Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 31

Up to the 17th century kings and their households were constantly on the move. Organising the royal itinerary was a precise task as monarchs spent particular times of the year in specific places, above all during the great religious feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. They would also want to appear at provincial residences to reinforce their judicial, administrative and military policies and, crucially, to hunt in the royal forests. Royal houses and castles formed the points around which the court gyrated (fig. 66). The king’s preference dictated where they went, what was repaired, built or extended, and when. In each county the sheriff was responsible for organising royal construction work. However, just as bishops and deans employed architects to oversee big projects, so the king had ingeniatores (engineers or designers) in his household. The first of these about whom we know anything was an Englishman called Ailnoth in the 1150s; under him were the master craftsmen, the masons, carpenters and others – all highly paid technical experts, not just workmen. Ailnoth was responsible for Westminster, the most important royal house in England up until 1512, although the precise layout of the palace is unclear before the reign of Henry III (p. 144). The provincial civil residences of the Crown fell into two groups: those large manors that we can legitimately call palaces, such as Clarendon, Wiltshire, and Woodstock, Oxfordshire; and smaller houses situated in royal forests that were used as hunting lodges, such as Writtle, Essex, and Kinver, Staffordshire. Clarendon was the largest and most important royal house in the west. It was excavated in the 1930s, and it is possible to walk through the fields and see substantial chunks of masonry still standing in front of spectacular views of Salisbury.

Fig. 66 Royal castles and houses in the reign of King Henry III (1216–72).

Fig. 67 Clarendon Palace, Wiltshire; a reconstruction as it might have appeared in about 1275 looking north-east: a) great hall; b) kitchens; c) King’s chambers; d) Queen’s chambers; e) gatehouse; f) stables.

Clarendon was a complex of one- and two-storey buildings whose pitched and tiled roofs were arranged in a long line running approximately east–west. At its heart was Henry II’s aisled great hall, with kitchens and larders to its west and the royal chambers to its east. The various parts of the building were arranged around cloisters containing gardens; these and other pentices linked the various parts. The house was largely built of stone, and contained rich carving and particularly spectacular tiled pavements, now in the British Museum.13 The king’s hunting lodges were similarly laid out; the one at Writtle, Essex, excavated between 1955 and 1957, was surrounded by a moat. Approached by a bridge and gatehouse, the buildings were again laid out in an axis, with a hall, a kitchen and a chamber (fig. 67). A house such as Writtle was not small; its great hall was about the same size as Clarendon’s, but the accommodation was less extensive and built of timber, wattle and daub, not of stone.14

These houses, great and small, were not materially different in layout from their Saxon predecessors such as Yeavering or Goltho (pp 29 and 55). They were axially planned, with a large ground-floor hall and a more private chamber slightly detached from it. This continuity of plan suggests a continuity of function, with the royal households living much like their predecessors. At the heart of this was still the hall, a structure of fundamental importance to anyone of any means and pretension, not only to royalty. The hall was no mere structure; it signified its owner’s social standing and was the centre of his public life. An example, although not a royal one, survives at Oakham, Rutland (fig. 68). It was built in around 1190 as part of a castle belonging to Walkelin de Ferrers, a sub-tenant of the Earl of Warwick. De Ferrers or his architect must have had close connections with Canterbury Cathedral, as the wonderfully crisp and lively carving of corbels and capitals is closely related to contemporary work there. The room is of four bays with low aisles. The entrance door has been moved and originally would have been at the east end, with a dais for the owner at the west. With a fire in the middle of the floor, long tables and heavy drinking, the scene on a feast day can hardly have been much different from the time of Beowulf.

Fig. 68 Oakham Castle, Rutland; a very rare survival of a great hall of around 1190. It is built like a church with a central ‘nave’ and aisles, though without clerestory windows. The door was originally in the far right bay and the dormer windows are later additions.

Fig. 69 Dover Castle, Kent. Henry II’s Great Tower dominates the castle and is surrounded by a mighty curtain wall with 14 towers and two gates, one of which can be seen in this view. In the foreground are the 13th-century Norfolk Towers and the circular St John’s Tower, while in the background can be seen St Mary in Castro (fig. 34).

While the disrupted reign of King Stephen saw less permanent castle construction, in the reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John this was the largest single item of royal expenditure, consuming ten per cent of royal income. There was serious purpose behind this. First, it was necessary to modernise the forts of the south coast as a protection against invasion, but also as a springboard for continental expeditions and to protect communication routes to the continent. Then it was necessary to protect England’s internal borders against the Scots and the Welsh. Perhaps most important of all was the lavishing of money on strategic royal castles inland. These had been established as the administrative, judicial and financial nodes of the kingdom, and many had become favoured royal residences too. All performed another crucial task, of emphasising royal lordship over both great and humble.

