Gone Medieval - Castles in Ruins

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Why are so many medieval castles left in ruins?Join Dr. Eleanor Janega as she steps through the rubble of these fallen stone giants to close our current series on the life cycle of castles.The technological advancements and changing comforts, such as chimneys, glass windows and not least privacy, made it challenging to maintain castles over time. Discover how societal shifts and changing fashion trends led to the decline of these historic structures that were once the ultimate symbol of power and control and how we can appreciate their historical significance today.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega, produced and edited by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. Feasting, festivals, homage,

sieges. The castles that we have discussed this month played host to dramatic, important, and sometimes violent scenes. Discussions of these historical events can help us to flesh out the castles that we encounter, and to be honest, when we encounter them, they need that fleshing out. Because most of the time, we're left with just their ruins. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, we are discussing the enigmatic castles that we are most likely to encounter today, those that are in ruins, and how these impressive and beloved buildings came undone. As we've seen over the past month, castles were used for all sorts of reasons, But what makes a castle a castle, and not a fortress,

was the express function of the castle as a living space for nobility and royalty. Any well-fortified hill can technically be a fort. But it took living areas to make it a castle. And when we are talking about the fanciest people in the Middle Ages, they aren't going to want to be living in anything that is anything less than sumptuous, and at the very least comfortable. As we moved out of the late medieval period and into the early months, modern, there were some advances that made life more comfortable that were pretty difficult to

amalgamate into the extant fabric of castles. As we move into the late medieval period, a huge change came about in tech that helped everyone to keep their homes warm. Chimneys. Prior to this invention, most hearths were in a central location in homes in general, including in castles. This didn't mean that smoke had nowhere to escape. There were usually vents for smoke in the walls or in the ceiling, but it didn't do as great a job in funneling out smoke as chimneys could do. In fact, the brand new tech was enthusiastically taken up in castles where possible. If you were building a brand new castle, you were in luck from the 12th century onward. In England, Conisborough Castle near Doncaster, which was built around 1185, was the first

to sport a chimney. But this didn't necessarily catch on very fast. And eventually, castles were obliged to knock through walls. to make sure that they had the proper fireplaces ready to go. This was a huge pain, but was done, and almost any castle you visit today will have a fireplace that you can tell is just ever so slightly wonky. So far, so good. Better air.

But here's the thing. Moving the fire from a central location in a great hall to a wall is great for ventilation. It's not as great for keeping the room warm. Suddenly all the warmth is just, down one particular end and it isn't circulating as well. It might also happen that your grand days where he's set up your throne was in a central location. So, yes, you could impress everyone when they came in, but also so you could take advantage

of the lovely central hearth. But now you've got a fireplace on one of the walls and its warmth isn't exactly reaching the middle of the room. How are you meant to be comfortable and impressive under these conditions? It's not that chimneys couldn't be fitted. It's more that they couldn't be fitted into the framework of how castles were laid out to work. And I bring up chimneys because issues like these extended into many other creature comforts as time went on and architectural features changed, and certain materials became more readily available.

For example, glass. Many medieval windows were little more than actual portals in a wall, which let in air. Again, this was at a premium if you didn't have a chimney. But they also let in light. They could be closed up with shutters at night to keep out drafts, but they were opened in the day to brighten things up. Any brief glance at medieval architecture will tell you that one fashion which changed over time was an increase in the size of windows. Matt and I discussed this in our episode on churches, but a quick and dirty way of dating medieval buildings is to see how many fingers you can align with a window and guess the century based on that. So if one finger fits in the window, it's probably 11th century.

if you can fit your whole hand, it's likely 15. Part of this was down to the architectural know-how of how to put a big old hole in a wall and retain structural integrity over the period. Some was down to how expensive glass was. Glass was a luxury commodity in the medieval period. But as glass-making techniques improved and the number of trained glaciers expanded,

the price began to drop significantly. So the adjusted cost of this, sort of luxury was a lot more in the 11th century than it was in the 15th. As a result, the fancy sort of people who wanted and could afford glassed windows could have much larger ones for similar prices later in the period. So again, if you're building a castle in the 15th century, it's perfectly possible to put in some nice large windows, now that building techniques to do so were standardized and glass was cheaper to come by. But what if you were in your ancestral castle that was built in the 12th century. You're, again, going to find yourself knocking through some

