National Trust Book of British Castles

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Ever since the Norman invasion the British castle has occupied a position of dominanoe: initially in military terms, but later and more enduringly in the popular imagination. First built on the motte-and-bailey principle to control an unruly populace, the nature and purpose of castles gradually evolved over the centuries to culminate in the lavishly ornate structures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, designed solely as romantic settings for domestic elegance and comfort. To call any one castle typically British would therefore be misleading; in fact England, Wales and Scotland together possess one of the largest and most diverse collections of castles anywhere in the world. Beginning with the great Iron Age hill forts, Paul Johnson traces each stage of the development of Britain,s rich and varied collection of castles: how advances in the techniques of warfare were reflected in increasingly sophisticated methods of defence; the vital part played by the castle in social life - both as an expression of the political and economic conditions of the time or simply as a rather uncomfortable place in which to live; the gradual decay of the castle after' its crucial role in the medieval and early modern period; and ending with a chapter on the restoration of several important castles in the nineteenth century, as well as the building of some extraordinary mock ones. Each stage of development is discussed within the context of the many castles which can still be seen today, and their history is vividly illustrated with contemporary paintings, drawings and engravings, detailed ground-plans and modern photographs. 32 illustrations in full colour and over 170 in black and white

THE NATIONA L TRUST BOOK OF BRITISH CASTLES Paul Johnson

Book Club Associates London

To George and Pat

This edition published 1978 by Book Club Associates by arrangement with Weidenfeld and Nicolson and The National Trust © Paul Johnson 1978 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. · Designed by Ray Carpenter Colour separations by Newsele Litho Ltd Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd London, Fakenham and Reading

CONTENTS Foreword

page 7

CHAP.TER I

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page 9

CHAPTER

4

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Iron Age to Hastings

•

3

page 101

5

CHAPTER 6

The Last of the Feudal Castles

Castles and Towers ofthe Borders page 153

125

CHAPTER

7

CHAPTER

8

Stone Walls and Gunpowder

The Scottish Inheritance page 181

CHAPTER

page 37

Edwardian Splendour in Wales

page 69

page

'The Norman Yoke'

CHAPTER 4

Plantagenet Castles

CHAPTER

CHAPTER 2

page 209

9

CHAPTER I 0

'The Monstrous Practice of Castle Building'

Castles and Sieges of the Civil War

page 253

page 229 Glossary of Technical Terms page 277 Select Bibliography page

281

Acknowledgements page

283

Index page

284

'And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and tho_u shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in' ISAIAH

Foreword

by the Director General]. D. Boles

The National Trust was formed in London in 1895 'to act as a corporation for the holding of lands of natural beauty and sites and houses of historic interest to be preserved intact for the nation's use and enjoyment'. Over the decades the vision of its three founders, Octavia Hill, philanthropist, Robert Hunter, Solicitor to the Post Office and to the Commons Preservation Society, and Hardwicke Rawnsley, Canon of Carlisle and defender of the Lake District, has grown and flourished beyond their greatest expectations. Today the National Trust is Britain's largest landowner and the greatest guardian of historic houses, their pictures and their fur­ niture and their gardens. All this is due to private generosity as the Trust receives no subsidy from the State; it is a charity dependent on the support and encouragement of its benefactors, members, vol­ untary helpers and the general public. The Trust now has more than half a million members and it opens those properties where a fee is charged, each year to more and more visitors - over 4½ million in 1976. Uncounted millions more visit without charge its open spaces, archaeological sites, coastline, woodlands and nature reserves. It is for this reason that the Trust can be described as 'National': it exists to preserve for and to offer pleasure to, a growing number of people who -value the best of Britain's past. In recognition of this great interest in the British heritage and because the Trust believes that a deeper knowledge of a subject leads to a greater enjoyment, it has been delighted to be associated in recent years with various television series and publications on dif­ ferent aspects of its work. So it is with great pleasure that the Trust welcomes the publication of Paul Johnson's fascinating history of British castles.

