Gone Medieval - The Story of Castles


Episode Date: September 24, 2022

Castles have held a pivotal place in British life, many of them remaining today as powerful reminders of our history and sources of inspiration. But castles were also homes and status symbols as well as hubs of life, activity, and imagination.In today’s edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis discusses the castle’s early genesis from the Norman Conquest onward with John Goodall, whose new book The Castle: A History weaves together the history of the British castle from the eleventh century to the present day. The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. 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. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Castles once dominated skylines and landscapes across England and across Europe. They're closely linked in our minds with the medieval world of knights and kings. But how did they reach the shores of England? Where did they originate from? What were they for? And how did their role change over the centuries of the medieval period. John Goodall is an architectural editor at Country Life magazine and writes on

castles and churches. His latest book, The Castle, A History, is a unique and fascinating survey of the long and varied histories of these quintessentially medieval buildings. And John joins us now to give us the lowdown on the story of the castle. Thank you very much for joining us, John. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be here. It's a pleasure and I've thoroughly enjoyed your book. I would absolutely recommend to anybody who is interested in the castle or this period at all. We usually told that castles are something that were imported with the Norman conquest of England. Would you say that that is correct? Is there any evidence of pre-conquest castles in Britain? And how were they developing on the

continent separate from what's going on in England? Yes, so it's a very complicated answer in some ways to this question. I think most people would accept that castles, as we know them, are really a phenomenon of the Norman conquest. That's certainly where they become widespread in England and the Breschalz as a whole. But it is complicated by two things. The first is that the Normans, when they came, there were people who come before them, as it were, from the continent. Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king, had himself been in exile in Normandy and brought back with him quite a lot of people from Normandy. And they clearly built castles too, but they were Normans building in England, as it were. But there are also,

then, stories and anecdotes are very hazyly understood sites, which were fortified in the Anglo-Saxon period. Clearly there are residents and houses that are fortified, but by and large, the Anglo-Saxons don't like fighting within fortifications. Generally, they like to fight in the field. So they build fortifications, but they tend not to use them in quite the same way. So you come back then to the question of what is a castle. Can we see these buildings before the conquest? And as conventionally defined, the definition of a castle is the residence of a nobleman that is defensible. And there are definitely defensible residences of Anglo-Saxon nobleman, but they don't really get used in the way that castles get used after the conquest, and certainly they don't litter the narratives

in the way that post-conquest castles litter the narratives of events. So they do exist, and an example of that would be, let's say, somewhere like Bamberon, Northumberland, which I cite in the book, which is described as being besieged by King Pender of Mercia, and it's described by Beads, this account, and there's a siege. But it's quite unlike most medieval sieges you've read about, because we can tell roughly what Bamber must have looked like, because it's on this massive plug of volcanic rock. The fortifications of Bamber are now occupied by a castle,

but they must always have more or less been coterminous, that natural outcrop of rock. And we're told that King Pender turns up, pulls down all the nearby villages and buildings, stacks them up to form an enormous bonfire, lights the bonfire when the wind is facing towards the castle, and hopes that presumably the castle or the fortifications, Bebber's burr, will burn down. That's not really like a siege from the late Middle Ages. If we understand it correctly, nobody tries to stop Pender from pulling down the houses for one thing, and when the wind

miraculously changes direction, Pender just gives up. So it's not a very hard-pressed siege of the kind that we're familiar with reading about in the later Middle Ages. It feels more like a natural fortification that is associated by its name, Bebba's Burr, so Queen Bebba and her Burr her fortification. So is it a castle? It depends really how you define it, and there are many ways of reading that text that B provides us with in the 8th century. But it's nevertheless really intriguing, and so you shouldn't think that there aren't fortifications that might possibly qualify as castles earlier on. And at least trying to set fire to it implies that it was a wooden fortification as well, that there wasn't any effort to build anything in stone at this time. It is slightly, again,

complicated. We're so restricted by lack of evidence. And I think it is possible there were stone walls, but I think the fire does definitely imply that the buildings inside the walls, even if there were walls, were timber. And that would accord with what we know of Anglo-Saxon architecture generally. It's basically all timber, apart from a few church, everything else is timber. So they do build in stone, but stone of course is grand and Roman. That's what the Romans build in. And the biggest buildings, the biggest man-made structures in Anglo-Saxon England, are all amazingly Roman.