serious and highly protected walls just to let some light into the place. And that in and of itself is hugely expensive. Now, this isn't to say that it wasn't done. Pretty much every castle has a hodgepodge of window styles poked here and there and everywhere, showing how these major renovations were seen as desirable. However, big, beautiful windows and streaming light also made a castle weaker. And part of the point of a castle was to protect the people inside in case of war. So you had a toss-up on your hands. Do you want a light, bright, great hall, or do you want to protect it against a tack? It's a difficult call to make, and one that can be avoided by just building a nice new pleasure palace with all the chimneys and windows you could ever hope for,

and then retreating to a castle or fortress if things got bad. The same thing, considerations are on display when we get to the modern invention that you probably don't think about that much. Privacy. If you lived in a medieval castle, well, there wasn't a whole lot of this. The master of the castle, whether royal or noble, probably had his own bedchamber where he retired to at night, likely with his wife. But guests? Several guests? And their retinues? And servants? These people might not have their own rooms to retreat to, and many actually slept in the great hall itself at night. As time went on, people started to feel like they wanted more space to themselves, and it's hard to renovate a castle to include lots of tiny little rooms for the help.

Yes, you could construct other outbuildings in the castle yard, and this was certainly done. But there you run up against the fact that space inside the walls is going to be limited. So as expectations for a private sleeping area increased with modernity, the desire to stick with the castle simultaneously plummets. It's just easier to start from scratch and create a situation where everyone gets a room rather than retrofitting them into a stone box. And as the modern period continued, the expectation of certain creature comforts and the difficulty of fitting them in only got worse.

consider, for example, plumbing. Castles, of course, had bathrooms and kitchens which could be supplied with water, but the supply in question was often done by good old-fashioned manual labor. Servants went to the well and carried water where it was needed. This was a massively difficult and time-consuming task. It got even worse if you were drawing water for a bath and the water had to be heated and then moved about. Now, granted, that wasn't necessarily a conversation. concern for the fancy sort of people who simply employed others to move water for them,

but it was costly in terms of human hours. And when plumbing became a thing, it began to look downright wasteful. Again, living in a massive stone building was an enemy of retrofitting precision plumbing. It's so difficult and fiddily that here in the UK, it's not uncommon to see retrofitted plumbing on the outsides of Victorian residential homes rather than having it added into the interior walls. If it's that difficult to add it to a 150-year-old house, imagine how difficult it would be to do it to a 700-year-old fortified stone building. Again, are you going to front the cost of that, or are you just going to start from scratch? The same goes for even more modern considerations like electricity.

This would be a massively difficult thing to integrate into the fabric of an old stone building. I grew up in a house that was built in the first years of the 20th century. It was wired for electricity, but come on, my childhood wasn't that dire, but it was wired in a very early 20th century way, in that each room had one plug socket. This isn't really acceptable now, and again, it was built with the miracle of electricity in mind. Even if you wired a whole castle, it would probably have to have been redone again at least once by now. So it's not an expense you could just tick off and never think about it. again. In an era where castles aren't necessary, this is often a bridge too far for those who would inhabit them, in theory. You can also extrapolate this out to things like central heating. Sure,

wood-burning fireplaces and their chimneys are extremely atmospheric. But most people want to be able to control temperature a bit more than that. Putting a series of radiators through a castle requires the same punching through walls as anything else, and a lot of people would rather just not bother, and that is understandable. I am, of course, talking about extremely modern considerations. But the fact that castles were difficult to renovate and that ideas of comfort were always changing

was even on display in the medieval period itself. One fantastic example of this is Castle Rising in Norfolk. In the 14th century, it was home to one of my favorite queens, Isabella of France. She was also known as the she-wolf, just because she happened to rule the kingdom in tandem with her out-of-wedlock boyfriend Roger Mortimer while she was regent for her minor son Edward III.

She ended up in Castle Rising, retired. And when I say retired, I mean, of course, that she was sent there after Edward toppled said out-of-wedlock boyfriend from the throne in a coup. Roger was hanged for usurping royal power. But Isabella was the king's mum, so she was given several castles and asked to please not do it again. One of these was rising, and from 1331 it became one of her main residences. Isabella liked rising for the excellent hunting, but the castle itself was not up to her elaborate tastes.

So she had an entirely new complex of buildings constructed in the central Bailey to see to her needs, including a bedroom and a chapel. If a decidedly 14th century woman like Isabella didn't want to deal with a remodel, can you blame people who expect flushing toilets, heating, and Wi-Fi if they don't feel like doing it either? Okay, I can't kind of blame them a little bit, but still. If ideas about comfort had an effect on the use of castles, so did taste more generally. As we approached the early modern period, fashions began to change, and so subsequently did expectations of the world. of what a royal or noble residence should look like and could do.

