Life in a Medieval Castle

by Joseph Gies

  In the long-drawn-out struggle of the English barons with the king, economic disputes played a major role. The barons succeeded rather better in this area than in others, while profiting from the slow but fairly steady rise in their own manorial incomes through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although agricultural technology and acreage yields virtually stood still through the High Middle Ages, most lords were able to increase their revenues by improving their landholdings in various ways, usually at the expense of their peasants. The growth of towns also helped many lords to find a market for crop surpluses and even to practice regular cash-crop farming. Yet even in the High Middle Ages, the market was too weak to provide an adequate incentive for dramatic agricultural improvement, which had to await a later age.

  In fact, the real enemy of the castle barons and their privileges was not the royal power but the slow, irresistible surge of economic change. The cloth merchants and other businessmen who exploited their workers, not perhaps more brutally, but more effectively than the barons did their villeins, were moving ahead in the economic race, while the lords of the countryside, in their arrogant but economically torpid castles, were standing still.

  Some were not even able to do that. What happened to a baron who neglected his estates in favor of politics was demonstrated by the fate of the younger Roger Bigod, who inherited Chepstow from his uncle in 1270. An unreconstructed rebel after the baronial defeat at Evesham in 1265, Roger spent his whole substance, English, Welsh, and Irish, tilting at the monarchic power, to such effect that in the end he had to make an ignominious fiscal surrender. In return for the liquidation of his mountain of debts, improvident Roger signed over all his estates to the king, receiving them back for life only. By this arrangement Chepstow Castle passed into the royal demesne with Roger Bigod’s death in 1302.

  Thus came to an end for the mighty fortress on the Wye more than two centuries of history as a baronial castle, during which it sheltered through the long noontime of the feudal age some of the most powerful of the aristocracy of Norman England.

  III

  The Castle as a House

  WHILE MILITARY ENGINEERING WAS ELABORATING the castle’s system of earthworks, palisades, walls, towers, gatehouses, barbicans, and battlements, the castle’s domestic aspect was undergoing a parallel advance in the direction of comfort and privacy.

  Few descriptions survive of the old motte-and-bailey castle, and only one gives information about living arrangements. Chronicler Lambert of Ardres described a timber castle hall built on a motte at Ardres, in Flanders, early in the twelfth century:

  The first story was on the ground level, where there were cellars and granaries and great boxes, barrels, casks, and other household utensils. In the story above were the dwelling and common rooms of the residents, including the larders, pantry and buttery and the great chamber in which the lord and lady slept. Adjoining this was…the dormitory of the ladies in waiting and children…

  In the upper story of the house were attic rooms in which on the one side the sons of the lord of the house, when they so desired, and on the other side the daughters, because they were obliged, were accustomed to sleep. In this story also the watchmen and the servants appointed to keep the house slept at various times. High up on the east side of the house, in a convenient place, was the chapel, decorated like the tabernacle of Solomon…There were stairs and passages from story to story, from the house into the [separate] kitchen, from room to room, and from the house into the gallery, where they used to entertain themselves with conversation, and again from the gallery into the chapel.

  So elaborate an architecture was exceptional in the motte-and-bailey castle, which rarely had room for accommodations on such a scale. The usual arrangement must have been for the lord’s family to eat and sleep in a building on top of the motte, while the kitchen, servants’ quarters, barracks, smithy, stables, barns, and storehouses occupied the bailey. Alternatively the lord’s family may have lived in a hall in the bailey, with the motte serving solely as watchtower and refuge.

  Whether on the motte, in the bailey, inside the walls of the shell keep, or as a separate building within the great curtain walls of the thirteenth century, the living quarters of a castle invariably had one basic element: the hall. A large one-room structure with a lofty ceiling, the hall was sometimes on the ground floor, but often, as in Fitz Osbern’s Great Tower at Chepstow, it was raised to the second story for greater security. Early halls were aisled like a church, with rows of wooden posts or stone pillars supporting the timber roof. Medieval carpenters soon developed a method of truss (triangular support) roof construction that made it possible to eliminate the aisles, leaving a broad open space. Windows were equipped with wooden shutters secured by

  Pembroke, Wales: Hall built by William Marshal, c. 1190, with principal room on the second floor.

  an iron bar, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were rarely glazed. By the thirteenth century a king or great baron might have “white [greenish] glass” in some of his windows, and by the fourteenth glazed windows were common.