And do we know how the castle begins to develop on the continent? Presumably if it comes over with the Norman conquest, it's something that's already in existence on continental Europe that they're able to import with them. How early do we see castles on the continent? Castle seemed to develop on the continent during the breakdown of the Carolingian Empire. in the 9th and 10th centuries. And they are a rarity, but what distinguishes them really is a kind of landholding, what we term the feudal system. And the feudal system is basically a system whereby

an individual has an enormous amount of land, and he breaks the land up into parcels, and he gives it to his followers. And in return for the land, and the money they can make from the land, they serve him in war. And they need the money because being a warrior, you need a horse, you need armor, you need training. It's an expensive pastime. So you have basically these blocks of land, which are partitioned up amongst your followers, and they create a military following. And the figures who hold the land tend to have castles. They seem extraordinary figures across this distance of time. And they make even modern autocrats seem quite modest by comparison. They're enormously powerful figures, and they just do exactly what they want. And it is extraordinary that there are places,

for the great keep at Losh. Architecture historians looked at this great castle building and they thought it must be a 12th century building. It's so big. And he dated timbers from it and turns out to be a late 9th century building. It's absolutely unbelievable. And the thing that defines all these buildings, I should say, is a single dominating tower,

whether it's of stone or a tower called a motte, which is basically a heap of earth, with a wooden tower or some kind of fortification on the top. And these are both basically kinds of tower and they define castles. And of course, both kinds of buildings require enormous resources to construct. And you must remember that all these buildings

are being constructed from an economy that's the fraction of the size of our own. And building them, I think, basically, is a kind of tyranny, really. And that's certainly what happens in England after the conquest. It's not an attractive thing. You basically take people off the fields

and you force them to build. You can imagine the resentment that causes, certainly in England in the late 11th century. And so why were castle so important to Norman military control of England in the aftermath of 1066? Is it partly because of the castle's novelty, if they've not been seen in England, it's this whole new system of control? And how do the Normans go about projecting that? Presumably building a castle is a long business, so were there quick fixes to get a castle up quickly to dominate a region easily? The first thing to say is that indeed timber, not stone, it's the material of the architecture of emergency in the Middle Ages.

When you're trying to build something rapidly, you don't build in stone. It's far too complicated. You always build in timber and earth. We talk about castles being introduced at the conquest, but in fact I think you can quite clearly identify three different kinds of castle that are built at the Norman Conquest and in its immediate aftermath. The first are the campaign castles that are built by William the Conquer when he lands were told at Pevensey, site of a woman. Roman fort, of course, very significantly. It's almost certainly within the walls of that Roman fort that he spends his first night. And then he travels along the coast to Hastings and builds a castle. Now, there are actually very few castles described as being constructed before the Battle of Hastings in its immediate aftermath. Hastings seems to be a castle to control his lines of communication with the continent in case everything goes disastrously wrong. But of course he needs to fight a

battle to prove that there is divine sanction for his takeover of the throne. But when he's won Hastings, he expects the English to concede defeat, and they don't. But instead of building lots of castles, he seems to march on this great predatory ring round London. He fortifies Dover, in fact, which is another interesting example of a pre-conquest castle, but then goes on this predatory march around London. There are no more castles built, we're told, in this period of time. When he has being crowned in Christmas Day in 1066, he initially tries to have a reprosch among with the Anglo-Saxon nobility. And his frustration is that they keep on rebelling in different ways. And his first reaction is to go around and build a second generation of castles where he goes

to major towns and cities and he builds castles in those cities to try and control them. And there are places such as London, the Tower of London, famously as a case in point, he builds two castles in London, but places such as York and Lincoln. Lincoln and Warwick and things like that. He marches around trying to control the kingdom. And then he quite simply just gives up trying to propitiate the Anglo-Saxon nobility. And he then dispossesses them on an enormous scale, gradually over a period of about 10 or 15 years. And when that happens, all the resources of England pass into the hands of pretty much 70 or so great magnates lay and ecclesiastical. And these figures do what has happened on the continent.