While one's such consideration was certainly comfort, another was fashion. As tastes changed in the early modern period, more and more wealthy people wanted to emulate the neoclassical elements of Renaissance style. Some castles, like Sterling, were able to adapt to this more easily. So-called Renaissance alterations could include things that were more or less cosmetic, adding in stucco work, painting over medieval murals and including classical scenes instead. However, one big change was often very specifically windows. And as already discussed, this was a huge expense and headache when you needed to cut through a massive stone wall. Now, the people

who might choose to commit themselves to fashion usually were the sorts who had super deep pockets. Having said that, even in the case of many royal houses, it was much more cost. expedient just to do a grand hall or a few rooms here and there as a nod to taste changes, rather than committing to a whole new decoration scheme and layout. Some castles and families who weren't quite so well off could throw their money at easier things like Renaissance gardens. You know the ones. They have hedge mazes, symmetrical layouts, and groundwater features. It was a nice way of pretending to be in Italy without literally having to bash through your own walls.

But as the period wore on and fashions changed and changed again, the most fashionable sorts who really wanted to prove that they were up to date with all the latest continental styles found it much easier and much more chic to just start from scratch and build a palace. Or if you weren't royal a house. This is in an audio format so you can't see me doing air quotes, but I am putting the most dramatic air quotes of all time around house here. It's easier just to make Kensington Palace with all its huge, glorious windows, beautifully inlaid floors, an intricate stucco, than to try to shoehorn all of that into Dover and turn it into a pleasure palace.

I mean, imagine trying to get a harpsichord up a tight spiral staircase. It's a logistical nightmare. The locations of the palatial homes are also key when it comes to understanding the early modern mindset. Because one of the new and more modern considerations was that rich people were so. suddenly very interested in living in cities. This isn't to say that medieval people didn't love the city. Complaints about being dragged from Edinburgh to Sterling shows us that there's always been a set of powerful people

who were inclined towards urbanity. However, in the early modern period in the United Kingdom in particular, there was a sudden influx of people more generally to the cities because of a process called enclosure. Inclosure was one of those really unfortunate modern inventions that made the lives of peasants much, much worse. The idea here was that common land, where peasants had traditionally raised animals,

coppiced for firewood, or did their laundry, was wasted, and it was taken under the control of the wealthy owners who owned the land. This made life in the countryside increasingly untenable, especially for the poorer peasants, many of whom moved into cities to seek a more secure life. These people coming in created to men for more building works, which created more urban jobs, which made more impoverished rural

decide that they were going to move in as well. Further, with increased shipping and international trade, there were also jobs that could be obtained in cities that you simply weren't going to be offered in a rural location. This urban hubbub attracted the wealthy, who made out like bandits off of enclosure, and soon everybody wanted at least a nice early modern townhouse

as well as their ancestral pie. And if you weren't really going to the castle for more than a summer, well, was it actually worth spending all that money to keep it going? Why not simply build a modern house that has a view of the castle out back? Then you're sorted. Of course, wealthy people living in townhouses in the cities then dragged more of the displaced peasantry into the cities in order to serve them, and well, you get the picture. If the point of the Renaissance was pretending to be a wealthy Italian, you did this

that in a city with a retinue of servants, not in a cool old medieval castle. Obviously, this then has knock-on effects, because the less time you spent in a castle, the less money you were going to spend on it, and they take a lot of work and money in order to just keep them upright at all. Never mind fashionable. So many castles just slowly began to crumble away due to disinterest while their owners were in the city at a salon. Now, you might find all of this quite shocking, but fashion and the way that we think castles should look comes into play now when we are talking about castles. For example, recently, renovations were done at Sterling Castle to bring it back to its late

medieval appearance, and this hasn't gone down well with the local community at all. From the 1990s to the 2010s, it's undergone. refurbishment to restore it as a site that really celebrates that key stage in its building. And this included controversially for the people of Sterling, the lime washing of the Great Hall. It's a bit like the question around classical statues that would have been all painted and everything, but people see that, they think, oh, this looks terrible. We want them just sort of bare materials. And this is like the case with Sterling Castle.

