Castle (22 page)

It is one thing to lay claim to France; getting hold of it is much more difficult. But to everyone’s surprise (not least that of the French), Edward III did remarkably well, roundly defeating his opponents in major battles at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). The high
point
of the English king’s campaigns came in 1360, when he was recognized as independent ruler of most of south-western France.

It was at this juncture that Edward Dallingridge made his first appearance in the war – or at least, so he claimed. Giving testimony as a witness in a court case in 1386, Dallingridge stated that he had been with Edward III’s army when it was camped outside Paris in the winter of 1359–60. He also stated for the record that his age was forty, which would have made him just thirteen at the time of his Parisian debut. This sounds rather fishy. Either his evidence was bent, or vanity got the better of him. The first official record we have of Edward crossing the Channel comes eight years later in 1367.

If, however, we take Sir Edward at his word, and suppose that his baptism of fire was indeed in 1359–60, he would have had the opportunity to join Robert Knowles during the most profitable period of his career. After the battle of Poitiers in 1356, the French royal government had totally collapsed, and the whole of the country was given over to anarchy. Such circumstances offered untold opportunities for men like Knowles, and Dallingridge, to make themselves a fortune. Banding together in large well-organized gangs (known as the Free Companies), they moved through the French countryside looting, plundering and killing as they went.

‘They would order villages great or small to ransom themselves,’ wrote one French monk, ‘and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every inhabitant, or see them burned, as they had been in so many other places. The people appeared before the Englishmen, confused and terrified. They agreed to pay in coin, flour, grain, or other victuals in return for a temporary respite from persecution. Those who stood in their way the English killed, or locked away in dark cells, threatening them daily with death, beating and maiming, and leaving them hungry and destitute.’

From 1360, England and France were nominally at peace, but this hardly mattered to Knowles and his gang. According to the
contemporary
French chronicler Jean de Froissart, the mercenary Englishman would boast that he fought for neither the King of France nor the King of England, but for himself. Setting up camp in Brittany in western France, Knowles continued to lead raids into the interior for a further twelve months. He returned to England in 1361, having already made a vast fortune. The Free Companies, however, continued to operate in his absence, and Knowles himself returned to the fray in the 1370s and 1380s when war was officially resumed.

In such circumstances, there was plenty of opportunity for Edward Dallingridge to make a mint, regardless of when his career actually started. We know from English Crown records that he crossed the Channel to fight at least six times during the 1360s and 1370s, participating on one occasion in a five hundred-mile march from Bordeaux to Calais and seizing a French ship,
La Seinte Anne
, on another. Doubtless there were other equally profitable occasions that went unrecorded. As well as terrorizing peasants and townsmen, he would also have had the occasional opportunity to go for the real jackpot – the capture and ransom of a French aristocrat. We know that later in his career Edward had at least one prisoner in his custody, and he may have had others. Even if the French nobles themselves evaded capture (by dying or escaping), it was still possible to turn a tidy profit by selling their armour, which by the fourteenth century had become very sophisticated and accordingly expensive. A full suit could fetch as much as £400 – twice what Dallingridge earned in a year from his estates.

By the time Edward Dallingridge returned from the Hundred Years War, therefore, he was a made man. With his own inheritance, his wife’s fortune and his recent ill-gotten gains from France, he had the wherewithal to invest in a splendid new home – a building appropriate to his new found wealth and status. The early 1380s were doubtless years of sounding out architects, discussing different designs, and talking specific costs. At the same time, Edward was also
trying
to get his hands on a very special and specific document; a piece of parchment sealed by the king. In 1385, his wish was granted. On 20 October that year, the king sent him the following letter:

The King to everyone who sees this letter, greeting. Know ye that, of our special grace, we have granted and given licence, as far as we can, to our dear and faithful Edward Dallingridge, knight, that he may crenellate and strengthen with a wall of stone and lime his manor house of Bodiam, next to the sea in the county of Sussex, and may make and construct it into a castle, in the defence of the country roundabout and in order to resist our enemies
.

