Download PDF | Charles Coulson - Castles in Medieval Society_ Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages-Oxford University Press (2003).
453 Pages
Acknowledgements
A book long in gestation acquires many debts. Those who are not responsible for the blemishes which remain include the late R. Allen Brown (my research supervisor in 1965-72), Christopher Brooke, Dick (C. N.) Johns, J. G. Edwards and Otto (R. C.) Smail, my first mentor in castellology. To Professor C. H. Lawrence, to my thesis examiners Maurice Keen and Robin du Boulay, and to Michael Thompson, who all read earlier versions in whole or part, I record my gratitude. For encouragement over many years I am grateful also to Marjorie Chibnall, my once and continual teacher, and similarly to Michel de Boiiard, Pierre Héliot, Anthony Emery, Arnold Taylor, Edmund King, Derek Renn, John Blair, Alf Smyth, Philip Dixon, and to Howard Colvin whose counsel and friendship have been most generous.
I have benefited also from discussions with Eric Fernie, John Kenyon, Katharine Keats-Rohan, Susan Reynolds, David Crouch, Robert Liddiard, Matthew Strickland, John Goodall, Pamela Marshall, Jean Mesqui, Marie-Pierre Baudry, and especially with Ann Williams, David Roffe, David Dumville, Vivien Brown, and from the fellowship of the annual Anglo-Norman Studies Conference at Battle. Membership of the Castle Studies Group has also brought many advantages. My colleague Richard Eales at the University of Kent has been a generous friend and advisor for many years. To him, to Malcolm Barber, to Michael Jones, and to Michael Prestwich I owe many suggestions for improving the final version of this book. Terry Barry has identified some Irish castles for me. The editorial support at the Oxford University Press, especially of the History Commissioning Editor Ruth Parr, of the copy editor Jeff New, and comments by the Referees to whom it was submitted and the typing of Sally Hewett have been no less important. Where illumination has failed me the fact will be obvious but none of these are responsible. No one has done more to sustain such illumination as I possess than my wife Anne.
Nonington Easter 2002
Introduction
Castles are not an obscure subject.’ Of all the monuments of medieval European civilization they are probably the most familiar, rivalled only by the parish churches and great cathedrals. They may well be the most popular form of amateur history. How they are perceived has coloured ideas of medieval society, aristocratic culture, faith, and strife, permeating them all with images of dungeons, battering-rams, and boiling oil. There ought to be an extensive literature, authoritative as well as accessible, to serve (and to guide) this interest; but the historical context in Britain has not achieved popular recognition. This neglect (less marked in France or Germany) is largely due to the prevailing modernist culture legitimated by the amateur and professional military strategist in numerous guises. Documentary historians have, in the past, compliantly tended to regard ‘fortification’ as an arcane technology relevant mainly to warfare.”
Archaeologists have been somewhat less prone to military determinism, with their triple rationale of warfare, society, and religion (‘cult objects’). Art history, in Britain, has begun to move towards a more holistic schema of development which no longer conceives of an evolution dependent upon tactical ‘improvements’. 3 Conversely, the gap between what is now the accepted academic view and the public perception is constantly widened by the pastiche medievalism of the visual media (in all shades from ‘Robin Hood’ to fantasy of the Tolkien variety), nourished like the popular literature by a blood-and-guts view as alien to the mature society of the middle ages as it is to its architecture. The picturesque is an authentic original element and must be accommodated, but not in the form of sado-romanticism. Idealism has not been imposed by historians and moralists. Humane values, though prone to exaggeration, do properly belong. Their importance is seen in the neglected medieval laws and customs governing the tenure and building of castles, to look no further.*
Much of what has gone wrong is both due to and expressed by the crushing imbalance in published writings, academic almost as much as popular, between emphasis on the brutal technology and the space given to social, aesthetic, and cultural aspects.> Fortresses were only occasionally caught up in war, but constantly were central to the ordinary life of all classes: of the nobility and gentry, of widows and heiresses, of prelates and clergy, of peasantry and townspeople alike, to whose interaction with castles this book is devoted. Correcting this perspective has required much of the first half to be concerned with seeing how we have arrived at the familiar scenarios of the castle-books since current traditions began in the early twentieth century.
