The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  The above building programme is remarkable for the fact that it took place alongside the expenditure of more than £5,000 every year at Windsor, and about £1,000 each year at Westminster. In addition there were repairs to all the other royal buildings. In his determination to create a clean, ordered image for his dynasty, Edward spent large amounts of money just mamtaining his predecessors' castles and palaces. Quite apart from all the major works he undertook, in the course of his reign he carried out extensive repairs to the castles of Cambridge, Carisbrooke, Carlisle, Corfe, Dover, Gloucester, Guildford, Leeds, the Tower of London (including the construction of the Cradle Tower and the wharf), Ludgershall, Odiham, Porchester, Rochester, Rockingham, Scarborough, Somerton, Wallingford and Winchester. Houses built by his grandfather Edward I, such as Clarendon Palace and Havering, were also extensively repaired. And the most significant and original constructions were yet to come.

  At Nottingham Castle in 1358 a major programme of remodelling and repair began, costing more than a thousand pounds. The most obvious result was the construction of Romylow's Tower, the rebuilding and reglazing of the chapels, the rebuilding of die king's kitchen, the queen's hall, the constable's hall and the great kitchen. All of this work was destroyed in the early seventeenth century. In the same year he began work at his great palace of Sheen, near Richmond, at which William of Wykeham administered more than £2,000 on an exquisite new royal house, with fishponds, gardens, tiled courtyards, and chambers with large fireplaces, glazing in the windows, and another one of Edward's favourite additions to any residence: a 'roasting house', somewhere for his meat to be spit-roasted. Edward's work at Sheen was probably entirely destroyed by Richard II after his wife died there in 1394. Anything left standing was destroyed by fire in 1499.

  In February 1359, Edward started work on remodelling his father's favourite house at King's Langley. There he spent more than three thousand pounds, including the rebuilding of the bath house. Bathing was a high priority of Edward's, as with other medieval kings. The water supply to the bathroom in the Palace of Westminster had been controlled by bronze taps in the shape of leopards, probably attached to metal cisterns, since at least 1275. Edward II had had the bathroom tiled. But hot water itself in these places had had to be heated in earthenware pots in a furnace, and then poured into a cistern in the bathroom. At Westminster in 1351 Edward made a breakthrough, introducing what was probably the first English bathroom with hot and cold running water, with one bronze tap for hot and Another for cold. This was the system he seems to have replicated at King's Langley, where the accounts record a payment for a 'large square lead for heating water'. This hot water would then have been piped - several of his accounts record payments for pipes — into the bathroom, and, having 'turned the water on' (by giving the order for the furnace near the cistern to be lit), he could then control the flow of hot and cold water into his bath as he desired. Sadly Edward's bath house and all the splendid buildings which he, his father and grandfather had built at King's Langley were allowed to fall down by the Tudors. Henry VIII's wives were each granted the manor but spent nothing on it, and what remained was demolished in the seventeenth century.

  It was also in 1359 that Edward began work on Hadleigh Castle. Parts of this do survive - a few jagged pieces of tower masonry - but nothing of the great royal apartments which were the focus of Edward's attention. Over the next ten years he spent more than £2,300 on the castle, creating an Essex shoreline residence to balance his planned Kentish shore residence on the Isle of Sheppey. By this stage Edward was beginning to link all his multi-thousand pound residences along the water of the Thames. From Windsor, his chivalric palace, he could travel by royal barge to Isleworth (which he repaired) and Sheen (which he was rebuilding) to Westminster, the Tower of London, and Rotherhithe, a short ride from Eltham. It only required him to add his Isle of Sheppey residence and Gravesend manor for him to have a whole suite of royal palaces and castles which he could reach swiftly. These he began in the early 1360s. In 1362 he acquired the manor of Gravesend from the earl of Suffolk and began yet another lavish building, spending more than £1,350 over the next five years on improving the royal chambers and facilities and decorating the buildings he retained.

  If any loss is to be lamented as much as St Stephen's Chapel, it is Queenborough Castle. It was the only new royal castle of the later middle ages and it is-remarkable in that it was the last truly military English royal residence. Edward himself took a key role in overseeing the works. This in itself was nothing new: he always had involved himself personally with his acts of patronage, from laying the foundation stone of William Montagu's priory at Bisham (a foundation plaque for which still survives) to overseeing the rebuilding of Roxburgh, Eltham and Windsor. What is interesting about Queenborough is that it seems to have been Edward's own statement in stone about his ideas of defensive building. It was, in some senses, an amusement, almost to show off that he could design a building which was as militarily strong as his grandfather's castles in North Wales or Richard the Lionheart's Chateau Gaillard (none of which Edward had seen for himself, incidentally).

