Castle (13 page)

With or without an accompaniment of squealing pigs, the scene that followed must have been both horrifying and spectacular. Torches were introduced to the tunnels. Deep underground, the kindling caught and the pig fat crackled. Flames started to lick the fatty wooden props and, as the fire grew to a roar, the props started to snap. Suddenly, the ground above the mine fell away. The great keep shuddered and split. With a final deafening roar, a quarter of the building came crashing to the ground.

The dust had hardly settled before John’s men were pouring into the keep through the gaping hole. Amazingly, in spite of the terror and confusion that the collapse must have caused, the men inside fought on. The south-east corner of the keep had been reduced to rubble, but its great cross-wall remained standing; using this, the rebels mounted a last, desperate line of defence. It was successful: try as they might, the king’s men were still unable to force their way in.

At the start of the siege, John had openly derided his opponents’ stamina.

‘I know them too well,’ he allegedly spat. ‘They are nothing to be accounted of, or feared.’

Having now spent seven weeks besieging them, the king must have felt like eating his words.

In the end, despite all John’s military ingenuity, it was starvation that finally forced the rebels to surrender. By this stage the men in the keep were totally out of supplies, and had been reduced to living on the flesh of their own expensive war-horses. This, says the Barnwell Annalist, ‘was a hard diet for those who were normally used to fine food’. At first the defenders tried to cut their losses by sending out ‘those who seemed the least warlike’: perhaps those too exhausted to fight, or possibly non-military personnel, such as clerics or blacksmiths. John, however, was in no mood for such half-measures. When these men emerged he had them mutilated, lobbing off their hands and feet in an effort to persuade those still inside to surrender. Eventually, lacking the strength to fight on any longer, the remaining rebels gave themselves up. By curious coincidence, it was 30 November – the feast of St Andrew, Rochester’s patron saint. The struggle for the city’s castle had lasted for the best part of two months.

‘Living memory does not recall,’ concluded the Barnwell Annalist, ‘a siege so fiercely pressed, and so staunchly resisted.’

After such a long, costly and bitter struggle, John was apparently in no mind to be merciful. According to one of the chroniclers, the king intended to celebrate his victory by having every member of the rebel garrison hanged. This would not have been entirely out of character – the king was famous for gloating when he had the upper hand. However, according to the same writer, one of John’s foreign captains persuaded him to show clemency in the name of self-interest. The war, he argued, was not yet over. What if John or his allies were themselves captured at some later stage? Better the king should imprison his enemies, rather than start a round of tit-for-tat killing that might end up with his own neck in a noose.

It is doubtful that John really needed to have the logic of this argument explained to him by one of his own men. Showing mercy towards a defeated opponent was perfectly normal behaviour in the early thirteenth century. Ever since 1066, warfare in England had been regulated by the code of chivalry. In John’s day, this had nothing to do with later perversions like laying your cloak over a puddle, or letting your enemy strike the first blow. It meant, in essence, that political killing was taboo. Naturally, this did not apply to the non-noble members of society. John had already demonstrated as much when he ordered the mutilation of the ‘less-than-warlike’ members of Rochester’s garrison during the final stages of the siege. After the surrender, he proved the point a second time by hanging one of the rebel crossbowmen (apparently punished for his treachery – the lowborn bowman had been raised in John’s household). Chivalry was not about a high regard for human life in general; it was a code that condemned killing among the upper classes, based on exactly the kind of enlightened self-interest advocated by John’s foreign captain.

Chivalric self-interest, moreover, extended beyond insuring against future reprisals. The man who spared his noble opponents stood to make a significant profit in the form of ransoms. Prisoners were valuable assets, as John fully appreciated. When the rebels were being clapped into chains, the king personally confiscated the most important ones for himself. For example, William de Albini was despatched to the king’s castle at Corfe, and ended up with a price on his head of £4,000. Having appropriated the choicest prisoners in this manner, John generously distributed the less important individuals among his cronies as gifts.

For the rebels themselves, the defeat at Rochester was a massive blow to their cause, and it left the remaining barons in London feeling totally discouraged. The Barnwell Annalist, concluding his section on the siege of Rochester, commented that ‘there were few
who
would put their trust in castles’, and he was absolutely right. When John moved into East Anglia at the start of 1216, the castles of Colchester, Framlingham and Hedingham fell in quick succession. All three were mighty stone castles, and before Rochester, men might have hoped to defend them. After the great siege of that autumn, there was no longer the will to do so.

John, however, despite scoring these new successes, never managed to pluck up the courage to risk a decisive assault on London. His delay cost him dearly. In May 1216, a full year after the rebellion had flared up, Prince Louis landed in Kent and quickly gained control of south-eastern England. All the castles that had fallen to John were suddenly back in the hands of his enemies. Only those fortresses which the king had placed in the hands of his closest servants held out for him. Hubert de Burgh – the man who came through with the pigs – successfully defended the great castle at Dover against the French assault.

By the autumn of 1216, the war was deadlocked. John held sway in the Midlands, but the south and east remained in the hands of his opponents. Ultimately, the situation was resolved by the king’s over-exertion and overindulgence. In early October, after a really good dinner with the burgesses of King’s Lynn, John fell sick with dysentery. He struggled on for a few days, time enough to reach the castle at Newark. By the time he got there, however, it was plain to everyone that he was dying. In the small hours of the morning on 18 October, as a gale howled around the castle walls, the king finally gave up the ghost.

The rebuilt corner of Rochester’s keep
.