  In a ground-floor hall the floor was beaten earth, stone, or plaster; when the hall was elevated to the upper story the floor was nearly always timber, supported either by a row of wooden pillars in the basement below, as in Chepstow’s Great Tower, or by stone vaulting. Carpets, although used on walls, tables, and benches, were not employed as floor coverings in England and northwest Europe until the fourteenth century. Chronicler Matthew Paris reported the reaction of Londoners in 1255 when Eleanor of Castile, wife of the future Edward I, was housed in an apartment “hung with palls of silk and tapestry, like a temple, and even the floor was covered with tapestry. This was done by the Spaniards, it being in accordance with the custom of their country; but this excessive pride excited the laughter and derision of the people.” Floors were strewn with rushes and in the later Middle Ages sometimes with herbs, including basil, balm, camomile, costmary, cowslip, daisies, sweet fennel, germander, hyssop, lavender, majoram, pennyroyal, roses, mints, tansy, violets, and winter savory. The rushes were replaced at intervals and the floor swept, but Erasmus, noting a condition that must have been true in earlier times, observed that often under them lay “an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats and everything that is nasty.”

  Entrance to the hall was usually in a side wall near the lower end. When the hall was on an upper story, this entrance was commonly reached by an outside staircase next to the wall of the keep. In some castles, as at Dover and Rochester, this staircase was enclosed in and protected by a building which guarded the entry to the keep—a “forebuilding”; in others it was merely roofed over. In Fitz Osbern’s keep the entrance stairway was constructed in the

  Chepstow Castle: Interior of the Great Tower, built about 1070. The principal floor, marked by square holes where the floor beams were secured, was at second-story level, with a storage basement below. The third floor was added in the thirteenth century, in two successive remodelings. The fragment of arcade in the middle of the righthand wall marks the site of the original wooden partition dividing the story into hall (foreground) and chamber (background). A stairway to the battlements is concealed in and supported by a half-arch in the third story, above. (Department of the Environment)

  thickness of the wall, leading from a doorway on the ground floor to the upper hall.

  The castle family sat on a raised dais of wood or stone at the upper end of the hall, opposite to the entrance, away from drafts and intrusion. The lord (and perhaps the lady) occupied a massive chair, sometimes with a canopy by way of emphasizing status. Everyone else sat on benches. Most dining tables were set on temporary trestles that were dismantled between meals; a permanent, or “dormant,” table was another sign of prestige, limited to the greatest lords. But all tables were covered with white cloths, clean and ample.

  Lighting was by rushlights or candles, of wax or tallow (melted animal fat), impaled on vertical spikes
on an iron candlestick with a tripod base, or held in a loop, or supported on wall brackets or iron candelabra. Oil lamps in bowl form on a stand, or suspended in a ring, provided better illumination, and flares sometimes hung from iron rings in the walls.

  If the later Middle Ages had made only slight improvements in lighting over earlier centuries, a major technical advance had come in heating: the fireplace, an invention of deceptive simplicity. The fireplace provided heat both directly and by radiation from the stones at the back, from the hearth, and finally, from the opposite wall, which was given extra thickness to absorb the heat and warm the room after the fire had burned low. The ancestor of the fireplace was the central open hearth, used in ground-level halls in Saxon times and often on into later centuries. Such a hearth may have heated one of the two halls of Chepstow’s thirteenth-century domestic range, where there are no traces of a fireplace. If so, it was probably situated below the high table and the dais, but away from the traffic of servants at the lower end of the hall. Square, circular, or octagonal, the central hearth was bordered by stone or tile and sometimes had a backing (reredos) of tile, brick, or

  Rochester Castle: Arched fireplace in the wall of the third floor of the rectangular keep, built 1130. (Department of the Environment)

  stone. Smoke rose through a louver, a lantern-like structure in the roof with side openings that were covered with sloping boards to exclude rain and snow, and that could be closed by pulling strings, like venetian blinds. In the fourteenth century, louvers were built to revolve according to the direction of the wind. There were also roof ventilators of pottery representing knights, kings, or priests, with smoke coming out of their eyes and mouths and the tops of their heads. A couvre-feu (“fire cover”) made of tile or china was placed over the hearth at night to reduce the fire hazard.

  When the hall was raised to the second story, a fireplace in one wall took the place of the central hearth, dangerous on an upper level, especially with a timber floor. The hearth was moved to a location against a wall with a funnel or hood to collect and control the smoke, and finally, funnel and all, was incorporated into the wall. This early type of fireplace was arched, and set into the wall at a point where it was thickened by an external buttress, with the smoke venting through the buttress. Toward the end of the twelfth century, the fireplace began to be protected by a projecting hood of stone or plaster which controlled the smoke more effectively and allowed for a shallower recess. Flues ascended vertically through the walls to a chimney, cylindrical with an open top, or with side vents and a conical cap.

  At Chepstow, where the two halls of the thirteenth-century domestic range were built at ground level, the slope of the land was utilized to place the service rooms of the larger Great Hall above those of the Lesser Hall. The lower part of the Great Hall, containing the entranceway, was partitioned off to form a “screens passage.” Such screens consisted at first of low wooden partitions projecting from side walls, with a curtain or movable screen covering the central opening. Later the central barrier became a permanent partition, with openings on either side. Above the screens commonly rose a musicians’ gallery overlooking the hall.

