Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  The Dallingridge family, however, had not always had it so good. A century beforehand, they had been little more than prosperous peasants. Edward’s great-grandfather had been a mere forester, possessed of a few acres at a place called Dalling Ridge (near East Grinstead). When he died at the end of the thirteenth century, he left his descendants little more than the family name.

  Over the next three generations, however, the Dallingridges pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by making really good marriages. Edward’s grandfather John did very well for himself when he married the daughter of a local knight. By the time he died in the autumn of 1335, the family’s fortunes had substantially improved, and John had taken to advertising his new-found importance with a coat of arms, borrowed from his father-in-law. Edward’s father, Roger Dallingridge, did even better. He married not once but twice, firstly a rich heiress and secondly a rich widow. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Dallingridges had become thoroughly respectable. Roger served as both a Justice of the Peace and Sheriff of Sussex, and ended his days as a Member of Parliament.

  But it was Edward himself who made the last and biggest leap forward. In 1364 he married Elizabeth Wardieu, a very wealthy young lady indeed; she was heiress not just to lands in Sussex, but also to estates in Kent, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Rutland. When her father died in 1377, Edward acquired the lot, and three years later he entered into his own paternal inheritance. Edward also outperformed his ancestors by becoming the first Dallingridge ever to take up the distinction of knighthood.

  You can see how much pride Edward took in his family’s achievement when you look at the front of Bodiam Castle. Above the doors of the main gatehouse are three carved shields.

  The one in the middle is Edward’s own coat of arms, inherited from his father and acquired by his grandfather. To the left and right are the coats of arms of Edward’s wife Elizabeth and his mother Alice. Together, the three shields celebrate how far the Dallingridges had come in just a hundred years.

  While Edward was rich, however, he wasn’t super-rich. His estates were worth at least £200 a year, but that placed him on only the lower rungs of the aristocracy. He was a prosperous knight, but still a knight and not a titled nobleman. Men like him generally had to content themselves with manor houses rather than castles, because castles cost thousands and thousands of pounds. This, then, is the first part of the mystery – how could Edward Dallingridge, knight, afford to pay for Bodiam Castle?

  Several options were open to him. It is quite possible that he borrowed some money, either locally from friends or from money-lenders in London. We know that from 1381, as part of his drive to develop the Bodiam estate, he began to sell off his wife’s properties in the Midlands, and this would have raised quite a lot of cash.

  Edward had also made plenty of money from another source. Once again, the clues lie in the castle’s heraldry. Round the back of the castle, above the doorway of the rear gatehouse, are three more stone shields.

  Those on the left and right are blank, but the angled one in the middle has a heraldic design carved onto it. It is the coat of arms of Robert Knowles, perhaps the most notorious individual of his age. Born and bred in Cheshire of peasant stock, Knowles, like Dallingridge, had taken the quick route to fame and riches. His rapid rise was due to his skill as a soldier – a soldier of fortune. He owed his reputation to his own savagery; even in a brutal age, Knowles stood out as a man more brutal than any other. His fortune had been gained through making war in France – raiding cities, towns and villages, burning and destroying, plundering and looting, ransoming and killing. French peasants, it was said, would throw themselves into the river at the very mention of his name.

  His arms are displayed over the postern gate at Bodiam because, for a time, he was Edward Dallingridge’s captain in a conflict known as the Hundred Years War. Edward had been in France with Knowles, indulging in the same get-rich-quick schemes, and committing the same atrocities. Pretty little Bodiam, England’s favourite fairy-tale castle, was built with blood money.

  The Hundred Years War is not, obviously, a contemporary term. It was, like most convenient historical tags, invented in the nineteenth century by a French historian to describe a series of intermittent wars between England and France in the late Middle Ages. As such tags go, the Hundred Years War is tolerably accurate (the wars started in 1337 or 1340, depending on your viewpoint, and lasted until 1453) and perfectly serviceable.

  The origins of the conflict can be traced as far back as the Norman Conquest. William the Conqueror may have been King of England, but he was also Duke of Normandy, and he and his successors continued to hold extensive lands in what is now modern France. These reached their greatest extent under Henry II who, through a combination of great skill and sheer good luck, ended up with more lands in France than the King of France himself. King John, with characteristic incompetence, managed to lose most of his father’s Continental possessions, and from the start of the thirteenth century English kings controlled only a narrow strip of coast in the area of south-west France known as Gascony.

  By the reign of Edward I, even holding on to Gascony was starting to become difficult. As King of England, Edward bowed to no one; but as Duke of Gascony, he was in theory answerable to the King of France. From the end of the thirteenth century, the kings of France began to get designs on Gascony, and sought every excuse to interfere in the duchy’s politics on the grounds of their legal superiority.

  From an English point of view, the situation looked insoluble; then, abruptly, the picture was transformed. France had been blessed with an unbroken succession of kings since the tenth century, but in 1328, the French suddenly found they had run out of candidates. In the event, they neatly stepped around the problem, anointing a cousin of the old king as their new monarch. This manoeuvre, however, involved overlooking the claims of another candidate, King Edward III of England, who was the nephew of the late French king. For Edward, this was great news – the perfect answer to the problem of his Continental lands. Never mind his ancient right to rule Gascony; he now had a claim to rule all of France.

