Editors Weekly Round-Up, March 5, 2017

by the EHFA Editors

Enjoy these three intriguing posts from the blog this week.

Dining out in Regency England: 

The Belle Sauvage

by Lauren Gilbert

The Three Destinations of the Medieval Pilgrim

by April Munday

The 17th Earl of Oxford: 

An Elizabethan Psychopath

by Anna Castle

Editors' Weekly Round-Up, January 8, 2017

by the EHFA Editors

Enjoy this week's round-up of excellent articles.

An Englishman's Castle

by April Munday

Christmastide: It's Not Over Yet!

by Emily Murdoch

Crawfie and The Little Princesses
by Linda Root

An Englishman's Castle

by April Munday

Siege of Acre: Public Domain [Wikimedia Commons]

Castles were introduced into England in the 1040s by French supporters of Edward the Confessor. There were only four of them (one at Clavering in Essex and three in Herefordshire) and it wasn’t until after the Conquest in 1066 that the English understood what castles really meant. The Normans erected them in large numbers across the country and used them to oppress the Saxons.

Castles were a tenth-century response to Viking raids in France and were developed as a means of protecting communities. By the eleventh century, they were being used by lesser lords to resist their overlords and to dominate their own underlings. These basic castles were wooden towers sited on raised mounds of earth surrounded by a wooden palisade. The mounds were mottes and the enclosure within the outer palisade was the bailey. The effectiveness of motte and bailey castles could be improved by digging a ditch outside the palisade, making it more difficult for the enemy to enter the defended area.

In its earliest forms, the bailey was situated just inside the outer palisade or wall, and provided an area in which animals could be kept or where people from the town or nearby villages could shelter from attack. Where possible, a castle was built on a hill, but where this was not possible, a hill had to be built. Then a high tower was erected within the defensive walls.

Stone castles were rare until the twelfth century. Motte and bailey castles could be erected in a few weeks (one at York took eight days), while stone castles could take decades. The castle that is being built in the thirteenth-century style at Guédelon as an archeological experiment is planned to take 20 years. The medieval building season lasted from March to September and successive building seasons can be seen in the horizontal lines in some castle walls.

In England, at the turn of the twelfth century, there was probably a castle, however basic, every 10 miles. The vast majority of these, however, have disappeared, as they fell out of use or were destroyed in civil wars. The twelfth century Bridgnorth Castle (pictured below) was destroyed by the Parliamentarians after a successful siege in 1646.

Bridgnorth Castle © April Munday

From the thirteenth century a licence from the king was required before a castle could be built in England. By then the Plantagenets had learned that castles could just as easily be used against a king as for him.

Sometimes booty brought back by soldiers fighting abroad was invested in building castles and fortifications in England. In much the same way that the exterior of a castle was designed to impress, so was the interior. The walls would have been plastered and painted with many colourful designs or covered with tapestries. The presence of garrison soldiers would have instilled a sense of fear into a visitor, welcome or unwelcome. The visitor would be led through increasingly opulent areas until they were brought before the lord in his solar. Only lords of great houses or castles had an entire room to themselves.

Edward I was one of the greatest castle-builders of the Middle Ages. He built castles in Wales to support his conquest of and dominion over that country. They were built on the coast so that they could be supplied by sea, but they were poorly maintained and fell into disuse fairly quickly.

Castles were designed to be difficult to take by besiegers. Arrow loops were built into walls so that archers could shoot out to any area from which an attack might come. Arrow loops were narrow vertical openings in the wall. Inside they opened out into a V, which gave the archer both a good line of sight to the attackers and plenty of room to shoot, but protected him from the attackers’ arrows.

Catchcold Tower, Southampton
© April Munday

Castles were supposed to put the opposition off attacking. Their walls were high to make scaling as difficult as possible. They were also thick to provide protection against siege weapons such as trebuchets and battering rams. A garrison of soldiers would be stationed within the castle. If the besiegers misjudged the size of the garrison, or if their own number dwindled after a lengthy siege (dysentery and disaffection contributed to this) the besieged could leave the castle and see off the attackers. It did not need a large garrison to withstand a siege. Castles were not impregnable, though, and walls could be brought down by mining beneath them and then lighting fires.

