The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (25 page)

One form of religious house exists largely for the purpose of entertaining travelers. This is the hospital. You may associate hospitals with sickness and medicine—and some are exclusively concerned with ill people, especially lepers—but many are for the provision of hospitality (hence the name). In particular, those which are called Maison Dieu or Domus Dei—”God’s House”—fall into this category. Normally they take the form of a hall, with beds placed around it, their head ends against the walls. There is always a chapel where you will be expected to say prayers on arrival and to attend Mass before you leave. Sometimes the hall is exceptionally long; that of the Newarke hospital at Leicester is seventeen bays—about two hundred feet—in length. This is run for the benefit of one hundred poor and infirm people, attended by a warden, four chaplains, and ten women.
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Obviously it is a very large establishment, and it caters for itinerant poor as well as the long-term sick, who are permanently resident. The small Maison Dieu at Ospringe is perhaps more typical of the sort of hospital at which you might stay. Situated on the main road from London to Canterbury, it is expressly for the benefit of pilgrims and lepers. It is run by a master, three brethren, and two clerks. As you may gather from the idea of lepers and travelers staying together and sharing the same bed linen, their priority is not the comfort of the guests. A large hospital might have its own kitchen and refectory in which one of the brethren will read a lesson aloud during the meal. If not, rye bread and a thin vegetable soup or pottage is likely to be your repast. Unless you have a particular craving for straw mattresses with torn sheets, rye bread, watery ale, and a pungent leper in the next bed, it is worth considering staying elsewhere.

Often modern historians declare that the great age of castle building is over by 1300. If you stand in front of Windsor Castle in the 1350s, or Bodiam Castle in the 1380s, and watch the dozens of carts and wagons carrying stones and timbers daily across the muddy approach roads, you might disagree. Castles and fortified manor houses continue to be built and rebuilt on a massive scale. One reason for this is security. Dozens of new licenses to crenellate are issued by the king, especially
in the reign of Richard II, when there are renewed fears of invasion from both France and Scotland. But there is another reason for all the rebuilding. Older castles are increasingly proving to be uncomfortable, with their small chambers and gloomy halls. All over the country you will find noblemen rebuilding their homes in pursuit of greater luxury. The earl of Devon almost entirely rebuilds his castle at Okehampton. The earl of March rebuilds his family seat at Wigmore and develops Ludlow Castle on a truly palatial scale. The earl of Warwick rebuilds Warwick Castle in a similarly extravagant fashion, with a new great hall, new gatehouse, and two of the finest residential towers in the kingdom (Guy’s Tower and Caesar’s Tower). Lord Neville rebuilds his castles at Bamburgh and Raby. Lord Berkeley rebuilds most of the domestic ranges at Berkeley Castle. John of Gaunt rebuilds the domestic ranges within his great castles at Kenilworth and Hertford. His younger brothers, Edmund and Thomas, rebuild Fotheringay Castle and Caldicott Castle, respectively. Most of all, their father, Edward III, repairs or extends a huge number of royal castles. He also builds the last completely new royal castle at Queenborough, at a cost of £25,000. His works at Windsor Castle, where he rebuilds practically everything within the outer walls, cost more than £50,000, making it the most expensive building project in medieval England. If the fourteenth century is not the great age of castle building, then it is certainly the great age of castle
rebuilding.

Where new fortified residences are constructed, they are designed to overawe and entertain, as well as to defend. The dozen most important new castles from the late fourteenth century are all well-defended buildings, with high towers, drawbridges, and portcullises.
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But they are all symbolic of lordly power as well. Life within them is comfortable, with large halls, well-lit solars, substantial kitchens and bakehouses, and enough chambers to allow every visiting esquire to have a room of his own. If anything distinguishes these new castles from their twelfth-and thirteenth-century predecessors, it is the number of chambers they have. By 1350 noblemen have shifted their priorities from communal defense to incorporate individual privacy. Bodiam Castle, for example, has more than thirty rooms which can be used as private bedchambers.

When you come to a castle or fortified manor house and have crossed the drawbridge, you will catch sight of the courtyard. This
is typically square in a fourteenth-century residence, with the whitewashed walls and glazed windows of the hall, solar, and chapel facing it. If the lord is in residence, liveried servants will be scampering about, carrying food from the storerooms to the kitchen, fetching water from the well to fill the dozens of pots for heating bathwater, and carrying firewood to stack inside the hall. A groom will proceed to show you around: this door leads through to the ale-cellar, this door to the general kitchen, this door to the meat stores, that door over there to the chapel, and this set of stone steps to a staff dormitory above the storerooms. If you look up you will see the hall and solar are roofed with lead. Above the whole building flies the armorial banner of the lord.

As in every other medieval building, the center of life is the hall. Noble halls vary in size primarily according to the function of the building as a whole—more so than to the status of the lord. The hall of the earl of Devon’s castle at Okehampton, which is little more than an administrative center and a hunting retreat, is forty-four feet long, twenty-four feet wide and about forty feet high—the usual size for the hall of a manor house or a rich merchant’s town house. That of a wealthy knight’s country seat may be far larger. Sir John Pulteney’s great hall at Penshurst (a fortified manor house) is sixty-two feet long, thirty-nine feet wide, and no less than sixty feet high. The chief castles or fortified manor houses of the nobility have halls on a similar scale, with exposed wooden roof beams of architectural complexity, albeit darkened with smoke.
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For example: the earl of Huntingdon’s hall at Dartington is sixty feet long, thirty-eight feet wide, and forty-eight feet high.
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The floors of such halls are often covered with patterned tiles. In the middle is a fire raised on flagstones. All the interior walls are plastered and painted, either with red lines imitating courses of stonework or more elaborate designs, such as heraldry, moons, and stars, or bees, butterflies, and flowers. At the upper end of the hall, raised on a dais, are the lord’s table, his chair, and several benches. Projecting out above the principal seat in the center is a rich canopy, known as a baldaquin, the red silk of which hangs down like a curtain behind the seat.

