The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (41 page)

In reality, what we are seeing, in castles throughout the medieval period, is a continuing theme concerned with a display of authority, power and grandeur. That display took different forms at different times. In the modest earthwork castles of the first century or so after the Norman Conquest, the emphasis was on economy, functionality and basic protection against surprise attack, but other considerations already came into play. Even a motte-and-bailey would dominate its surroundings psychologically as well as physically and its timber tower might be decorated for aesthetic effect, as the illustrations on the Bayeux Tapestry imply. As early as 1068, William the Conqueror chose to provide his new motte-and-bailey castle at Exeter with a stone gatehouse, the design of which seems to have been a deliberate echo of the gate tower style favoured for the entrances to the fortified residences of Anglo-Saxon nobles: in military terms not particularly strong, but symbolically a powerful statement of continuity from the previous regime. Choice of
sites in this early period was also often dictated by a mixture of pragmatism and symbolism: it made good military sense to re-use former barrows as mottes and Iron Age or Romano-British enclosures for baileys, and also to construct castles by enhancing pre-Conquest fortified residences, but these decisions also provided the new structures with authority carried forward from the past.
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Stone castles of the late eleventh to the late thirteenth century became increasingly expensive to build and to maintain – so cutting down the numbers and restricting ownership to a royal and lordly élite – and certainly progressed in terms of their defensibility, but this growing elaboration also served to impress from an aesthetic point of view. Thus, the twelfth-century castle at Castle Acre (Norfolk) has been interpreted as part of a ‘conscious manipulation of the landscape in order to present an impressive tableau to the visitor’, embracing priory and planned vill as part of the structured approach to the castle, over 200 years before similarly designed landscapes were being provided as settings for Bodiam and Cooling.
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Similarly, the deliberate creation of extensive water features surrounding Kenilworth Castle, including the raising of the ‘Great Mere’ by over 3 metres, can be traced back to the reigns of John or Henry III; these lakes were intended not for defence but for enjoyment, as the name of the banqueting
hall and chambers built for Henry V at one corner of the Great Mere in 1414 – the ‘Pleasance in the Marsh’ – makes abundantly clear.
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When all this is said, however, we ought not to deny a change of focus with the passage of time. As the ultimate vulnerability of defences was accepted during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at the same time as landed incomes fell, there were urgent questions to be asked about whether the cost of building increasingly elaborate fortifications was worthwhile. So the quest for symbolism, comfort and aesthetic delight became even more important than hitherto: the motifs of fortification persisted – they were indelibly associated with the dwellings of kings and great lords – but in a context in which the urge to impress visitors and observers, rather than repel them by force, was paramount.

This chapter began with a definition of a ‘castle’, associated with the status of its principal occupant, the extent of its fortification and its role as an administrative centre. It goes without saying that some medieval fortified buildings did not measure up to this full definition, and that others commonly called ‘castle’ scarcely deserve the appellation. The original structure at Castle Acre (Norfolk), built by one of William the Conqueror’s Norman magnates William de Warenne in the 1070s was an unfortified two-storey stone residence surrounded by a low ringwork bank; the gatehouse was of stone but had a wide entrance passage and (in the opinion of the excavators in the 1970s) was ‘for ostentation rather than to withstand prolonged military assault’. Not until the 1130s and 1140s was what these archaeologists called a ‘country house’ extensively rebuilt with great tower, stone curtain wall and remodelled gatehouse incorporating a narrower entrance.
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Stokesay Castle (Shropshire) is better regarded as a fortified manor house, since the addition in the 1290s of a battlemented south tower, with moat and curtain wall, scarcely altered its nature or purpose. It is possible to argue a ‘defensive’ motivation here, given the location in the Welsh marches, but by the closing years of the thirteenth century Edward I had improved security as a result of his North Wales campaigns, and the principal driver was surely a wish to demonstrate affiliation to the aristocracy through the addition of some of the trappings of militarism (
Figure  38
). Similar considerations almost certainly lay behind the so-called ‘fortification’ of the manor house at Greys Court, Rotherfield Greys (Oxfordshire), where four small battlemented towers were built into a low wall surrounding the fourteenth-century house. On the other hand, Markenfield Hall, near Ripon (Yorkshire), where a gatehouse with portcullis controls access across a moat, may well have had a more serious defensive intent, since the licence to crenellate here dates to 1310, when the northern counties were especially vulnerable to Scottish raiding parties.

Figure 38: Stokesay Castle (Shropshire)
. The fortified manor house was built for the wool merchant Laurence of Ludlow, who bought the lordship of Stokesay in 1281. The centre-piece, an open hall with private and service ends, had a battlemented south tower (to right) added following the grant of a ‘licence to crenellate’ in 1291.

It would be similarly hard to dismiss a genuine concern for security in the various ‘pele towers’, rectangular stone towers at least three storeys high, built mostly in the northern shires during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries; they were evidently a response on the part of local lords and parish clergy to a perceived need to take occasional refuge from attack. The vicar’s peles at Corbridge and Embleton (Northumberland) and the manorial Thistlewood Tower at Ivegill (Cumberland) are good surviving examples, as are Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough and the tower at Brimstage Hall (Cheshire), despite their distance from the northern frontier. The fortification of some church towers in the north of England, also noted at the beginning of this chapter and apparently intended to serve as refuges for the local population, is a further reminder not to dismiss the importance of ‘defensibility’ wherever there was a perception of danger. The argument that castles should be seen as status symbols and places of aesthetic delight has added immensely to our understanding of these structures, but as one of its leading exponents has made clear, it is ‘important that the pendulum does not swing too far’ so as to ‘deny or misinterpret more utilitarian explanations’.
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Castles have recently been described as ‘at once … symbolic, magnificent, powerful and prestigious’:
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defensive security, status, aesthetics and a natural desire for as much residential comfort as possible all have their place in the interpretation of medieval castles. Every site deserves to be considered on its own merits rather than in accordance with preconceived theory.