They take over these enormous bodies of land and they organise them into what are called castleries. They distribute land to followers and their followers, serve them militarily, and the resources of their estates go towards constructing and maintaining and garrisoning through their followers, their castles. Now it's only that third kind of castle that really sets its roots into the fabric of England.

because other castles that have been built so far have never been endowed with property. But once you endow a castle with property, it suddenly has a longevity that it never possessed before. And it actually becomes part of the social fabric of what you're doing. And in addition to that, they take these bodies of lands from castleries, they also found beside castles towns, boroughs, which are a means of economically exploiting the landscape, and also religious foundations, which are endowed out of the castlery lands and perform the servicing kind of prayer. So you suddenly have castles with towns attached to them, with other institutions attached to them, and these have real lasting power in a way that neither the town castles that he

builds, unless they're subsequently endowed, or the campaign castles that he built possess. So in fact, the castle enters quite gradually into English life, and it's really the third kind of castle that has legs. That's what's important because these castles with the landed units that accrue to them descend from generation to generation of families and they are beyond the compass of wealth. They're enormously important and they establish the bones, the skeleton, the economic skeleton of post-conquest England. I'm left wondering whether William was sort of trying to avoid creating that parcel of land to give away with a castle and maintain as much of it as he could royal hands before realizing that actually the only way to maintain proper control is to reflect

that system on the continent. There's a reason it's worked on the continent, so that's what he has to fall back on in England to start giving away big parcels of land with a castle to have localized control. And he does actually create two kinds of castle, in fact, it's worth saying that on the borders of his kingdom, so on the south coast where he himself landed facing Normandy, on the border with Wales, which is very unruly, and on the northern border, he creates coherent bodies of land that are attached to castles. But everywhere else, castles have very strange inherited systems of landholdings, which are basically inherited from their Anglo-Saxon owners, so you can own property all over the place. So there are on the borders coherent land holdings,

which I think are quite clearly meant to protect an area. I think also you do need to remember that William the Conquer and his immediate successors, they really rule pretty much. Their word has authority in a way that subsequent monarchs and the late Middle Ages just don't possess. And William makes and breaks people with complete ruthlessness. So it doesn't really matter what he gives you, because if you put a foot out of line, he'll just take everything away again.

So the Conqueror and his children, really until the mid-12th century, controls resources to a degree that is quite hard to comprehend, I think, at this distance of time. People don't really have independent authority of him. So you build castles, by permission of the king really effectively. Because if he doesn't like you, you're out.

I should probably say I'm out near the Welsh border so I can vouch for how unruly it gets out here sometimes. I've seen the young farmers down the pub. Nothing changes. No, not at all. How much of an effect do you think castles then have on the landscape and the way that society is ordered in Norman England compared to Anglo-Saxon?

Do we see a sharp change or is there some continuity? Yeah, again, it's a fascinating question. The answer is that there are points of continuity and points of disjunction, but also what William the Conqueror is very keen to do is demonstrate his legitimacy as the rightful descendant of Edward the Confessor. So ironically, even when he revolutionises things, he thinks that he's recreating England as it existed before. It's very strange.

He takes as his point of reference what things were like on the last day of the reign of Edward the Confessor, because that was legitimate somehow, and he is inheriting that and wants to see how things have changed since that time. But he's interested in being seen as the legitimate follower, which is successor of Ed and the Professor, which is why I think he gives the English nobility so many chances. When he finally gives up, of course, he ends up really completely transforming society.

And one reason is that the people who are put in charge of society, by and large, there are one or two exceptions. But they're basically foreigners. They're people. They talk a different language. They dress in different clothes, they have different fashions, they cut their hair differently. I mean, if you look on the by a tapestry, I'm sure you're aware, the Normans basically shave the backs of their heads. The English accents have moustaches, and they all have strange names.

