Castle (10 page)

It wasn’t just food the constable had to worry about. Fresh reeds had to be cut as bedding for those sleeping in the castle, and fresh oats and hay were gathered for the many horses that would need stabling. All these preparations, as well as any repairs to the castle, had to be carried out quickly, and the whole place had to be cleaned from top to bottom before the lord arrived.

An eighteenth-century cross-section of Hedingham
.

On arrival, the focus of the lord and his household would have been the castle’s great hall. The hall was celebrated in medieval literature as the place of light, warmth and good cheer. The household would have dined here with the lord, his lady and their noble guests seated at one end at the high table, and the remainder of the household at tables to either side. During dinner they might have been entertained by musicians or storytellers. The twelfth century was a
golden
age for troubadour poets, and they often wrote for aristocratic patrons, especially rich women. Like a hall in a school or college, the hall could be used for solemn ceremonies as well as elaborate feasts. Then, when the feasting was over, the hall served as a bedchamber for all but the most important members of the household. The hall, in short, was all-important.

But where was it? In old guidebooks to castles, it is often assumed that the hall was part of the keep. In many ways, this is a natural assumption, given the grandeur of certain chambers in towers like Dover and Orford. The chambers on the second floor of the keeps at Rochester and Hedingham are in each case the grandest rooms of all, stretching to twice the height of the other rooms, and both surrounded by a gallery built into the thickness of the outer wall. Without question, these rooms are ‘halls’ of some kind. But is either of them the main hall, where the household dined and slept? A close study of both buildings suggests perhaps not. For one thing, most great towers don’t have integral kitchens (though there are exceptions – Castle Rising in Norfolk, for example, has one). Any food cooked at Rochester or Hedingham must have been prepared in a separate kitchen, which stood in the bailey. If, therefore, a feast was held at either castle, the kitchen staff would have had a long walk across the open courtyard of the bailey and up two different sets of stairs before they even reached the entrance to the second floor. It seems far more likely that the feasting took place in a separate hall in the bailey, positioned next to the kitchen so that the food could be brought in with ease. Few such bailey halls survive today, but we have already seen that Roger of Montgomery had a great hall in the bailey of Hen Domen. Rare examples of stone halls in the bailey survive at Richmond Castle in Yorkshire, and also at Great Oakham in Rutland.

So if they were not for dining, what was the purpose of the halls in the towers at Rochester and Hedingham? Clearly they were not
private
chambers, because in both cases they are overlooked by galleries. They were, it has been suggested, purely ceremonial spaces. We might call them presence chambers: grand rooms where their owners could sit in state, receive important guests, and hold court. This, of course, did not necessarily prevent them from being used for dining if the owner thought it appropriate – feasting was also a matter of ceremony. Of course, it would have meant that the kitchen staff had to work much harder; but then there is no evidence to suggest that medieval magnates ever worried unduly about making life hard for other people.

The countersunk roof of the keep at Richmond Castle
.

Most great towers, like their wooden counterparts, provided additional accommodation for their owners. At Rochester, the top floor of the castle is thought to have contained private sleeping chambers for the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as a very large and ornate
private
chapel for his personal use. Similar sleeping quarters existed at Dover and the Tower of London. At Hedingham, however, there was originally no such private space for the lord to rest his head. Although from outside, the keep appeared to have four floors (like Rochester), the top floor was in fact a ‘dummy’ – the walls, despite their windows, merely concealed a countersunk roof. The present third floor is actually a late medieval addition – a very early example of loft conversion. Such ‘dummy’ floors were not, in fact, uncommon – the keeps at both Richmond and Scarborough were similarly constructed. The point in each case was that the tower should look big and impressive, so that everyone could see it for miles around; a useful reminder that keeps were constructed for their ceremonial and symbolic value as much as their residential and defensive potential.

The interior of castles like Rochester and Hedingham, therefore, can tell us a great deal about the needs and pretensions of their owners, and the kinds of activities that they considered important. It is appropriate to dwell on these peacetime functions, because castles are too often regarded in exclusively military terms. One of the great myths about the nobility of the Middle Ages is that they loved nothing better than to wage war against the king or, failing that, each other. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, medieval aristocrats relished the practice of arms, and used their prowess to justify their high position in society: it would be disingenuous to call them peace-loving, or even peaceable individuals. But they were not marauding idiots (in most cases, at least), and were well aware that peace brought material advantages. In order to build castles, stuff them with nice things, and put enough venison and pheasant on the table, kings and barons alike depended on a steady flow of cash. They needed their tenants to pay rent and their bailiffs to sell off agriculture surpluses. Put crudely, great magnates were landlords and farmers, and as such they sought to safeguard their income by protecting their tenants
rather
than terrorizing them. Nothing is more damaging to the economy than war, and for that reason most right-thinking individuals did their best to avoid it.

However, then, as now, politics and principles could on rare occasions force men – even men who were normally peaceable – to take up arms. When they did so, castles became all-important, and warfare was all about the struggle to control them.