Since the cause of the war had been John himself – his bad governance, his untrusting personality, and his broken promises – the king’s death removed most of the reasons for fighting. It was much more difficult for the die-hard rebels to justify their opposition to John’s blameless nine-year old son, now crowned as King Henry III.
Moreover
, the new king’s governors encouraged a cease-fire by recognizing the legitimacy of many of the rebels’ grievances. They issued a new version of Magna Carta, and indicated that in future the king would respect its terms. The only person who stood to lose out now was Prince Louis; it took a decisive battle at Lincoln and a large payment of cash to persuade him to go home.

By 1217, the war was over; John was dead and peace had been restored. Rochester Castle, however, remained shattered and broken – a pale reflection of its former glorious self. It was not until ten years later that builders arrived to make good the damage. The work they carried out was not a reconstruction, but a repair job. Inside the castle, the new archways look shabby in comparison with the elegant originals. Outside, the contrast is even more striking. The collapsed corner of the keep was rebuilt, not with a square tower as before, but with a round one. This had nothing to do with aesthetics; the repairs make a real mess of what was previously a very handsome building.
But
the king’s masons weren’t interested in making the castle look pretty, or putting it back together piece by piece. The recent siege had demonstrated, in the most dramatic way imaginable, that great towers – even the greatest towers – were vulnerable. Masons, however, had already thought of ways to make castles stronger.

CAERNARFON IS ONE
of my favourite castles in the UK. It sits right beside the sea on the coast of north Wales, opposite the island of Anglesey, surrounded by swans and besieged by seagulls. Despite its remote location, the castle is familiar to millions of people because of the spectacular ceremony that took place there in 1969 – the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales.

It was, for many reasons, the perfect place for such an occasion, not least because of its stadium-like proportions. For centuries, poets and painters had come to Caernarfon and gazed in wonder at this giant among castles. In his diary of 1774, Dr Samuel Johnson described it as ‘an edifice of stupendous majesty and strength’.

For me, part of Caernarfon’s appeal is its difference from the castles I grew up with in Kent, like Rochester and Dover. To begin with, there is no single great tower or keep. Instead, the castle derives its military strength from a huge circuit of walls. This was the big departure in castle design in the thirteenth century and, in this
respect
, Caernarfon is a ‘typical’ castle of its time. In every other way, however, this mighty fortress-palace, with its polygonal towers, masonry of different colours, and the carved stone figures on top of its battlements, is a truly exceptional building.

As we shall see, Caernarfon is the work of many thousands of anonymous individuals. Ultimately, however, the castle is the accomplishment of one man – the English king, Edward I. It was built to mark, in the grandest way possible, his conquest of Wales in 1283. Edward wanted a castle that was a royal palace and an impregnable fortress, an administrative centre for his new dominions, and a grand statement that Wales had become part of a new ‘British’ empire. In Caernarfon, all his wishes were fulfilled.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Caernarfon, however, is that it does not stand alone. The castle is ‘only’ the greatest of a whole string of new fortresses, all built by Edward I with astonishing speed at the end of the thirteenth century. The famous castles at Harlech and Conway, Rhuddlan and Flint, as well as the great unfinished castle of Beaumaris, were all built at the king’s command in the wake of his victory. Together they form a group of buildings that still rank among the most impressive engineering achievements the world has ever seen. Not only are they mighty fortresses – a perfect realization of the new ideas of the thirteenth century – they are also works of art, intended to spell out in the most dramatic fashion the achievement of a conquering king.

So what drove Edward I to this excessive display of power? What kind of man was he? As a king, Edward had many great qualities. Physically very big and very strong, he was an expert warrior and a skilled general. He lived up to the image of an ideal Christian ruler by going on crusade. He was also a great legislator, and a faithful husband. But Edward also possessed several less endearing character traits – a dark side, if you like – which earlier historians tended to
overlook
. Contemporary chroniclers noted that he could be sly and duplicitous. He lacked the ability to see any issue except from a point of view other than his own. Most importantly, he was a king who would not tolerate any attacks on the dignity of the Crown.

It is always dangerous to imagine we can read peoples’ thoughts and intentions, especially if they have been dead for seven hundred years. But if we were forced to psychoanalyse Edward, and to explain why he was so prickly about his royal dignity, we would probably point to the hard lessons he learnt in his father’s reign. Edward’s father was Henry III, whom we recently left as a little boy of nine, being crowned after the death of his own father, King John. From the time of his accession in 1216 until his death in 1272, Henry had a long but troubled reign. Although not actively unpleasant, like John (Henry actually comes across as quite an amiable chap) he lacked good judgement and made bad, even inept policy decisions. By 1258, the great men of the realm had had enough of his mistakes, and forcibly deprived the king of power.

By this time, Edward was around. He was, however, still only a teenager, and powerless to assist his father. All he could do was stand in the wings and watch as the king was humiliated. One can easily imagine how angry he felt, and how frustrated he was at his inability to intervene. Just a few years later, Edward did lead the fight-back that restored Henry to power, but by then he had already learnt his hard lessons about rulership. The young Lord Edward was determined never to let such a shameful thing happen again. When he was king, he would defend his royal rights tooth and nail, and accept no challenges to his authority. By God, he was going to be absolute master in his own kingdom, and woe betide anybody who dared to suggest otherwise.

Henry died in 1272, and in due course Edward succeeded him. Of course, once he was crowned, the new king faced political opposition just like any other ruler – occasional conflict between the monarch
and
his magnates was an accepted part of medieval government. Some English lords did stand up to Edward from time to time, and several of them lived to regret it. The greatest challenge to the king, however, came not from the political heartlands of England, but from the distant hills and valleys of Wales.