Life in a Medieval Castle

by Joseph Gies

  The greatest lords and ladies might occupy separate bedrooms, the lady in company with her attendants. One night in 1238, Henry III of England had a narrow escape, reported by Matthew Paris, when an assassin climbed into his bedchamber by the window, knife in hand, but found him not there. “The king was, by God’s providence, then sleeping with the queen.” One of the queen’s maids, who was awake and “singing psalms by the light of a candle.” saw the man and alerted the household.

  Sometimes a small anteroom called the wardrobe adjoined

  Curtained beds. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Claud. B.iv, f. 27v)

  the chamber—a storeroom where cloth, jewels, spices, and plate were stored in chests, and where dressmaking was done.

  In the thirteenth century, affluence and an increasing desire for privacy led to the building of small projecting “oriel” rooms to serve as a secluded corner for the lord and his family, off the upper end of the hall and accessible from the great chamber. Often of timber, the oriel might be a landing at the top of external stairs, built over a small room on the ground floor. It usually had a window, and sometimes a fireplace. In the fourteenth century, oriels expanded into great upper-floor bay windows. An example for an extraordinary purpose was added to Stirling Castle during the siege by Edward I in 1304 in order to provide the queen of Scotland and her ladies with a comfortable observation post.

  In the early Middle Ages, when few castles had large permanent garrisons, not only servants but military and administrative personnel slept in towers or in basements, or in the hall, or in lean-to structures; knights performing castle guard slept near their assigned posts. Later, when castles were manned by larger garrisons, often of mercenaries, separate barracks, mess halls, and kitchens were built.

  An indispensable feature of the castle of a great lord was the chapel where the lord and his family heard morning mass. In rectangular hall-keeps this was often in the forebuilding, sometimes at basement level, sometimes on the second floor. By the thirteenth century, the chapel was usually close to the hall, convenient to the high table and bed chamber, forming an L with the main building or sometimes projecting opposite the chamber. A popular arrangement was to build the chapel two stories high, with the nave divided horizontally; the family sat in the upper part, reached from their chamber, while the servants occupied the lower part.

  Except for the screens and kitchen passages, the domestic quarters of medieval castles contained no internal corridors. Rooms opened into each other, or were joined by spiral

  Restormel Castle, Cornwall: Twelfth-century shell keep with domestic buildings and barracks added in thirteenth century around inside of wall, with a central court. Projecting building at right is the chapel. (Department of the Environment)

  staircases which required minimal space and could serve pairs of rooms on several floors. Covered external passageways called pentices joined a chamber to a chapel or to a wardrobe and might have windows, paneling, and even fireplaces.

  Water for washing and drinking was available at a central drawing point on each floor. Besides the well, inside or near the keep, there might be a cistern or reservoir on an upper level whose pipes carried water to the floors below. Hand washing was sometimes done at a laver or built-in basin in a recess in the hall entrance, with a projecting trough. Servants filled a tank above, and waste water was carried away by a lead pipe below, inflow and outflow controlled by valves with bronze or copper taps and spouts.

  Baths were taken in a wooden tub, protected by a tent or canopy and padded with cloth. In warm weather, the tub was often placed in the garden; in cold weather, in the chamber near the fire. When the lord traveled, the tub accompanied him, along with a bathman who prepared the baths. In some important thirteenth-century castles and palaces there were permanent bathrooms, and in Henry III’s palace at Westminster there was even hot and cold running water in the bath house, the hot water supplied by tanks filled from pots heated in a special furnace. Edward II had a tiled floor in his bathroom, with mats to protect his feet from the cold.

  The latrine, or “garderobe,” an odd euphemism not to be confused with wardrobe, was situated as close to the bed chamber as possible (and was supplemented by the universally used chamber pot). Ideally, the garderobe was sited at the end of a short, right-angled passage in the thickness of the wall, often in a buttress. When the chamber walls were not thick enough for this arrangement, a latrine was corbeled out from the wall over either a moat or river, as in the domestic range at Chepstow, or with a long shaft reaching nearly to the ground. This latter arrangement

  In a scene from the story of the Marriage at Cana, servants draw water from a well with a dipping beam. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Nero Civ, f. 17)

  sometimes proved dangerous in siege, as at Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionhearted’s castle on the Seine, where attackers obtained access by climbing up the latrine shaft. As a precaution, the end of the shaft was later protected by a masonry wall. Often several latrines were grouped together into a tower, sometimes in tiers, with a pit below, at the angle of the hall or solar, making them easier to clean. In some castles rainwater from gutters above or from a cistern or diverted kitchen drainage flushed the shaft.

  Henry III, traveling from one of his residences to another, sent orders ahead:

  Since the privy chamber…in London is situated in an undue and improper place, wherefore it smells badly, we command you on the faith and love by which you are bounden to us that you in no wise omit to cause another privy chamber to be made…in such more fitting and proper place that you may select there, even though it should cost a hundred pounds, so that it may be made before the feast of the Translation of St. Edward, before we come thither.

