Castle (20 page)

The letter obviously did the trick. Edward made sure that Master James got the money he needed, and building work at Beaumaris went on. At the same time, repairs were under way at Caernarfon – over £1,000 was spent rebuilding the town’s damaged walls, and the building of the castle continued apace. Notwithstanding the distractions in Scotland and France, and despite cutbacks in all other areas, the king continued to pour men and materials into Wales. Year by year, his two greatest castles grew steadily more grand.

By 1305, Edward’s imperial vision had almost been realized. He had conquered Wales, eliminated its rulers, and crushed all trace of rebellion. Six great stone castles stood finished, and two more were nearing completion. By this date, Edward had also added Scotland to his dominions. The northern kingdom, after nine years of spirited resistance, had finally been bludgeoned into submission. Londoners who had grown bored gawping at Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s skeletal features could now venture down to London Bridge, where William Wallace’s freshly severed head was the latest grisly attraction. To us, his actions may make Edward seem like a bloody tyrant, a Caligula or a Stalin. But many contemporaries saw it differently. For patriotic Englishmen, Edward had become what he had always aspired to be – a new Arthur, ruling over a united kingdom of Britain.

It was, however, a fleeting vision. Even as the king clutched at his dream, it slipped through his fingers. In 1306, the Scots rose in rebellion. Edward moved north to crush it, but he grew ill in the
course
of the summer and, although his armies had some notable successes, the revolt was not extinguished. Christmas was spent at Lanercost, and the following spring Edward crossed to Carlisle, planning to lead a fresh expedition into Galloway. At that point, however, time caught up with the sixty-eight-year-old king. On 7 July, at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, Edward himself was conquered.

Just eighteen months later, Master James of St Georges, the genius behind the king’s Welsh castles and one of the greatest architects of the European Middle Ages, followed his employer to the grave. Neither Caernarfon nor Beaumaris was ever finished. Work at both castles ground on for another two decades, but the vast river of money no longer flowed as freely. By the 1320s, it had slowed to a tiny trickle, and ten years later it stopped completely: building on both sites was abandoned forever. Today the castles still stand incomplete, their appearance much as it was seven centuries ago. At Caernarfon, the majestic outer walls conceal an interior only half-realized. The royal apartments intended for the upper ward were never built, and the gatehouses, so imposing from the outside, have the feel of a movie set when viewed from behind. At Beaumaris, the inner walls, which had grown to about half their intended height, simply stop at the same horizontal level. You can almost picture the workmen packing up their tools and going home.

In one sense, Edward’s great chain of castles did their job. As tools of conquest, they were supremely successful. The Welsh never drove the English out, and their country continued to be ruled by foreigners. As royal palaces, however, Edward’s castles can only be viewed as failures. Their great halls, intended for feasting and revelry, stood empty. Their suites of chambers, designed for luxurious living, were never finished. The king had imagined royal visits on a grand scale; Beaumaris was to have accommodation enough for five separate royal households. But future kings and queens of England stayed away, preferring their
comfortable
homes in southern England to Edward’s windswept white elephants in north-west Wales. Within a few generations, the castles were falling into ruin, reduced to the role of administrative outposts in a failing English empire. Ultimately, despite spending enormous sums of money on huge armies and spectacular castles, Edward’s dreams died with him.

Never again would a king of England attempt to build a castle on the scale of Caernarfon. In the fourteenth century, Edward’s successors learnt to accept that, in reality, their power in Britain stopped at England’s borders. Instead of expanding northwards and westwards, they turned their attentions south and east, and began once again to exercise their ambitions on the Continent. The result was endless war in France, unbroken peace at home – and a brand new breed of castle.

AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME

BODIAM CASTLE IS
one of the most famous, most photogenic and most visited castles in Britain. One look at it and it is easy to see why: it is what you might call a pin-up castle. Ravishing good looks have made it a firm favourite with calendar compilers and magazine picture editors; it has charmed its way onto the cover of many a book. A stunning setting in the middle of a mirror-like moat, especially magical on cold mornings when the mist hangs round the walls, has guaranteed top billing in pop videos, TV series and Hollywood feature films. Some castles can look tough, others can look homely, but few can manage both at the same time. Bodiam can, but then Bodiam has star quality – it’s a true celebrity.

All this attention would have much gratified the castle’s builder, Sir Edward Dallingridge, who, in his own day, was just as much of a
celebrity
as his castle is now. Just as Bodiam is a great example of a castle from the late Middle Ages, so Edward Dallingridge is a perfect example of a late medieval castle-builder. castles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tended to be built not by kings, dukes and earls – who, after all, had plenty of them already – but by men like Sir Edward: individuals who stood on the lower rungs of the aristocracy, but were determined to climb higher.

Bodiam and Dallingridge belong, essentially, to Chaucer’s England. It is an age we associate with good times, largely because of the lively characters, vivid colours and bawdy humour of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. Chaucer’s England is ‘Merrie England’ – a golden age, yet to be tarnished by the dynastic struggles of the fifteenth century, or the religious upheavals of the Tudor period. Yet in fact, these times were far from trouble-free. The story of Dallingridge and Bodiam is played out against a backdrop of invasion threats, revolting peasants and rebellion against the king.

More importantly, Edward Dallingridge was not a fuzzy idealized character like Chaucer’s knight in the
Canterbury Tales
. He was a real flesh-and-blood individual, with genuine ambitions and legitimate anxieties. He and his friends and family lived in an age which has left: a rich seam of documentary evidence, enabling us to view their lives inside and outside the castle in a way that is impossible for earlier periods. We know not only what they ate and drank, but the exact recipes they followed, the actual songs they sang, even some of the things they believed in.