So they had very good evidence of the lime washing. And they found remains of this from the kind of period we talked about with James the 4th and James the 5th, that sort of period. And that's why they chose to do that. But the people of Sterling were really, a lot of them reacted very badly to seeing this big shining sort of golden castle that they'd used to just be in a stone, you know, grey stone surface. And apparently this is partly because, you know, even the people that were involved in that renovation, they admitted that they could have done better with the calm side of things because they had the castle. sort of underwraps for about 10 years apparently and then suddenly just took that off and there was this gold shiny thing. So people, people didn't like it. But I mean, perhaps inevitably because I'm a historian of the period that is harking back to, I like it. And I think it looks striking. And,

you know, you can see this sort of dazzling thing from miles around. And maybe people will come around to it a bit. But it's an interesting example of how do you, how do you go about what decisions do you make when you're in charge of that kind of process? If the good people of Sterling thought that the castle should look all stone hume and rough and ready, it's also because as the wealthiest people moved out of castles in interstately homes, castles took on a much more military-specific role and began to shed their nods toward refinement and taste. Sterling, and certainly Carlyle and Dover, remained as strategic military placements, and they were increasingly used as military barracks,

and so their fashionable exteriors were allowed to slough off on the outside. And if they broke down on the inside, well, this is an army barracks. Who cares if the frescoes aren't pristine? However, when it comes to castles as a military feature, the early modern period also drastically changed what was necessary for using castles as military buildings, especially because of one major invention. Gunpowder. Hassels were designed as the ultimate protective military building for a world where the great majority of military action was very specifically siege warfare, as opposed to open-pitched battle.

They were designed so that you could simply hang out inside while your opponents hurled their best efforts against your, hopefully, robust walls. Of course, this didn't always work. Trebushes and catapults could do massive damage, but they were also expensive and expensive in underage. wieldy. But the fact remains that castles weren't always impregnable. The introduction of gunpowder to Europe meant that suddenly major ballistic weapons that can pierce walls, especially cannon, began to make an appearance, and the safety which castles could afford therefore needed a major rethink in order to keep offering it. Well, it ends up with a major overhaul in the Tudor period, 1540s. There's some significant works which are done to change the medieval layout in terms of putting in batteries and thinking about the structure of where the gates sit. So much of what we see is shaped by

those Tudor renovations. It survives through into the 1600s and 1700s. It ends up seeing battle in even in the context of the Jacobite rebellions in the 18th century. Bombardment then, which does further damage to the walls. And it becomes a, well, it doesn't become, it continues. That strand of its life, which is military, one of its strands, right through to the modern era, and it is the base of the border regiment through the 20th century and beyond. So it continues with that life, that military element through the later centuries after the period we've been discussing.

One fairly non-invasive way of responding to Canada, was to just make thicker walls. You could pile a new wall either inside or outside the extant building and hope that by doubling up the thickness, you were also going to be able to repel any stray cannon fire. I didn't say it was technically interesting, okay? I said it was an approach. However, many more new approaches to walls could be introduced as well,

though they were not necessarily to the castle itself, but the walls and fortifications surrounding them. These innovations led to the creation of what we now call Starforts. The Star Fort was invented specifically to answer the difficulties posed by wall-shattering cannon, and they were also known as Trace Italian or Italian style, because it first arose in Italy. So there you have it. Italian sensations weren't all stucco windows and gardens. The title Star Fort sort of lets you know what you're looking at when you see one, but essentially they are usually a polygon of some sort with bastions,

a type of projection outward from the curtain wall placed at the corners. These corner bastions had the benefit of eliminating so-called dead zones or protected blind spots. They also created positions along the curtain walls where defenders were protected from direct fire, allowing them to use fire themselves. A lot of star forts also included raised secondary secondary. structures based entirely inside the primary structure called cavaliers. These were usually platforms that were higher than the rest of the castle. The idea here was from the cavalier you would be able to fire over the main parapet without

interfering with the fire of the latter. These were all big military advancements, and they could be retroactively done to extant castles, and they certainly were at times. For example, Barrett Castle was famously redone by Queen Elizabeth I and Trace Italian in an effort to stave off any attacks from marauding Spanish or French fleets. Such works came at a massive price, however. And if Barrett's renovation was famous, so was its cost. It was the single most expensive project of Elizabeth's reign, which is saying something, because my girl wasn't exactly a miser. Other renovations also took place at castles, which were seen as strategically,

important. And they often had a lot to do with lowering towers so that they weren't so susceptible to attracting fire. The bonus here was that they also wouldn't be so likely to topple if they did get hit up top. A squatter tower is much harder to knock to the ground. At Dovercastle, they did just this, and further fortified the walls on the northeast side with an earthwork to help absorb incoming cannon shop. So it isn't to say that it wasn't possible. possible to change extant castles and prepare them for war? It was just really, really expensive and time-consuming. If even good old Lizzie I had a hard time doing it,

what hope did a family of the lower nobility out in the countryside have? Better to just build a star fort from scratch, knowing that it is nice and safe and go from there. Still, the arrival of gunpowder weapons wouldn't necessarily have meant that castles were abandoned outright. After all, if you were, said theoretical lower noble family in the countryside, it wouldn't automatically matter unless a war showed up on your doorstep. And one emphatically did in 1642.