  On the lower side of the screens passage of the Great Hall at Chepstow, three doorways opened side by side. Two led to the two rooms with a passageway between them that comprised the service area. A buttery, for serving beverages, stood on one side; a pantry, for bread, on the other. In early days of castle building, these service rooms had been rough

  Manorbier Castle, Wales: cylindrical chimneys.

  huts or lean-tos, but by the twelfth century they were usually, as here, integral parts of the hall. They were equipped with shelves and benches on which food brought from the kitchen could be arranged for serving. The buttery of Chepstow’s Great Hall contained a drain opening over the river, where a sink was doubtless situated. The third of the three doors opened between the buttery and pantry on a flight of stairs leading to the passage between the two halls. In one direction this passage led to a double latrine, cupboards, and steps down to a vaulted storage basement under the Great Hall, with an opening through which supplies could be drawn up from boats on the river below. In the other direction it led to the kitchen, located in a separate building in the Lower Bailey.

  In the thirteenth century the castle kitchen was still

  Chepstow Castle: Cupboards built into the wall of the passageway between the Great Hall and the Lesser Hall of the thirteenth-century domestic range.

  generally of timber, with a central hearth or several fireplaces where meat could be spitted or stewed in a cauldron. Utensils were washed in a scullery outside. Poultry and animals for slaughter were trussed and tethered nearby. Temporary extra kitchens were set up for feasts, as for the coronation of Edward I in 1273 when a contemporary described the “innumerable kitchens…built” at Westminster Palace, “and numberless leaden cauldrons placed outside them, for the cooking of meats.” The kitchen did not normally become part of the domestic hall until the fifteenth century.

  In the bailey near the kitchen the castle garden was usually planted, with fruit trees and vines at one end, and plots for herbs, and flowers—roses, lilies, heliotropes, violets, poppies, daffodils, iris, gladioli. There might also be a fishpond, stocked with trout and pike.

  Both the interior and exterior stonework of medieval castles were often whitewashed. Interiors were also plastered, paneled, or ornamented with paintings or hangings. Usually these interior decorations, like most of the comforts of the castle, began with the dais area of the hall, often the only part to be wainscoted and painted. A favorite embellishment was to paint a whitewashed or plastered wall with lines, usually red, to represent large masonry blocks, each block decorated with a flower. The queen’s chamber at the Tower of London in 1240 was wainscoted, whitewashed, given such sham “pointing” or “masoning,” and painted with roses. Wainscoting was of the simplest kind, vertical paneling painted white or in colors. In England the wood was commonly fir imported from Norway. In the halls of Henry III’s castles, the color scheme was frequently green and gold, or green spangled with gold and silver, and many of the chambers were decorated with murals: the hall at Winchester with a map of the world, a lower chamber at Clarendon with a border of heads of kings and queens, an upper chamber with paintings of St. Margaret and the Four Evangelists and, as described in the king’s building instructions, “heads of men and women in good and exquisite colors.” Wall hangings of painted wool or linen that were the forerunners of the fourteenth-century tapestries were not merely adornments, but served the important purpose of checking drafts.

  In the earliest castles the family slept at the extreme upper end of the hall, beyond the dais, from which the sleeping quarters were typically separated only by a curtain or screen. Fitz Osbern’s hall at Chepstow, however, substituted for this temporary division a permanent wooden partition. In the thirteenth century William Marshal’s sons removed the partition, making the old chamber part of the hall. They constructed a masonry arcade to support a new chamber above, with access by a wooden stair. In the last decade of the thirteenth century the new third-story chamber was extended over the entire hall.

  The Great Hall of the domestic range at Chepstow had its own chamber on the floor above, while the Lesser Hall was equipped with a block of chambers at the upper end, on three levels. Sometimes castles with ground-floor halls had their great chamber, where the lord and lady slept, in a separate wing at the dais end of the hall, over a storeroom, matched at the other end, over the buttery and pantry, by a chamber for the eldest son and his family, for guests, or for the castle steward. These second-floor chambers were sometimes equipped with “squints,” peepholes concealed in wall decorations by which the owner or steward could keep an eye on what went on below.

  The lord and lady’s chamber, when situated on an upper floor, was called the solar. By association, any private chamber, whatever its location, came to be called a solar. Its principal item of furniture was a great bed with
a heavy wooden frame and springs made of interlaced ropes or strips of leather, overlaid with a feather mattress, sheets, quilts, fur coverlets, and pillows. Such beds could be dismantled and taken along on the frequent trips a great lord made to his other castles and manors. The bed was curtained, with linen hangings that pulled back in the daytime and closed at night to give privacy as well as protection from drafts. Personal servants might sleep in the lord’s chamber on a pallet or trundle bed, or on a bench. Chests for garments, a few “perches” or wooden pegs for clothes, and a stool or two made up the remainder of the furnishings.