  It is one thing to lay claim to France; getting hold of it is much more difficult. But to everyone’s surprise (not least that of the French), Edward III did remarkably well, roundly defeating his opponents in major battles at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). The high point of the English king’s campaigns came in 1360, when he was recognized as independent ruler of most of south-western France.

  It was at this juncture that Edward Dallingridge made his first appearance in the war – or at least, so he claimed. Giving testimony as a witness in a court case in 1386, Dallingridge stated that he had been with Edward III’s army when it was camped outside Paris in the winter of 1359–60. He also stated for the record that his age was forty, which would have made him just thirteen at the time of his Parisian debut. This sounds rather fishy. Either his evidence was bent, or vanity got the better of him. The first official record we have of Edward crossing the Channel comes eight years later in 1367.

  If, however, we take Sir Edward at his word, and suppose that his baptism of fire was indeed in 1359–60, he would have had the opportunity to join Robert Knowles during the most profitable period of his career. After the battle of Poitiers in 1356, the French royal government had totally collapsed, and the whole of the country was given over to anarchy. Such circumstances offered untold opportunities for men like Knowles, and Dallingridge, to make themselves a fortune. Banding together in large well-organized gangs (known as the Free Companies), they moved through the French countryside looting, plundering and killing as they went.

  ‘They would order villages great or small to ransom themselves,’ wrote one French monk, ‘and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every inhabitant, or see them burned, as they had been in so many other places. The people appeared before the Englishmen, confused and terrified. They agreed to pay in coin, flour, grain, or other victuals in return for a temporary respite from
persecution. Those who stood in their way the English killed, or locked away in dark cells, threatening them daily with death, beating and maiming, and leaving them hungry and destitute.’

  From 1360, England and France were nominally at peace, but this hardly mattered to Knowles and his gang. According to the contemporary French chronicler Jean de Froissart, the mercenary Englishman would boast that he fought for neither the King of France nor the King of England, but for himself. Setting up camp in Brittany in western France, Knowles continued to lead raids into the interior for a further twelve months. He returned to England in 1361, having already made a vast fortune. The Free Companies, however, continued to operate in his absence, and Knowles himself returned to the fray in the 1370s and 1380s when war was officially resumed.

  In such circumstances, there was plenty of opportunity for Edward Dallingridge to make a mint, regardless of when his career actually started. We know from English Crown records that he crossed the Channel to fight at least six times during the 1360s and 1370s, participating on one occasion in a five hundred-mile march from Bordeaux to Calais and seizing a French ship, La Seinte Anne, on another. Doubtless there were other equally profitable occasions that went unrecorded. As well as terrorizing peasants and townsmen, he would also have had the occasional opportunity to go for the real jackpot – the capture and ransom of a French aristocrat. We know that later in his career Edward had at least one prisoner in his custody, and he may have had others. Even if the French nobles themselves evaded capture (by dying or escaping), it was still possible to turn a tidy profit by selling their armour, which by the fourteenth century had become very sophisticated and accordingly expensive. A full suit could fetch as much as £400 – twice what Dallingridge earned in a year from his estates.

  By the time Edward Dallingridge returned from the Hundred Years War, therefore, he was a made man. With his own inheritance, his wife’s fortune and his recent ill-gotten gains from France, he had the wherewithal to invest in a splendid new home – a building appropriate to his new found wealth and status. The early 1380s were doubtless years of sounding out architects, discussing different designs, and talking specific costs. At the same time, Edward was also trying to get his hands on a very special and specific document; a piece of parchment sealed by the king. In 1385, his wish was granted. On 20 October that year, the king sent him the following letter:

  The King to everyone who sees this letter, greeting. Know ye that, of our special grace, we have granted and given licence, as far as we can, to our dear and faithful Edward Dallingridge, knight, that he may crenellate and strengthen with a wall of stone and lime his manor house of Bodiam, next to the sea in the county of Sussex, and may make and construct it into a castle, in the defence of the country roundabout and in order to resist our enemies.

  This letter – a so-called ‘licence to crenellate’ – is the central piece of documentary evidence about Bodiam Castle. Not only does it help us date the building; it also helps to explain why Edward Dallingridge wanted a castle in the first place. Like the castle itself, however, the licence has proved to be very deceptive. Its meaning seems to be perfectly clear, but if you read between the lines, it tells us a different story about Bodiam and its owner.

  Taken at face value, the document confirms that castles are dangerous weapons. This much seems obvious from the very fact that the king felt he had to licence them. The ownership of castles, like the ownership of guns or dangerous dogs, needed to be monitored and restricted by the government. If the king did not exercise such control, who knows what he might face? In the wrong hands, castles might be used against him – just think of the trouble King John had with Rochester. Only in very special circumstances, therefore, would permission be granted to build one. But if there were extenuating circumstances, the king might choose to extend his ‘special grace and favour’ and give you a licence.