  There is no castle quite like Queenborough. Moreover, there was nothing quite like it, for today not a single stone survives. It is known from one seventeenth-century survey and an Elizabethan plan. Work began in spring 1361, Edward himself being present at the start. It was basically an enormously strong encircling wall, three hundred feet in diameter, with no towers except those overlooking the two gates. These gates, which were opposite one another, led into the castle, but not in a usual way. The main gate led to a passage which gave no access to the central part of the great fortress. Instead it acted as a barbican: anyone breaking through the main gate would have found himself trapped in this area, susceptible to arrows and other objects being thrown at him from above, on all sides. If an attacker had escaped from this he would only have been able to reach the outer court. This circular, outward-looking court, which circled the high central part of the castle and its six great circular towers, was built largely to house the trebuchets and the cannon which guarded the sea approach to London. In 1365 Edward installed two great cannon and nine small ones here, making it one of his three permanent artillery fortifications along with Dover (where there were nine cannon by 1371) and Calais (where there were fifteen). The postern gate also was guarded by a barbican, but this one gave way to the inner court of the central stronghold. It was around this inner court that the king's residence was planned. Thus at Queenborough as nowhere else we have the culmination of the royal castle as a palace, fortification and gun emplacement, an architectural masterpiece which 'exemplifies the principles of cylindrical and concentric fortification carried to their logical conclusion with perfect symmetry'. It cost Edward over twenty-five thousand pounds. He might have thought that such a huge and impressive construction would guarantee its permanence. Alas, its defensive foresight was probably its undoing. Although the mid-seventeenth-century parliamentary commissioners thought its potential as a gun emplacement was small, its concentric self-protection meant that it was too powerful and strategically important to risk letting it fall into enemy hands even at that late date. Parliament ordered it to be pulled down.

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  In the layout of Queenborough and the creation of the naval gun emplacement we can see that a technological mind was at work. In the luxury of the hot and cold running water in the bathrooms at Westminster and' King's Langley, we can see a similar technological approach. If we knew nothing about Edward and his strategies and patronage of guns and his adapting of longbow crossfire as a fighting method, we might wonder whether these developments were not due to his capable advisers. But the point at which all these technological developments meet is Edward himself. And this brings us to Edward's key area of patronage which has most definitely lasted. The use of the mechanical clock.

  The earliest mechanical clock in Europe for which we have clear evidence is often said to be the one put up at Milan in 1335. Earlier attempts t
o make a mechanical clock, using a weight and ratchet system, were certainly underway in the late thirteenth century, for in 1271 it was recorded that clockmakers were trying to make a wheel which would make exactly one full turn every day.*' Early in his reign (probably in 1332) Edward saw for himself the realisation of such ideas when he stopped by the monastery of St Albans and found the abbot, Richard Wallingford, building his clock. Wallingford had succeeded in making a machine which both chimed regular hours and showed the movements of the sun and stars. At the time Edward did not recognise the importance of this, especially as it was apparent that the abbot was neglecting his spiritual duties. But by the early 1350s he realised he had been wrong. In 1352 he paid three Italians - one described as 'the master of the clock' - to make him a mechanical timepiece in London. This and a suitable bell on which it would regularly chime the hours were transported from London to Windsor and set up in the great tower there. It had no face but rang the intervals hourly.

  Edward's first mechanical clock is a very interesting development in itself, but, when one thinks of the social implications of regulating time in this period, it suddenly becomes apparent that Edward was at the forefront of a profound European revolution. Medieval people divided the day into the twelve hours of the night and the twelve hours of the day. The day started with daylight: so each of the twelve 'hours' of daylight in summer was approximately twice as long as an 'hour' of daylight in winter. Edward, in introducing a regular timepiece, was attempting to standardise time. Moreover he was doing this in his own castle in Berkshire within fifteen years of the introduction of the practice in one of the most advanced cities at the heart of Renaissance Italy. There is something remarkable about this, especially in a war leader. Nor was it just an idle experiment. The clock at Windsor lasted, so that it needed a new bell by 1377 (at which date it was described as being called 'clokke', the earliest recorded use of the English word, derived from the French word cloche, meaning 'bell'). Long before then Edward had purchased additional mechanical bell-striking clocks for his palaces at Westminster and Langley (notably the two palaces with hot and cold running water) and his great castle at Queenborough. At Westminster he built a bell tower to contain a great bell inscribed 'Edward'. This weighed four tons, rang the hour at Westminster for more than three hundred years, and has been described as the original 'Big Ben'. The implication of all this is that he was regulating his household and his own life not around the traditional long and short hours of the day but with a standard unit of time measurement.

  Although none of Edward's clocks have survived, they nevertheless had an important cultural influence. In the same way, his buildings, paintings and other commissions - even his long-lost plate and costumes - had an influence. Just as Edward's preference for mechanically regulated hours was soon adopted by others, with mechanical clocks being introduced at Salisbury Cathedral in 1386 and Wells Cathedral in about 1390, and soon after that elsewhere around the country, so too his vanished palaces affected architectural development in later generations. Hence it would be foolish to say that his buildings or costumes are somehow less important because they have not survived to this day.