This letter – a so-called ‘licence to crenellate’ – is the central piece of documentary evidence about Bodiam Castle. Not only does it help us date the building; it also helps to explain why Edward Dallingridge wanted a castle in the first place. Like the castle itself, however, the licence has proved to be very deceptive. Its meaning seems to be perfectly clear, but if you read between the lines, it tells us a different story about Bodiam and its owner.

Taken at face value, the document confirms that castles are dangerous weapons. This much seems obvious from the very fact that the king felt he had to licence them. The ownership of castles, like the ownership of guns or dangerous dogs, needed to be monitored and restricted by the government. If the king did not exercise such control, who knows what he might face? In the wrong hands, castles might be used against him – just think of the trouble King John had with Rochester. Only in very special circumstances, therefore, would permission be granted to build one. But if there
were
extenuating circumstances, the king might choose to extend his ‘special grace and favour’ and give you a licence.

This fits very well with the known facts about Bodiam. In the 1370s and 1380s, the Hundred Years War was not going at all well from the English point of view. The French had begun to strike back,
attacking
the south coast of England, raiding and burning towns like Rye, Southampton and Plymouth. In 1385 (the very year Dallingridge got his licence) the people of southern England were seized with panic when they learnt that the French had assembled a huge armada, and were making ready to invade. In such circumstances, what king could refuse one of his leading subjects the right to build a castle? The licence itself specifically links Bodiam to the raids. The castle was to be built ‘in the defence of the country’ against the French (‘our enemies’).

This interpretation also seems to be supported by the fact that Dallingridge was not acting alone. Other men with lands in southern England, especially the counties nearest the coast, were applying for and receiving licences to crenellate at exactly the same time. In the 1380s new castles were under construction at Cooling, Penshurst, Hever and Scotney. Their owners, like Dallingridge, evidently wanted to protect their lands and their families; and they also wanted to make it clear that they were doing their bit for everyone. Dallingridge, his licence tells us, was building Bodiam to help defend the country in general. John de Cobham, who built Cooling Castle from 1381, similarly wanted us to know that he was motivated by public-spirited altruism. When his castle was finished, he took the trouble to have a little metal charter made, and fixed it over the gatehouse. It is still possible to make out the words: ‘Knowyth that be-th and schul be / That I am mad[e] in the help of the cuntre.’ What could possibly be clearer? An authentic voice from Edward Dallingridge’s day, addressing us directly, and telling us that Cooling (and, by extension, Bodiam, Hever, Scotney and others) was built for the common good in the face of threatened invasion.

There is only one tiny problem, which is this: these noble sentiments are completely contradicted by the castles that were actually built. If Cooling really was ‘made in the help of the country’, as Cobham’s plaque proudly proclaims, why did it have towers with
open
backs, and why was it so badly defended on the side that faced the coast? Likewise, if Edward Dallingridge really built Bodiam ‘in the defence of the country’, as his licence to crenellate would have us believe, why is it built in such an untenable position, halfway down a hill and overlooked by higher ground to the north? As we saw earlier, the castle was not really built with defence in mind, and would hardly have been up to keeping out aggressive burglars, never mind an invading French army. We can only assume, since the castles they built were so puny, that Edward Dallingridge, John de Cobham and their ilk were not actually very frightened by the prospect of French raids at all. This, in Dallingridge’s case, is hardly surprising; Bodiam, despite what it says in the licence, is not actually very close to the sea at all; it’s a good ten-mile walk to the nearest beach.