7

CHAPTER I

Iron Age to Hastings

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Above: The Roman amphitheatre at Caerlon-on- Usk, Gwent.

20

Iron Age to Hastings

Above: Arthur arrives at Caerlon.

Opposite: Tristan arrives in an anteroom at Caerlon an illustration from a thirteenth-century manuscript.

seven to nine feet thick, consisting of a concrete core with stone facing, bonded at intervals with brick courses, and with a plinth on the outer face. One of its entrances, Newgate, had two pas­ sageways, each twelve feet wide and flanked by square towers. In time, furthe; massive towers were added to the walls. Ofteh, as happened later in Norman times, the original timber defences were gradually replaced by brick and stone. Silchester was fortified in stone about AD 200. It then had a ditch, topped by a wall nine feet six inches at the base and seven feet six inches at the top, a concrete core faced with flints, and bonded with flat stones at intervals; internally, 12-foot-wide buttresses strengthened the walls every 200 feet. York got its stone wall over a period of two years, AD 107-8, the wall being spaced with stone towers and gateways. At about the same date, Caerlon-on-Usk was refortified in stone. This was a typical legionary fortress, two miles from Newport, designed to accommodate 5-6, 000 men, at a strategic point on the Welsh marches, overlooking the mouth of the Severn. Caerlon is the Welsh version of castra legionum (legionary camp); the Romans called it Isca, from the River Usk on which it stands. There· are few literary references to it in Roman times, though it was clearly the fortified sea-and-land base from which the precious supplies of gold, mined at Dolancothi in south-central Wales, were shipped to the Continent. Later it became a centre of Arthurian legend. Geof­ frey of Monmouth claimed that Arthur had been crowned there, 'upon the River Usk near the Severn Sea . . . a place most pleasant and fit for so great a solemnity'. He said it had magnificent palaces with gilded roofs; certainly as late as the twelfth century a good deal of the city and fortress remained. Geraldtis Cambrensis, writing in 1188, noted 'the city was handsomely built of masonry, with brick courses . . . . Many vestiges of its former splendours may yet be seen, immense palaces formerly ornamented with gilded roofs in imita­ tion of Roman magnificence . . . enclosed within fine walls, part of which remain standing. You will find on all sides, both within and without the circuit of the walls, subterraneous buildings, aqueducts and underground passages. . .. . ' The truth about Caerlon is somewhat more prosaic. It was first laid out in about AD 75, the headquarters of the Second Augustan legion, one of the three permanently stationed in Britain. · The buildings were essentially complete during the second century. The fortified area was oblong, 540 yards by 450, and enclosed fifty acres; Caerlon Parish Church now stands roughly in what was the centre of the fortress. Fragments of the wall remain. The defences consisted of an outer v-shaped ditch, thirty feet wide by nine feet deep, revetted with stone; and a stone rampart wall, five feet thick and twenty feet high. The wall defence was reinforced with stone turrets, fifteen feet square, at fifty-yard intervals. There was also a clay bank, two feet broad and eight feet high, revetted with timber. The chief interest of Caerlon now is the amphitheatre, excavated in 1 928, and once known as King Arthur's Round Table. All Roman

21

Iron Age to Hastings

22

The Roman wall at Housesteads, Northumberland.