The tendency to militaristic idée fixe is made worse by the peculiarly English error, reinforced by historical accident, of supposing that ‘the castle’ was, and could only be, the sort of exclusive lordly residence not (in truth) introduced by ‘the Normans’ but spectacularly multiplied by them in Britain in the demonstrative style of all their buildings. As a study of ‘keeps’ shows, defence was but one, and seldom the primary factor, even in the Conquest process. The whole cultural and socio-political context is essential. To turn to the European background is to be convinced of the fact. In France fortresses of every possible kind were ‘castles’, be they entire ancient towns, newer ecclesiastical precincts, great territorial capita, and lesser castellated mansions, descending in scale down to ephemeral earthworks and campaign-forts (some British ‘castles’ of 1066-c.1100 fall into this category); reducing even to mere crenellated platforms on ships and to architectural elements like battlements: all of which were called or styled castrum and castellum by contemporaries.”
The only satisfactory term to cover this diversity is that which they themselves most used: fortalicium (‘fortress’, but also ‘element’ and ‘sign’ of fortification). It meant always the symbolism of aristocratic armed power, incidentally only the physical ‘strength’ (nugatory unless manned) for forcible resistance to an enemy. Castles were not truly anticipations of premodern ‘military architecture’. The original vocabulary is treated in detail in the first half of this book. It offers new insights for England and Ireland derived, in no small part, from associating Britain with the provinces of France with which links were so intimate during that central medieval period which runs from the later eleventh to the late fourteenth century, the era ‘covered’ by this book.
Historical authenticity has been scarcer even than the social dimension in the very large popular literature. General architectural surveys predominate, ample at least in illustration. Categorization and an arbitrary structural scheme of evolution of ‘castles’, taken as a select few from the broad class of ‘noble defended residence’, by separating those held to be ‘military’ have misrepresented and suppressed the medieval phenomenon of the fortress. Here, instead, by quoting excerpts of texts as fully as may be helpful and in translation, chiefly of ‘records’ covering a wide spectrum, and by addressing themes rather than limited periods or regions, authenticity has been put first. This is primarily an institutional not an architectural study, seeking to go back to the documentary basics. Some ‘ground-clearing’ accordingly accompanies textual exposition in the first half, mingling the modern consciousness of ‘the castle’ with the medieval realities.’ Parts III and IV are thus able to turn from argument to pure illustration of the social realities of castles, among which symbolism was always important.?
Too often castle-study has operated in a historical vacuum. Instead of examining the structure in the light of the builder’s career, social position, and political aims, or of the family history of ownership, sometimes even without considering properly the state of the local peace, a scenario of constant pressing danger has tended to be assumed but is seldom proved.’° ‘Medieval’ is equated with ‘anarchic’. Monographs, particularly the former Ancient Monuments guides, and rare general works of scholarship, most notably The History of the King’s Works, have not altered the violent and murderous fixations of popular castellology."
Indeed, recent popularizations have accentuated them. In a recent survey of English publications since c.1970, selected with an eye to saner thinking, seventy-five books are listed, but nearly all for no more than hints of innovation.” Among more academic papers and articles questioning is stronger and more direct, as is to be expected. A few among a select eighty of these articles published in the last twenty years take castle-study substantially forward. The narrowly ‘military approach is the bugbear identified in an incisive review article by David Stocker, published in 1992.’3 Stocker sees even one of the most flexible of recent writers as ‘still proposing an underlying military imperative’,’4 and as no more than ‘emerging from the shadows of the armchair-strategic view’. Tradition has insisted that non-defensive elements were signs of ‘decline’. Thus ‘early’ castles must necessarily be more ‘military and later ones more ‘residential’. The ingrained but largely imaginary scenario from ‘impregnable’ fortress to country house is part of this well-nigh universal view.
Not until 1983, when David King’s unevenly comprehensive archaeological gazetteer with historical source-notes eventually appeared, were the English and Welsh ‘military’ sites presented as a whole and the printed texts initially searched.!¢ Even limited by the conventional definition of ‘the castle’ as ‘a private fortified residence of king or noble’,’” those seats judged by King to be ‘seriously fortified’ (assessed by scale, siting, nomenclature, and details) total well over a thousand in England and Wales (not the hundred or so untypical major examples of tradition’’). King’s purview, moreover, as reiterated in 1988, required ‘military structures’ to be starkly distinguishable from ‘domestic and (‘not-seriously-fortified’) ‘rejects’. 9 His survey put English castle-study paradoxically on a new quantitative footing whose qualitative implications have still to be digested. Taken as a whole, the visible archaeology now demands a reassessment which must bring in economic, political, and social circumstances. Very creditably walled towns are not, as is usual, excluded by David King, and minor sites (the overwhelming majority) get due attention—but as forts, not as gentry-seats. Sheer number and enormous diversity compel new thinking.