In some respects, Bodiam is similar to the castles featured in the previous chapter. Both Edward Dallingridge and Edward I asked for castles built to an enclosure design; at Bodiam, as at Beaumaris, there is no trace of a keep. There is, however, one very important difference, and it springs from the contrasting priorities of the two Edwards. The king’s castles were constructed as weapons of conquest, and it is
quite
clear that military considerations were uppermost in the master mason’s mind. Caernarfon, Conway and Harlech were made all the mightier by being built to fit platforms of rock. All three castles therefore have irregular ground plans and, as a result, some rather unusually shaped rooms. Take, for example, the great hall at Conway Castle, which is banana shaped. This peculiar layout, one imagines, was not an essential part of Edward’s design brief. Clearly what happened was that the castle’s exterior wall was given top priority, and the great hall was built to follow a predetermined curvy profile. At the king’s other castles, the halls and chambers were similarly squeezed inside restrictive military straitjackets.

At Bodiam, however, the thinking was the other way round. Far from being a peculiar shape, the castle is very regular and symmetrical; seen from above, it looks almost perfectly square (in fact, it’s rectangular – the east and west walls are 10 per cent longer than the north and south). The chambers, hall and chapel are all well proportioned, and arranged to serve each other perfectly. It therefore seems that more importance has been attached to the accommodation than to the exterior walls. The starting point was a well-ordered courtyard, and the castle walls were simply wrapped around the outside. In fact, if you look at the plan of Bodiam, and ignore the gatehouse, towers and turrets, it starts to look very much like a courtyard house.

The courtyard design originated in the fourteenth century, and was first used by the builders of manor houses and colleges. It soon became the most popular shape for castle designers too, and in this respect Bodiam can claim to be a ‘typical’ castle of its time. There were, however, plenty of alternative models for castle-builders to follow. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, masons were having so much fun experimenting with form that it becomes very difficult to generalize about their designs at all. We find courtyard castles up and down the country, at places like Maxstoke (Warwickshire), Sheriff
Hutton
(Yorkshire), and Cooling (Kent); they are especially common in the south of England. We also find great towers making a spectacular come-back at places like Tattershall (Lincolnshire), Ashby de la Zouche (Leicestershire) and Raglan (Monmouthshire – see Chapter Six). Other castles built in this period simply defy classification; try as we might, it is impossible to pigeon-hole castles like Nunney (Somerset), Old Wardour (Wiltshire) and Warkworth (Northumbria). Bodiam belongs to an age of great variety and individualism.

However, the big question that has been raised about many of these castles is this: are they really castles at all? Bodiam itself has been one of the main battlegrounds for debate. For more than a century now, the building has taken a heavy pounding from harsh critics, who have sought to expose its weaknesses and undermine its military reputation. At the same time, it has been staunchly defended by legions of doughty admirers. If you are writing about Bodiam, therefore, you have no choice – you must strap on your armour, and step bravely into the fray.

On first inspection, the castle’s defenders seem to have the upper hand. Bodiam, surely, must be a castle. After all, it appears to have everything: towers on every corner, a fine pair of gatehouses, battlements along every wall, and, of course, a splendid moat. If you made a list of features you might expect to see in a castle, Bodiam would get a tick in almost every box.

Ah, yes, say the critics, but do these features work? If you take a circular stroll around the castle and, like a hostile attacker, look for weak spots, they are many and obvious. The southern and eastern walls of the castle are punctuated by two huge windows – equal in size to the palatial windows at Conway but, crucially, on the outside. Nor are they the only weak points. The rest of the windows may look small in comparison (perhaps suggesting a concern with defence), but they are windows nonetheless, not arrow-loops. Arrow-or crossbow-loops
are
conspicuously lacking at Bodiam: there is little sense of the castle taking the fight to the enemy, as there is at Caernarfon. Bodiam does not even score very highly when it comes to passive defence. The walls are nowhere more than a few feet thick, and the parapets, with a thickness of barely twelve inches, are positively weedy.

It is the castle’s moat, however, which has been the focus of the critics’ attack. Moats of an earlier age were conceived as defensive barriers – intended, as at Caerphilly and Beaumaris, to impede access to the walls and to frustrate attempts at undermining. The moat at Bodiam is a less convincing obstacle. At six feet deep, it is no puddle, and looks sufficiently broad to deter the average medieval house-breaker; but in fact, it would have been far easier to deal with than the massive water defences of thirteenth-century castles. The chief problem is that it could be easily drained. The castle is built on sloping ground, which fells away from north to south, and the moat is held in place by a man-made bank at the southern end. This bank is all that stops the water flowing away to join the River Rother at the bottom of the hill. As barriers go, it is not particularly thick or strong; the sides are not reinforced with stonework. It is argued, therefore, that a small group of men working with picks and shovels could have cut through it in the space of a day (or a long night, if they wanted cover of darkness). Deprived of its moat, the castle would be an easy (if rather muddy) target. Mud, however, was not really much of a hindrance – using tree-branches and planking, an organized attacker could quickly lay a carpet of makeshift duckboards and create a path to the foot of the walls.

So is there anything to be said for Bodiam’s defences? The castle, seen from the north, would certainly have us think so. While getting into the building today is literally straightforward (a wooden bridge runs directly from the north bank of the moat right up to the gatehouse), in the Middle Ages it was a good deal more complicated. Medieval visitors had to start on the west bank and cross a long bridge in front of the castle. This led to a small octagonal island where they turned through ninety degrees to face the castle directly. The approach was, however, protected by a barbican (an outer gatehouse). Only having passed through this could visitors proceed towards the castle’s main gate.

A gun-loop in Bodiam’s main gatehouse
.