Iron Age to Hastings towns of a certain size had one, but in a legionary fortress it also served military purposes. At Caerlon the amphitheatre is I 84 by I 36 feet, big enough for the entire legion to parade for weapons' inspec­ tion, formal drill and some types of training. Some three hundred yards to the north-west is the Prysg Field Barrack Building, exca­ vated in -1927-9, with its own system of ditch-and-wall defences. One could say that Caerlon was not so much a castle as a military complex, and its defensive capacity lay essentially in its huge trained manpower. There is no record of a standard-type legionary fortress being taken by storm when fully manned. But although Rome kept huge numbers of professional soldiers under arms - so long as its currency was strong enough to enable them to be paid - there was constant financial pressure, over so large an empire, to spread military manpower as thinly as possible; and it was this consideration which led to the construction of fixed lines. Of these the most important was Hadrian's Wall, built early in the second century AD, roughly on a line from Carlisle to Newcastle, over a distance of seventy-three miles. Like most other permanent Roman military constructions, it has a concrete core with stone facings. The standard thickness is seven feet six inches, broadening to nine feet six inches in parts, and the average height of the wall-walk is about fifteen feet. On the lower stretches there is a deep ditch with a level terrace or berm, between the ditch and the wall; and in addition, on t):ie 'pacified' side of the wall, there is the so-called vallum, a ditch whose precise purpose is still debated but which seems most likely to have been a form of rearward defence. The wall is equipped with sixteen forts, on the standard Roman model, at four-mile intervals; and at every Roman mile there is a milecastle, projecting inwards from the wall, and measuring sixty by seventy feet internally. One of the main forts, Housesteads, on the most impressive section of the wall, has been fully excavated. Clearly the wall was of no great value against a massed attack, even of savages, since there were no stairways to the top other than at the stations. It was designed, rather, to stop routine infiltration by raiding parties and, in the case of mass attacks, to gain time for an outflanking movement by Roman troops issuing from the north gates of the forts. In short, it was a tripwire and a series of bases. As such, it probably served its purpose, over long periods, of cutting down the total manpower needed to man the northern frontier, especially since it was linked by semaphore to the main northern base in York. But not all Roman governors were content with it. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, 142-3, the so-called A�tonine Wall was built to the north, on a line from Old Kilpatrick on the Clyde to Bo'ness on the Forth. This, too, was a continuous line, dotted with nineteen forts at intervals of two miles. But it was much shorter thirty-six m�les, a1:1d of ir�ferior construction, partly of clay, partly' _ of sods laid like bncks, with a heavy stone foundation fourteen feet wide. It was only ten feet high, with sloping sides, a six-foot-wide wall-walk, and a forty-foot defensive ditch; some of the forts have

24

Opposite: Housesteads Fort, Northumberland.

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Above: The Roman uialls at Burah ,s Castle, Suffo lk.

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Opposite: Harlech Castle, Gwynedd.

Above: Siege techniques - an illustration from a .fifteenth-century manuscript depicting the Crusaders besieging Jerusalem.

Plantagenet Castles

Besiegers catapulting the decapitated heads of prisoners over the castle walls - an illustration from the thirteenth-century 'Les Histoires d'Outremer'.

90

Plantag enet Castles

Cannon, crossbows and fire all played a part in siege waifare.

