Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fifth - The Fall of the Plantagenets - Chapter I

Wherein Norwich Castle is downgraded from a royal palace to a gaol, Part the Fifth also sees the decline and fall of the Plantagenet dynasty (yup, them that put the nasty in dynasty).

Norwich Castle Keep external detailing. Photo courtesy Old Dive.

Go to Jail … Go Directly to Jail … Do Not Pass GO … Do Not Collect £200 …

Alas and alack, for now we reach a sad part of our tale, when Edward, Edward and Edward began the slow process of letting Norwich Castle slip into doleful neglect.

Already, by around 1300, Edward Longshanks, having repaired the castle after two sieges, built his new palace against the northern wall of the keep, gave the old royal palace over to the sheriff and allowed the basement of the keep to be used to house prisoners, beginning over six hundred years of decline.

In 1327, the fourteen-year-old Edward the Third was crowned king. In 1330, he staged a coup d'état against regents Mortimer and Isabella, executing Mortimer for treason. He went on to reign for fifty eventful years before succumbing to - in a break with bum gravy tradition - a "large abscess" and a stroke.

Meanwhile, big changes were afoot in Norwich. During the decades following 1294 the city's defensive ditch was augmented by the mighty city walls.

The Mighty City Walls … or the lower part of them anyway. Courtesy Old Dive.

In 1326, Edward the Second had the Norwich Castle Shirehall rebuilt (original build cost in 1271: £5; cost of converting Edward Longshanks' palace into the new Shirehall: £62. 19s. 0d.). Four years later, the young Edward the Third spent £72. 19s. 0d on further repairs to Norwich Castle keep, rendering it more suitable for use as a prison, which was to be its principal rôle until the late nineteenth century.

By this time the Bigods had buggered off back to Bungay Castle to carry on their Hughing and … er … Rogering and henceforth play no further part in our story.

Norwich was now a much safer place in that besieging forces were kept outside the city walls and were no longer free to loot and burn as before.

Thirty of these buggers atop the towers of Norwich City Walls.

Pic courtesy of the interweb's obscene number of GoT fansites.

The citizens responded enthusiastically, with one Richard Spink donating thirty 'springalds' to be mounted atop the towers of the city walls in 1342 (think Qyburn's scorpions). In the following decades these were augmented by "some fifty expensive guns with the requisite gunners and gunpowder" (Blomefield).

With the garrison now manning the city walls Norwich Castle lost its defensive imperative, officially becoming a gaol in 1345. The keep was retained as a royal prison and sheriff's residence with the remainder of the Castle Fee sold off to the city bailiffs. The Castle Fee's surrounding walls were demolished, the material being re-used in the city walls.

Now that the city owned the banks and ditches of the Castle Fee, commercial interests replaced military and from 1345 quarrying was permitted in the ditches.

That's it, over there, under the bus.

Photo courtesy EAA 132.

This appears to have been carried out rather too enthusiastically, with the result that the south gatehouse of the castle bridge collapsed into the adjacent sand and gravel quarry, having been undermined. It seems nobody could be bothered to clear it up, as, during the excavations for the Castle Mall the collapsed tower was found still laying where it fell in the quarry.

No bones of squished quarrymen were found beneath it so I would imagine when the dust settled we would have witnessed a bunch of men with spades whistling and trying to look innocent whilst sidling away from the wreckage. "Who? Me, guv? Naah, I was nowhere near it."

Next time: ring-a-ring-of-roses and the peasants' revolt. Yay!

Sources:

Acts and Monuments: Foxe: Old Dive's 1621 edition.

Francis Blomefield: An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 3: The History of the City and County of Norwich: published 1753 to 1775

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part I: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part II: c.1345 to Modern: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

Report on the City Walls of Norwich: The Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society: Feb. 1964

The Oxford History of England: Volume V "The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399" May Mc.Kisack (ed): 1959

 

The Oxford History of England: Volume VI "The Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485" E. F. Jacob (ed): 1961

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter X

Wherein we step aside from Norwich Castle for a brief breath of not so fresh air before diving back in to a sad tale of its decline from royal palace to gaol.

Piers and Eddie, from the interweb.

This doesn't involve Norwich at all but is so grimly entertaining that I simply cannot resist relating the most eye-watering death of an English monarch in history (at least to date).

After his ghastly father's equally ghastly demise from three months of continuous arse gravy, Edward the Second decided to continue what had been his dad's hugely successful war against the Scots, while at the same time keeping the French from his rear by betrothing himself to the two-year-old French princess Isabella. … as you do.

