Castle (21 page)

This gatehouse, on first inspection, has all the paraphernalia of military might that we saw at Caernarfon – oak doors, portcullises (three of them) and murder-holes. What’s more, because it was built a hundred years after Edward’s great Welsh castles, it also has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. In the first place, there are gun-loops. Guns and gunpowder arrived in western Europe in the fourteenth century, and Bodiam is one of the earliest English castles to make provision for this new type of weapon. The castle’s other up-to-date feature is at the top of the gatehouse. Here the masonry stands proud from the wall, as if the building is wearing a crown. It is a feature known as ‘machicolation’, and is a stone version of the wooden hoardings that were built around the tops of earlier towers. Rather like murder-holes,
machicolation
offered the defenders another vantage point from which to drop things on to the heads of people standing underneath.

So it seems that full marks go to Bodiam’s architect for making the main gate secure. Or do they? A more careful inspection of this impressive entrance raises all kinds of questions. For example, looking at the gatehouse from outside, you might think the gap between the bridge and the castle was crossed by means of a drawbridge. I certainly assumed as much on my first visit to the castle, because the front of the gatehouse is recessed as if to accommodate a drawbridge in the upright position. Look closely, however, and you discover that there are no holes in the stonework for the all-important drawbridge chains. Look closer still, and you realize that there is no room in the gatehouse to house a drawbridge mechanism. The gap, we are forced to conclude, must have been bridged by something much less elaborate and much weaker – a simple removable wooden gantry.

The drawbridge problem is merely the clearest example of how the gatehouse’s swagger in fact conceals a weak design. Other features are similarly duplicitous. The masonry only allows for thin wooden doors, and provides no means for effectively barring them. The murder-holes look rather too small and mannered to be effective, and would hardly deter a determined intruder. The gun-loops and the machicolation might have offered some protection, but, importantly, they only defend the gatehouse itself – the rest of the castle remains totally unprotected.

What really undermines our confidence in the main gatehouse, however, is its smaller counterpart on the opposite side of the castle. The rear entrance not only shows the same structural weaknesses – no drawbridge, thin doors, and puny murder-holes; it doesn’t even bother with the elaboration of the main gate. The bridge ran directly up to the doorway, there is only room for one portcullis, and there are no gun-loops at all. This is the real clincher – why go to all the trouble of securing the front door if you are going to leave the back door unlocked?
We
can only conclude that all the elaborate features on the north of the castle, including the complex bridge arrangements, were intended not to keep out undesirables but to impress distinguished guests.

In this respect, there is no doubt that Bodiam must have worked a treat. For all its apparent weaknesses, the gatehouse is very impressive – tall, dramatic and menacing. Despite its evident vulnerability, the moat still glistens and shimmers in the sunshine, and the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its reflection in the water. The walls and towers may be thin and indefensible, but they are tall and sheer, their height exaggerated by a host of tiny battlemented turrets and chimneys. Moreover, Bodiam’s determination to strike a pose extends beyond its walls and moat. The castle once stood at the centre of a carefully planned and skilfully sculpted landscape of gardens and ponds. The ponds have now disappeared, their banks long since broken. Recent topographical surveys, however, have revealed their true extent – an elaborate series of water features, created to increase the castle’s dramatic effect.

The lack of viable defences at Bodiam is quite typical of late medieval castles. So why were they so weedy? It was, in part, because of a change in military tactics. When politics in England broke down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the first response on all sides was to rush to castles and try to hold them against the enemy. Warfare revolved around castles, and resulted in spectacular sieges like Rochester (1215), Dover (1216) and Kenilworth (1266). By the fourteenth century, however, the goalposts had shifted. With advances in siege technology, fewer and fewer commanders were willing to put their trust in castles, however strong they might appear. Instead, they preferred to fight pitched battles in the open field. Such encounters were liable to be far more decisive than before, because they had become far more bloody. By the start of the fourteenth century, the chivalric taboo on killing a defeated opponent had been quietly forgotten (largely thanks to Edward I, if you ask me).

The biggest reason, however, for the decline of serious fortification in England is that there was not really much fighting going on. Although the fourteenth century got off to a disastrous start during the reign of Edward II, and despite the bad press it has often received, late medieval England was fundamentally a peaceful place to live. In such circumstances, huge, elaborate and expensive fortifications became unnecessary.

Bodiam, then, might talk tough, but it would not have been much good in a real fight. It is a castle that is more concerned with dazzling us with its good looks than it is with keeping us out.

Does this mean, then, that we should not describe it as a castle? As I said in the Introduction, I really don’t think so. Bodiam’s status only becomes a problem if we adhere to the old-fashioned view that a castle must be built with defence in mind. If, on the other hand, we pay less attention to our own definitions, and ask what contemporaries thought, the problem disappears. Edward Dallingridge clearly believed he had built a castle and, more importantly, so did his contemporaries. It hardly mattered to them whether or not Bodiam’s defences ‘worked’. The fact that it had them was enough.

However, this does beg a whole host of other questions. If defences were becoming unnecessary, why bother building them? Why construct a castle, when you could have had a nice little courtyard house or, for that matter, a grand palace? The answers to these questions are tougher and more complicated. The best way to answer them is to look at the needs, lifestyles and personalities of late medieval aristocrats, and try to work out why they still wanted to build castles.

