Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  It is also important to stress that there is no sense in which the great tower ‘evolved’ from the wooden tower on top of a motte. Stone castles were, of course, bigger, stronger and taller, nicer to live in and much more expensive to build. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, they originated in France at exactly the same time as wooden ones. Likewise, timber castles continued to be built in England and France well into the thirteenth century. It is not a case of a ‘Wood Age’ being followed by a ‘Stone Age’. The switch to the building of keeps cannot be represented as a technological advance; one type of castle did not ‘develop’ out of the other. Nevertheless, stone castles themselves did develop, and by the time Rochester was constructed, building a keep was the norm – for the tiny minority of castle-owners rich enough to afford one. The twelfth century was the golden age of the great tower.

  Although Rochester is an early example of this type of building, it is by no means the earliest. In England, the tradition of building towers began with the most famous of them all – the Tower of London. Today, when people talk of ‘the Tower’, they mean the entire complex of royal buildings that occupies the south-eastern corner of the City. They also tend to think of it in terms of its later history as a Tudor prison – a place of ravens, Beefeaters and beheadings. Yet all the important buildings on the site were erected long before Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth I gave them their bloody reputation. The Tower was built not as a prison, but as a castle – arguably the most important castle in England. Most of the outer walls, towers and chambers are the work of England’s thirteenth-century kings. The building at the heart of the complex, however, which has given its name to the whole, was constructed earlier still. The White Tower was the work of William the Conqueror, and it was the first keep in England.

  If motte-and-bailey castles came as a shock to the Anglo-Saxons, then the new castle that William started to build beside the Thames in the 1070s must have knocked them for six. The Anglo-Saxons had seen stone buildings before (many churches were built in stone), but they were not internationally renowned for their masonry skills. Before the Norman Conquest, the kings of England were accustomed to living in wooden halls, much as their distant Germanic ancestors had done. In fact, when the Anglo-Saxons talked about ‘building’, they used the word timbrian; if an Englishman told you he was going to build something, you took it for granted he was talking about woodwork.

  In France, of course, building a stone residence would not have raised nearly as many eyebrows. But even the most sophisticated French mason would have been surprised and impressed by the scale of the building project that William had embarked upon in London. Nothing on the Continent could compare in size and grandeur with the Tower. It has recently been suggested that the smaller tower of Ivry-la-Bataille in Normandy, now in ruins, might have provided the inspiration for the basic shape, but the scale of William’s new building was entirely novel.

  So what prompted William the Conqueror and his engineers to build on such a scale, and to build in stone? Even today, the Tower is a hugely impressive building, and impressing people was without doubt one of William’s intentions: this was a building project which said that the Normans were here to stay.

  Monumental pride, however, might be only half the story. The other way of understanding the Tower is to imagine how nervous and edgy the Normans were in the 1070s – it was, after all, still only a few years after the Conquest, and the English continued to be obstinate and rebellious. In more peaceful circumstances, if a king wanted a palace complex, he might have preferred to distribute the buildings – the hall, the chapel, the bedrooms – over a wider area. Instead, what William and his architect decided to do was to stack all these rooms one on top of the other, and encase the whole structure in immensely thick stone walls. A great tower like this might be first and foremost a monument to vanity, but it also betrays a crucial element of fear.

  Whatever the actual inspiration, the final result was an astounding building. Measuring 107 by 118 feet at its base, and standing 90 feet high, William and his sons created a giant among castles. Construction on this scale had not been witnessed in Britain since the time of the Romans. The Normans were well aware of this, and seem to have been deliberately styling themselves as new Romans, come a-conquering in imperial style. William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s sycophantic biographer, regularly compares his royal master to Julius Caesar (William was better, naturally), and suggests that the king’s leading men were equivalent in wisdom and power to the Roman senate. It is possible to see this attitude reflected wherever William built in stone. At the Tower of London, parts of the old Roman city wall were incorporated into the wall of the castle’s bailey. At Colchester, the former Roman capital, William built another great tower, very similar in design to the Tower of London and probably created by the same architect. Although it now stands only two storeys high (and, thanks to misguided restoration in the eighteenth century, looks faintly ridiculous), it was once even bigger than its London counterpart. The new building was constructed on the ruins of the old Roman Temple of Claudius. This, of course, gave the Normans a convenient head-start, but importantly it also emphasized their authority as rulers. Finally, at Chepstow in Wales, the castle’s original two-storey stone hall still stands on the cliff-top high above the River Wye. Once thought to be a creation of William’s close friend, William Fitz Osbern, it has recently been reinterpreted as an audience chamber built for the king himself, perhaps in order to receive tribute from his Welsh subjects. Again, it is a building with Roman resonances. It was built with materials taken from the nearby Roman town of Caerwent, and decorated throughout in an imperial style.

  So William the Conqueror’s great towers in London and Colchester, and the hall-keep at Chepstow, are our prototype English keeps. Few other stone towers can be dated with certainty to the period before 1100. Taken together, these buildings provided inspiration for the next generation of castle-builders, and supplied them with a model for the next hundred years. By the time building work began at Rochester Castle, some fifty years later, the prototype had settled down into something approaching an archetype.