So why did Edward Dallingridge and others like him need to get licences for their castles if they didn’t intend to build useful military bases? The simple answer is that they didn’t actually
need
licences at all. Plenty of castles, some of real military value, were built without the king’s say-so. Historians, it seems, have for a long time had the whole idea of licensing completely back to front. Dallingridge and other would-be castle builders sought licences from the king not because they
had
to have them, but because they desperately
wanted
them. It was not a matter of getting planning permission; more a case of getting listed building status. Building without a licence was perilous, not because the king might turn up one day and pull your castle down, but because people might not acknowledge that your new home was a proper castle at all. Suppose, for instance, you did what Edward Dallingridge did, and built yourself a really splendid little castle – bristling with towers and battlements, decked out with portcullises, murder-holes and machicolations – and your neighbours referred to it as your
house
! Imagine the humiliation!

It might sound funny, but it was no laughing matter for the upwardly mobile knight Sir William Heron. In 1338 he began building a new home at his manor of Ford in Northumberland, and took the trouble to get hold of a licence to crenellate. Two years later he seems to have realized that this in itself was not going to be enough to impress the locals, so he wrote to the king again. His new crenellated house at Ford – could he please, um, call it a castle as well?

Edward Dallingridge, as his licence shows, got it right the first time: the wording of the grant leaves no doubt that he would be entitled to call Bodiam a castle. In fact, it is now assumed that references to the clear and present danger from France were Dallingridge’s own invention – a cunningly worded case for castle ownership, intended to improve his chances of getting the royal stamp of approval. The king might not have been worried about castles being built from a military point of view, but there was nevertheless a social dimension to be considered. Castles were for kings, dukes and earls; you did not want any Tom, Dick or Harry coming back from the Hundred Years War and starting to build one. Edward Dallingridge, descended from a family of foresters, was still very much on the fringes of the nobility; it was not his God-given right to live in a castle. In order to justify his entry into the charmed circle of castle owners, he needed to dress up his private desires as communal needs, and pose as a genuine defender of England’s south coast. It hardly mattered if he then went on to build a castle that was not up to the job. Once he got his hands on the licence, he calculated, the document itself would confer greatness upon him.

The actual licence has not survived, but it would have been a grand affair, handsomely written and sealed with the king’s great wax seal. Such documents spoke of great honour. It is important to note that it was not addressed to Edward personally, but to ‘everyone who saw it’ – it was not a private letter, but a public one, intended to be read out loud in the county court of Sussex, and
perhaps
put on display afterwards. It was really more like a certificate – something Dallingridge could wave under people’s noses to prove that Bodiam was indeed fit to be called a castle. From what we know of Sir Edward, the only surprise is that he didn’t go as far as John de Cobham, and have a little metal version knocked up to go over his front door.

The Hundred Years War, therefore, explains how Dallingridge and others like him (for example, John Falstolf who built Caister in Norfolk, and the Beauchamps who rebuilt Warwick) were able to pay for their castles. It also explains how, despite his fairly humble origins, he was able to justify it. The turning tide of the war in the 1370s and the attacks on the south coast of England provided the crafty knight with an ample excuse. But what the war cannot adequately explain is
why
Sir Edward wanted a castle. As their licences to crenellate suggest, Dallingridge and his neighbours wanted castles for social reasons rather than military ones. Castles were noble homes, and this alone made them desirable for upwardly mobile knights. But this, by itself, hardly seems sufficient explanation for the sudden burst of castle-building that occurred in southern England in the 1380s.

In fact, there seems to have been a quite specific reason for the boom. Men like Dallingridge might not have feared the French, but they did have good grounds for concern about an enemy closer to home. Ever since the Black Death in the middle of the fourteenth century, English peasants had been getting uppity. The great plague had wiped out a third of the population more or less overnight, and the result was massive social upheaval in the decades that followed. Labour was suddenly in short supply, and peasants therefore found themselves in a much stronger bargaining position. Landowners found it increasingly difficult to enforce their traditional demands for unpaid ‘customary’ services – though the resistance they encountered did not, of course, stop them trying. In 1381, the situation
exploded
. The peasants of Essex, Kent and Sussex rose up against their superiors. Manor houses and castles were attacked, agricultural tools were destroyed, and manorial accounts were burned. This was the famous Peasants’ Revolt – the biggest mass uprising in the English Middle Ages.