It must have been a very peculiar and horrible, particularly English beforehand. It's a complete takeover. And they assert that they're doing things in pursuance of tradition, but they're not really at all. Though there are one or two things, I think, that do fall through in Castle Architecture. We've talked a little bit about Norman living in fortified residences. They're often called Bergeet's. And Bergeet basically means the entrance to the fortification or the enclosure. And so it's quite clear that in English, Bergeet's gatehouses were probably very prominent buildings.

And it cannot be a coincidence, therefore, that Norman architecture in England puts a particular emphasis on grand gatehouses. There's no parallel to this on the continent. That must be an inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past. And the other thing they do is they build halls. Now, in Doomsday, lots of Jews and duties are owed to a hall. And the importance of an English hall means that the Normans need to build big halls. And they do. And they pass into the English tradition of architecture.

So this strange sense of total disjunction and yet an effort of continuity and in some points, very significant points of continuity. But the evidence also must be said is so exiguous, Trying to rescue a good picture of Anglo-Saxon England from before the conquest is almost impossible. And doom stairs as close as we really get. And archaeologically, of course, it's almost impossible. And there are lots of circular arguments that can develop from, let's say, archaeological evidence, because you date things in terms of what you expect.

And if you expect certain things, then you can never date at the unexpected before the time when it's expected. So there are complications there. But I think it's fair to say continuity and major interruptions, but the effect is a transformation cumulatively. I think that's an absolutely fascinating point about the gatehouses and the halls, being a feature particularly English Norman castles, because we tend to think of them being about absolutely stamping a new authority on the landscape, but it's clear that they were at least initially harking back to something

that looked somehow vaguely familiar to the English, even if it was a new system of control. had a gatehouse and a hall, which isn't a normal continental thing. So they are making allowances for the English almost? I think they are, and I think it's important to emphasise, too, that both the late Anglo-Saxons and the Normans are both ultimately in their architecture. They're looking back in stone building to a common example, the example of Rome. So in fact, they're speaking the same language, and that's in itself a fascinating thing, that when they start building in stone. And I think that they're looking to a common language

and the revival of Rome. And it's important, I think, to emphasise too, that the stone buildings, buildings such as the Tower of London that we think of as paradigmatic of early castle architecture, nothing like those buildings have been seen in England before,

but the Tower of London is still under construction at the very end of the 11th century. It takes decades to build in stone on that scale. That's not how you build in an emergency. So you need to understand a building such as the Tower of London. It is a massive statement.

It is also very strong, and powerful, but it's not what you build when you're conquering a country, it's what you build when you conquer it. And if we fast forward a couple of generations to the civil war that we call the anarchy, so we're in the 1130s, 1140s, 1150s and King Stephen's reign, is that period quite a good example of how out-of-control castle building could get and the danger that that could pose to a monarch when we have stories of castles and counter-castles springing up all over the place to perpetuate the war? It is absolutely. The anarchy is the moment. The anarchy is the moment where the king or the queen, the emperor, lose control that monopoly of authority that

their predecessors have had as kings of England, that what actually happens is that there are all these enormous prizes, these great castleries scattered about, and everybody competes for them. And different people want the same stuff. And in order to get hold of a castle, if it's not your own, what you do is you build lots of castles, temporary castles, campaign castles around it, and pillage the area and try and take control of it. And if, possible you try and take the castle itself. And then when you're installed, you in turn can be besieged by other people who are trying to take it back from you. And meanwhile, both Stephen and the Empress Matilda are offering people every incentive to try and get them on their side. They're offering

them bits of land that are already claimed by other people, saying you can be the owner of this if you fight for me, I'll back your claim to this castlery or that block of land. And so everybody is competing for these blocks of land, but of course as soon as the civil war is solved, as soon as this arrangement is made where Vatilda's son, this came to be the heir to Stephen, all the temporary campaign castles just melt away because they have no endowment to make them permanent. But what of course is fascinating that in the process of trying to buy people's support, I talk about this in a book in connection with Castle Headingham. Castle Headingham is built by somebody who's offered four alternative titles of the highly prestigious title of Earl.

