, far from being the bloody nightmare depicted by Shakespeare, were intermittent, small-scale dynastic affairs. While they could have dire consequences for the individual aristocrats involved (William, Earl of Pembroke, was not the only man to lose his head), they had no effect whatsoever on architectural fashions. Nobody felt the need to invest in elaborate defences because of such minor civil disturbances. Equally, with the end of the war in France, no one was making a fortune from soldiery any more either. By the century’s end, the people who were really prospering were not soldiers but courtiers – men who worked in the service of the Crown. When they built new homes, they forsook all the cunning and elaborate forms of defence that their forebears had devised, and lavished their money on courtyard houses. A well-known example is Hampton Court, built in the early part of the sixteenth century by Henry VIII’s one-time first minister, Cardinal Wolsey.

  While Henry VIII’s nobility set about building non-defensible residences like Hampton Court, the king himself constructed a chain of tiny coastal forts, stretching from Pendennis in Cornwall to Deal in Kent. Throughout the Middle Ages, the English Crown had been growing steadily stronger, increasingly able to raise large national taxes and fund a bureaucracy on an ever greater scale. By Henry’s day the Crown was also willing to take on the burden of defending its subjects from foreign attack. When they first appeared, Henry’s new defences were christened ‘castles’, and surviving examples (like Camber, Sandwich and Walmer) still go by the name of castle today. Without being too judgmental about what is and what is not a castle, however, I think they are rightly excluded from the castle club. Their function is purely military – they have no residential dimension at all.

  By the start of the sixteenth century, therefore, castles (according to my definition, at any rate) were already a thing of the past. Everywhere you travelled, the great fortresses of earlier centuries stood empty, their owners having moved out into comfy courtyard houses. Very quickly, these abandoned buildings fell into disrepair. Castles might look tough, but at the end of the day they require a lot of care and affection. You have to clean out their drains and their gutters, and repair holes in the roofs. Surveys of royal castles, which survive from the middle of the thirteenth century, make it perfectly clear that the king and his custodians fought a constant battle against the elements just to keep them in working order. A few years of neglect or one big storm was enough to wreak considerable havoc with the fabric of a building. Travelling writers and official surveyors in the sixteenth century noted that most castles were in a very bad way.

  Only a minority of aristocrats stuck it out in castles, either because abandoning the ancestral pile was unconscionable, or because the castle was sufficiently well-appointed to meet their more refined requirements. In the case of Raglan, it was probably a mixture of both reasons. The castle had been in the same family for generations, and as a fifteenth-century building it was also extremely well provided and handsomely fitted out. Nevertheless, the sixteenth-century owners of Raglan, like other die-hard castle owners with less up-to-date models, still felt compelled to upgrade the medieval buildings to bring them into line with the latest architectural fashions. It was essential to keep up with the owners of courtyard houses in terms of luxury and refinement. If you were a castle owner in the sixteenth century, you had to make home improvements.

  The man who undertook these improvements at Raglan was the grandfather of the Marquis of Worcester, William Somerset (d. 1589). Most of his alterations were concentrated on the castle’s eastern courtyard, which he enlarged by destroying an earlier range of buildings and constructing a new office wing. He also substantially altered the castle’s hall, rebuilding its eastern wall (again, part of the eastern courtyard) and fitting a handsome new hammer-beam roof of Irish oak. At the same time, Somerset improved the hall’s service arrangements, in particular by extending the size of the buttery. The castle was brought up to speed to cater for the more demanding tastes and larger household of an Elizabethan courtier. The commodity that Somerset really craved in abundance, however, was light. Like other Tudor castle owners, he wanted to make his dingy medieval castle as bright and sunny as a courtyard house. This meant, of course, big new windows.

