Castle (26 page)

The Stewarts took their name from one Walter, who was steward to the king of Scots. They came to the throne in 1371 and held it right up until the late seventeenth century. Their rule is seen as traumatic and bloody; almost all of them came to a sticky end. James I was stabbed to death; Mary Queen of Scots was executed; James II, James III and James IV were all killed in battle. In addition to their propensity for dying horribly and being called James, the Stewarts have a reputation for being bad rulers – utterly useless, dangerously violent, or irrepressibly lazy, and sometimes a mix of all three. As such, history’s judgement on them tends to be that they got what they deserved.

The Stewarts’ notoriety is exceeded only by that of the people they governed. The Scottish nobility, according to one historian in the last century, ‘were probably the most turbulent, rapacious and ignorant in Europe’. The lords of Scotland, according to this line of thinking, were in fact so utterly despicable that the merely deplorable kings seemed almost good by contrast. Scottish history under the Stewarts therefore reads like one long drawn out fight between the kings and nobles. Locked in an endless round of bloody power struggles, they both slugged it out for centuries, until eventually the kings won the day.

If this was the reality for the Scots in the late Middle Ages, small wonder they chose to shut themselves away in strong stone towers. But is this
really
what life was like in medieval Scotland? The answer, which you probably saw coming, is no. When you start to look closely at the castles themselves, and the careers of the men who built them, a very different picture of Scotland emerges – one that stands the old version of the story completely on its head.

Until the middle of the fourteenth century, castle-building in Scotland was much the same as it was in England and Wales, although the timing was somewhat different. Motte-and-bailey castles arrived in
Scotland
slightly later than in England, coming with Norman settlers in the early decades of the twelfth century. Also, perhaps because castles (and Normans) arrived late, Scotland never witnessed the building of great keeps. By the thirteenth century, however, Scottish castle-building had caught up, and the new castles that were being built were almost indistinguishable from those south of the border. Leading Scottish noblemen, often related by marriage to their English counterparts, built great curtain-wall or enclosure castles; like the castles of Edward I in Wales, these were characterized by circuits of high walls, round towers and imposing gatehouses. Good examples include the mighty castle at Bothwell (near Glasgow) and the somewhat smaller Caerlaverock. Both were built in the second half of the thirteenth century.

A particularly fine example of a great curtain-wall castle is Tantallon in East Lothian. It was built by Sir William Douglas, probably to mark his elevation to the peerage as the first Earl Douglas in February 1358. He economized somewhat by choosing to build on a spur of land that stuck out into the sea. With sheer cliffs on all but one side, the site required only one great stretch of wall for protection, and the result is a very dramatic and unusual-looking castle. Nevertheless, Tantallon clearly belongs to the same tradition as Bothwell and Caerlaverock. The great curtain wall has a large gatehouse, and once had two round towers (both of which have now partly collapsed and fallen into the sea).

For all its former splendour, however, Tantallon was the last of a dying breed. Scottish nobles had given up building castles on this scale. Even as Sir William was putting the final touches to Tantallon, his cousin, Archibald Douglas, was busy on the other side of Scotland, building to a different design – one that would endure for the next three centuries. Archibald, known to his contemporaries and to posterity as ‘Archibald the Grim’, had also been promoted. In September 1369 he was made Lord of Galloway in the extreme southwest of Scotland. But rather than build a curtain-wall castle like his cousin, Archibald had decided to mark his elevation by building a tower house.

Archibald’s tower, known as Threave Castle, is a grand affair. Now slightly diminished in stature, it once stood around eighty feet high. At such a size, it is reminiscent of the great towers of Norman England, and it might therefore seem that Archibald simply resurrected an old and unfashionable design that had been around for at least three hundred years. In fact, if he was following any form of fashion, it probably originated closer to home. Some historians are inclined to see the origins of tower houses like Threave in the
brochs
of Dark Age Scotland.

There is, however, enough to distinguish the tower house of the fourteenth century from any of its suggested ancestors. Some of the differences are stylistic. Tower houses tend to have one or more barrel-vaulted ceilings, rather than the wooden floors typically found in Norman keeps. Those who cling to the blood-and-guts view of Scottish history say that this was because your average tower-house owner lived in perpetual fear of attack, and built stone ceilings to stop his tower being torched; but the difference may have been for more mundane reasons. Wooden flooring requires a lot of very large oak trees, which were less readily available in Scotland than stone. Another minor difference is that Scottish towers, especially later ones, did not have portcullises. Instead, entrances were barred with a simple but sturdy iron gate, called a ‘yett’. Furthermore, some tower houses, especially later ones, are entered by a door on the ground floor, whereas keeps are always entered on the first floor.

The major difference, however, between a Scottish tower house and a Norman keep is one of function. Keeps were not intended to be self-contained and (as we saw in
Chapter Two
) may have been intended more for ceremonial use than day-to-day living. While they typically contained accommodation, they needed to be supported by a range of additional buildings in the bailey, not least a kitchen and a hall. Tower houses, on the other hand, were built to be self-contained. In every case, a tower house contains not only bedrooms, but also a hall, a kitchen and storerooms.