  Despite its monumental size, Rochester is in many ways a ‘typical’ building of its time. On the one hand, it shares many features with the stone castles that William constructed. Like the Tower of London, Rochester was built to be strong and defensible. At its base, its walls are twelve feet thick, and only slightly thinner at the top, where they narrow to ten and a half feet. The windows on the lower floors are small, only becoming larger towards the top of the building.

  But while there are superficial similarities between William’s buildings and castles of later decades, there are also important differences. Whereas both the Tower of London and Colchester Castle are quite squat in appearance (Colchester, even at its full height, was broader than it was tall), Rochester is a slender, soaring building, four storeys in height compared to the Tower’s three. While William’s architect was apparently inspired by a Continental original at Ivry in Normandy, the mason who built Rochester seems to have based his design on the giant castle at Loches in France.

  However, the biggest difference between Rochester and earlier towers in England is in the nature of its entrance. William’s towers were entered via a first-floor doorway, reached by means of an external wooden stair. At Rochester, the entrance was much more elaborate: the front of the building was covered by an additional wing, known as the forebuilding. This became a fairly typical feature of towers in the twelfth century: an entrance block contrived to frustrate attackers and impress visitors. To get into Rochester Castle, friend or foe had to mount a stone staircase that snaked around the base of the tower, creating a passageway that could be blocked with portcullises and barred with a drawbridge. Clearly, this was a building whose owner, if he wanted to, could keep you out. At the same time, however, it was equally important for a castle-owner to impress his guests. At Rochester, once visitors had negotiated the grand sweep of the outer stairway, they were
admitted to the entrance level of the forebuilding. This room, of course, would shield the castle’s main doorway from a direct assault. But it is also a very large and impressive chamber, with high ceilings and beautiful rounded archways, decorated with the chevron or zigzag pattern that the Normans liked so much. As at other castles, it was probably intended as a waiting room, where visitors would be deliberately delayed, giving them time to admire the building, and putting them in a mood of suitable reverence prior to meeting the owner.

  The slender stone tower, with a forebuilding over its entrance, was the commonest design for keeps in the twelfth century. But while these buildings share certain basic characteristics, it is important to stress the enormous overall variety in their design. In one way or another, each one is different from its peers, and there are many examples that are far removed from the simple stone box. In Suffolk, for example, the little stone keep at Orford is a particularly ingenious and intentionally whimsical creation, with circular rooms and three large buttressing towers. More imposing and hardly less original, the tall, almost windowless keep at Conisbrough is a similarly rounded and buttressed affair. At Norwich, the great keep, much-restored in the nineteenth century, is thought to belong to the early decades of the twelfth century and has no close parallels in England, except nearby Castle Rising, which was clearly inspired by its bigger neighbour. But whatever shape he settled on, the twelfth-century lord who wanted to dazzle his neighbours was going to be building a great tower. From the start of the century, new keeps were constructed up and down the country, from Newcastle in the north to Porchester in the south; altogether, more than fifty had been erected by the century’s end. Dover in Kent, one of the last to be built, was also one of the greatest – a final hurrah for the keep, and a worthy descendant of the Tower of London.

  To build on this scale, of course, took enormous resources, and for this reason many of the more important keeps were built by kings. In twelfth-century England, there were four of them: Henry I (1100–35), Stephen (1135–54), Henry II (1154–89) and Richard I (1189–99). From the point of view of castle building, Stephen and Richard were not very important. Stephen was too busy fighting his cousin Matilda for control of the country throughout his troubled reign, and had neither the time nor the money to invest in large-scale building projects. Richard I does enjoy a reputation as a castle-builder, but it derives from his magnificent new fortress (Château Gaillard) at Les Andelys in Normandy, rather than the improvements that he carried out to his English castles. Our great castle-building kings in the twelfth century are the two Henrys. Henry I, youngest son of William the Conqueror, was a famously unpleasant individual, but nevertheless a noted builder of stone castles. Usually credited with the huge keep at Norwich, he is also thought to have built new towers at Canterbury, Gloucester and Corfe. He ruled England successfully, through a combination of administrative genius and calculated brutality (unlike Edward I, who only does it in a Hollywood film, Henry really did throw one of his enemies out of a castle window). As Duke of Normandy, however, Henry had a much harder time, and therefore invested most of his castle-building budget in his troubled dukedom. The king was responsible for the keeps at Caen, Domfront and Arques, as well and repairs and rebuildings at other Norman castles.

  The prize for building keeps in England, however, must go to Henry II. Always remembered for his ill-timed rhetorical question, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’, Henry II also deserves lasting fame as England’s pre-eminent builder of great towers. At the start of his reign, young Henry’s position was the opposite to that of his namesake and grandfather, Henry I. With strong support from his Norman barons, the new king’s grip on his Continental inheritance had long been secure. In England, however, he was a newcomer, and found at his accession that the power of the Crown had been much diminished during the war-torn reign of his predecessor, King Stephen. Henry therefore set about re-establishing the Crown’s authority, and he did this in the most visible way possible – by building castles. The king was responsible for brand new keeps at Scarborough, Newcastle, Orford and Dover, as well as the small keep at the Peak in Derbyshire, and perhaps a now-vanished tower at Nottingham.