  In the second half of the sixteenth century, the replacement window trade in England was booming, thanks to a minor revolution in the glazing industry. Glazed windows had been the norm for aristocratic dwellings since the thirteenth century, but glass could only be produced in small sheets, and was expensive to manufacture. Curiously, the sudden improvement in the later sixteenth century cannot be linked to any dramatic technological change (that came slightly later, in the early seventeenth century, when glaziers began to use coal-fire furnaces). The advances made in William Somerset’s day were due solely to the arrival of Continental artisans, equipped (it seems) with nothing more than greater savoir-faire than their English counterparts. Coming from Normandy and Lorraine, attracted no doubt by the prospect of untapped markets, these glaziers set up shop in Sussex and Staffordshire and promptly made a fortune. Windows were suddenly cheaper and bigger. For the less well off, this meant that they could enjoy the benefits of a product that had hitherto been restricted to only the very wealthy. For the very wealthy, it meant they could indulge themselves with fantastical amounts of glass. Elizabethan courtiers began to build great ‘prodigy’ houses, with hundreds of giant windows. At Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, such was the scale of the glazing job that locals coined the rhyme ‘more glass than wall at Hardwick Hall’. For castle owners, the new market in glass meant that the small narrow windows of yesteryear could be ripped out and replaced with grand new ones. At Kenilworth Castle, the twelfth-century keep had large windows inserted on the first floor. At Carew, a late thirteenth-century castle in Pembrokeshire, enormous ranges of glass were added to the original buildings. The great thirteenth-century tower at Chepstow (Marten’s tower) was flooded with light in a similar fashion.

  Raglan’s fifteenth-century hall, with its sixteenth-century windows.

  At Raglan, William Somerset’s principal concern was his rather dingy great hall – one of the oldest parts of the castle. When he rebuilt its eastern wall, he provided the main body of the room with three large windows, while at the far end he treated himself to a grand oriel window (a window which projects from a building), better to illuminate his guests at dinnertime.

  Tudor aristocrats were not simply content, however, with replacement windows. The courtyard style that was gaining popularity in the sixteenth century had led to the creation of a new species of room, and the availability of better, cheaper glass only encouraged the fashion. At aristocratic residences all over the country, masons and glaziers set to work to construct long narrow corridors, typically over a hundred feet from end to end. Such rooms were called (appropriately enough) long galleries, and every self-respecting homeowner had to have one.

  Castle owners looked on enviously. The architecture of a castle could occasionally extend to indulge the private whims of its noblest inhabitants; some castles, especially later ones, were provided with private chambers, parlours and gardens. On the whole, however, castle architecture was predominantly functional. Halls were for dining and entertaining, kitchens for cooking, bedrooms for sleeping. The invention of long galleries suddenly raised the stakes in terms of frivolous opulence.

  There was no fundamental need for a long gallery – it was not a covered walkway to link two other rooms; no one would sleep or dine in one; it did not, like the chapel, bring you closer to God; and it was certainly not provided with toilets. A long gallery, in the words of Roger North, a seventeenth-century authority on the subject, was ‘for no other use but pastime and
leisure’. Its point was recreation. In North’s opinion, the idea had originated in Italy, where sophisticated members of society would pass their time in conversation while wandering along outdoor colonnades (columned walkways). Such architecture was fine for the villa-owning elite of southern Europe, but England was far too chilly for such al fresco chats. The obvious solution was to bring an equivalent amount of space indoors, and the long gallery was the result. It provided an interior area where genteel ladies could take a stroll without fear of catching cold. Gentlemen who needed to brush up on their fencing could repair to the gallery if rain stopped play outside. Both groups could convene in the gallery in order to rehearse their dance moves. But one did not need a specific reason; it was simply the nicest possible room for enjoyment and relaxation – a place to sit and while away the time, to make pleasant conversation, and to exhibit the trappings of wealth and taste. By the end of the sixteenth century, such was the popularity of galleries that people had even started to hang pictures in them.

  Fitting a gallery inside a castle was no mean feat, but that of course did not stop fashion-conscious castle owners from trying. We have already seen how Danzig Willie’s designer struggled to squeeze one inside Craigievar, in spite of the overriding importance of making the castle tall and slender. The result just about works, but its position high up on the castle’s fifth floor would not have impressed gallery connoisseur Roger North. For him a gallery had to be down low, ideally on the first floor – off the ground, but easy to access. ‘Higher than the next floor it must not be, for such as are in garrets, as I have often seen, are useless, because none will purchase the use of them with paines of mounting.’ When you climb the stairs to the gallery at Craigievar, you can see what he means – the ascent in itself is exercise enough. Willie’s descendants evidently agreed with North’s estimation that it was ‘irksome to think of climbing so high’; the gallery was later converted to servants’ quarters.