The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (42 page)

The components of the defensive circuit which offered most opportunity to impress the approaching visitor were of course the gateways. Indeed, some towns classed as ‘fortified’, such as Oakham (Rutland) and Whitchurch (Shropshire) had no encircling ramparts, only protective gates. This was also the case at Warkworth, where the fortified tower controlling access from the river bridge still stands – the only example of a medieval bridge in England where fortification survives, even though this is known to have been a fairly widespread phenomenon (
Figure 34
).
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In design terms, both in gate towers and in other mural towers arranged at intervals along the wall, there was a sequence not unlike that for the towers of castles. Rectangular designs were the norm in the twelfth century (as at Monk Bar and Bootham Bar, York), rounded versions prevailed for much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (examples being the Strandgate, New Winchelsea, and the West Gate and mural towers at Canterbury) (
Figure  40
), but rectangular forms returned thereafter (as at the Bondgate, Alnwick and the South Gate, King’s Lynn). While the presence of arrow-loops, portcullises and (occasionally as at Walmgate Bar, York and Beverley Gate, Hull) projecting barbicans suggest
that the defensibility of gates was not entirely irrelevant, there was clearly a significant element of symbolism and display involved in their design, which tended to override purely military considerations. At York’s Walmgate Bar, for example, the effectiveness of the second-floor gun ports would have been inhibited by the portcullis winding gear immediately behind them and by a severely restricted field of fire. Rather, there was a concern to show off heraldic devices, whether it was the Percy lion on the town gate at Alnwick (Northumberland) or (more usually) a combination of royal and civic coats of arms (as at York and Exeter). When the upper portions of the Tile Tower, Carlisle, were rebuilt in brick from 1483 to accommodate three new gun ports, the opportunity was taken in this border location to make a political point by displaying the white boar badge of the new king of England, Richard III. Statuettes of figures allegedly protecting the town might also appear on the gates (such as Brennus and Belinus on St John’s Gate, Bristol) and there was occasional use of decorative chequerwork, as at Sandwich.
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Figure 40: Canterbury Town Wall
. Canterbury’s walls, which follow the Roman circuit, were rebuilt in the late fourteenth century, the best surviving stretch being here on the south-eastern side of the city. The open-backed D-shaped interval towers include some of the earliest examples in England of ‘keyhole’-style gun ports, in place of conventional arrow-loops.

Yet when all this has been said, there are dangers in dismissing a military-defensive role altogether. We have already noted the considerable investment during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in improving the defences of some towns in Kent, against the perceived threat of French raids, and shortly after our period, during the reign of Elizabeth I, Berwick-on-Tweed would be provided with a new stone circuit which incorporated the latest style of angled bastions, now accepted as the most effective defence against artillery despite their omission from the south coast forts designed under Henry VIII. Against the examples which can be cited of late-medieval gun ports which were clearly ineffective can be set those in the otherwise-meagre town walls of Southampton: first, gun ports inserted on the west side, evidently in response to French attacks on the Isle of Wight in the 1370s, which were cleverly angled so that the fields of fire from handguns overlapped, and second, the fifteenth-century Catchcold Tower, projecting further beyond the main circuit than others, which was soundly constructed to bear the weight of cannon.
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As with castles, so with urban defences, any explanation which assumes a single purpose is almost certainly wrong.

T
his book, like so many others, draws a line under the middle ages sometime in the first half of the sixteenth century. Here the terminal date is 1540 and if we have to stop somewhere this is as good a date as any. But why is this so? If this was a political history of England one could point to the upheavals of the 1530s which transformed the Crown’s relations with the Church and enhanced the role of parliament in government. If it was a social and economic history, one might point to renewed growth in population, the breakdown of manorial ties, increasing problems of poverty and vagrancy and the burgeoning cloth trade. If it was a religious history, the Reformation would be reason enough, even if Henry VIII’s ‘break with Rome’ (encapsulated in his styling as ‘Supreme Head’ without any qualifying phrase in 1534) did not of itself mean the triumph of Protestantism in England, certainly not in his own reign. In an intellectual and cultural history, one would cite the impact of the Renaissance on architectural styles and the secularisation of thought, in a military history the increasing effectiveness of gunpowder in rendering conventional fortifications obsolete. In fact, as a history of the landscape, the book takes account of all these developments, and much else besides. The forces for change with which we began – the impact of population pressure upon resources, individual and collective power to shape one’s surroundings, the effects of technological advance – were all here at work, and together they would bring profound and lasting changes to the appearance of the country.