While in France, arranging his marriage, he left the country in the hands of his intimate favourite, Piers Gaveston, an act which outraged the barons as Piers was not "high-born". Gaveston had already been exiled once by Edward Longshanks for having too great an influence on young prince Eddie, and was exiled twice more by the barons after Longshanks' death, but Edward the Second kept on bringing him back home and the pair lived high on the hog, with the king heaping honours and lands on his favourite.

Prudish historians still argue about Piers and Eddie's relationship, but it's probable that they were lovers. Why this was considered outré in a king is a mystery, especially after King William Rufus and his gleeful buggering of all and sundry, but as my 1951 Oxford History of England went into gusts of splenetic apoplexy at Rufus' homosexuality I feel we now need a more tolerant approach and historians will hopefully soon acknowledge Edward the Second's bisexuality without judgement. Eddie married Isabella when she reached the age of twelve and they begat the future Edward the Third amongst others but contemporary chroniclers attest his love for Piers so I'll trust them rather than twentieth century bigots.

Eventually, however, the barons rebelled openly and chased Piers and Eddie around the north of England, forcing them to flee Newcastle. The king rode to York but Piers made the mistake of retreating to Scarborough Castle where he was besieged and surrendered on guarantee of his safety.

We know from past chapters never to trust a baron and so it went this time, too. Piers was given a show trial, run through with swords and beheaded, his body left unburied as he had been excommunicated by the Pope.

Edward the Second went apeshit and decided to take out his rage on Robert the Bruce, who by this time had recaptured most of the Scottish forts and towns previously lost to the Longshanks. Eddie was not his dad, however, and got his arse comprehensively spanked at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314.

The following three years saw terrible famine as crops failed across Britain and the rift grew between the barons and the king. Edward found a new favourite in Hugh Despenser the Younger and together they kicked baronial arse, while Queen Isabella now abandoned the king and with her lover, Robert Mortimer and a French army, invaded England from Normandy to take the throne in the name of thirteen-year-old Edward (soon the third).

Eddie was forced to abdicate and languished in Berkeley Castle, writing execrable poetry lamenting his fate. With Edward the Third crowned and Isabella and Mortimer as regents, poor Eddie was conveniently murdered, reportedly by the insertion of a red hot poker via a funnel into his "fundament", burning his bowels from the inside. 

Whatever the truth of this sorry tale, the act was later gloriously immortalised in the name of one of John Peel's favourite bands, Edward the Second and the Red Hot Polkas.

Amazingly, our friend the interweb appears to contain no images of the unfortunate insertion, so instead, here's a picture of a kniphofia.

Next time, things get grim at Norwich Castle.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter IX

Wherein a Bigod sallies forth from Norwich Castle, takes on a king and wins!

Edward the First, Courtesy Westminster Abbey.

Edward the First, known as Edward Longshanks for being … er … a little over six feet tall, spent the first few months of his reign valiantly attempting to reform common law and to regulate criminal and property legislation. He also built a new palace up against the north wall of Norwich Castle, which later became used as the Shirehall before being flattened in the late eighteenth century to make way for Sir John Soane's prison (later chapter).

As I write (December, 2020), the archæologists are grubbing around in that area, under the now-demolished 1960s café, in an attempt to trace the lower walls and foundations. Exciting stuff for we dirt-nerds.

Like his dad before him, however, Edward Longshanks soon found that legislative reform was too much like hard work and so he reverted to type and declared war on Wales, Scotland and France in short order.

This was not a cheap option for a cash-strapped kingdom so Edward did what Plantagenet kings always did and taxed all and sundry extortionately to pay for mercenary armies. In addition, especially in Norwich, where the community was particularly large and prosperous, he took out huge loans from the Jews (who should have suspected his motives after Richard the First's refusal to pay back his debts and his forcing the Jews to wear a star of David, à la 1930s Nazi Germany).

Once Edward had bled them dry he issued the Statute of Jewry, which effectively outlawed usury and meant that the Jews wouldn't be getting their money back (again). In 1290 he went further and expelled all Jews from Britain, appropriating (for which read "stealing") all their remaining property, lands and houses. Nice man …

By-the-bye, if you want to get really fucking angry I may at some future point post my essay on the events following Monday 21st March 1144, the so-called martyrdom of Saint William of Norwich. This, via the hideous, anti-semitic ravings of bigoted psychopath Thomas of Monmouth, led to pogroms across Europe, murdered Jewish families whose bodies are still being found by Norwich archæologists and was the acknowledged source for the Blood Libel, revived in the late nineteenth century which gave us Hitler and such white supremacist filth as Trump's favourite Proud Boys and the Q-Anon conspiracy nutjobs who still peddle it to the gullible and feeble-minded today. Grr … Argh, etc.

