Being some rather dull stuff about castle building and what to do with a drunken sailor.
In contrast to the fame of the earlier, timber castle-builder, one Herbert the Ditcher (possible relation of Roger the Shrubber), the name of the master mason who gave us the stone keep of Norwich Castle has not come down to us. We do, however, know his methods …
T. A. Heslop states, "The designer of the building employed the English perch of 16'6" as the standard measure. Multiplications of it (5'6", 11'0", 16'6", 22'0", 33'0", 55'0" and 77'0") occur in the plans of basement and first floor levels.
Alongside this ran an almost obsessive application of 1 to the root 2 (the relationship between a square and its diagonal) in both the plan and the elevation."
Mister Heslop proceeds at some (exhaustive) length quoting examples from all over the castle but for our purposes all we need to know is that the perch and the ratio 1: √2 (1.4142) are the basic units employed.
However exacting our master mason may have been, there is little doubt that William Rufus would have wanted his palace finished while he was still alive to enjoy it.
A client renowned for his regular bouts of stuttering, apoplectic rage, who happens also to be king, is not a person who wants to hear that the newly extended mound should be allowed to settle for twenty years before plonking a great heavy stone castle on top of it.
The new castle being larger than the old mound inevitably meant that one end of it overhung the compacted ground, which had settled properly over the years. Before the builders were even half-way up the basement walls the east end began to lean outwards. a large crack appearing in the north wall about 20' from the north-east corner.
"Pile some wood in front of it and don't tell the king" just wasn't going to cut it.
Attempts to stitch the crack didn't really help much, as can be seen here, with the original stitching of Caen stone in the cracked flint wall. Those are the original putlog holes, by-the-bye, dressed with Barnack stone for strength.
To prevent things getting any worse, the design of the north elevation was hurriedly changed.
Ah, the blissful days before planning authorities. It's taken us five years to get all our approvals through (not just the local planners but Historic England and the Scheduled Ancient Monuments people; and don't get me started about the Victorian Society … I've fought those asshats my whole professional career; "This is a Norman Castle, you dickwads! Those disastrous Victorian excrescences are going, whether you like it or not!"). If only we could have said, "The king wants it changed or you're for the chop!"
Anyhoo, windows were omitted, arcading realigned and a big-ass buttress added to strengthen the wall, which seems to have done the trick, at least for the time being.
One of Francis Stone's 1833 survey drawings showing the additional buttress where the crack had opened up. Courtesy Old Dive's personal collection.
Other attempts at remedying the slow slide of the east wall into the old ditch included construction of a new spine wall to reduce the loading on the wall by transferring some of it to the old, stable mound and the inclusion of tree trunks embedded horizontally in the flint rubble core of the walls.
The rectangular pad foundations for the spine wall in the basement were extended in another attempt to spread load away from the east wall.
Here you can see the joint between the original and the enlarged foundation pads. Photo courtesy Old Dive.
Here we come across what we have seen before in our talks on mediæval buildings and the panicky trial and error methods of their masons: "Let's just throw everything we can at it and hope it stays up."
Stitch it, buttress it, enlarge the foundations; hell, let's embed whole tree trunks in the flint rubble core. Then stand back and hope. while awaiting the invention of duct tape.
Exciting post holes. Photo courtesy Old Dive
While we're in the basement with the archæologists, let us see what's been getting them all excited.
Those rather unprepossessing holes in the photo are thought to be the post holes from the original timber keep or its palisade … holes dug under the supervision of Herbert the Ditcher himself in 1068.
We shall be putting a glass floor over them so that visitors can gasp in awe at something that would get TV archæologist Alice Roberts all tingly.
This is an ex-staircase. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, etc.
To return to our narrative, the castle builders had almost reached the height of the main floor at the time of William Rufus' unfortunate hunting accident. Matilda, renamed wife of Henry the First loved a good banquet and so, rather than have the food prepared in the basement and lugged up the spiral stone staircases, she decided to build a big bling kitchen for the Great Hall.
This resulted in the abandonment of the spiral stair in the north-west corner of the keep and the use of the space as a fireplace. You can't really see it from the above photo, but if you peer down there you can see the last few steps before the stonemason rolled his eyes and downed tools. Again, we're putting a glass floor in here with the abandoned staircase properly lit.
Alas poor Matilda; she died in 1118 without ever having enjoyed her new banqueting hall. Alas poor Henry, too, as he suffered another family tragedy in 1120, just a year before the completion of Norwich Castle.
His sole legitimate male heir, William Adelin drowned in the wreck of the White Ship, along with at least two of Henry's bevy of bastards, Richard of Lincoln and Matilda Fitzroy.
Young William Adelin, by all accounts a bit of a roister-doisterer, decided to race supposedly the fastest ship afloat, the Blanche-Nef, from Barfleur in Normandy to England in record time.
With the family trait of cack-brained stupidity proudly to the fore, the day before sailing he provided the crew with alcohol in great abundance and thus fortified they waited for that night's tide. Of the three-hundred or so aristocrats in William's drunken party, only one - Stephen of Blois - chickened out of sailing (we shall hear more of him later).
That night, with the tide turned and the water calm, William's alcohol-fuelled crew set off at speed and steered the White Ship straight onto what became later known (with Gallic drollery) as Quillebœuf Rock. Around three-hundred nobles and drunken sailors drowned, many while overloading the only lifeboat. The sole survivor being one Berold the Butcher from Rouen who managed to reach shore and related the whole sorry tale.
Next time we'll take a look at the finished castle, chow down on peacocks and porpoises and discover why the nuns of the Priory of Notre Dame du Pré in Normandy received a peculiarly gross gift.
Sources:
Francis Blomefield: An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 3: The History of the City and County of Norwich: 1753 to 1775
The Oxford History of England: 1087-1216: From Domesday Book to Magna Carta: Austin Lane Poole (ed.) 1951
Frank Barlow: The Norman Conquest and Beyond: 1983
T. A. Heslop: Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: Centre for East Anglian Studies: 1994
Elizabeth Popescu: The Norman Connections - Castles: Part 1; Norwich Castle: 2010
T. A. Heslop: The Shifting Structure of Norwich Castle Keep, 1096 to c.1230: 2011
James F. King: Norwich Castle Keep: Dates and Contexts: British Archæological Association: 2015
3 comments:
What was done to keep the Tower of Pisa from eventually "leaning" at 90-degrees? Would a related solution be applicable? One that anchors it to keep from sliding? Then cover it with sod and flower beds.
During this work, do you and your fellow architects/restorers have the castle to yourselves? Or are you working around the tourists? (Not that there would be many at the moment.) I ask because I imagine it feels (for lack of the right word) profound to be somewhat alone in such a space.
Speedway, it's still falling down, but very, very slowly. It'll stay up another thousand years if we're careful with it.
Petrea, the deep joy I have after site meetings (socially distanced) is that I take an hour or two wandering the empty museum, checking all my favourite exhibits. Of course I can also get into the store rooms and see the thousands of paintings and treasures not currently on display. It's a wonderful feeling; the only folk there are the security personnel, Jim and the archæologists, who are currently excavating under the central rotunda (which you'll meet later).
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