Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the First - The Rise of Castle Blanchefleur - Chapter VI

Wherein bowel cramps, bum-gravy and open-crotched breeks …

Henry the First's wife Matilda - so many Matildas and yet more to come - having died in 1118, the king was now desperate to remarry and produce an heir, a matter made more pressing when his only legitimate son, young William Adelin drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120.

Henry chose the young and reportedly beautiful Adeliza of Louvain, a descendant of Charlemagne, and they were married in January 1121. King Henry, however, by that stage appears to have run out of bullets. Having previously fathered two legitimate children and at least twenty-two bastards, he never managed to produce a child with Adeliza, even though, after his death she went on to remarry and produce seven kids in short order.

To celebrate the completion of the royal palace at Norwich, Henry and Adeliza moved in at Christmas, 1121 and proceeded to use the word party as a verb in no uncertain manner.

A still from the 3D survey of the keep showing the black line on the strata. Courtesy ggs.co.uk

This picture shows what last season's archæologists found in the basement under the Great Hall kitchen.

We initially thought the dark layer was from one of the many (really many) Great Fires of Norwich, but on analysis it was found to contain the waste from the hearth and kitchen in the Great Hall. The food remains were almost exclusively rare and exotic fare, including peacock, swan and at least one porpoise. Now that it has been properly dated it is concluded that this is the waste from the weeks of feasting Henry and Adeliza hosted around Christmas 1121, which was then simply dumped in the half-finished basement and covered in straw and clay when they left.

As part of my work for the "Norwich Castle - Royal Palace Reborn" project another section of glass floor will be put in over that, with a holographic display explaining what the hell you're looking at. My current glass floor count (we keep finding more stuff worth looking at) runs to two in the basement, six more in the British Museum Gallery adjoining the archæology and two on the Great Hall level.

There is a charming, almost Pythonesque model in the Castle Museum, illustrating Henry and Adeliza's Christmas party.

 

 Photos courtesy Old Dive

The Norman entrance archway was once brightly painted, as shown here (from analysis of tiny fragments remaining on the stone). It might seem a teensy bit kitsch for our 'modern' tastes but it was all the rage in Norman times.

They held a particular fondness for red and blue clothing, especially on their hosiery. The most popular choice among men was a brightly coloured woolen pair of tights fitted closely to the leg, open at the crotch (your tunic covered your bits) and with each leg a different colour. Can't wait for that to come back into fashion.

Anyhoo … King Henry, having previously locked Robert Short-Arse in the wine cellar of Devizes Castle, now turned his attention to his other realm in Normandy and to his succession.

Prior to William Adelin's death, Henry had married off his only other legitimate child, eleven-year-old Matilda (yup) to the elderly German Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V (creepy, huh?). Our King Henry forced the English earls and barons to take an oath accepting Empress Matilda as his legitimate heir should he not produce another boy, passing over his nephew, Stephen of Blois, though he ensured Stephen's future by marrying him off to a wealthy woman named … you guessed it … Matilda. The Empress Matilda versus Queen Matilda smackdown is coming soon, I promise.

First, however,  we need to kill off King Henry.

Henry was over in Normandy on a hunting trip at Lyons-sur-Forêt in 1135.

Eat Me! Photo courtesy the interweb.

The contemporary chronicler Henry of Huntingdon records that - against the advice of the royal physician, who knew that the things didn't agree with the king's digestion - Henry the First consumed "a surfeit of lampreys."

A week of bowel cramps and arse-gravy later, on the first of December, King Henry the First of England became ex-King Henry.

His corpse was embalmed for return to England (where it was interred in Reading Abbey), though not before his ghastly, rotting lamprey-fragranced entrails were removed. These were slopped into a pot which was then buried at the nearby Priory of Notre-Dame du Pré. Precisely what the resident nuns thought of that is sadly unrecorded.

So let us take a look at the outside of the royal palace that was Norwich Castle, gift to the nation of the sons of William the Bastard.

Here's the south elevation as it stood in 1995, when it was surveyed by Norwich City Council. In Norman times the basement level (below the decorative arcading) was faced in flintwork; only the main floor and upwards was faced in ashlar Caen stone. This was because only the upper levels could be seen from the city as the basement was obscured by a palisade and later a wall.

The soubriquet Castle Blanchfleur was given to the castle due to its shining white Caen stone facings. The quarries at Caen were owned by William the Bastard's family and it was cheaper and easier to barge Caen stone across the Channel, up the coast and river to a specially cut canal (now Pull's Ferry, opposite my office) supplying the castle and cathedral with stone than it was to cart quarried Bath or Portland stone across the Fens from England.

Round to the right and here's the east elevation. You can see each elevation differs considerably from the others. This one features the Bigod Tower (more on which later) and much of it is obscured by Victorian toss, which I shall gleefully remove to make the original walls visible again.

On the north elevation you can see the extra buttress the Norman masons put it to stitch the crack and stop the east end sliding down the mound. The lower right is another Victorian "embellishment", up until this year used as the café kitchen. You'll be pleased to know that as I write, it is being carefully demolished to reveal the missing section of Norman wall.

The west elevation features some lovely chevron-cut arcading on the top level. It also features eight little chutes within the two larger arches at basement level. These are the eight great poop-chutes from the garderobes above and we shall be meeting those quite often in the coming chapters.

[adopts James Brown voice] … "Take it to the Bridge!"

Meet Stumpy. Photo - courtesy Gabriela

Stumpy is the suspiciously short bridge over the moat leading to the castle keep. Until 2000 this was believed to be an early nineteenth century replacement.

The exposed bridge foundations. Photo credit: Current Archæology: Issue 170: 2000.

Five yards below the current moat level the original Norman Caen stone foundations were located in 2000. Further investigation revealed that the whole of the Norman bridge is still in situ, just re-faced in knapped flint in around 1830.

Centuries of folk dumping their shit in the moat (more on which later) has resulted in Stumpy's inelegant proportions.

Here endeth Part the First … Coming next: the Great Anarchy. Yay, fun!

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