By 1385, Sir Edward Dallingridge wanted to build a castle. He was around forty years old, and had just about everything else he could possibly want – a rich wife, a strapping young son, bags of money and plenty of political influence. A prosperous Sussex knight, he mixed
with
the great and the good in his county, and was beginning to make his mark on the national stage. All he needed now, he reasoned, was a fabulous new home, and so that year he began to build Bodiam.

The Dallingridge family, however, had not always had it so good. A century beforehand, they had been little more than prosperous peasants. Edward’s great-grandfather had been a mere forester, possessed of a few acres at a place called Dalling Ridge (near East Grinstead). When he died at the end of the thirteenth century, he left his descendants little more than the family name.

Over the next three generations, however, the Dallingridges pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by making really good marriages. Edward’s grandfather John did very well for himself when he married the daughter of a local knight. By the time he died in the autumn of 1335, the family’s fortunes had substantially improved, and John had taken to advertising his new-found importance with a coat of arms, borrowed from his father-in-law. Edward’s father, Roger Dallingridge, did even better. He married not once but twice, firstly a rich heiress and secondly a rich widow. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Dallingridges had become thoroughly respectable. Roger served as both a Justice of the Peace and Sheriff of Sussex, and ended his days as a Member of Parliament.

But it was Edward himself who made the last and biggest leap forward. In 1364 he married Elizabeth Wardieu, a very wealthy young lady indeed; she was heiress not just to lands in Sussex, but also to estates in Kent, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Rutland. When her father died in 1377, Edward acquired the lot, and three years later he entered into his own paternal inheritance. Edward also outperformed his ancestors by becoming the first Dallingridge ever to take up the distinction of knighthood.

You can see how much pride Edward took in his family’s achievement when you look at the front of Bodiam Castle. Above the doors of the main gatehouse are three carved shields.

The one in the middle is Edward’s own coat of arms, inherited from his father and acquired by his grandfather. To the left and right are the coats of arms of Edward’s wife Elizabeth and his mother Alice. Together, the three shields celebrate how far the Dallingridges had come in just a hundred years.

While Edward was rich, however, he wasn’t super-rich. His estates were worth at least £200 a year, but that placed him on only the lower rungs of the aristocracy. He was a prosperous knight, but still a knight and not a titled nobleman. Men like him generally had to content themselves with manor houses rather than castles, because castles cost thousands and thousands of pounds. This, then, is the first part of the mystery – how could Edward Dallingridge, knight, afford to pay for Bodiam Castle?

Several options were open to him. It is quite possible that he borrowed some money, either locally from friends or from
money-lenders
in London. We know that from 1381, as part of his drive to develop the Bodiam estate, he began to sell off his wife’s properties in the Midlands, and this would have raised quite a lot of cash.

Edward had also made plenty of money from another source. Once again, the clues lie in the castle’s heraldry. Round the back of the castle, above the doorway of the rear gatehouse, are three more stone shields.

Those on the left and right are blank, but the angled one in the middle has a heraldic design carved onto it. It is the coat of arms of Robert Knowles, perhaps the most notorious individual of his age. Born and bred in Cheshire of peasant stock, Knowles, like Dallingridge, had taken the quick route to fame and riches. His rapid rise was due to his skill as a soldier – a soldier of fortune. He owed his reputation to his own savagery; even in a brutal age, Knowles stood out as a man more brutal than any other. His fortune had been gained through making war in France – raiding cities, towns and villages, burning and destroying, plundering and looting, ransoming and killing. French peasants, it was said, would throw themselves into the river at the very mention of his name.

His arms are displayed over the postern gate at Bodiam because, for a time, he was Edward Dallingridge’s captain in a conflict known as the Hundred Years War. Edward had been in France with Knowles, indulging in the same get-rich-quick schemes, and committing the same atrocities. Pretty little Bodiam, England’s favourite fairy-tale castle, was built with blood money.

The Hundred Years War is not, obviously, a contemporary term. It was, like most convenient historical tags, invented in the nineteenth century by a French historian to describe a series of intermittent wars between England and France in the late Middle Ages. As such tags go, the Hundred Years War is tolerably accurate (the wars started in 1337 or 1340, depending on your viewpoint, and lasted until 1453) and perfectly serviceable.

The origins of the conflict can be traced as far back as the Norman Conquest. William the Conqueror may have been King of England, but he was also Duke of Normandy, and he and his successors continued to hold extensive lands in what is now modern France. These reached their greatest extent under Henry II who, through a combination of great skill and sheer good luck, ended up with more lands in France than the King of France himself. King John, with characteristic incompetence, managed to lose most of his father’s Continental possessions, and from the start of the thirteenth century English kings controlled only a narrow strip of coast in the area of southwest France known as Gascony.

By the reign of Edward I, even holding on to Gascony was starting to become difficult. As King of England, Edward bowed to no one; but as Duke of Gascony, he was in theory answerable to the King of France. From the end of the thirteenth century, the kings of France began to get designs on Gascony, and sought every excuse to interfere in the duchy’s politics on the grounds of their legal superiority.

From an English point of view, the situation looked insoluble; then, abruptly, the picture was transformed. France had been blessed with an unbroken succession of kings since the tenth century, but in 1328, the French suddenly found they had run out of candidates. In the event, they neatly stepped around the problem, anointing a cousin of the old king as their new monarch. This manoeuvre, however, involved overlooking the claims of another candidate, King Edward III of England, who was the nephew of the late French king. For Edward, this was great news – the perfect answer to the problem of his Continental lands. Never mind his ancient right to rule Gascony; he now had a claim to rule all of France.