Items at Dartington Hall, Devon, in the Lord’s Absence, 1400
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One bed of silk embroidered with bulls and divers other arms with three curtains of tartarin [a rich Eastern silk fabric imported from Tartary] covered with gold foil with bulls, with two rugs of tapestry with bulls, and eight cushions of silk embroidered with bulls

One bed with a baldaquin embroidered with the arms of England and Hainault, with three curtains of red sendal

One bed of red tartarin embroidered with letters with a curtain of red tartarin belonging to the same bed

Nineteen white Arras tapestries showing parrots

Fourteen rugs of red tapestry with the arms of the late earl of Huntingdon and of the lady his wife, and with the wheat-ear livery badge of the same earl

Twelve rugs of blue tapestry with the arms of the late earl of Huntingdon

Two long cushions of red cloth of gold

Two long cushions of red velvet and eight short cushions of the same cloth

Eight short cushions of red cloth of gold and twelve cushions of white cloth of gold

Four long white cushions of white damask cloth embroidered with
M
’s with golden crowns and two short cushions of the same material

Two long cushions of green damask cloth

One cushion of black damask cloth

Three golden Arras rugs One long cushion of old damask One hanging tapestry for the hall Four green rugs of tapestry Seven rugs of white worsted embroidered with black ragged staves Three curtains [for a bed] with one valance of white tartarin of the same ragged staves design

One bed with a baldaquin with three curtains of red tartarin Eleven old rugs of white and blue linsey-woolsey

One bed with a green baldaquin and three curtains of green tartarin

Eight carpets

One old bed with a torn baldaquin and three curtains of blue tartarin

One other old Norfolk bed with three curtains of card [a form of linen]

An old bed of red embroidered worsted with three matching curtains

An old bed of red worsted embroidered with oak leaves, with three curtains of tartarin and seven worsted rugs to match

One dosser and two costers [sidehangings] with the same oak-leaves pattern

One cover for a silk bed of red and white

One missal, one antiphonal with a psalter contained within it and one gradual

Altar coverings, vestments, surplices, and curtains in the chapel

Eight tablecloths, six hand towels, and five other cloths for the table

Two silver bowls and a silver washbasin

One silver pot and one covered salt of silver

Three silver cups, one with a cover of gilt-silver

Six silver spoons, six silver plates, and four silver saucers

Five chests bound with iron

In the kitchen, four great standard pots of bronze

Five smaller pots of bronze

Six small bronze pots

Five very small bronze pots

Two great cooking vessels

Two small cooking vessels

Four great ladles of copper

Four small ladles of bronze

Four frying pans

Three great iron griddles, and one old iron griddle

Six iron rakes

Five great mortars

156 tin plates

Before each meal the serving lads put up trestle tables along each side of the hall. They bring brightly glazed green and gold ceramic wine jugs and ale flagons to set out in readiness. Others place candles on the spikes protruding from the walls, and light the candles on the chandeliers. These are iron or silver hoops, about six feet in diameter, raised on pulleys. On the lord’s table, a plain white linen tablecloth is placed, reaching to the floor. Then a second cloth with a colored strip down the center is placed over it; this is the sanap, on which the choicest dishes will be placed for the delectation of the lord and his guests. Brightly colored cushions are placed on the benches on the dais. Good-quality wax candles are impaled on the spikes of the three-legged candlesticks on the lord’s table, along with other precious luxuries, such as his gilt-silver saltcellar and enameled gilt-silver drinking cups.

What will impress you about life in a castle is not so much the gold and silver but the scale of everything. A man who drinks out of an enameled gilt-silver cup is rich, but a man whose
steward
drinks out of such a cup is powerful. Most barons have about forty-five men in their household. The earl of Devon has 135 in 1384, the bishop of Ely eighty-three.
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John of Gaunt—the richest Englishman of the century (excluding the kings)—has 115, but this does not include a further 150 armed retainers contracted to serve him whenever he wants them. Edward II has about 450 to 500 men in his household in 1318.
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Edward III has considerably more than eight hundred in the period 1344–47, during much of which time he is fighting abroad.
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In the more peaceful 1360s he has between 350 and 450. The largest household of all in peacetime is not that of a king. It is that of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, cousin to Edward II, who at the start of the century has no fewer than 708 men. Imagine traveling along the highways of northern England with that small army buzzing around: people come out of their houses just to see him pass by.

As you wander around the castle, you may be surprised to see that there are hardly any females present. Of the 135 people in the earl of Devon’s household, only three are women. This is normal—even in those households which are headed by a woman.
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A washerwoman might be employed (cleaning clothes is strictly a woman’s job in medieval England) but she will not live within the household. The only resident females will be the lord’s wife and daughters and their personal
companions. kitchen staff, grooms, valets, pantlers, butlers, even the dishwashers—all of these positions are filled by men and boys. If the men choose to marry, then they must leave the lord’s household and set up their own.