  But, as with motte and baileys, the building of stone towers was not exclusively a royal affair. Great barons of the twelfth century also adopted the stone tower design, and built some of the most distinguished and important examples. Rochester, of course, was built by the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Conisbrough was built by Henry II’s half-brother Hamelin. The giant square keep at Kenilworth was built by the Sheriff of Warwick, and the vanished keep at Bungay was erected by the Earl of Norfolk. Several of these baronial towers were constructed during the reign of King Stephen, who, along with his rival Matilda, embarked on a policy of creating new earls in order to win support. Building a keep was an excellent way of proclaiming one’s own new-found importance, and there is good reason to think that it was recent ennoblement that inspired the building of towers at Hedingham and Castle Rising.

  When it comes to working out how much these castles cost, however, we have to rely on royal examples, because Crown records always survive much better than their aristocratic equivalents. For our detailed knowledge of costs in the twelfth century, we have to thank Henry I. Henry, when he wasn’t indulging his enormous sexual appetite (he had a string of mistresses before and after his marriage, and fathered at least twenty bastard children) was busy inventing new ways to govern the country. He is credited not only with the introduction of a new breed of administrative sheriff to manage his affairs in the English counties, but also with the creation of a new financial court to check on their activities. Twice a year, his sheriffs were obliged to come before the officers of this court and account for all the money they had received from rents, fines and taxes. The process was made easier with the help of a large visual and mathematical aid – a kind of abacus, with counters placed on a chequered cloth. Almost at once, people began to refer to the court as the Exchequer. When a sheriff was summoned before it, he either had to produce the money he owed, or give a good reason for its absence. One such good reason might be the building of a royal castle in the county at the king’s orders. Provided the sheriff could account for the money he had spent on building (produce receipts, if you like), the corresponding amount would be deducted from what he owed.

  Amazingly, the records of the Exchequer have survived. The clerks wrote up their accounts on huge parchment rolls, known as ‘pipe rolls’ (for the simple reason that, when rolled up, they looked like pipes). Using these ancient documents, we can find out rough costs for royal castles, and also gauge the length of time it took to build them.

  The sad thing is that although Henry I invented the whole accounting system, only one roll survives from his reign. As a result, we are not very well informed about the king’s castle-building activities. In fact, early twelfth-century towers – whether royal ones like Norwich, or baronial ones like Rochester – belong to a mysterious Dark Age, almost entirely unilluminated by written records. Fortunately, in Rochester’s case, we know from a copy of a royal charter that building began in 1127; and a Kentish chronicler noted in passing that the Archbishop of Canterbury began to construct ‘a noble tower’ at this time. But as to how long it took to build the mighty keep, and how much it cost, we can only make intelligent guesses by comparing it with examples from later in the century.

  From the start of Henry II’s reign, the pipe rolls survive in an almost unbroken series, and we can calculate the cost of some of the king’s keeps. The great tower at Dover, for example, which is shorter than Rochester but bigger at the base, cost around £4,000 and took ten years to build (1180–90). The much smaller keep that Henry built at Orford cost about £1,500 and took just six years to build (1166–72). With these figures in mind, and allowing for a small amount of inflation, the keep at Rochester must have cost at least £3,000, and taken between eight and ten years to construct.

  To the modern reader, of course, these sound
like castles at knock-down prices. When you look at the contemporary pay packets, however, you begin to realize that would-be castle-owners had to start saving early. In the twelfth century, an unskilled labourer earned a penny a day, while a skilled labourer might take home tuppence. A fully armed knight, risking life and limb and providing his own kit, would expect to receive a shilling (twelve pence) in return for a day’s military service. Only at the top of the scale did things start to improve. The king’s annual income – which was also the government’s annual budget – was somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 a year. Even for the king, therefore, building a tower like Dover or Rochester would absorb between a quarter and a third of his money for a year, or 3 to 4 per cent of his annual budget spread over a decade. In the twelfth century, then, there were only a handful of people who could afford to build a great tower.

  What our records cannot tell us is how these towers were actually built. We have to wait until the thirteenth century before we get really detailed building accounts for castles (see Chapter Three). Occasionally, the pipe rolls will record the name of the architect or mason working on a particular building. Henry II’s favourite builder, responsible for the keeps at Dover and Newcastle, was one Maurice the Engineer. In almost every other case, however, the names of the geniuses who designed and erected these wonderful buildings are lost to us.

  The towers themselves, however, provide us with some clues as to how they were built. Rochester, for example, was constructed with two types of stone. Most of it is Kentish ragstone, very probably quarried near Maidstone, and shipped from there up the River Medway to Rochester. The fine details, however – the fireplaces, the window arches, and the cornerstones – are fashioned from a softer stone, more suitable for carving. This is Caen stone, which (as the name suggests) had to be transported from Caen in Normandy, a journey of over a hundred miles. Tons and tons of stone, quarried in northern France, ferried hundreds of miles by scores of ships over dozens of voyages – this is the scale of the enterprise we have to imagine to explain how Rochester Castle came to be built.