Chapter VII: The Castles of the Normans in England (5)

WISBEACH, Cambridgeshire.--William I. built a castle here in 1072, after suppressing the revolt of Hereward, in order to hold in check the Cambridgeshire fen country.[781] There is an early mention of it in the Register of Thorney Abbey. This castle, after being several times rebuilt, is now completely destroyed, and "several rows of elegant houses built on the site." Nevertheless, there still remain distinct traces of the motte-and-bailey pattern in the gardens which now occupy the site of the original castle of King William; the present Crescent probably follows the line of the ditch. The meagre indications preserved in casual accounts confirm this. There was an inner castle of about 2 acres, just the area of the present garden enclosure, and an outer court, probably an addition, of some 4 acres.[782] Both areas were moated. Weston, a prisoner who was confined in the keep of this castle in the 17th century, has left an account of his captivity, in which he casually mentions that the keep or dungeon stood upon a high terrace, from which he could overlook the outer bailey, and was surrounded by a moat filled with water.[783]

The castle is not mentioned in Domesday, but as might be expected in a district which had been so ravaged by war, the value of the manor had fallen.

WORCESTER.--This borough, as we have seen, was fortified by Ethelfleda and her husband Ethelred in the 9th century. That the fortifications thus erected were those of a city and not of a castle is shown with sufficient clearness by the remarkable charter of this remarkable pair, in which they declare that they have built the _burh_ at Worcester to shelter all the people, and the churches, and the bishop.[784] The castle is first mentioned in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ in 1088, and it is to be noted that it is styled the king's castle. Urse d'Abitot, the Norman sheriff of Worcester, has the credit of having built the first castle, and Malmesbury relates that he seized part of the monks' cemetery for the bailey.[785] The monks, however, held on to their right, and in the first year of Henry III. the bailey was restored to them by the guardians of the young king, the motte being reserved for the king's use.[786] The first wooden castle was burnt in 1113.[787] The tower or keep which succeeded it, and which was repaired by Henry II.,[788] may have been either of stone or wood; but in the order of John, that the gateway of the castle, which is of wood, is to be made of stone, we get a hint of the gradual transformation of the castle from a wooden to a stone fortress.[789]

Worcester Castle was outside the town, from Speed's map, and was near the Severn. The area now called College Green was no doubt the outer ward of the castle, which was restored to the convent by Henry III. The tower called Edgar's Tower was built by the monks as the gatehouse to their newly conceded close.[790] From the map given by Green, this outer bailey appears to have been roughly square; but there was also a small oblong inner ward, retained by the king, where the gaol was afterwards built. The area of the castle is said to have been between 3 and 4 acres.[791] The motte, which is mentioned several times in mediæval documents,[792] was completely levelled in 1848; it was then found out that it had been thrown up over some previous buildings, which were believed to be Roman, though this seems doubtful.[793]

The value of Worcester had risen since the Conquest.[794]

YORK (Fig. 39).--William the Conqueror built two castles at York, and the mottes of both these castles remain, one underneath Clifford's Tower, the keep of York Castle, the other, on the south side of the Ouse, still bearing the name of the Baile Hill, or the Old Baile.[795] The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_ implies, though it does not directly state, that both these castles were built in 1068, on the occasion of William's first visit to York. The more detailed narrative of Ordericus shows that one was built in 1068, and the other at the beginning of 1069, on William's second visit.[796] Both were destroyed in September 1069, when the English and Danes captured York, and both were rebuilt before Christmas of the same year, when William held his triumphant Christmas feast at York.

This speedy erection, destruction, and re-erection is enough to prove that the castles of William in York were, like most other Norman castles, hills of earth with buildings and stockades of wood, especially as we find these hills of earth still remaining on the known sites of the castles. And we may be quite sure that the Norman masonry, which Mr Freeman pictures as so eagerly destroyed by the English, never existed.[797] But the obstinate tendency of the human mind to make things out older than they are has led to these earthen hills being assigned to Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, anybody rather than Normans. A single passage of William of Malmesbury, in which he refers to the _castrum_ which the Danes had built at York in the reign of Athelstan, is the sole vestige of basis for the theory that the motte of Clifford's Tower is of Danish origin.[798] The other theories have absolutely no foundation but conjecture. If Malmesbury was quoting from some older source which is now lost, it is extremely probable that the word _castrum_ which he copied, did not mean a castle in our sense of the word at all, but was a translation of the word _burh_, which almost certainly referred to a vallum or wall constructed round the Danish suburb outside the walls of York. Such a suburb there was, for there in 1055 stood the Danish church of St Olave, in which Earl Siward was buried, and the suburb was long known as the Earlsburgh or Earl's Burh, probably because it contained the residence of the Danish earls of Northumbria.[799] This suburb was not anywhere near Clifford's Tower, but in quite a different part of the city. To prove that both the mottes were on entirely new sites, we have the assurance of Domesday Book that out of the seven _shires_ or wards into which the city was divided, one was laid waste for the castles; so that there was clearly a great destruction of houses to make room for the new castles.[800]