So in English-Saxon England, there were very few earls. An Earl tended to be a title that you claimed by rather than by bequest of the monarch. Matilda tries to buy this chap's loyalty with the offer of four alternative titles of Earl, and he chooses, in fact, the Earl of Oxford, and then built for himself an enormous stone keep. And the reason that he built a keep is it's demonstrative. There's nothing to do with the fighting. You don't have time in the fighting to build a great big stone keep. But it is emblematic of the very greatest castles.

So he's an earl. He needs a keep. That's what he needs to have. So away he goes and he builds one. And it's probably built over a decade or more. And inside, it's not a rugged, harsh environment. It's an absolutely sumptuous interior. And one little detail, if you want to know just how heavily maintained it must have been,

is one of the peculiarity. of the keep at Heddingham is that the latrine shafts don't void themselves outside the building. They void themselves inside the building. Now, if you were to have a building which wasn't going to stink, you needed lots and lots of people to manage that kind of thing. This is a high maintenance building. Of course, you don't want to outside latrines shaft. It must be rather draughty to sit on. I have no idea. That indicates that this is being designed to the highest possible spec, and there are lots and lots of people running around in this building. And also that you could say it was to make it safer against your people climbing up the latrine

sharpness, I suppose that's possible. But whether or not that's the case, it also needs lots of people to manage it. And that sense of people with big followings, getting their dynastic tentacles into these large blocks of land through backing the right horse, it completely transforms English politics. But the crucial thing also to remember is that there are the real castles, in the sense of the castles which have endowments attached to them. There are the predatory campaign castles that try and win those territories off those castles. And when the fighting stops, the campaign castles just disappear because nobody ever thought they were important except as a means to getting hold of those real castles.

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History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. It's fascinating with Headingham, as you mentioned it, in the book, that it arrives at a time of civil war, and yet it isn't really about defending and fighting, it's about making a statement about wealth and power and status and being comfortable, and perhaps even those indoor latrines are saying, I've got enough people to deal with this for me. I don't need outside toilets because I've got loads and loads of people who can shovel all this stuff away for me. So even in a time of civil war, they're not actually about fighting. It's about comfort and power and an expression of your wealth. Indeed, there are lots of campaign castles which are entirely about fighting, but there are also

these other castles, these great seats. And also, in the case of Headingham, I think it's very easy. You go to Headingham, it's absolutely glorious. I don't know if you've ever been there. It's absolutely wonderful building. But it's easy to forget that the very, very biggest man-made structures there is not the tower. It's the earthworks. So, in fact, Headingham could have been built as a very powerful fortification with its earthworks.

And the keep is just something that's built over a period of time inside that. So it could be a castle of war, but the emblem of the castle is not necessarily a structure of war. it goes up inside. It's like a great monastic complex and the Abbey Church. So a castle can be a functioning fortification, but the sort of focal point of it is the keep. It's fascinating. And given that castles are unnecessarily static buildings, albeit they can be altered and added to and things like that, was siege warfare able to then catch up and sort of overtake castle defences? I'm thinking, particularly in the book of the 1215 siege of Rochester, where you say that the faith in the castle as a defensive building is really shaken by what happens at Rochester.

So yes, there's this famous quotation from the chronicler I quote there saying people didn't put their faith in castles after the Rochester keep has been taken. And history proves that's simply not true. But the idea is interesting. And I think that what you're actually seeing is not necessarily the sort of advance of military technology as such. It's the fact that by the late 12th and early 13th century, if you're going to take on a big castle, the resources you need to do that are enormous.

And basically the only people who can do that are kings. So the siege of Rochester takes place in this very febrile moment where people are rebelling against King John. It's the context of Bangor Carter. And of course, a group of nobles invite Prince Louis of France to come to England and be crowned king. And it's implied by one chronicle account that he brings a machine called a trebouchet. This is a catapult fired by counterweights. And the implication of this is it's the first time that a Trebyshire had ever been seen in England. So there is a major military advance, if that's the case.