The early Tudor kings, Henry VII and Henry VIII, were successful in ending the period of rebellion and civil war dubbed the ‘Wars of the Roses’ and
in channelling aggression towards military adventures across the Channel instead. Although claims to the French throne must have seemed increasingly unrealistic as the decades passed since Henry V’s triumphs had been reversed under Henry VI, they still gave an excuse for the two Tudor Henries to invade France several times between them. At the same time, castles rapidly disappeared in large numbers as functioning features of the English landscape, partly because of changing aristocratic tastes, partly because of their indefensibility against gunpowder, and partly because many passed from private to royal hands as a result of forfeiture or failure of the line and were left thereafter to decay. By the closing years of Henry VIII’s reign, John Leland was repeatedly lamenting the ruinous state of one after another. Only a limited number in the possession of the crown, whether by inheritance from previous kings or by recent acquisition, had money spent on them during the course of the sixteenth century, the rare exceptions including the Tower of London, Carisbrooke and Wark because of their strategic importance; and such as Windsor, Pontefract, Kenilworth and Fotheringhay as royal residences. By 1609, an exchequer list of over 60 castles in England and Wales described virtually all of them as ‘very ruinous’ or ‘utterly decayed’, the only ones still with a claim on the king’s finances being Windsor (a residential palace), Dover and the Tower of London (key defensible structures), Chester and Ludlow (centres of local and regional government), Tutbury (a hunting lodge and stud farm) and Pontefract (‘to prevent the ruin of a monument of such antiquity and goodly building’).
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The demise of the castle was accompanied by increased activity among the nobility in the building of country houses instead, a development which meant that ‘the division between a [lordly] dwelling and fortification was complete … as much an indication of the end of the middle ages as the Dissolution of the Monasteries’.
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We have seen that some late-medieval noble residences were already more like palaces than castles, but the popularity of this type of grand house spread, with a clear emphasis on comfort and ostentatious display and no regard for fortification except occasionally as a decorative motif. From Compton Wynyates (Warwickshire) completed for Sir William Compton in 1520, through Burghley House (Northamptonshire) built for William Cecil Lord Burghley between 1577 and 1587, to Hardwick Hall (Derbyshire) begun in 1576 for Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury and still incomplete when she died in 1607, there is a splendid series, through which can be traced an evolution from the medieval layout of a great hall flanked by living quarters at one end and service rooms at the other towards the very different concept of a house constructed entirely as two-storey and double-pile (embracing front and back rooms), with increasing evidence of the impact of Renaissance ideas of symmetry and formal decoration.
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Below this élite level, too, among country gentry and substantial freeholders, open
halls with one or more ends increasingly gave way to dwellings which were virtually of two storeys throughout. Behind all this lay a major change in outlook, a preference for living in privacy rather than sharing the communal experience of the open hall, which was typically reduced to a single bay; the hall took on the role it still plays in twenty-first century houses as a reception area for visitors. Behind this, too, was a wish to escape the atmosphere of the hall with open hearth from which smoke meandered up to the roof, seen in the insertion of specially constructed bays or chimneys to confine the smoke, which preceded or accompanied the conversions of open halls to two storeys. Such imperatives were less pressing in the north of England, where fire hoods were already established as means to control smoke from hearths, and this must have been a factor in prolonging the importance of the central hall and delaying two-storey conversions or new build into the early seventeenth century.
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But the essential point remains that a domestic style shared by a wide sector of society, marked by the prominence of a communal room open to the roof, was coming to an end for those who could afford it as the sixteenth century wore on.

These changes in domestic architecture came at a time when – in many respects – the nobility and gentry wielded less power over the residents on their estates than their forebears two centuries earlier. By the mid-sixteenth century, unfree peasant tenure was a memory which very occasionally provoked resentment or was seized upon as a rare financial perquisite by an opportunistic lord, but could be described by contemporary commentators as virtually extinct: and with its passing went much of the incentive to a lord to maintain an effective manorial administration. Such was the decline of the manor as a unit of local control that successive sixteenth-century parliaments entrusted increasing local government responsibilities to the parish instead, with provision for the election of officers such as surveyors of the highways and overseers of the poor.
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The weakening of manorial ties facilitated the depopulation of weaker rural settlements – as peasants readily departed and lords were sometimes prepared to remove those who remained – a matter which by the early sixteenth century had come to be seen as a major social problem. This perception was almost certainly associated with rising population, which contributed to falling living standards and an increase in poverty and vagrancy, although a sustained increase in numbers after the downturn of the late middle ages can only be claimed with confidence once epidemic disease became far less frequent from the middle of the sixteenth century.
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With that population increase came a greater concentration in towns than had been the case hitherto. While England’s population roughly doubled between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries, the proportion resident in towns with populations above 10,000 more than tripled: a consequence largely of the rapid growth of London, to a
lesser extent the enhanced prosperity of certain cloth-making centres such as Norwich and Exeter and a phenomenon which was to have profound effects on the countryside where the production of food for urban markets inevitably intensified, through enclosure and the adoption of new crops and methods.
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These developments were played out against a background of religious conflict which, to a greater or lesser extent, affected the whole of sixteenth-century Europe. But of greater long-term impact on society than the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism was the growing secular-isation in outlook among artists, intellectuals and patrons, ultimately derived from late-medieval humanism. This shift has been traced in patterns of philanthropic expenditure
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and in landscape terms is reflected in the focus of building endeavour. Major construction work on churches, old or new, fell dramatically after 1530. Langley Chapel (Shropshire) which carries dates of 1564 externally and 1601 on a roof beam and is still furnished within as befitted the Anglicanism of the 1559 prayer book, is a very rare example of a complete newly-built place of worship for the Established Church in the period between the Reformation and the Restoration of Charles II. With the dissolution of the chantries in 1547, the chapels with which they were associated also ceased to be added to existing structures, most effort going instead on remodelling the interiors of churches to meet the changing demands of successive religious settlements. While dissolved monasteries fell into ruin or were converted to dwellings or other secular purposes, post-Reformation England witnessed the erection of new town halls, new almshouses and new schools and colleges, none of which had been absent from the philanthropy of the medieval period but which now came to the fore.
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England was still of course a religious country, and one where the impulse towards collective endeavour which had infused the middle ages was still very much alive: but religious and communal duty could now be expressed more broadly, increasingly to fund buildings which served this world as well as the next.