  This draws our attention to those other aspects of Edward's cultural patronage which have been obscured by destruction. Literature was never thought to be an area in which Edward scored highly except in regard to his employment of Chaucer. So when one modern scholar discovered that Edward kept a library of one hundred and sixty books at the Tower of London, not counting his books kept in other places, and that these were regularly loaned out to members of the court, the view of Edward as anti-scholarly and unbookish was exposed as a presumption based mainly on a lack of evidence. Also, among the books borrowed by Isabella in 1327 were a history of the Normans and Vegetius's De Re Militari, then the best-known and most trusted military guidebook of all. Isabella had no interest in warfare, but her fourteen-year-old son certainly did. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence which suggests that Edward was bookish. In 1335 he gave the huge sum of one hundred marks (£66 13s 4d) to Isabella of Lancaster, a nun at Amesbury, for a book which he kept for his own use. He borrowed books too; we know this because he often failed to return them. Some lavishly illuminated texts carry the arms of England and Hainault, and can therefore be said to have been commissioned by him or his wife, or presented to them. Edward's wardrobe accounts also mention romances given as occasional gifts, and list many liturgical books (graduals, missals, antiphons, chorals, martyrologies and gospels). That three or four of these are psalters accords with the idea that Edward himself only normally commissioned books for routine liturgical use or extravagant display. Texts containing historical information which he wanted he either borrowed or purchased from other magnates or ecclesiastical libraries.

  This attitude to the latent power of books - which, incidentally, is not dissimilar to that of his intellectual mentor Richard Bury - is amplified by Edward's attitude to learning The borrowing of a book on the history of Normandy mentioned above quite possibly relates to his own research, as he would have had to know something of the history of Normandy in order to spin the lines he did on the Crecy campaign. In 1332 he paid a clerk to sit down and read through all of Domesday Book to work out which towns had once been royal: not because of any sentiment but so he could think about how to tax them. History was simply a requirement of a king. But his knowledge went further than just kingly necessaries. His interests extended beyond religion, military strategy and good kingship to history and alchemy (an interest he shared with his mother and the earl of Lancaster). His summoning of two alchemists who claimed to have made silver, 'whether they would come willingly or not', should not be taken as a sign of pure covetousness. It should be remembered that a major alchemical text was dedicated to him.5' Given Edward's propensity to give books away, and considering the destruction of most medieval manuscripts in the sixteenth century, the non-existence today of a magnificent library of beautifully illuminated royal texts owned by Edward cannot be taken as evidence that his court was an anti-intellectual one, or that Edward himself was not interested in the extension of knowledge. We only need to reflect on Edward's foundation of King's Hall at Cambridge, and Philippa's foundation of Queen's Hall at Oxford, to remind ourselves that this was a court which valued learning.

  One vivid extension of this interest in the natural world is to be seen in Edward's collection of wild animals. Edward kept a large menagerie of wild beasts, especially large cats, and even paid for them to be taken with him around the country. In 1333 a payment was recorded 'to the keeper of the king's leopards', and the following year the Italian merchant Dino Forzetti was paid for providing Edward with an additional two lions, three leopards and a mountain cat. In 1334 he took these animals north with him when he moved the royal household to York, and kept them there until he turned his attention to France (at which time they returned to the Tower of London). He also owned a bear, given to him several years earlier by King David of Scotland. In later years the royal menagerie was supplemented by gifts of wild leopards and lions, including a gift of live animals from the Black Prince in 1365. Of course, nothing of the royal menagerie remains. But even the idea of Edward III as a collector of rare species has been eclipsed by the knowledge that Henry III had an elephant. That all these beasts were kept at the Tower of London is interesting, as there too was the royal lending library. The Tower of London as a resort of learning is perhaps one of the more unpredictable images to arise from a study of the life and interests of Edward III.

  So what does survive of Edward's cultural patronage which we can pick up and see for ourselves today? The answer is precious little. Almost no trace remains of the music of his court, only the payments to his minstrels and the odd motet. Of all the hundreds of gold and silver enamelled cups and goblets which we read about in the royal records, probably only one example of the type from his reign is still in existence. This belongs to King's Lynn, and, ironically, is known as the King John cup, as a result of a confusion with the
king who granted King's Lynn its charter. Hardly any cloth survives, except some parts of a horse trapper and some ecclesiastical vestments of the period. All the fantastic gold- and silver-embroidered tournament aketons and other chivalric garments have gone. As for jewellery, of all the choice items which are extant, none can be associated personally with Edward. Some texts survive but these do not make light reading. Rather it is in the literary creations encouraged by the successes of his reign that we may find cultural importance, the poetical works of Chaucer, Gower and Langland, the histories of his exploits in the works of le Baker, Froissart, Gray, Murimuth, Avesbury and the author and translator of the longer Brut, and the imaginative works, such as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville of which various copies are known with supposed dedications to Edward.