  This fits very well with the known facts about Bodiam. In the 1370s and 1380s, the Hundred Years War was not going at all well from the English point of view. The French had begun to strike back, attacking the south coast of England, raiding and burning towns like Rye, Southampton and Plymouth. In 1385 (the very year Dallingridge got his licence) the people of southern England were seized with panic when they learnt that the French had assembled a huge armada, and were making ready to invade. In such circumstances, what king could refuse one of his leading subjects the right to build a castle? The licence itself specifically links Bodiam to the raids. The castle was to be built ‘in the defence of the country’ against the French (‘our enemies’).

  This interpretation also seems to be supported by the fact that Dallingridge was not acting alone. Other men with lands in southern England, especially the counties nearest the coast, were applying for and receiving licences to crenellate at exactly the same time. In the 1380s new castles were under construction at Cooling, Penshurst, Hever and Scotney. Their owners, like Dallingridge, evidently wanted to protect their lands and their families; and they also wanted to make it clear that they were doing their bit for everyone. Dallingridge, his licence tells us, was building Bodiam to help defend the country in general. John de Cobham, who built Cooling Castle from 1381, similarly wanted us to know that he was motivated by public-spirited altruism. When his castle was finished, he took the trouble to have a little metal charter made, and fixed it over the gatehouse. It is still possible to make out the words: ‘Knowyth that be-th and schul be / That I am mad[e] in the help of the cuntre.’ What could possibly be clearer? An authentic voice from Edward Dallingridge’s day, addressing us directly, and telling us that Cooling (and, by extension, Bodiam, Hever, Scotney and others) was built for the common good in the face of threatened invasion.

  There is only one tiny problem, which is this: these noble sentiments are completely contradicted by the castles that were actually built. If Cooling really was ‘made in the help of the country’, as Cobham’s plaque proudly proclaims, why did it have towers with open backs, and why was it so badly defended on the side that faced the coast? Likewise, if Edward Dallingridge really built Bodiam ‘in the defence of the country’, as his licence to crenellate would have us believe, why is it built in such an untenable position, halfway down a hill and overlooked by higher ground to the north? As we saw earlier, the castle was not really built with defence in mind, and would hardly have been up to keeping out aggressive burglars, never mind an invading French army. We can only assume, since the castles they built were so puny, that Edward Dallingridge, John de Cobham and their ilk were not actually very frightened by the prospect of French raids at all. This, in Dallingridge’s case, is hardly surprising; Bodiam, despite what it says in the licence, is not actually very close to the sea at all; it’s a good ten-mile walk to the nearest beach.

  So why did Edward Dallingridge and others like him need to get licences for their castles if they didn’t intend to build useful military bases? The simple answer is that they didn’t actually need licences at all. Plenty of castles, some of real military value, were built without the king’s say-so. Historians, it seems, have for a long time had the whole idea of licensing completely back to front. Dallingridge and other would-be castle builders sought licences from the king not because they had to have them, but because they desperately wanted them. It was not a matter of getting planning permission; more a case of getting listed building status. Building without a licence was perilous, not because the king might turn up one day and pull your castle down, but because people might not acknowledge that your new home was a proper castle at all. Suppose, for instance, you did what Edward Dallingridge did, and built yourself a really splendid little castle – bristling with towers and battlements, decked out with portcullises, murder-holes and machicolations – and your neighbours referred to it as your house! Imagine the humiliation!

  It might sound funny, but it was no laughing matter for the upwardly mobile knight Sir William Heron. In 1338 he began building a new home at his manor of Ford in Northumberland, and took the trouble to ge
t hold of a licence to crenellate. Two years later he seems to have realized that this in itself was not going to be enough to impress the locals, so he wrote to the king again. His new crenellated house at Ford – could he please, um, call it a castle as well?

  Edward Dallingridge, as his licence shows, got it right the first time: the wording of the grant leaves no doubt that he would be entitled to call Bodiam a castle. In fact, it is now assumed that references to the clear and present danger from France were Dallingridge’s own invention – a cunningly worded case for castle ownership, intended to improve his chances of getting the royal stamp of approval. The king might not have been worried about castles being built from a military point of view, but there was nevertheless a social dimension to be considered. Castles were for kings, dukes and earls; you did not want any Tom, Dick or Harry coming back from the Hundred Years War and starting to build one. Edward Dallingridge, descended from a family of foresters, was still very much on the fringes of the nobility; it was not his God-given right to live in a castle. In order to justify his entry into the charmed circle of castle owners, he needed to dress up his private desires as communal needs, and pose as a genuine defender of England’s south coast. It hardly mattered if he then went on to build a castle that was not up to the job. Once he got his hands on the licence, he calculated, the document itself would confer greatness upon him.

  The actual licence has not survived, but it would have been a grand affair, handsomely written and sealed with the king’s great wax seal. Such documents spoke of great honour. It is important to note that it was not addressed to Edward personally, but to ‘everyone who saw it’ – it was not a private letter, but a public one, intended to be read out loud in the county court of Sussex, and perhaps put on display afterwards. It was really more like a certificate – something Dallingridge could wave under people’s noses to prove that Bodiam was indeed fit to be called a castle. From what we know of Sir Edward, the only surprise is that he didn’t go as far as John de Cobham, and have a little metal version knocked up to go over his front door.