  Before a visit to York in 1251 for the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Alexander III of Scotland, the king specified a privy chamber twenty feet long “with a deep pit” to be constructed next to his room in the archbishop’s palace.

  Hay often served as toilet paper; Jocelin of Brakelond tells how Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds one night dreamed he heard a voice telling him to rise, and woke to find a candle carelessly left by another monk in the privy about to fall into the hay.

  By the later thirteenth century, the castle had achieved a considerable degree of comfort, convenience, and privacy. The lord and lady, who had begun by eating and sleeping in the great hall with their household, had gradually withdrawn to their own apartments. Bishop Robert Grosseteste thought the tendency toward privacy had gone too far and advised the countess of Lincoln: “When not prevented by sickness or fatigue, constrain yourself to eat in the hall before your people, for this shall bring great benefit and honour to you…Forbid dinners and suppers out of the hall and in private rooms, for from this arises waste and no honour to the lord and lady.”

  A century later, in Piers Plowman, William Langland echoed the bishop’s warning. Langland blamed the change on technology: the wall fireplace, with its draft chimney, which freed the household from huddling around the central hearth of the old days:

  Woe is in the hall each day in the week.

  There the lord and lady like not to sit.

  Now every rich man eats by himself

  In a private parlor to be rid of poor men,

  Or in a chamber with a chimney

  And leaves the great hall.

  IV

  The Lady

  [The lady of Faiel] entered, a golden circlet on her blonde hair. The castellan saluted her, sighing: “Lady, God give you health, honor and joy.” She replied: “And God give you pleasure, peace and health.” Then he took her hand and made her sit down near him…He looked at her without saying anything, too moved to speak, and grew pale. The lady saw this and apologized for the absence of her husband. The castellan replied that he loved her and that if she did not have mercy on him, nothing mattered to him. The lady reminded him that she was married and that he must ask her for nothing which would soil the honor of herself or her lord. He replied that no
thing would keep him from serving her all his life.

  —The Castellan of Coucy

  Her hair was golden, with little love-locks; her eyes blue and laughing; her face most dainty to see, with lips more vermeil than ever was rose or cherry in the time of summer heat; her teeth white and small; her breasts so firm that they showed beneath her vesture like two rounded nuts; so frail was she about the girdle that your hands could have spanned her, and the daisies that she broke with her feet in passing showed altogether black against her instep and her flesh, so white was the fair young maiden.

  —Aucassin and Nicolette

  The lady of Faiel and Nicolette were heroines of two popular thirteenth-century romances. Renaut de Coucy’s lady, “best, noblest and most intelligent of the land,” was worshipped by her lover, who wore her sleeve as a token in battle, composed songs to her, and endured a series of painful trials before at last winning her favor. Beautiful, accomplished, adored, she devoted her life to love—outside the marriage bond. Nicolette, for her part, physically exemplified the medieval feminine ideal—blonde, delicate, fair-skinned, boyish of figure.

  Scores of similar ladies dazzled lovers in the outpouring of fiction of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but how much they reflect the flesh-and-blood lady of the castle is difficult to say. Little information is available on the personalities and private lives of the women who presided over Chepstow and other castles. One fact, however, is well substantiated: The castle lady customarily was a pawn in the game of politics and economics as played by men.

  Although a woman could hold land, inherit it, sell it, or give it away, and plead for it in the law courts, most of a woman’s life was spent under the guardianship of a man—of her father until she married, of her husband until she was widowed. If her father died before she married, she was placed under the wardship of her father’s lord, who was felt to be legitimately concerned in her marriage because her husband would be his vassal. In the case of an heiress, marriage was a highly profitable transaction—a suitor might pay a large sum for the privilege. But wardship itself was a sought-after prize, because the guardian pocketed the income from the estate until the ward’s marriage. Many medieval legal battles were fought over rich wards, and even those not so rich attracted greedy notice. In 1185 Henry II ordered an inventory of all the widows and heirs in the realm with a view to possible royal claims. The age, children, lands, livestock, rents, tools, and other possessions of widows were painstakingly enumerated. A typical entry read:

  Alice de Beaufow, widow of Thomas de Beaufow, is in the gift of the lord king [i.e., in his wardship]. She is twenty and has one son as heir, who is two. Her land in Seaton is worth £5 6s. 8d. with this stock, namely two plows, a hundred sheep, two draught animals, five sows, one boar, and four cows. In the first year in which the land has been in her hand she has received in rent 36s. and 10d. and two pounds of pepper, and apart from the rent her tenants have given her 4s. and three loads of oats.

  The wardship of a wealthy three-month-old orphan provoked a spirited resistance by Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds against Henry’s son Richard the Lionhearted. In the end the king surrendered to the prelate in return for the gift of some hunting dogs and horses. But the abbot was foiled by the infant’s grandfather, who successfully kidnapped her, and Samson finally sold his claim to the wardship to the archbishop of Canterbury for 100 pounds. The little girl survived and appreciated in value, the archbishop in his turn selling the wardship to Thomas de Burgh, brother of the king’s chamberlain and future justiciar, for 500 marks (333 pounds).