But nevertheless, actually building these catapults and siege machines and things, and he requires such enormous sums of money and to operate them and to have the expertise to manufacture and fire them, that's just beyond the pocket of anybody but monarchs. So what castles have done, by the late 12th and 19, 13th century, they become so difficult to take that the only people who can really afford to besiege them are monarchs. So that immediately limits the field. And it means that people in Rochester, although they may have lost their faith in castles,

they probably thought that unless they were fighting against the king, they had a pretty good chance. And there are subsequent sieges, of course, you think of somewhere like the siege of Bedford, which is besieged by Henry III in the next generation, and this very brutal siege, which culminates in most of the garrison being hung. but they definitely hold that against the king and they think they're probably going to be fine but the king can just bring enough resources to bear that ultimately the castle falls.

Yeah, history teaches us that that wasn't the end of castles but you get the sense from the chapter on Rochester that to some people it felt like it might have been and obviously looking back we can say that it wasn't but they felt like something had changed maybe. And I think you mustn't forget that a building such as Rochester it was the tallest building in Kent until the Industrial Revolution

They are prodigy buildings. They don't come and go entirely on the base of one siege. They're enormous investments in architecture and they're very possess. And what roles do castles then go on to play in the administration of justice, both royal and local justice? Do they help to connect the two? Do they project the monarch's authority into the localities? Depending on who owns them, they do. They have a role in local justice. And so when the king owns castles, they are places from which you can exercise royal justice. but there's certainly places from which justice is administered.

And again, we come back to the hall. It's quite clear that in major seats of all kinds, halls are incredibly important for judicial hearings. That's where the King's Justice has come or where lords send their deputies who will arbitrate over minorial cases. But this is where law is exercised. And castle halls are clearly very important. And it is quite curious that there are buildings where, I think, of somewhere like Clun, for example, in Shropshire, where the hall of the castle lasts far longer than the castle itself because it's still being used. And that pattern is repeated over and over again.

Lester Castle has this wonderful 12th century hall or in Rutland. There are lots and different examples of buildings where halls survive. And it's basically because they're being used for judicial functions. And that continues very late. I think Lincoln now is the only, I think I'm right in saying, is the only castle that still has a sitting court. but others until very recently, Lancaster, Exeter, there are lots of places where that judicial function has continued right through until the last 20 years. Incredible, really, that continuity.

And from your research and writing the book, what would you say it was like to live in a castle? I think you'd be talking about knights and nobleman who live there, but how might life have been different inside a castle to the towns that grew up around them and surrounded them? One of the things I've tried to do in the book is quote from lots of contemporary sources. It's lots of different anecdotes basically about castles and trying to give a flavor of what life seemed like to the people who actually lived through it. And I think it's very important to acknowledge. I tell one story in the book about this little boy, Roger, two and a half-year-old toddler, who's found apparently dead and frozen covered in frost in the moat of Conway Castle. And a nearby bystander who sees the discovery of the body offers a prayer.

to St Thomas Canterloop of Hereford, and the boy miraculously recovers. And there's an inquest into this, when there's a papal inquest in order to see if Thomas Cantaloup is to be a saint. And so we have all these depositions by different people involved in this case, which offer us a detail and an impression of life on the ground, which simply we could not have otherwise. And one very moving deposition to this is the deposition of Roger's mother, who talks about her own experience of what this was like. and what happened on the night of this accident. And what's quite clear from her narrative

is the way in which the life of the castle and the town is absolutely integrally connected. Her husband is the castle cook, though she lives in the town, and her friend is a maid-servant of the constable's wife. So there are very close connections between the castle and the town. I think what you can say about castles,

it's difficult, isn't it, to capture a sense of medieval life? I think when we go to these buildings, they look barrack-like and comfortless. But in the Middle Ages, the rich expected to live for their own pleasure as well, just as they do today. And the ability to transform these gaunt interiors that you see today into colourful, warm, habitable rooms, that's what happened. They were transformed, they appeared in a quite different way. And of course, certainly for kings and wealthy nobles, they travelled with their wealth with them.