Castles could be military strongholds and/or royal and aristocratic residences. After the eleventh century they were not usually large enough to provide refuge for many civilians other than those already living in the castle. Although they were built for defensive purposes, they were not, however, great defensive weapons. Unless they were of strategic importance, they could simply be bypassed by the enemy. Garrison forces were not usually sufficient to fight a full-scale battle, their primary purpose being to defend the castle once it had been attacked. Most castles were never put to the test, either because they were considered to be impregnable, or because they simply weren’t considered important enough to be worth the effort involved in an attack or siege. Despite this medieval wars were usually won or lost by sieges, not by battles. Where a castle was considered to be important enough to be worth besieging, its surrender could have consequences that lasted for generations. When the castle was taken, so was the region that it protected. They were often administrative centres, which was why their surrender was usually more important than winning or losing a battle.

Castles have been part of the English landscape for almost a thousand years. They have ranged in size from little more than a fortified house, such as Stokesay Castle, to huge structures, such as Kennilworth and Dover. In most cases even the ruins are impressive. I’m looking forward to visiting Guédelon when it’s complete to get an idea of what a functioning medieval castle really looked like.

References:

Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages – Michael Prestwich

The Norman Conquest – Mar Morris

Inside the Medieval World – James Harpur

The Mediaeval World Complete – Robert Bartlett

Knight – Robert Jones

The Making of Europe – Robert Bartlett

The Medieval Siege – Jim Bradbury

~~~~~~~~~~

April Munday lives in Hampshire and has published six novels set in the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They include The Traitor’s Daughter, His Ransom, The Winter Love and the Regency Spies Trilogy. They can be purchased from Amazon. A novel set around the sack of Limoges in 1370 will be available early in 2017.

Her blog ‘A Writer’s Perspective’ arose from her research for her novels and is a repository of things that she has found to be of interest. She can also be found on Twitter (@aprilmunday)

Editors' Weekly Round-Up, December 11, 2016

by the EHFA Editors

Enjoy this week's round-up of great posts!

Snuff - the medicinal cure-all and herbal panacea 

by Deborah Swift

So Why Pineapples?

by Helen Hollick

A Dish Fit for a King: Feasting in Medieval England

by Kristin Gleeson

Manorial Courts

by April Munday

Michael of Rhodes: a 15th Century Visitor to London

by Mark Patton

After a Wedding Comes a Marriage: Regency Marriages

by Maria Grace

Giveaway 

Scars From The Past by Derek Birks

Manorial Courts

by April Munday

Rolls from the manorial courts tell historians a great deal about the lives of medieval peasants and how they interacted with their lord. The court governed their lives, determining when they could plant and when they could harvest. It fined them if they allowed their animals to stray onto the lord’s demesne, and it was where they took their claims against other villagers to be judged.

Battage á Fléau *

The manor was made up of the lord’s demesne and the land that he leased to tenants. The demesne was the farm that the lord kept for his own benefit.  The people who worked the land were both freemen and serfs (cottagers, smallholders or villeins). The manorial court dealt with the serfs’ issues, while the freemen were able to go to other courts.  It was the rôle of the court to assess land, levy taxes and settle disputes. A manor court was also able to create new bylaws for the manor.

Some lords had more than one manor and could not look after all of them closely. Sometimes the lord would simply be away, at court or fighting in the king’s wars. The manorial court was one of the ways in which properties could be managed whether he was there or not. The lord had his steward, who looked after the lord’s interests in his absence, but it was the village officials (reeve, hayward and beadle amongst others) who made sure that things happened as they should. The court decided the land boundaries and the days on which animals could graze in the fields. The steward presided over the court, but the village elected the officials from among themselves. The steward could not tell the court what to do and the court could appeal to the lord if necessary. Usually the business transacted by the court had no direct reference to the lord, covering village problems such as loans not being repaid, men not turning out to work on the lord’s demesne, theft, the erection of a fence in the wrong place, and one villager injuring another.