forms of penthouses, or cats, used to protect men throwing brushwood to make causeways across ditches, undermining, or piling combustibles against wooden sections of the walls. Artillery included the petriaria, which hurled huge rocks, catapults or scorp­ ions for smaller stones, or the medium-sized ballista or mangonel which threw stones weighing around half a hundredweight. By the end of the twelfth century some projectile engines were as powerful as early cannon. At the siege of Acre, 1189-91, the French king had a petriaria, called like many other types of major engine or mobile tower a malvoisin, which broke down the main wall of the city with its continuous blows. At the same siege, one of Richard i's engines killed twelve men with a single shot; this impressed the Saracens, who brought the missile to Saladin as a curiosity. Big sieges con­ sumed prodigious quantities of ammunition. In I 198 Evreux Castle was stocked up for war with 6,200 bolts and 4,000 arrows. Stones were specially quarried for the bigger engines. When they ran out, paving stones and millstones were hurled, and iron bars, darts and sharpened poles. In 1339, during a French attack on Edward n1's Flanders castle at Thin, dead horses and cattle were flung over the walls. Other missiles included pots of quicklime or burning pitch, and flaming torches. But stories of boiling oil and molten lead are probably fictitious; both were too expensive. Fire was what the defenders feared most, for even supposedly fireproof castles were crammed with combustible materials. Next came mining: that is, digging tunnels with wooden supports, which were afterwards fired, causing subsidence. With gunpowder came the true mine. At St Andrews, Fife, a mining tunnel and a counter-mine have been preserved. But these date from the siege of 1 546-7. Direct evidence of early siege techniques and weapons is rare. We have a sketch of part of a trebuchet in a thirteenth-century architect's manual. But no major siege-engine has survived. A strong, well-defended castle usually fell, if it fell at all, to a combination of weapons and privation. Chateau Gaillard, taken_ in 1203-4, yielded to starvation, to a system of counter-forts and ditches which provided the attackers with cover, and to a terrific array of petriariae, mangonels, mantlets, a very high siege-tower, and mining. The middle bailey fell when an audacious Frenchman climbed up a stone latrine outlet on the river bank, from which he made an entry through a chapel window - a classic case of exploit­ ing a weakness created by the pursuit of comfort. The final inner bailey was breached by undermining and a huge petriaria. Nothing in the history of British castles has quite the varied interest of the siege of Chateau Gaillard, but there were a number of ferocious sieges in the reigns of John and his son. Against a well­ defended castle persistence was the supreme virtue. Rochester held out against John in 1215 for three months; fighting continued not only after mining breached the curtain but after the assault had penetrated the huge keep itself The garrison finally surrendered only when they ran out of food. After even Rochester fell, wrote

91

Plantagenet Castles one chronicler, 'men no longer put their trust in castles'. But any� ne with less obstinacy than John would have given up. The followmg year the French dauphin Louis, though armed with the very latest _ machines, failed to take Dover. An up-to-date castle rarely yielded to a direct assault, unless it were unexpected. That is why psy­ chological weapons were often employed. The knights defending Bedford in 1 224 were excommunicated, with bell, book and candle, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, on behalf of the king. The king's men had a tower strong enough to carry ballistae, and high enough to command the interior of the bailey; even so, the knights held out against these spiritual and material forces for two ·months. Excommunication was also employed at the siege in 1 266 of Kenilworth, so foolishly handed to his son-in-law by Henry 111. By then De Montfort was dead, killed at Evesham by the Lord Edward, who had escaped from the castle and was now in charge of besieging it. Even in such masterly hands, however, the castle defied all the king's forces for a year, and only surrendered on easy terms. The elaborate water-defences made mining impossible, and bom­ bardment was confined to extreme range of the biggest machines. Eyewitnesses described how huge boulders hurled by both sides sometimes met and shattered in mid-air. Edward directed the attack to the double moat on the fourth side, where the water barrier was narrowest. He had two wooden siege-towers, one big enough to contain 200 archers and eleven catapults. He also unleashed a night attack by water, in barges dragged overland from Chester. Kenil­ worth was one of the great sieges of history, and it profoundly influenced Edward's castle strategy in Wales, as we shall see in the next chapter. With the intensification of castle technology, there was an insati­ able demand for expert craftsmen, who were increasingly well paid and therefore figure more prominently in the records. We have already heard of Maurice, Henry n's engineer. At Westminster there was an architect-dynasty founded by Geoffrey, Keeper of the Palace under Henry 1, and his son, Nathaniel; Geoffrey's successor, Ailnoth, also brought his son, Roger into the business. These four worked on the palace, on the Tower, at Windsor, Woodstock and elsewhere; they were also, under Henry II, in charge of demolishing adulterine castles. In the north a prominent architect of the age was Richard the Engineer, employed by the Bishop of Durham at Bowes and Norham castles. In Wales Ralph of Grosmont figures in references to the 'three castles', and probably built them. These men were all termed engineers in the accounts., a name deriving from their skill in designing, making, dismantling and transporting siege-engines, and directing operations from them. They were liable to field service; were, in fact, soldiers. But they could build castles and churches, too - in fact they turned their hand to anything involving mechanical ingenuity. From the early thirteenth century many royal craftsmen begin to

92

Plantagenet Castles

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