Wider perspectives are needed. Turning to France, whence so much (but far from everything) came, and especially to its charter-material, can be very illuminating. The long-extended substantial pedigree and more diversified forms of Continental fortresses help to correct the ‘private’ and ‘fortress-home’ conceptual straitjacket.2° Only by discarding or greatly broadening such ideas can fortresses be given their proper place in medieval society. The French castle-literature inevitably also tends to militarism, but less strongly and differently. Thinking (recently) in terms of the demeure seigneuriale and of the habitat rural noble dilutes the defensive fixation. But the chateau (still more the misconceived neologism chdteau fort) is still a construct too narrow for the authentic castle. The German Schloss, Burg, or Festung is more diversified and truer to its original. In general, following their different experience, the word ‘fortress’ and variants are understood across the Channel more sensitively to mean an architectural specimen of the militant aristocratic (‘feudal’) culture.” It is a more social concept but one still tinged with the ideas satirized by Sellar and Yeatman—otherwise ‘feudal anarchy’ and guerre privée, not so prevalent in England.” But irrespectively, military history still tends to view castles everywhere doctrinally as elements in some scheme of ‘national defence’.
The military tendency (derived essentially from war since Napoleon, heightened by 1914-18 and 1939-45) might be less strong had popular theorists been exposed to countervailing material of the kind this book provides.?3 Documents for a social history of fortresses are abundant. The remains of the dwellings to which banks, walls, and towers were the shell or carapace are found almost everywhere; but despite important work by P. A. Faulkner in the 1960s, the domestic imperative is only beginning to be appreciated.*4 Attempts in the ‘life in the castle’ vein have catered chiefly for children, aimed to interest girls, and boys too young to demand ‘murder-holes’, ‘flanking fire’, and strategy-speak.*5
Castle-study has been curiously arrested in its adolescence, in English especially. This frozen immaturity, in all but particular areas, is not the fault of the pioneers. George T. Clark’s architectural papers, republished with a much-criticized but valiant historical introduction as Medieval Military Architecture in England (1884), combined a civil engineer’s expertise with documentary awareness and acute architectural sensitivity. Ella Armitage’s pioneering (but polemical) institutional, archaeological, and source-based book The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (1912) was far in advance of its time.?° Castellology has had significantly few female exponents.?” Also in 1912 appeared A. Hamilton Thompson’s Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages, the fruit of wide-ranging and deep knowledge, despite its title essentially cultural in sympathy, as thorough for its date architecturally as historically.** These three solid and original books were marred by little more than applying unthinkingly the strategic, imperial, and soldierly ideas of late-Victorian Britain to an era which was almost utterly different.
This wrong turn was not quite inevitable: an alternative tradition might well have sprung from the aristocratic ethos which contemporary plutocracy and political power made visible everywhere in the Victorian country house. It could so easily have happened, in England as abroad, that the continuities of the chateau and the Schloss from medieval to early- and later-modern times should have prevailed. *° They do in Sir James Mackenzie’s anecdotal compilation The Castles of England, their Story and Structure (1897); as also in T. MacGibbon and D. Ross’s The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, five elegant volumes of socio-architectural continuum (published 1887-92). T. Hudson Turner and his continuator (and employer) J. H. Parker, the Oxford antiquarian and publisher, reflected the same culture but confined their four volumes (somewhat nominally) to Some Account of Domestic Architecture in England, and covered the whole era from 1066 to Henry VIII (1851-9). Harold Leask’s Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (1951) is a late but brief exemplar.
The logic faded away thereafter of treating most ‘castles’ as medieval country-houses, to be revived only recently; and incipient understanding of their widely varying ‘defensive’ panoply as really dual-purpose, also symbolizing the noble lifestyle, went too. There is much sociological perception in architect-historian Hugh Braun’s The English Castle (1936) and in the distinguished work of Arnold Taylor, but in Sidney Toy (1953, 1955) and Stewart Cruden (1960) it tends to be submerged.’ The respected work of the medievalist R. Allen Brown (1954, 1976) joined lifestyle to militarism with rare historical authority, but in him the soldierly view still predominated.3? Dissenting from it, as we do, is not just an attribute of belonging to the post-war generation: the current reappraisal depends upon a fresh perception of the truth derived from going back to the basics.