Many of the castles that we have discussed in this series were touched by the War of the Three Kingdoms, known in England more particularly as the Civil War. Perhaps the most involved of our castles was Conway. It was besieged after the town fell in all of the city, August 1646. Even with gunpowder weapons at their disposal, it took the roundheads three months to take the castle. It is much to the credit of medieval engineering technique that it perhaps could have still stood even after all of this. But in 1655, the Council of State, which had then been appointed by the triumphant parliament, ordered that the castle was to be slighted. Sliding essentially

means that a castle is forcibly made to be unfit for military use. So it seems that the puritanical drive to destroy what is beautiful also extends to the military. Sterling Castle, meanwhile, was the scene of the Second Battle of Sterling in 1648. Later, in 1651, the castle was damaged significantly under siege by General Monk of the New Model Army, as it had been a royalist stronghold. The damage was largely done to the Great Holland Church, but it was also extensive enough that after the restoration, it was largely used as a prison for dissenters for quite some time. Over in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell's general denicidal program meant that the parliamentary

forces also took trim, though only after it had been abandoned by Irish forces following the sack of Droheda in 1649. The roundheads weren't phenomenal caretakers, and by the time it was turned backed over, it was left to deteriorate. Carlisle, perhaps unsurprisingly, spent a huge part of the Civil War under siege. It was initially occupied by royalist forces and endured an attack from October 1644 until late June 1645. At that point, it became a garrison for parliamentary forces.

It then went into decline, but it was still integral enough to get caught in a siege by Jacobites in 1745. It managed to survive because it was just so bloody convenient to have as garrison, and it was even redeveloped in the 1820s. This shows that if there is a strong governmental desire to keep a castle integral and to continue to funnel money into its upkeep, it can survive. The question is, just to be a strong governmental desire to keep a castle integral, and to continue to funnel money into its upkeep, it can survive. is just how many people can do that, and in a modern age with a professionalized army, why would you? Old Sarum, meanwhile, had long since been dismantled by the time that Cromwell

was kicking off. So there wasn't much of anything to destroy there. And oddly, the great Dover Castle was just never looked in on at the time either. However, up and down England, one will find castles that sustained serious damage in the war itself. Off the top of my head, just those that I personally have visited include Scarborough, Barclay, Lincoln, Helmsley, I mean, I could go on. Stillmore were deliberately slighted like Conway was, and these include Goodrich, Bolsavar, Kenilworth, Sheffield, and Pontefract. In many ways, these modern conflicts were the death knell for most of our castles. because following the restoration, tastes and fashion had moved on so much

that there wasn't even a romantic association with the castles which had seen so much damage. Modern people like to see the Middle Ages as backward, and opposed to whatever it was that was going on during the War of the Three Kingdoms that was so incredibly enlightened. And it would have taken a great attachment to the medieval, which wasn't necessarily a feature of this period,

to encourage owners to pour the money they needed to into reestablishing these castles as livable. So they were just left to crumble. To be fair to early modern people, if there was one romantic thing that they attached to castles, it was that they enjoyed looking at their crumbling ruins. And so great houses were often built on the old castle grounds so you could gaze out your modern Georgian windows and enjoy the scenery.

And, you know, I agree with them. I think castle ruins look great. They are atmospheric, sometimes spooky, and always interesting. It is expensive and difficult to keep a castle going. So we can't always blame people if they don't want to keep them in perfect nick. I absolutely get it. And in some ways, I am thankful that many castles have been left in ruins because it means that people like you and me get more of a chance to interact with them.

It's a lot more likely that you're going to be allowed to go around and see a romantic old ruin than it is to convince some wealthy people to let you poke around in their home. Castle ruins can be more than one thing. It's okay to look at them and wish that we could still see the extant buildings. It's also perfectly fine to stand on top of a wind-swept old tower and enjoy looking all the way down into what would have been the sub-basement. Neither of these things detracts from their importance or our appreciation of them. Indeed, the abandonment of castles has often meant that we are,

are now communally their caretakers. And rebuilding them in our imaginations makes them more personal than they could ever be as the property of the powerful. I like that. Thank you so much to listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. As always, my co-host Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription.

And we're offering 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. If you can't bear to be apart from me for a whole week, there are some fabulous films that we've made for you to enjoy, including my recent series Meet the Normans, where I spent some time at The Amazing and intact, Filet's Castle. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family about us. If you have a minute, could you please do me a favor and drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to podcasts? It really does help new listeners to find us. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.