  The daughter of a great lord was typically brought up away from home, in the castle of another noble family, or in a convent, where she might spend her life if she did not marry. Education of girls evidently compared favorably with that of their brothers. The differences in the training of the two sexes were given a jocular exaggeration by the writers of romances, who pictured boys as learning “to feed a bird, to hawk, to know hunting dogs, to shoot bow and arrow, to play chess and backgammon,” or “fencing, horsemanship and jousting,” whereas girls learned “to work with needle and shuttle…read, write and speak Latin,” or to “sing songs, tell stories and embroider.” Ladies of rank were patrons of poets and wrote poetry themselves, and some devoted themselves to learning. Yet, like their husbands, ladies enjoyed hunting and hawking (on their seals they were often portrayed holding a falcon) and chess.

  Girlhood was brief. Women were marriageable at twelve and usually married by fourteen. Heiresses might be married in form as young as five and betrothed even younger, though such unions could be annulled before consummation. By twenty a woman had a number of children, and by thirty, if she survived the hazards of childbirth, she might be widowed and remarried, or a grandmother.

  Whereas personal choice and attraction played a part in the marriages of peasant girls on the manors (where marriage commonly followed pregnancy), the marriages of ladies were too important to be left to predilection. There were exceptions. King Henry III’s sister Eleanor, married to Chepstow’s Earl William Marshal II at the age of nine and widowed at sixteen, married Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, in 1238 in the king’s private chapel at Westminster, with the king giving the bride away. The following year the king quarreled with De Montfort, who, he revealed, had “basely and clandestinely defiled” Eleanor during courtship. “You seduced my sister before marriage, and when I found it out I gave her to you in marriage, though against my will, in order to avoid scandal,” were the king’s words, reported by Matthew Paris.

  There is evidence that many marriages were happy. The fourteenth-century noble author Geoffrey de la Tour touchingly described his late wife as

  both fair and good, who had knowledge of all honor…and of fair behavior, and of all good she was the bell and flower; and I delighted so much in her that I made for her love songs, ballads, roundels, virelays, and diverse things in the best wise I could. But death, that on all makes war, took her from me, which has made me many a sorrowful thought and great heaviness. And so it is more than twenty years that I have been for her full of great sorrow. For a true lover’s heart never forgets the woman he has truly loved.

  Although there was no legal divorce, the taboo against consanguineous unions provided general grounds for annulment suits, especially since it extended to distant cousins, and even relationship by marriage could be invoked. The Church did not always admit such claims. When in 1253 Earl Roger Bigod, lord of Chepstow and grandson of the first William Marshal, repudiated his wife, the daughter of the king of Scotland, because he was allegedly related to her, the Church ruled that he should take her back, and Roger gave in: “Since such is the judgment of the Church, I safely and willingly accede to the marriage, of which I was formerly doubtful and suspicious.”

  The bride brought a marriage portion and received in return a dower amounting to a third part of her husband’s estate, sometimes specific lands named at the church door on her wedding day, which became hers on her husband’s

  A lady gives her heart to her lover. (Bodleian Library. MS. Bod. 264, f. 59)

  death. Even without this formal assignment, a third of his lands was legally hers, and if the heir was slow to turn it over to her, she could bring an action in the royal courts to secure it. The dower was accepted as a fixed charge throughout the feudal age, but was gradually replaced by a settlement made at the time of the marriage.

  Once married, a woman was “under the rod” or “under the power” of her husband. She could not “gainsay” him even if he sold land which she had inherited, could not plead in court without him, or make a will without his consent.

  Women recovered some of these rights when they became widows. Sometimes a widow even successfully sued to recover land sold by her husband “whom in his lifetime she could not gainsay.” But in England before Magna Carta the king could force the widows of his tenants-in-chief to remarry, and if they wished to remain unmarried or to choose their own husbands they had to pay him large fines.
Magna Carta limited the king’s power in this respect while reiterating that a widow must not marry without the consent of her lord, whether he was the king or one of the king’s vassals. Another article of Magna Carta provided that the king’s wards, whether widows or maidens, should not be “disparaged”—married to someone of lower rank.

  Consent was one of the legal conditions for marriage, and marriages could be annulled on the grounds that they had been contracted against the will of one of the parties. In 1215 King John gave young Lady Margaret, daughter of his chamberlain and widow of the earl of Devon’s heir, as a reward to the mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté. When Falkes was exiled in 1224, Margaret presented herself before the king and the archbishop and asked for an annulment, declaring that she had never consented to the marriage. On her death in 1252, Matthew Paris, characterizing the marriage as “nobility united to meanness, piety to impiety, beauty to dishonor,” quoted a Latin verse someone had written about the marriage:

  Law joined them, love and concord of the bed.

  But what kind of law? What kind of love? What kind of concord?

  Law out of law, love that was hate, concord that was discord.

  The chronicler did not mention the fact that Margaret, who had been married to Falkes for nine years and had had at least one child by him, had waited for his downfall to seek legal redress. Falkes died in Rome in 1226 while petitioning the Pope to restore his wife and her patrimony to him.