In France also, but more variably, it became the rule to keep aesthetics and all metaphysics out of castellologie, confining them to ‘domestic’ but especially to church architecture. 33 These compartments were devised early on. Thus Arcisse de Caumont, truly ‘fondateur de la science archéologique en France’ (Larousse), divided his seminal Abécédaire into ‘Ere Gallo-Romain’, ‘Architecture Religieuse’, and ‘Architectures Civile et Militaire’.34 In Germany the more diffuse ‘countryhouse’ literature reflects modern landlordism as well as faithfulness to archaeological diversity since the Carolingian Palast era.
By contrast, in France the 1789 Revolution made almost everything before then féodal (a term as condemnatory as our vernacular pejorative ‘medieval’), unpatriotic as well as outmoded (even barbaric); whereas in Germany emergent pan-German Romantic nationalism, manifested politically in 1848, 1870, and 1933-45, defined German identity medievally in terms of Reich and Ritterzeit (and even of the Raubritter and ‘robber-baron’). In Britain, the overthrow of King Charles I in the Civil War and the demolitions of royalist places ordered by Parliament made castles, like Cavaliers, ‘wrong but wromantic’,, if not dangerous then sinister—admirable only as rational applications of strategic ruthlessness.
How different castellology might have been but for this wrong turning is illustrated in France by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), best known as architect-restorer to Napoleon II at Carcassonne and Pierrefonds, but also of churches like Notre-Dame de Paris and elsewhere. Although imbued with the pervasive militarism of his century he expressed original artistic and spiritual insights, dedicating his Essai sur Parchitecture militaire au moyen dge (1854) to Prosper Mérimée, inspector-general of historical monuments as well as novelist. Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural scholarship was combined with originality as an engineer, but subsequent changes of taste away from the style of imaginative but careful reconstruction, practised in Britain most notably by William Burges at Castell Coch, Glamorgan (compare his additions at Cardiff), rather marooned Viollet-le-Duc, so that his vision lost some academic respectability.3° Symptomatically, the Victorian ‘sham-castles’ even of so scholarly a designer and ‘restorer’ as Anthony Salvin have also been left in disfavour.*”
It would be both unwise and impossible to ignore these influences. The present work adopts some of this Romantic pedigree but seeks to put the brutalism imposed on the period in truer perspective. Instead of presenting referenced generalities it employs case-studies, preferring examples and detail in context, taking warfare as no more than one part of the social tapestry. “Violence’ must be kept in proportion. The book is document- not architecture-based, expounding topically collated sources and minimizing argument from secondary works. The Continental literature is vast and (like so much else) can only be sampled. Matters of detail are pursued (if ‘the devil is in the detail’, so is the spirit), but particulars given are representative and an effort has been made always to relate minutiae to the central theme of the social relationships of the lay aristocracy, bourgeoisie, clergy, and peasantry to the fortress in all the variety of its forms. Above all, the aim has been to make a fresh start, avoiding the traditional constructs and shibboleths of the literature of ‘castles’. It runs a risk to go directly to the sources, trusting that they will appeal to sophisticated palates jaded by all levels of table dhéte fare, as well as be accessible to the newcomer to the subject. But this method is (incidentally, as it happens) a style now in vogue.
The method, in fact, is by no means new. Feeling himself embroiled in conflict (between his own scholarly but rather severe Anglican view of the middle ages and that of Roman Catholic apologetics), G. G. Coulton went to his document-index ‘with damnable iteration’.3° The present writer agrees with him that the period speaks best through its own documents, and shares some of his temperamental earnestness; but this book, while serious, hopes to be no more polemical or disjointed than the mode of analysis and presentation dictates. By drawing upon the accessible printed extenso records and summary translated calendars, which have their own (less obvious) difficulties but require somewhat less interpretation than the very large body of chronicle material, the aim is to provide a series of signposts for the general reader who needs a corrective supplement to orthodox books of castle-study and wishes to pursue it in greater depth.
It is hoped also to equip the teacher with a source-book which may contribute to bridging the gap between ‘history and ‘archaeology’3? The full Index of Persons, Places, and Subjects, it is hoped, will offer some compensation for the sacrifice of chronological and geographical order entailed by analysis by topics. Some loss of differentiation between periods and regions is harder to remedy. Chronological leaps and modern analogies are partly inevitable, partly deliberate. Specialists naturally work in terms of evolution and change—but this book is concerned with the basic continuities which make the middle ages a peculiar and fascinating period. Any such approach to an enormously various and constantly evolving era incurs great risks, some of which cannot be minimized. Some irritation may be provoked— but the risks will be justified if something of the peculiar medieval European thought-world, too readily ignored by the modernisms (technical and ‘strategic’) to which ‘castle study’ is particularly prone, emerges as a result.
