Behind the Castle Gate

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Matthew Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415261005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135135652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this engaging book Matthew Johnson looks 'behind the castle gate' to discover the truth about castles in England at the end of the Middle Ages.

Traditional studies have seen castles as compromises between the needs of comfort and of defence, and as statements of wealth or power or both. By encouraging the reader to view castles in relation to their inhabitants, Matthew Johnson uncovers a whole new vantage point. He shows how castles functioned as stage-settings against which people played out roles of lord and servant, husband and wife, father and son. Building, rebuilding and living in a castle was as complex an experience as a piece of medieval art.

Behind the Castle Gate brings castles and their inhabitants alive. Combining ground-breaking scholarship with fascinating narratives it will be read avidly by all with an interest in castles.

1
Introduction

Casting our eyes upon sconces

ALONZO: De Flores.

DE FLORES: My kind, honourable lord?

ALONZO: I am glad I ha’ met with thee.

DE FLORES: Sir.

ALONZO: Thou canst show me The full strength of the castle?

DE FLORES: That I can, sir.

ALONZO: I much desire it.

DE FLORES: And if the ways and straits Of some of the passages be not too tedious for you, I will assure you, worth your time and sight, my lord.

ALONZO: Puh, that shall be no hindrance.

DE FLORES: I’m your servant, then. ’Tis now near dinner-time; ’gainst your lordship’s rising I’ll have the keys about me.

ALONZO: Thanks, kind de Flores.

DE FLORES: (aside) He’s safely thrust upon me beyond hopes.

(Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, Act II, Scene ii, 1622; Daalder 1990: 44)

This book is about castles, and what happened to castles at the end of the Middle Ages. It will concentrate on England in the period running from roughly 1350 to 1660, covering both the later medieval period and the Renaissance.

I start by talking about late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century castles such as Cooling, Bodiam, Warkworth and Tattershall (Figure 1.1); I go on to look at what happened to castles in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I offer some thoughts on a wider theme: I reconsider through the medium of castle studies how we might rethink the ‘medieval to Renaissance transition’ as archaeologists. In this latter part of the book I will look at castles such as Kenilworth, old and ancient medieval piles that were reused in new, Renaissance contexts.

Figure 1.1 Location map of the principal castles mentioned in the text.

This book is not an attempt to reassess individual castles; nor does it attempt to claim particular new insights into particular structures. Its motivation and theme are more general. I try to look afresh at what these buildings meant to contemporaries, and how now, as we think and write in the present, archaeologists and architectural historians might best understand or approach them. Castles, I suggest, were not simply defensive structures. Equally, they were not built simply to passively fulfil certain functions like meeting a need for a certain standard of accommodation or to ‘reflect’ social status. Castles did do all these things, but they did much more besides. They were active and complex pieces of landscape and material culture.

A guiding metaphor for this complexity will be this: castles acted in part as stage settings. If we want to understand how they worked as elite structures, we have to understand them as backdrops in front of which and through which the identities of men and women were ‘played out’. And those backdrops were manipulated with all the care and skill of a theatre production. As the identities of the protagonists changed, so did the meanings of the physical structures, even where their form remained the same.

I utilise several recent practical and theoretical developments in telling this story. First, recent archaeological fieldwork on the landscapes surrounding castles has shown that their surroundings often contained formal elements – causeways defining patterns of ceremonial movement, sheets of water, landscape elements ‘framing’ the castle. Second, recent theoretical stress within archaeology on ‘agency’ and ‘lived experience’ – the importance of studying how people moved through buildings, what they saw from different vantage points, and the stress on everyday practice – plays a role here. Third, interdisciplinary work on the Renaissance by New Historicists, Cultural Materialists and others suggests that forms of buildings – architecture – and elite identity and power – who people were, how they negotiated their social surroundings – were interwoven and unstable in the sixteenth century, and before that period.

Such a story is an incredibly wide-ranging and difficult one to tell, both practically and theoretically. It covers a wide base, encompassing the territories of both medievalists and Renaissance specialists, students of both the ‘castle’ and the ‘country house’ or ‘domestic residence’ (though I will be deconstructing these categories). It must equally be set within the intellectual context of contemporary theories of architecture and architectural change, changing interdisciplinary understandings of the Renaissance, changing historical and archaeological theory.

And most importantly, such a story cannot be reduced to one simple baseline or reality or final explanation. Castles are not ‘basically about conspicuous consumption’ or ‘essentially about social status’ or ‘at heart about balancing defence and comfort’ or ‘fundamentally symbols of power’. I am going to argue that they were all these things, but basically or fundamentally none of them. At the risk of sounding pretentious, it seems apparent to me that the study of castles, and of the world in general, has moved well beyond the point where it can be reduced to a few core or basic essentials in this manner.

