The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (36 page)

Any observant traveller today should also be able to see that in different regions of the country there are characteristic styles of ecclesiastical building. To some extent, this is a matter of locally available building materials – some more responsive to delicate carving than others – which give us the granite churches in Cornwall, Jurassic limestone churches in the south and east midlands, sandstone over much of the Welsh borders, millstone grit in Yorkshire and the chequer patterns of flint and chalk in East Anglia. Beyond this, it is clear that fashions took hold in particular areas, and features perceived as outstanding examples of their type became models to be copied in the neighbourhood: as in Norfolk with the round towers to which attention has already been drawn, and in Lincolnshire, where distinctive designs of spire cluster in neighbouring villages to the south and west of the county. In the fifteenth century, the urge to emulate one’s neighbour can often be demonstrated from building contracts. On the Suffolk coast at Walberswick, for example, the masons in 1425 were to build a new church tower with the walling modelled on the tower at Tunstall (some 24 kilometres to the south west) and west door as good as that at Halesworth (11 kilometres to the west). Within the same county in 1487, the new tower at Helmingham was to have as many storeys as the steeple at Framsden, the next village to the north. Yet another factor was the fluctuating wealth of a region or place. The relative decline of fifteenth-century York, at a time when Norwich maintained much of its former prosperity, can be traced through the number of chantries founded to commemorate the dead – falling in the former, remaining buoyant at the latter – with the result that there is little fifteenth-century church building to be seen in York to this day, but examples in virtually every church in Norwich. The proliferation of the Perpendicular style in the Cotswolds and much of East Anglia is rightly seen as evidence of prosperity emanating from the success of the cloth trade, while at a humbler level, an outburst of building activity in central Cheshire in the 1520s to 1540s – new towers at Little Budworth, Mobberley and Rostherne, substantial remodelling and enlargement at St Chads, Winsford – have been taken as indicative of a localized rise in prosperity in the early Tudor period. By contrast, some parts of the country remained poor and underpopulated throughout the middle ages, leaving churches which retain much of their original appearance: as at SS Protus and Hyacinth, Blisland (Cornwall), where nave, chancel, north transept and the lower stages of the tower are all identifiably Norman, or St Cuthbert, Cliburn (Westmorland), where Victorian windows cannot disguise the Norman nave and chancel.
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It is something of a cliché to say that a parish church is ‘a reflection of its local community’, but this is almost invariably the case – not only in
the plaques, monuments and funerary hatchments which commemorate prominent families, but also in the structure itself, the product of centuries of growth and decline in the numbers, resources and commitment of the people it served. Only where there has been a patron of outstanding wealth has a church broken free, so to speak, from its geographical context, to display building materials or architectural styles which cannot be said to be characteristic of its region. Local – and especially parish – churches are, therefore, one of the most tangible means of reaching back to the lives, and the landscape, of our medieval forebears: focal points in their lives, expressions of their sense of community, mirrors to their fluctuating fortunes, and readily accessible for us to experience today. The message they seem to convey is that, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, popular religion was lively, with plenty of commitment being shown, at all levels of society, to the support of the local church.
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This contrasted with the apathy and indulgence which – despite many honourable exceptions – was characteristic of much late-medieval monasticism. It is one of the ironies of history that criticism of Catholic observance, in England as on the continent, flourished in a context of popular enthusiasm for it: with profound implications not only for the political and religious development of the country, but also for the appearance of the urban and rural landscape.

A
sked to draw a quintessential medieval building, most people would probably sketch the outlines of a castle, complete with one or more towers and battlements. Anyone familiar with English Heritage will have encountered its logo, representing the ground plan of a square fortified building. But for all this familiarity – and while for most of the twentieth century a chapter on fortifications in this period would have aroused little controversy – such has been the revolution in castle studies since the 1980s that this is now one of the more challenging aspects of the medieval landscape to discuss. It has been claimed that ‘castles are at once the best known and least understood of medieval buildings’,
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so their study is all the more fascinating. Castles were not, of course, the only form of fortification in medieval England – manor houses, town walls, even churches figure in the pages which follow – but an initial focus upon them will provide a context for the discussion of other structures.

A. L. Poole’s
Medieval England
, published in 1958, offers a typical summary of how castles have traditionally been viewed. In a chapter entitled ‘Military Architecture’, A. J. Taylor, then Assistant Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, ran through a sequence beginning with earth-and-timber castles (mostly motte-and-baileys) through rectangular then circular stone keeps to the elaborately defended gatehouses and curtain towers of the late thirteenth century, when castles were at their mightiest as defences against armed assault. This was followed by a ‘decline from earlier standards of strength and security’ through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with increasing emphasis upon domesticity and display.
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The juxtaposition with a chapter called ‘The Art of War’, which dealt among other things with various forms of siege artillery, reinforced the message that developments in castle design were largely a response to improvements in the techniques of military offence. While the details have been expertly refined, this basic structure has recurred time and again in subsequent authoritative treatments of the subject.
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While focusing on military considerations, these analyses fully recognized a requirement for castles to offer some residential comfort, while also acknowledging the relevance to design of social and financial issues such as the relationship between lords and retainers (reflected in the disposition of buildings) and the affordability of different types of structure in the light of prevailing economic conditions. However, recent work on castles has usually had a very different focus. Attention has been given, for example, to the role of women in the domestic affairs of a castle and their impact upon the arrangement of private chambers, castle gardens and other forms of ‘gendered space’.
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Above all, there has been growing recognition of the role of castles as symbolic displays of royal and lordly power – ‘intended to enhance the dignity of aristocracy’
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– which have come to be seen as more important than their strictly military function: a view reinforced by a series of studies which have demonstrated the significant limitations, in terms of capacity to resist armed assault, of one major castle after another. Very few were built on ‘impregnable’ hilltops, and even those that were, such as the baronial castles of Peak (Castleton, Derbyshire) by 1086 and Beeston (Cheshire) in the 1220s, may owe their choice of site as much to symbolism as to defensibility. Most were sited in less-naturally defended positions, from which routeways could be controlled, estates administered or towns and counties governed.
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There continues to be a difference of view between those who believe that ‘while castles of all dates had many other functions including self-promotion, it was defence that remained the first consideration of almost every castle-builder throughout the Middle Ages’, and those who hold that ‘fortresses possessed a total role in medieval England, to which the strictly military contribution was relatively slight’: ‘the military was but one dimension … to the motives of castle-building society’.
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Neither party in this debate rules out a wider role for castles than the one they see as paramount, but they certainly see a difference of emphasis. All this needs to be borne in mind as we approach our own analysis of castle development here.