Their wealth was expressed in their possessions. And so these interiors would have been hung with fabrics. They would have been incredibly rich. They would have had lots of things that ordinary people simply couldn't afford. And food, of course, is an enormously important element of display and luxury living, then as it still is now. And there is also one really delightful or fascinating narrative about the surrender of Richard II to Duke of Lancaster. And he's accompanied on this panicked tour of Welsh castles when he knows. that the game is up and he's about to be captured by the Duke of Lancaster. He travels between all

these different castles and one of the members of his party is gentlemen for the French king and he gives an incredibly compelling account of what this ride through North Wales is like and how they turn up in all these castles and he says there's nothing in them absolutely nothing at all. Not even straw on the floor, there's nothing there. They haven't been properly looked after. And so you have this fleeing king, staying night after night in buildings all across Wales with nothing in them. And the whole point is that if he'd gone there as a king, they would have been overflowing with stuff, but he would have brought it all with him. And of course, then there is this final and deeply humiliating surrendered at Flint Castle, which, of course, you can still go and

see, you can still see the place he must have met the Duke of Lancaster. Most of the narrative is told in poetry, and at this moment comes into prose, because he wants to relate exactly what he saw and what the Duke of Lancaster said to Richard the 2nd and how Richard the 2nd surrendered to him and how Richard the 2nd had this meal in the keep at St Flint and how people came and stared at him and were very aggressive while he ate a meal. But he kept on eating a meal because he knew that when he finished, he'd have to go and meet the Duke of Lancaster. So it's very compelling.

And it's amazing that we can get so close to these events and get a sense of what they were like. The material really is there, just occasionally, these little flashes of information. and they're compelling when you find them. Yeah, I thought that story of Roger in particular was very interesting and quite touching and informative. It wasn't a story I'd heard before, so I really enjoyed finding out those snippets of information about life in a castle and the surrounding town and the way people interacted with the castle and how it affected their lives. So that was a really great example.

Did castles throughout the rest of the medieval period remain as primarily military buildings, or do their uses change and develop? and does that reflect changes in England as the period goes on? I think that they become a trophy of nobility. Actually, I'd say that in the Middle Ages, the thing that most fascinates me, and it's insight from writing this book, is that castle buildings, when they're flattered,

they're often described as being noble, and the people who live in them are also flattered as being noble. That there's this idea that they are an attribute of nobility, and they need to be splendid. They also need to appear to be strong, they need to make apparent the sort of three-part character of nobility. So noblemen need to be born noble, so they need a lineage. One of the very important points to make about castles is how quickly they become associated with the foundation myths of the realm.

These are buildings that don't really have a historical context in the Middle Ages. They're just so ancient that Julius Caesar could have built the Tower of London, that Kenwells could have been built by a king called Ken Elm, who never existed, incidentally. But it doesn't matter. The point is they are foundational buildings. They are the bones of the kingdom. They represent its history and the ancestry of the person who lives there. So that's the first thing. The second thing is they need to demonstrate the vocation of a nobleman,

and that is as a soldier. They need to show that he fights for his living. Battlements, towers, strong walls, small windows, formidable exterior, and splendour. And then the third thing is that they need to express the means by which the nobleman performs his vocation, which is landholding. But they're also very commonly bound up with parks for hunting, which is an exclusively aristocratic pastime. So castles come to express the idea of nobility, and that never goes away. And actually, castles are built, I think, throughout the Middle Ages to a greater or less a degree to be fortifications.

But the most important thing is that they actually show these qualities, and those have nothing, in fact, intrinsically to do with fortification at all. So I think there are changes, but there are major and very powerful late medieval fortifications. And even the word castle, it's quite complicated. Another story I refer to is the siege of Kaster in 1469 to 70, I seem to remember. And Kaster is described by its builder, sometimes as my castle, sometimes my fortress, my stronghold. What are these buildings actually called? It's sometimes quite ambiguous. But it is quite clear from the fact that it is besieged, that it is of,

strong fortification. But when the builder, he has no children, he wants to turn it into a monastery. Of course, nobody wants to see this prize possession turned into a monastery. That's why they fight over it. They want it themselves. It's a little bit medieval equivalent to giving your house to the National Trust. You know, it's a way of saying, my memory will be preserved forever because it'll be a monastery. Of course, if there's a lot at stake, there'll be plenty of people who say, I'd rather want it myself. And in that case, Sir John Paston, who is the lawyer of Sir John Fastov says that just before he died, Sir John Fastov on his deathbed gave a spoken will, basically telling him he could do whatever he wants with the castle. Do we believe him? I don't know.

