Lordship and Architecture in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland

Richard Oram, Geoffrey Stell, Richard D. Oram, Geoffrey Stell

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781788853996
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

These essays constitute the first radical reassessment since the nineteenth century of the role of architecture as an expression of lordship and status among Scottish secular and ecclesiastical elites in the period c.1124–c.1650. These studies of the architectural patronage of particular families or groups explore how the nobility operated socially and economically, as well as politically, in the organisation and structure of lordship throughout the medieval and renaissance periods. The contributors draw on the traditions and strengths of Scottish genealogical, archaeological and art-historical enquiry to illustrate key themes, which include: family or kindred styles in building on a local, regional or national level; builders' or patrons' motives; the scale and use of the buildings; and ascertainable changes in function, purpose and attitude.

Chapter 1

PRELATICAL BUILDERS:
A PRELIMINARY STUDY,
c.1124–c.1500¹

Richard D. Oram

INTRODUCTION

While aristocratic families climbed and plummeted, through failure of heirs or forfeiture, their prelatical counterparts enjoyed a continuity unbroken until the sixteenth century. This continuity arose from the corporate nature of the Church, a characteristic which ensured that property remained secure in its grasp, and which, for present purposes, permits a view of the developing status and concomitant socio-economic standing of a distinct segment of the wider nobility. This segment of the nobility had no requirement to assert its social credentials with each changing generation, nor, for the most part, to reflect shifting patterns of lordship in its use of monumental architecture. However, although not strictly a kin-based group, individual churchmen’s building works often displayed the influence of the wider lay aristocracy from which they came: in their perspectives they tended to share the outlook and aspirations of the secular nobility.

The reorganisation of the Scottish Church in the early twelfth century profoundly reshaped the social landscape of the kingdom. In the first generation of reform, clerics who were appointed to major benefices, and who formed new monastic communities, were overwhelmingly non-native. As a consequence, they imported cultural attitudes and ideas of dramatically new forms, clearly evident in their architecture. Most senior clerics were of Frankish or Anglo-Norman aristocratic stock, and their social background is explicitly revealed in the residences which they built, carrying identical symbolic messages of power and lordship to those of their secular counterparts. As the higher clergy acquired greater temporal power as lords of substantial propertied estates – in effect lords of men – their residences more clearly reflected their worldly status and membership of the aristocratic social elite, while monastic complexes and cathedral precincts were dressed in the symbolic architectural vocabulary of seigneurial power.

THE EPISCOPATE

In spite of historiographical recognition of the aristocratic background of the senior clergy of the Middle Ages, no study of their socio-political role has moved beyond examination of their tenurial or ministerial status to examine in any depth either their seigneurial function or the physical mechanisms through which they projected their social status. We can recognise that control of land – the temporalities of the see – gave the episcopate their political muscle in the Middle Ages, but generally choose to look at their cathedral-building work as a gauge of standing in the pecking-order of bishoprics, to the neglect of the castle-building which signalled their position in the hierarchy of nobility. Bishops were not simply pastors to their diocesan flock, but were territorial magnates vested with temporal powers which placed them towards the top of the hierarchy of regional secular authority.

Extensive episcopal landholding was an established phenomenon by the early twelfth century, as revealed by the Inquest of David into the possessions of the bishops of Glasgow.² Bishops, too, led the advance into the northern and western districts of mainland Scotland: the bishops of Moray, Ross and Caithness acted as royal agents in the colonial venture. Land accrued to their station as much in response to their prominent socio-political roles as by virtue of their spiritual office. The powers and privileges incumbent in extensive landholding became rights defended jealously by an increasingly secularised episcopate: the root of Bishop Bur of Moray’s dispute with Alexander Stewart, Lord of Badenoch, in the 1380s, lay in conflicting claims of jurisdiction over men on episcopal lands in Strathspey.³ Where the legal trappings of secular lordship were secured by the episcopate, we should also expect the physical manifestation of that lordship projected through construction of suitable settings for the active exercise of the lordly role. The role of such settings, albeit in a lay aristocratic rather than an episcopal context, is admirably summarised by Dr Keith Stringer⁴ in his dicussion of the position of Inverurie in the lordship of Garioch:

It was the pivot of economic administration for the castle-area … where revenues were received and kept in secure storage or sold. It was the lord’s residence and judicial centre. All these functions were different aspects of the lordship imposed to dominate and exploit the territory subject to its influence. It was also a strong military base, and although the administrative element rapidly subsumed the military, strategic considerations had been uppermost in determining its siting.

Such functions are characteristic of the exercise of lordship, irrespective of whether the holder of that lordship was a secular or ecclesiastical lord.

Little survives of structures which gave expression to such lordly status erected by the first generation of episcopal builders in the twelfth century. A rare example of an excavated twelfth-century bishop’s residence in Scotland is at Glasgow,⁵ where the earliest phase was a ditched earthen ringwork, 28m in diameter, entered across a timber bridge. A timber gatehouse defended the entrance, and any internal structures? hall, private chamber, chapel and domestic buildings – were probably likewise timber-built: no trace of these was found. Facing the west front of the cathedral, the ringwork lay on the axis of the stone church consecrated in 1136, but is probably attributable to Bishop Herbert (1147–64), formerly abbot of Kelso, or Enguerrand (1165–74), a secular clerk and chancellor to Malcolm IV prior to his election to the bishopric in 1164. Enguerrand’s elevated administrative background in the household of a king who embraced the lordly symbolism of Frankish culture points to him rather than the monastic Herbert as builder of a residence which projected the secular authority of the bishop.

A second episcopal ringwork stands at Mains of Penninghame in Wigtownshire. This was the heart of one of the mensal estates of the bishops of Whithorn, a unit whose origins lie in the eighth century and which remained the location of the later medieval bishops’ principal rural residence, the Clary, 1.5kms to the east.⁶ The earthwork is a massive roughly triangular embanked enclosure, approximately 125m along each side. Its scale is in marked contrast to Glasgow and probably reflects differences in the function of the two. While Glasgow is most clearly residential, Penninghame was also the administrative focus of an agricultural estate – here the analogy with Inverurie is strongest – and probably contained the complex of domestic and store buildings attendant on that role.

Ringworks are characteristic of eleventh- and twelfth-century defensive engineering throughout Britain.⁷ Their use in frontier contexts reveals them as more than symbolic statements of lordship: this was a recognised military tradition with no obvious social hierarchy amongst its builders. Examples at Auldearn, Tarradale and, possibly, Castlehill near Thurso, were royal strongholds; Glasgow was the work of a senior bishop; a group in Renfrewshire are associated with the Steward and his tenants.⁸ Ringworks, clearly, were socially acceptable – and long-lived – settings for lordly power.⁹ It is possible that their less overt militarism, in contrast to motte-and-bailey castles which functioned regularly as garrisoned strongpoints at the advance edge of colonial plantations,¹⁰ commended them to supposedly non-military episcopal bu...