If the burden of this book is complex, it is tempting then to start with a long excursus on where this book stands theoretically. I do not want to do this, however; instead, I want to present changing views of medieval and Renaissance architecture as arising out of more complete, deeper, better understandings of the data, the buildings and landscapes themselves. I have already discussed Cooling, and in the next chapter move on to the reassessment of Bodiam now well known to castle specialists. However, before we can get on to the buildings, it is necessary to make a few comments on the present state of castle studies.

No real doubt

Some people know exactly how to look at castles, even before they start. For the Royal Archaeological Institute, at the outset of their research project into castle origins, a castle is a ‘fortified residence which might combine administrative and judicial functions, but in which military considerations were paramount’ (Saunders 1978: 2). For Michael Thompson, ‘there is no real doubt about a castle, no doubt for the medieval scribe nor for ourselves, a house in which the defensive features completely overshadow the domestic one’ (1998: 5). Allen Brown writes:

The difference [between Norman and earlier defences] lies in the intention and hence the scale, strength and design of the enclosure. The dividing line between the castle . .. and the unfortified residence is always going to be hazy, but on either side of that dividing line there is really no confusion.

(1973: 79)

How do they know this? How can such certainty be attained, even before research has begun in the case of the Royal Archaeological Institute?

In part, this certainty can be understood with reference to the historical context of castle studies. A generation of scholars working on castles were military men. They chose to pursue historical interests in retirement; and the obvious place to look for evidence of changing medieval techniques of warfare was the castle. Castles, then, were understood in military terms almost by definition; if it wasn’t military, it wasn’t ‘really’ a castle.

I want to stress right at the outset that the military view is not so much wrong as only part of the story. Many castles did play important ‘military’ roles; as we shall see, many of their features have a clear military intent; the definition of a castle is indeed bound up with what today we call the martial. For the time being, I will simply raise a series of problems with the military view, to be explored in later chapters.

Perhaps the most fundamental problem is one of circularity. Castles are primarily military. Ah, but what happens when we point out one that is not? Oh, the military men reply, but if it is not really military, then it is not really a castle. Bound up with this circularity is the difficulty of mentalist explanation: if we define a structure or artefact with reference to a ‘need ‘ or ‘intention' on the part of its builders, in this case an intent to defend, we are defining castles with reference to something that is inherently unknowable. In other words, we make assumptions about motivations and mentalities – what was inside the heads of medieval people before we have started the research.

Tom McNeill has pointed out the limitations of this view elegantly:

[W]hen we are studying castles . . . what we are studying are the structures of power, literally and metaphorically, in the society of the middle ages . . . The nature of that power will be reflected in the structure of the castle, and so we should be able to deduce it from the study of the structure. Until then, the castle is dumb, so we must not carry to the castle preconceived notions of its role.

(1997a: 235; emphasis mine)

But we cannot even go as far as McNeill suggests. Stand in front of a castle’s ruined walls, or stand within its shattered vaults, and however carefully you listen, you will hear absolutely nothing, not even structures of power. (Not always; at Bolton, you will hear taped prayers in the chapel, and taped screams from the dungeons). So any meanings that we attach to the castle come from us, in the here and now.

Second, the military view can be argued to be a strong view of castle development up to c.1300, but weakens thereafter. Between the introduction of the castle to England at the Norman Conquest and the construction of Edward I’s Welsh castles, according to the military narrative, we see the replacement of passive defence with active defence, the ‘evolution’ of the donjon and towers from vulnerable square forms to circular ones without weak angles, the proliferation of projecting towers providing flanking fire along the walls, the development of systems of concentric defence, and so on. At the same time there are well-documented and clearly desperately serious sieges in which many soldiers and others lost their lives, of Rochester, Kenilworth, Dover and many others. So a military view of twelfth- and thirteenth-century castle development is apparently very strong, at least at first sight; and for some, interest in the development of castle architecture ends there. Allen Brown writes of Rochester in terms that could easily be extended to castles in general that ‘after the end of the 14th century, at least in military terms, the rest is anti-climax, and certainly the architectural development of the castle was at an end’ (1986: 18).

The military view, however, visibly weakens when we turn to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. All sort of odd things start to happen. The donjon or an architectural form very like it comes back into fashion; walls get thinner; military commanders apparently prefer military engagement in the field to the security of the castle. We shall see in Chapter 5 how the period 1350–1500 has been characterised, I will suggest rather awkwardly, as a ‘transitional period’ between the military perfection of Edward I’s Welsh castles and the advent of the Renaissance house.