It's a very advantageous thing to have been told that you can do whatever you like with my castle. And quite contrary to all the instructions he'd given before. So of course there was going to be a fight. Castles, they are expressions of nobility, their attributes of nobility, they are theatres of noble life, an element of that. They're also sometimes fortresses. But I think our conventional definition of a castle is much closer to the mark when it talks about 12th and 13th century buildings than buildings in the late Middle Ages. And part of the point of the book is that the tradition of castle building does not stop at the end of the Middle Ages. The story of the castle has its roots in the Middle Ages and it has its roots, particularly in the Norman conquest, but we still

live in the shadow of castles and they still have meaning. Just as Winds a castle, it is a medieval building with a character and a presence in the 21st century. Incredible. You may not approve, but it's there. And that's really significant to recognise. And curiously, nothing you could do to Windsor Castle would ever stop it being a castle. Nobody seriously expects that you're going to defend it, but it is a castle. It's a kind of honorific title of the grandest kind of building. But how should we view castles today? What is their legacy to British history and on the landscape? You mentioned there, you know, Windsor is this fixture in Britain and will probably never be lost as Windsor Castle barring some terrible disaster.

But how should view castles and what their legacy is today? It's quite a complicated question to answer that in some way, because what I've done at the very end of the book is I've talked about the Disney Castle. And the Disney Castle, which we all know at the beginning of films, this castle appears. What's so curious is that it actually speaks to two completely different audiences in completely different ways. When we see a castle in Europe, we are familiar with castles as lived in houses, as ruins, as earthworks. We see in the Disney Castle a kind of fantastical echo of reality, but there are lots of people who see the Disney Castle who have never seen a castle at all.

And for them, the castle is in fact an evocation of fantasy. And the point I make is that opening sequence of Disney films actually really bears comparison to the way in which people design super cinemas in the 1920s. The idea here is that you go into a completely fantastical environment, and the film, it could take you anywhere. It's a moment of complete fantasy, and you're entering into that fantastical world and engaging with it. So castles simultaneously speak to history for us. In Western Europe, we live with castles and see them. They speak of history, but they also speak of fantasy. And as I've said, that connection with fantasy is not new. It goes right back to the Middle Ages.

Figures like Guy of Warwick and Warwick Castle, these foundational myths. So the castle has these themes that are intertwined, that the legacy is both of a historical past for those of us who know, but also of a kind of fantastical world, which is not really real. And I certainly am very conscious of this from my first book, and I wrote a massive tone about castles up to 1650 in England. And what really struck me about, American friends, saying most people won't believe that this is about real buildings, because it just simply doesn't strike people as being like that. So the castle is a very powerful thing as an idea, but we all see the idea slightly in our own ways.

And if you're British, Winter Castle, is a real seat of a head of state, and that has a kind of reality to it, but it feels like fantasy. But what's so amazing is that we all recognise it. The idea of the castle is commonly recognisable. These two totally different traditions can yet see an idea in this building. And the idea in many ways is not so far divorced, but they are two threads. So I think we inherit both those things, a kind of historical awareness and awareness of the middle ages, but also the castle is an expression of fantasy and what we project on the past. It's a sort of mirror to society and how we want to see ourselves, how we conceive of castles. It's a fascinating note to end on. Thank you so much, John.

And I would thoroughly recommend John's new book, The Castle, A History, to anybody. As he said, it's kind of a series of anecdotes that help us to understand and explore castles and their place in our world. So thank you so much for joining us, John. Thank you very much for having you met. Wonderful. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help new listeners to find the podcast. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then do subscribe to our medieval medieval. Monday newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below and I'll drop into your inbox every Monday with hopefully some interesting thoughts. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.