This difference of function has coloured people’s view of tower houses. Because they are self-contained, they have been seen as ‘closed up’ and ‘inward looking’. While keeps are seen as being proud, assertive, defiant, and often architecturally exuberant buildings, tower houses, by contrast, have been seen as plain, dark, and forbidding. Keeps, built in towns or villages, dominate and overawe their surroundings. Tower houses are often as not built in isolated locations. Cut off on rocky peninsulas, stranded on lonely hills, they seem to speak not so much of domination but retreat. They are seen, in short, as the product of a mind-set that regarded itself as under threat, and constantly in danger of attack. The tower house is the paranoia of the Scottish medieval nobility, expressed in stone.

This idea certainly seems to be borne out when one looks at Threave. A great, forbidding tower, unadorned and unwelcoming, the castle stands alone on an island in the middle of the River Dee. Even today, it is only accessible via a mile-long footpath and a boat ride across the river. It is hard to imagine a building being more remote. As if this is not proof enough, another feature suggests a permanent siege mentality – around the base of the tower is an artillery platform: a strong wall of stone with towers at each corner, designed both to carry cannon and to protect the castle from bombardment. All in all, Archibald’s tower appears to have been as grim as the man himself.

An aerial of Threave taken in the 1970s showing the excavated buildings
.

First appearances, though, can be deceptive. When you start to dig a little deeper, a very different picture emerges. This is exactly what Chris Tabraham and a team of archaeologists did in the mid 1970s. What started out as a straightforward job of preserving and consolidating the masonry of the artillery wall soon expanded to become one of the more remarkable archaeological digs of recent times – one which blew the idea of Threave as an isolated military outpost clean out of the water. The major discovery was that the artillery wall had been built over the foundations of a set of earlier domestic buildings. Adjacent to the tower were the remains of a very large rectangular block, almost certainly a great hall. At right angles to this building stood another stone structure, longer but narrower, interpreted as a second suite of rooms, possibly including a chapel. On the basis of their smaller archaeological finds, Chris and his colleagues concluded that they must have been constructed at the same time as the tower. And these stone buildings were not the only ones on the site: spreading out from the castle, and filling almost all the habitable part of Threave Island, was what amounted to a small village of lesser buildings made of wood. These could be reached by means of a causeway that ran from the southern tip of the island to the opposite bank of the river.

So Threave had a very different appearance in Archibald the Grim’s day. It was not an isolated tower, but a whole complex of castle buildings, surrounded by a bustling community. The nature of this community was further revealed by the fantastic small finds – one of the most important archaeological collections of medieval Scottish artefacts. Some of the finds, like the excavated buildings, were high status; they included a seal-matrix and an extremely well-preserved
silver
locket. No less valuable, however, were the everyday items that were uncovered in the castle’s harbour. Because of the muddy, waterlogged conditions, all kinds of ordinary wooden and leather items (which in normal conditions would have perished) were preserved at Threave. Several shoes were unearthed, some of them so small that they had obviously once belonged to children. Wooden tableware was also discovered, including bowls and plates stamped with the symbol of the Douglas family, the Bloody Heart (Archibald’s father, James Douglas, had carried the heart of Robert the Bruce on crusade with him, in accordance with the late king’s wishes). Even a small wooden gaming counter was found, very well carved and evidently part of a set used for playing draughts or backgammon.

Such a hoard of everyday items is a useful reminder that castles, even Scottish castles, were homes to their owners 99 per cent of the time, and were rarely put to military use. They indicated that in the late fourteenth century, Threave was not a castle full of grizzled soldiers, but a community of men, women and children going about fairly humdrum business, and leading perfectly ordinary lives.

If this sounds like a rather poor exchange for the blood-and-guts version of Scottish history we have all come to know and love, you will be pleased to know that we can only push this archaeological evidence so far. Even if we concede that the castle was not ‘closed up’, that the women wore silver lockets, the children wore shoes and everybody enjoyed the odd game of chequers, certain other facts about the castle and its history are inescapable. Most obviously, the main building is almost eighty feet tall. It has (or had) a battlemented roof, and you can still see holes for joists that would have supported a wooden hoarding or fighting platform around the top of the whole tower. Even if we picture the castle stripped of its artillery platform, and imagine instead the vanished stone buildings standing nearby, it still seems very clear that this was a building designed to hold its own
in
wartime. No amount of imaginative recasting is going to turn Archibald the Grim’s tower house into a holiday home.

The political circumstances of his promotion to the lordship of Galloway are also worth remembering. In the late fourteenth century, Galloway was a war-torn region. The loyalty of its people to the kings of Scotland was highly doubtful; in recent decades they had sided with the English against the Scottish crown. Archibald was a veteran of the wars against the English, sent to Galloway to control and pacify the area. He was a man with a fierce reputation, and had not earned his nickname by playing board games.

Archibald could have chosen to build at Threave for any number of reasons. To some extent his choice of location may have been symbolic. The island is said to have been the seat of power for the native rulers of Galloway since the eleventh century. If so, then Archibald had in part chosen the site to make a statement: not quite so bold and imperious a statement as William the Conqueror or Edward I (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), but nonetheless a significant statement of authority (‘There’s a new sheriff in town’).

Likewise, the decision to build a tower can be read in other ways. Towers were becoming fashionable, and tall buildings are always popular with those who wish to express domination and power. However, whatever deeper meanings we ascribe to the castle and its location, we must not ignore the old-fashioned functional considerations. Threave Island is wonderfully well defended by nature, and Archibald’s tower is also well equipped to withstand a military assault. So yes, Archibald was making a statement with Threave. It may not be an isolated and inward-looking building and, yes, he built a castle that scores of people eventually regarded as home; but whichever way you look at it, Archibald the Grim was clearly expecting trouble.