The court was run by the rich villeins who provided the jurors and officials. The court was supposed to meet every three weeks, but some met less often. All the serfs in the village had to attend. Those who did not attend were fined. The court was often held in the nave of the church, the part that ‘belonged’ to the village. There were not many places in the village large enough to hold the court and many were simply held in the open air, often in the churchyard. Some manorial courts met in the hall of the manor house itself.

The jurors pronounced judgement on their fellow villagers (and occasionally on the lord) and this was sometimes put to the rest of the village as well for their assent. When making a judgement they had to take into account what they knew of the law, the custom of the manor and the manor bylaws. All the jurors and everyone else in the court knew both parties in every case that was brought before them, which was supposed to make it easier to come to a correct judgement.

Villagers had to pay a fee to get their case heard. This fee went to the lord. The lord of the manor benefited from any fines issued by the court and the court was often the source of a large part of the lord’s income. The manorial court also required payments to the lord on all kinds of occasions – death, inheritance and marriage all had their appropriate fee. All of these meant that part of the lord’s land was being transferred from one person to another and the fee was to obtain the lord’s permission for the transfer. The court could generate a lot of income for the lord, and fines and fees tended to increase after the Black Death (1348 – 1351) when there were fewer tenants to pay rents. The steward’s clerk recorded the cases and any fines or fees. As well as fines which went into the lord’s coffers, the court could also award damages to be paid by the guilty party in a case to the injured party.

Burying victims of Black Death - image Public Domain

Some freeholders had the right to attend the court, but they could also look to other courts for justice, which the serfs could not. Other courts included the church courts and the royal courts, but the villeins were unlikely to have dealings with either, since they did not have the right to be tried by a royal court, unless they were accused of killing someone. Twice a year the male villeins had to report to the hundred court, however, to demonstrate that they were members of a tithing.

One of the commonest cases to come before a manorial court was the accusation that someone was selling ale before it had been tasted by the ale taster. Ale was brewed at home and sold to the neighbours, who came to the brewer’s house to drink it. The ale taster’s rôle was to ensure that a consistent quality and price were maintained.

In the Great Revolt of 1381 legal records, including manor court rolls, were targeted and destroyed by the rebels. After the Black Death some lords increased their villeins’ rents in order to maintain their incomes after losing half, or more, of their serfs. At the same legislation was passed to keep wages low. One of the demands of the rebels was a cap on rents. They also wanted manorial courts to be abolished and villeins to be allowed to appear before the king’s courts. Everything in the manorial court was weighted in the lord’s favour. The decrease in the population caused by the Black Death and subsequent plagues between 1351 and 1381, and the reaction of those in authority to it made the yoke of serfdom much harder to bear for those who could not leave the land.

Corpus Christi College's Old Court, attacked by the rebels on 15 June
via Commons Licence

It is, of course, thanks to the surviving manor court rolls that so much is known about everyday life in the middle ages in rural England, although it is like looking through a distorted lens, since they show only the things that were brought before the courts.


*Image - Battage á Fléau – BnF, département des Manuscrits, Latin 12834, fol 64v – Calendrier-martyrologue de l’abbaye de St-Geramin-des-Prés, France (Paris). Image in the Public Domain via Wikimedia.

References:
England in the Reign of Edward III – Scott L. Waugh
Medieval Lives – Terry Jones
Life in a Medieval Village – Frances and Joseph Gies
Making a Living in the Middle Ages – Christopher Dyer
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England – Ian Mortimer
England, Arise – Juliet Barker

~~~~~~~~~~

April Munday lives in Hampshire and has published a number of novels set in the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They include The Traitor’s Daughter, His Ransom, The Winter Love and the Regency Spies Trilogy. They can be purchased from Amazon. Amazon.  A novel set around the sack of Limoges in 1370 will be available early in 2017. Her blog ‘A Writer’s Perspective’ (www.aprilmunday.wordpress.com) arose from her research for her novels and is a repository of things that she has found to be of interest. She can also be found on Twitter (@aprilmunday)