What has been assumed above receives striking confirmation from excavations made recently (1903) in the motte of Clifford's Tower. At the depth of 13 feet were found remains of a wooden structure, surmounted by a quantity of charred wood.[801] Now the accounts of the destruction of the castles in 1069 do not tell us that they were burned, but thrown down and broken to pieces.[802] But the keep which was restored by William, and on the repair of which Henry II. spent 15_l._ in 1172,[803] was burnt down in the frightful massacre of the Jews at York Castle in 1190.[804] The excavations disclosed the interesting fact that this castle stood on a lower motte than the present one, and that when the burnt keep was replaced by a new one the motte was raised to its present height, "an outer crust of firmer and more clayey material being made round the older summit, and a lighter material placed inside this crater to bring it up to the necessary level." This restoration must have taken place in the third year of Richard I., when 28_l._ was spent "on the work of the castle."[805] This small sum shows that the new keep also was of wood; and remains of timber work were in fact found on the top of the motte during the excavations, though unfortunately they were not sufficiently followed up to determine whether they belonged to a wooden tower or to a platform intended to consolidate the motte.[806] It is extremely likely that this third keep was blown down by the high wind of 1228, when 2s. was paid "for collecting the timber of York Castle blown down by the wind."[807] In its place arose the present keep, one of the most remarkable achievements of the reign of Henry III.[808] The old ground-plan of the square Norman keep was now abandoned, and replaced by a quatrefoil. The work occupied thirteen years, from the 30th to the 43rd Henry III., and the total sum expended was 1927_l._ 8_s._ 7_d._, equal to about 40,000_l._ of our money. This remarkable fact has slumbered in the unpublished _Pipe Rolls_ for 700 years, never having been unearthed by any of the numerous historians of York.

The keep was probably the first work in stone at York Castle, and for a long time it was probably the only defensive masonry. The banks certainly had only a wooden stockade in the early part of Henry III.'s reign, as timber from the forest of Galtres was ordered for the repair of breaches in the _palicium_ in 1225.[809] As late as Edward II.'s reign there was a _pelum_, or stockade, round the keep, on top of a _murus_, which was undoubtedly an earthen bank.[810] At present the keep occupies the whole top of the motte except a small _chemin de ronde_, but the fact so frequently alluded to in the writs, that a stockade ran round the keep, proves that a small courtyard existed there formerly, as was usually the case with important keeps. Another writ of Edward II.'s reign shows that the motte was liable to injury from the floods of the River Fosse,[811] and probably its size has thus been reduced.

The present bailey of York Castle does not follow the lines of the original one, but is an enlargement made in 1825. A plan made in 1750, and reproduced here, shows that the motte was surrounded by its own ditch, which is now filled up, and that the bailey, around which a branch of the Fosse was carried, was of the very common bean-shaped form; it was about 3 acres in extent. The motte and bailey were both considerably outside what is believed to have been the Anglo-Saxon rampart of York,[812] but the motte was so placed as to overlook the city.

The value of the city of York, in spite of the sieges and sacks which it had undergone, and in spite of there being 540 houses "so empty that they pay nothing at all," had risen at the date of the Survey from 53_l_. in King Edward's time to 100_l._ in King William's.[813] This extraordinary rise in value can only be attributed to increased trade and increased exactions, the former being promoted by the greater security given to the roads by the castles, the latter due to the tolls on the high-roads and waterways, which belonged to the king, and the various "customs" belonging to the castles, which, though new, were henceforth equally part of his rights.

THE BAILE HILL, York (Fig. 39).--There can be no doubt whatever that this still existing motte was the site of one of William's castles at York, and it is even probable that it was the older of the two, as Mr Cooper conjectures from its position on the south side of the river.[814] The castle bore the name of the Old Baile at least as early as the 14th century, perhaps even in the 12th.[815] In 1326 a dispute arose between the citizens of York and Archbishop William de Melton as to which of them ought to repair the wall around the Old Baile. The mayor alleged that the district was under the express jurisdiction of the archbishop, exempt from that of the city; the archbishop pleaded that it stood within the ditches of the city.[816] The meaning of this dispute can only be understood in the light of facts which have recently been unearthed by the industry and observation of Mr T. P. Cooper, of York.[817] The Old Baile, like so many of William's castles, originally stood outside the ramparts of the city. The original Roman walls of York (it is believed) enclosed only a small space on the eastern shore of the Ouse, and before the Norman Conquest the city had far outgrown these bounds, and therefore had been enlarged in Anglo-Saxon times. It appears that the Micklegate suburb was then for the first time enclosed with a wall, and as this district is spoken of in Domesday Book as "the shire of the archbishop," it was evidently under his jurisdiction. At a later period this wall was buried in an earthen bank, which probably carried a palisade on top, until the palisade was replaced by stone walls in the reign of Henry III.[818]

The evidence of the actual remains renders it more than probable that this rampart turned towards the river at a point 500 feet short of its present angle, so that the Old Baile, when first built, was quite outside the city walls.[819] This is exactly how we should expect to find a castle of William the Norman's in relation to one of the most turbulent cities of the realm; and, as we have seen, the other castle at York was similarly placed. By the time of Archbishop Melton the south-western suburb was already enclosed in the new stone walls built in the 13th century, and these walls had been carried along the west and south banks of the Old Baile, so as to enclose that castle within the city. This was the archbishop's pretext for trying to lay upon the citizens the duty of maintaining the Old Baile. But probably on account of his ancient authority in this part of the city, the cause went against him; though he stipulated that whatever he did in the way of fortification was of his own option, and was not to be accounted a precedent. A contemporary chronicler says that he enclosed the Old Baile first with stout planks 18 feet long, afterwards with a stone wall:[820] an interesting proof that wooden fortifications were still used in the reign of Edward III.

Though the base court of the Old Baile is now built over, its area and ditches were visible in Leland's time,[821] and can still be guessed at by the indications Mr Cooper has noted. The area of the bailey must have been nearly 3 acres, and its shape nearly square. This measurement includes the motte, which was placed in the south-west corner on the line of the banks; it thus overlooked the river as well as the city.[822]