The basic vocabulary, direct idiom, elementary syntax, and natural-sense word-order of the texts translated or adapted here are respected, so far as comprehension allows, in the author’s translations and adaptations. Given the importance of the original terminology of fortification (if the loose vocabulary, contrasting with modern technical jargon, can be so described), the original words are quoted wherever it matters. Given the quantity and quality of the photographs which are the chief merit of a large proportion of the recent books on castles, in this book they are entirely omitted.
The most photogenic sites are often the least typical. Moreover, if one good picture is worth pages of text, perhaps one good and full document may be better than either. By drawing upon a restricted but representative sample of printed, not manuscript, record collections (see the Bibliography), it has been possible to comb them thoroughly, instead of picking snippets perhaps more widely but according to a preconceived set of ideas. Accordingly, this book provides a basis for wider search, particularly the local research which can best advance the subject.
Using documents which are in only a few cases the result of modern selection (being almost all from complete original archives) does produce a miscellany—but it helps to ensure that original sources, not modern preoccupations, have set the agenda. Some focused passages of revisionist argument occur in Parts I and II, but they deal with issues too important to be fudged. It is hoped that readers unfamiliar with my journal articles will be relieved of the need to look them up—and that those who know them will forgive any reiteration.
In order to be sensitive and to achieve as far as possible an accurate insight, without too intrusive an effort at interpretation, most of the texts are given quite fully (often including the revealing verbal rind), or alternatively in long excerpts or extended interpolated summaries. Without even touching the mass of manu-script material in British (still more in French) archives, local and national, much case-detail has still had to be excluded, or relegated to the footnotes. It is one of the attractive qualities of the period that universal human problems (e.g. reconciling poverty with protection, power with justice, and government with God) are so prominent and persistent. Another indigenous element is the individuality and personal nature of the obligations of society, not so much impersonal and abstract citizenship as man to man, vassal to lord, and the king to all his subjects.4°
The female dimension (Part IV) and the role of children were essential to these relationships, through which, both major and minor, runs the linking thread of common principles. Binoculars are as necessary as the microscope—but keeping both in focus is not easy as we attempt to show that the records can be as vivid as the physical remains of the castles, cathedrals, parish churches, and houses themselves, when all are seen in their proper and mundane peaceable social environment.
With these intentions, the ideal of footnotes confined to bare references is not only unattainable but actually undesirable. As Professor Brown remarked (1969), footnotes “cite the authority for statements made and they also lead all those who wish to follow into the deep woods, green pastures and rewarding byways which lie on either side of the motorway of the text’." Getting off motorways, even for the newcomer, need not entail a map, boots, four-wheel-drive vehicle—or whatever are their academic equivalents.
The organization of this book also requires explanation. Texts have been put together according to a combination of theme, geographical region, and period— but themes, announced in the frequent section headings, receive priority. It has seemed best to set aside tradition and let topics be dictated by the evident concerns of particular classes and social groupings, relating them to those functions of fortresses which are clearly evident from the sources. Since many popular castle-books presume an overriding, largely autonomous, architectural evolution (even taking this alone as constituting a ‘history of the castle’), to provide a supplementary study such as this requires emphasis not on structural changes but, instead, must highlight the substantial institutional and sociological continuities. Much remained but little changed along with the castellated noble residence, and the walled-town which was its patrician, bourgeois equivalent, well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in France especially. It is true that fortresses were especially characteristic of the European middle ages, but there was not much about them, even architecturally, which was exclusively medieval; and, in truth, very little which was peculiarly ‘feudal’ .*
Such demythologizing can necessarily have little respect for the literary and media industry devoted to the charisma of ‘the castle’ of convention—but historical truth will gain. How much richer the broader cultural understanding can be may be seen by considering in the round the familiar but little-known example of Bodiam Castle in Sussex, built after 1385 by Sir Edward Dallingridge chiefly to proclaim his leadership of the local gentry, out of pride, not fear.43 To see Bodiam as it really was does not make the concept of ‘the castle’ disappear, but rather expands it to its proper dimensions, comprehending all the myriad castellated buildings of lords, ecclesiastics, burgesses, and even of the rural community. Fortification was the predominant aristocratic style to which all classes, whether as subjects or as proprietors, conformed in various ways and to varying degrees.
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