One of the difficulties in any treatment of castles is to arrive at an acceptable definition of the term. We have encountered similar problems time and again in this book, but here they are exacerbated by the fact that eleventh- and twelfth-century usage of the Latin
castellum
(or
castrum
) and the English
castel
could embrace a broad range of fortified structures, far beyond the stone buildings commonly associated with kings and great lords to which visitors pay for access today.
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Contemporaries were more concerned with the realities of fortification than with what they were called. On the one hand, the
defining line for the Dukes of Normandy in the second half of the eleventh century was the nature of the enclosing barrier and its accompanying ditch, though it remains a presumption that this legislation, which implied a blanket prohibition which could be lifted through specific permission, also applied to their kingdom of England: ‘no-one in Normandy shall be allowed to make a fosse in the open country of more than one shovel’s throw in depth, nor set there more than one line of palisading, and that without battlements or allures [wall-walks]’.
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On the other, it is clear that even churches could serve as fortifications in some circumstances. King Stephen had Lincoln Cathedral turned into a castle’ (‘incastellaverat’) in 1140–41 and there remain traces of machicolation on the west front; Geoffrey de Mandeville Earl of Essex is also reported to have fortified Ely Cathedral in some way so that it could be used as a base for his rebellion against the king a year or so later. Beyond this, fourteenth-century church towers, clearly fortified primarily against the Scots, survive at Burgh-by-Sands, Great Salkeld and Newton Arlosh (Cumberland), all with battlements, at Edlingham (Northumberland) which has a series of narrow arrow-loops, and at Bedale (Yorkshire) where there is a portcullis groove at the bottom of the staircase and battlements which extend from the tower to the roof of the nave.
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However, if only for the convenience of historians and archaeologists today, we need to know what we are talking about when we refer to ‘the medieval castle’. Modern definitions generally assume that a castle was the residence of a lord and his household, while accepting that the greatest lords – kings, bishops, barons – divided their time between several. Castles were also fortified, even though the extent and purpose of the fortification varied. In large part, they were also administrative centres from which the lord exerted authority over the neighbourhood. Additionally – according to circumstance – they might serve as prison, hunting-lodge, mustering point for soldiers and, if the lord or his representative permitted it, a refuge for the local populace. ‘Licences to crenellate’, issued on behalf of the king as permission to fortify a building through the provision of battlements, might seem to offer an easy means towards delineation and classification, but few such licences are known from before 1200 and among the 500-plus which can be identified thereafter – peaking in the fourteenth century but persisting into the sixteenth – there is poor correlation with the known distribution of fortified residences which by most definitions would be labelled as ‘castles’.
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Yet we cannot proceed without a definition, so let us settle on ‘a royal or lordly residence, fortified against the weapons of the day, normally serving as an administrative centre from which the surrounding area was governed’. No definition is perfect, but this will serve as a basis from which to begin the discussion.

The regional distribution of castles is instructive. It is no surprise that Northumberland, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cumberland are the English
shires with the highest densities of recorded castles: their positions near the Scots and Welsh borders provide an obvious explanation, although this had more to do with the prevailing insecurity of a frontier zone where raiding and banditry were (at times) endemic than with any grand scheme for defence against invasion. The fact that the border county of Cheshire had a much lower density – similar to that of Hampshire and Essex – may reflect deliberate policy on the part of the Earls of Chester to restrict castle-building among their own barons, although there is a group of earthwork sites near the western frontier, such as those at Aldford, Pulford, Castletown near Shocklach and Dodleston, which may be interpreted as part of an early scheme to protect the shire, and Chester itself, against incursions from the west. Cambridgeshire has one of the lowest densities in the country, readily explained by the fact that much of it was composed of fenland which was both unsuitable for castle-building and largely in the hands of major religious houses who had no wish to see fortifications proliferate among their tenants; here again, however, there was a local initiative near the southern fen edge at Caxton, Swavesey, Rampton and Burwell, where a chain of earthwork castles appear to owe their origin to King Stephen’s efforts against the rebellious Geoffrey de Mandeville, who was eventually killed trying to take Burwell in 1144. The shires with the lowest castle-densities of all probably owe this largely to the restrictions imposed by the prevalence of royal forests (Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire) and to a social structure with a large number of freeholders and relatively few substantial lords with the resources to invest (Lincolnshire and Norfolk).
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