Part of the problem here would be recognised by the structural anthropologist Edmund Leach from his work on how humans classify the world around them (1976). The military men have created two structurally opposed categories: castles and unfortified houses. The category of the castle works quite well for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thereafter, its edges are increasingly fuzzy, and by 1550 or so we have clearly moved to the unfortified house, built according to ‘Renaissance’ principles. The ‘in-between' period thus defined is difficult to classify. It becomes marginal, liminal, ‘transitional’.

One way to explain this ‘transitional period’ is in terms of neither being militarily serious on the one hand, nor a complete sham on the other. The phrase often used here is ‘defence against casual violence’, in which reference is made to the peasant revolt and unrest of the later Middle Ages. For Thompson, ‘the enemy was at the gate, but ill-armed and ill-equipped; he was not a military enemy to be fought, but to be overawed by fierce-looking buildings’ (1998: 108). I will suggest later that castles are indeed intended to convey ideas and messages to the lower social orders, though whether these were blindly accepted by the lower social orders, or on the other hand resisted, is quite another matter. However, the idea that late medieval castles acted as a kind of social deterrent is again at best only part of the story.

I find this view of the mentalities and capabilities of lower social orders, apparently so easily overawed by the odd machicolation, unconvincing. Even within the military view’s own terms, the ‘enemy at the gate’ of yeomen and others has been seen in other contexts as the finest archery in Europe, enjoined by Edward III and Henry V to practise military skills every Sunday and capable of beating massively superior forces of trained French knights mounted on specially bred steeds. If the lower social orders were so overawed by crenellations at Cooling, how on earth did they manage to stand up to French finery at Agincourt?

An exclusively military view of castles is therefore now in headlong retreat, though rumours of its death have I feel been exaggerated; there is a degree of interpretive ‘doublethink’ in which assertions of military primacy are overtly denied, but slipped in through the back door through implicit assumptions. I shall discuss such doublethink in Chapter 5. Of more interest to our present purpose are recent, more ‘social’ interpretations.

Social interpretations

Over the last decade or so, castle studies have explored other themes in addition to the military, looking at the ‘social’ functions of the castle. I would pick out several elements in these new views: interest in circulation patterns and the organisation of space; stress on castles as reflective of social status; and the castle as theatre.

The interest in circulation patterns is actually quite long-standing. Forty years ago Peter Faulkner published two influential articles centring on Goodrich on the Welsh border and Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. He looked at the circulation patterns within this late fourteenth-century structure and argued that its increased provision of ‘private’ lodgings and for domestic comfort was one point in a slow evolution of domestic provision stretching back to the thirteenth-century structures of Conway and Goodrich and forward to the Renaissance unfortified house (1958, 1963).

Faulkner’s work was extremely influential and continues to be cited as a central text today. His suggestions were expanded by Graham Fairclough (1992), who extended the analysis of Bolton through the use of more sophisticated ‘penetration diagrams’ of the sort that have seen increasing popularity among theoretically minded archaeologists in recent years (Hillier and Hanson 1984; Gilchrist 1993; Mathieu 1999). Castles, being structures with complex circulation patterns whose subtleties are not immediately apparent to the casual modern visitor, are very suitable for these sorts of analyses; though I often think that the complex circulation patterns they describe still remain to be explained after the penetration diagram has been outlined (see Chapter 3).

Close structural analysis of buildings, often done on a stone-by-stone basis using new techniques of photogrammetry, has also led to new views of castles. This is most obvious in the work of Philip Dixon and Pamela Marshall (1993a, 1993b), who have made the point that very famous, high-status buildings still have secrets to yield to us; millions of people troop by the Tower of London every year, but until the last decade, archaeologists and historians included, few pause to examine the stonework in any detail; the new discoveries at the Tower testify to the power of such techniques (Impey and Parnell 2000). Dixon, Marshall and others have shown how apparently well-known buildings actually have very surprising structural sequences and initial forms. They make the point that we think that castles’ fabrics have been ‘studied to death’ – that because they are so famous, we already know everything they have to of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Preface: behind the gate at Cooling
• 1 Introduction: casting our eyes upon sconces
• 2 Watery landscapes
• 3 The ordering of the late medieval castle
• 4 Medieval to Renaissance
• 5 Kenilworth: the evidence house
• 6 Beyond the pale
• 7 Conclusion: rethinking castles
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index