On 11 October 1215, a crack troop of a hundred knights arrived at the gates of Rochester Castle and demanded to be admitted. The constable of the castle, Sir Reginald de Cornhill, did not hesitate, for he had been expecting them. The drawbridge was lowered, the doors swung open, and the horsemen swept inside.

These men were rebels, come into Kent on a highly dangerous mission. Earlier in the year, along with scores of other noblemen, they had seized control of London in defiance of their king. In recent days, however, they had started to sense that the tide was turning against them, and had therefore decided to take action. Selected by their fellows as the bravest and most skilled in arms, they had ridden south-east to open up a second front. If London was to hold out, they knew they had to distract the king, and draw his fire away from the capital.

Their plan, in this respect, was brilliantly successful. Two days later, a royal army drew up outside the walls of Rochester. King John had arrived.

John was the youngest son of Henry II, and the runt of his father’s litter. He is familiar to all of us as the bad guy from the Robin Hood stories – the snivelling villain who betrayed his elder brother, ‘Good’ King Richard the Lionheart, and made a grab for the English throne. It will hardly surprise most people to learn that this picture of John is a caricature – the Robin Hood legends originated long after the
king
was dead. Nevertheless, even if we scrape off all the mud that has been flung at John over the centuries, he still emerges as a highly unpleasant individual, and a man unsuited to the business of ruling. Contemporaries might not have recognized the hideous, depraved monster of legend, but they would have acknowledged the basic truth of the matter – John was a Bad King.

To find out what people really thought about King John, we have to leave the stories of Robin Hood, and turn instead to another piece of writing, very different but no less famous. In 1215, shortly before they set off to seize Rochester Castle, John’s enemies compiled a list of complaints about him, and presented it to the king in the hope of persuading him to behave better in the future. The list was drawn up in the form of a charter and, because it was so long, the charter itself was very big. People soon started referring to it simply as the Big Charter; or, in Latin,
Magna Carta
.

So, by looking at Magna Carta, we can work out why people were annoyed with King John. What aggravated them most, it seems, was the way in which he constantly helped himself to their cash; the first clauses of the Charter are all concerned with limiting the king’s ability to extort money. In 1204, five years into his reign, John had suffered a major military and political disaster when he lost Normandy, Anjou and Poitou to the king of France. These provinces had formed the heart of John’s empire, and trying to get them back had kept him busy for the past ten years. Ultimately, however, by plotting his recovery, John was paving the way to his own downfall. The cost of building an alliance to strike back against the French king was enormous, especially because it was John’s misfortune to rule at a time when inflation was causing prices (of mercenaries, for example) to soar. With increasing frequency, John passed the costs on to his English subjects, imposing ever greater and more frequent taxes, fining them large sums of money for trivial offences, and demanding huge amounts of cash in return for nothing more than his grace and
favour
. Very quickly, John managed to create a situation where the people who didn’t want him in charge outnumbered those who did – a dangerous scenario for any political leader.

In some respects, however, the rebellion that the king faced in 1215 was not entirely his own fault. Both his father and his brother had governed England in much the same fashion, expanding their power at the expense of the power of their barons. One very visible way of measuring their success is by looking at their castles. At the start of Henry II’s reign in 1154, only around 20 per cent of all castles in the country were royal. The two decades before Henry’s accession had seen a proliferation of private castles (mostly motte and baileys) built without the king’s consent. One of Henry’s first actions as king was to order (and, where necessary, to compel) the destruction of such fortifications. Moreover, Henry and his sons, as we have seen, built new castles – big, impressive stone towers like Newcastle, Scarborough, Orford, and Odiham. By the time of John’s death, the ratio of royal castles to baronial ones had altered drastically; almost half the castles in England were in royal hands. Castles, therefore, provide a good index of the king’s power against the power of his barons.

It is evident that the rebels brought long-term grievances such as this to the negotiating table in 1215, because John tried to address them in Magna Carta.

‘If anyone has been dispossessed without legal judgement from his lands or his castles by us,’ the king said, ‘we will immediately restore them to him.’

But John went on to add that his subjects should make allowances for anyone who had been similarly dispossessed ‘by King Henry our father, or King Richard our brother’. Such hair-splitting, however, ignored the basic truth of the matter, which was that Henry and Richard were simply better kings than John. They were skilled warriors, while he was condemned for his cowardice. Although he
proved
a capable administrator (John could be dynamic and efficient when it came to collecting taxes), he was a bad manager, unfit to command the loyalties of his leading subjects, unable to check or channel their ambitions, and uneven in his distribution of rewards. Most of all, John was just an unpleasant guy. He sniggered when people talked to him. He didn’t keep his word. He was tight-fisted and untrusting. He even seduced the wives and daughters of some of his barons. Henry and Richard might have acted unfairly from time to time, but overall people liked them; almost nobody liked John.