There was brief reference to urban defences in an earlier chapter and it is appropriate to discuss them in more detail here. Over 200 towns in medieval England are reckoned to have had some form of protective circuit, although as with castles it is possible to debate the extent to which these were seriously regarded as effective defensive barriers and there was certainly considerable variety in the strength of the fortifications. Even a few settlements which cannot be regarded as towns, such as Anstey (Hertfordshire) and Castle Acre, the latter with a large embankment and twin-towered stone gatehouse, were provided with earthworks to surround them, but it is hard to see these ‘fortified villages’ in military terms and the defences have the appearance of being ‘vanity projects’ for their lords.
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An authoritative survey has demonstrated the re-use of Roman masonry circuits at some 17 English towns including Carlisle, Chester, Exeter, Gloucester, Lincoln, London, Winchester and York; the continued use of Anglo-Saxon earthwork defences (doubtless with timber palisades) at towns such as Bridgnorth, Cambridge and Guildford (Surrey); the reinforcement of such defences by the addition of stone at Tamworth, Cricklade (Wiltshire), Wareham (Dorset), Wallingford and elsewhere; and considerable new building in the century or so following the Norman Conquest. In some cases, as at Carlisle, Gloucester, Nottingham and Oxford, this involved enlarging the existing circuit, with at least some part of the extensions being built in stone. In others, like Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Devizes and Taunton, entirely new enclosures were constructed, in stone in the first case, earth-and-timber in the others. The thirteenth century saw a peak in activity, with various campaigns to replace earthen defences with stone, new circuits being built (such as the earthen ramparts with stone gatehouses at Salisbury and Sandwich), and stone extensions being added to accommodate increasing population (as at Bridgnorth, Bristol, Norwich, Shrewsbury, Worcester and York).
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By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, some towns were demolishing their walls or allowing them to fall into disrepair. This evidently happened at Lincoln, where the ‘commonalty’ petitioned Edward II in 1325 to the effect that the governing town council was embezzling money raised for the maintenance of the walls and allowing them to decay. It has also been identified at Shrewsbury, where excavation has shown new houses to have been built over the foundations of the old circuit about 1400. Even so, considerable sums continued to be spent on urban defences elsewhere, such as in Coventry, whose twelfth-century earthen circuit was rebuilt in stone in a long-drawn-out campaign between 1355 and 1534, and in Kent at Canterbury (
Figure  40
), Rochester and Sandwich, where the walls were strengthened
presumably because of a heightened threat of French raiding in this part of the country. Hartlepool, which played a key role as a north-east port in provisioning troops engaged against the Scots, had new stone walls built during the fourteenth century (
Figure 39
). Not until the Tudor and Stuart periods was there widespread demolition of town walls, by then regarded as expensive and unnecessary barriers to urban expansion, leaving them to survive only where they were considered still to provide a useful purpose.
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Figure 39: Hartlepool Town Wall (County Durham)
. Founded as a port in the late twelfth century, the town had walls added during the fourteenth-century conflict with the Scots. The Sandwell Gate, an insertion of the 1390s or later, was a postern giving fishermen direct access to the sea, and evidently reflects reduced fear of attack. (Photograph by kind permission of Castle UK.)

Urban defences, whether masonry walls or earthen banks and ditches, had many functions. One they shared with more modest boundary-markers was to delineate the area within which borough jurisdiction and trading privileges applied. More prosaically, the ditches around the circuits could contain water to house fisheries or drive mills, while towers and gates could serve as lock-ups, meeting places and accommodation for town officials.
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Most obviously, there was a role in protecting the inhabitants and possibly serving as a communal refuge for the surrounding countryside as well. This certainly applied to the circuits around pre-Conquest
burhs
: Domesday Book mentions arrangements for the maintenance of town walls which hint at this purpose, since at Chester ‘for the repair of the city wall and bridge, the reeve used to call out one man to come from each hide in the county’, while at Oxford the obligation to repair the wall was attached to specific ‘wall-dwellings’ (
mansiones murales
) many of which were otherwise rent-free.
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But it is hard to sustain an argument for a primarily defensive purpose thereafter. As we have seen, several urban defences put up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries consisted of earthen ramparts (presumed to have had timber palisades), at a time when castles were increasingly being built or rebuilt in stone. The introduction of murage taxes from 1220 – levies on goods brought into the town, specifically to be spent on the upkeep of the walls – facilitated some great building campaigns from then onwards, but examination of surviving remains suggests that the stone walls which were built were intended to be more impressive from without than within. Southampton’s fourteenth-century stone wall was less than a metre thick and both here and at Oxford surviving examples of curtain towers show them to have been little more than semi-circular projections in the line of the wall, undefended on the inside. Had town walls been seen as essential to defensibility, urban centres in the north – including Lancaster, which housed the castle from which the Duchy bearing its name was administered, Appleby, Darlington, Kendal and Hexham – would surely have sought to provide them, notwithstanding the pressure on limited corporate funds this would have entailed, and King John would have had them built around his new town of Liverpool after 1207. Instead, we find them being erected in more prosperous but less vulnerable parts of the country, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that they were being seen above all as a status symbol. The burgesses of Coventry would have been delighted to see their town depicted with walls on the Gough Map, especially since nearby Warwick was shown without any.
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