Few new castles were founded after 1130. As both prestige and warfare demanded buildings of stone, it was a period of rebuilding and reconstruction. For Henry II and his successors, the cultural and military value of a great tower was still unsurpassed and so, while many timber castles had their walls replaced in stone, the towers were in many cases a new addition. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Orford, Peveril and Scarborough castles all acquired great towers, but the last, largest and most expensive was at Dover, where Henry II spent £7,000 between 1180 and 1190. To put this in some sort of context, the total receipts of the royal exchequer in 1130 were £24,500. Dover has a continuous history of fortification back into the Iron Age and perhaps beyond, but no securely dated remains exist before the reign of Henry II. Henry erected his great tower on the highest point of the site surrounded by an inner defensive wall, with 14 projecting rectangular towers and two gates protected by a defensive outwork or barbican. This inner wall was itself guarded by the Iron Age earthworks around it and a short section of wall to the north-east (fig. 69). The great tower was a colossus: nearly square, 83ft tall, with walls between 17ft and 21ft thick. Its silhouette was designed to be seen from France. Inside it does not disappoint. The great tower, like most post-Conquest castle towers, was approached by a fore-building with steps ascending to a second-floor entrance (fig. 70). Refinements in the Dover fore-building include a chapel on the stair, perhaps for giving thanks for a safe journey, a drawbridge, and a guard room by the entrance door. The main building was three storeys high. The ground floor was designed for kitchens and the two floors above contained two magnificent suites of rooms, one for the king on the second floor and another for guests below. Each had a hall and a chamber, and in the massive thickness of the walls were other subsidiary rooms, including garderobes. The king’s floor also had a lavish chapel for his private use. The rooms were architecturally unadorned. Colour and decoration were provided by murals and portable furnishings: hangings, furniture and plate.¹⁵ It is worth dwelling on the great tower at Dover as it was the last in the line of great towers built after the Conquest. Henry II constructed it at a time when military engineering had moved away from square and rectangular towers to cylindrical ones. But this was no ordinary castle; it was built in a deliberately retrospective style to emphasise royal gravitas and dynastic durability. It was also a gateway to England, a place where the king could receive important visitors, many of whom were on their way to the new shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral. So while this was a military building, it was also a palace and guest house cast in the traditional language of dynastic triumphalism.

Fig. 70 Dover Castle, Kent; the Great Tower: a) king’s hall; b) king’s chamber; c) guest chamber; d) guest hall; e) forebuilding, including chapel; f) chapel.

Dover was, of course, exceptional in both its scale and the thoroughness in which it was rebuilt. For many hundreds of other castles, rebuilding in stone took place piecemeal over a long period. In many instances timber palisades were replaced by stone walls, while the residential buildings inside remained of wood. This can be seen at Totnes, Devon, an example of a motte and bailey castle dominating an important trading settlement (fig. 71). It was founded, together with a priory, by Judhael of Brittany, a commander in the Conqueror’s south-west campaign. The timber palisades on top of the exceptionally large motte were rebuilt by his successors in around 1200. The arrangement of the domestic buildings inside cannot now be discerned, but at Restormel in Cornwall the whole plan can be read in a single visit. It is most impressive (fig. 72). The kitchen, hall, lord’s chambers and guest rooms are all arranged inside the perfectly circular outer walls, with only the gatehouse and the chapel projecting outside the circuit. In the 12th century castles were never ordinary residences. Holding a castle proved that the owner was in royal favour with delegated authority to govern and dispense justice. The crown’s ability to take and hold castles, to raise them and demolish them, to grant them out and to take them back was central to the exercise of power. Constructing a new castle required royal permission, and if the king were ever to need it he had the right to requisition it at will. From the 1150s to the 1210s the balance of castle power shifted markedly towards the Crown. At the end of the chaotic reign of Stephen there had been 225 baronial and 49 royal castles. By 1214 there were only 179 baronial castles and the number of royal castles had risen to 93; a shift in ratio from 5:1 to 2:1.

Fig. 71 Totnes Castle, Devon. The motte is what we see today, although there was a bailey with a great hall and other buildings in it. The circular curtain wall was topped with crenellations with arrow slits. Within the wall was at least one domestic building.

Fig. 72 Restormel Castle, Cornwall was topped by a ring of buildings 130ft across: a) gate tower; b) kitchen; c) hall above; d) chambers above; e) chapel above; f) store; g) courtyard.