But getting back to our Eddie, even with this obscene extortion he still found himself short of the cash to fund his pointless wars and so he now heaped an additional tax on wool, an act know as "maltolt" (bad tax) by the wool merchants of Norwich.

So once again a Bigod sallied forth from Norwich Castle. Roger, son of Hugh, son of Roger and father of another Hugh, rebelled against the tax and together with Humphrey de Bohun, Constable of England, he drew up a series of complaints known as The Remonstrances.

Undeterred, King Edward the Potato demanded yet another tax, resulting in Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun turning up fully armed at the Exchequer to forcibly prevent the collection of the taxes.

Robert, King of Scotland … The Bruce, courtesy the interweb.

The king relented and - after much ado with Robert the Bruce, which does not concern us here, died of (you guessed it) arse gravy; a lingering bout of dysentery happily lasting from May through July of 1307.

Nasty death for a nasty man …

Edward the First was later to become blessed with the soubriquet "Hammer of the Scots" but this was not contemporary and was chiselled into his tomb in the sixteenth century by the entertainingly named Abbot Feckenham.

King Edwards.

After the discovery of the New World, King Edward more famously became a type of potato.

Roger Bigod returned to Norwich Castle, now promoted to Marshal of England and resumed the family habit of happily plundering the citizens.

Next time, a brief diversion involving kniphofia, after which we look at Norwich Castle's transformation from royal palace into royal prison and torture chamber. Bring rubber gloves and a mop.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter VIII

Wherein a pitched battle takes place in the Cathedral Close and the monastery and cathedral go up in flames …

Fortunately this thing is pretty hard to burn. The spire, however, is the fourth as three came down in storms and the south face of the tower was rebuilt in the 1970s by Old Dive's current architectural firm after Victorian "repairs" threatened to bring the whole thing  down.

Photo: courtesy Old Dive.

So … after the riot at the 1272 June Fair, when a priory man murdered a town man, things got pretty tense. There was a stand-off for several weeks while the good folk of the city occupied Tombland and the prior. besieged within the Close strengthened his defences with "three shiploads of bad lots from Yarmouth" (Blomefield).

In the second week of August it all kicked off. The citizens of Norwich attacked the Close and invaded the priory. I'll let James Campbell, writing in Rawcliffe and Wilson's "Mediæval Norwich" take up the tale:

"A great fire broke out, probably semi-accidental in origin. Most of the monastic buildings and much of the cathedral were burned. The intruders killed a number of priory men though all the monks escaped. The furore was intense."

Eventually things calmed down into a stand-off once more, but the king was so alarmed that: "On 1st September, King Henry III came to Norwich. Alleged participants in the riot were put on trial; some thirty were hanged. The bodies of some (perhaps all) were burnt; this was the penalty for arson.

The affair did not end there. Wider inquiries indicated that the prior was not innocent of provocation. He was deposed and the priory taken into the king's hand."

Contemporary sources have "something interesting to say about the forces from Yarmouth which the prior brought to resist, or oppress, the townsmen; namely that they were bad men who 'tempore turbationis regnii' (in the time when the kingdom was disturbed), had become thieves, ravagers and evil-doers."

Pretty much like the Yarmouth of today, then …

 

Here be dragons … Ethel and Bert's Gate, Photo courtesy Old Dive.

That same year of 1272, Henry's eldest son Edward, kicker of Simon de Montfort's arse, came to the throne, when Henry broke with family tradition and decided not to die of arse gravy but of "a long illness". Spoilsport.

Anyhoo, in Edward the First's reign, as part of a final settlement for the burning of the monastery, the citizens of Norwich paid for the building of the current Ethelbert Gate (above), replacing the original timber gatehouse, burned down in the riot.

We shall learn more of Edward the First next time.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter VII

Wherein the good folk of Norwich finally revolt against the Normans, featuring riot, mayhem and murther most foule.

Roger Bigod's three gateway towers at Norwich Castle. The topmost tower, seen here with two circular bastions had a deep series of cellars which form the current dungeons.

Picture courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

While all the aforementioned faff and blather was going on, the citizens of Norwich, sick of being sacked and burned, dug a defensive ditch around the entire city in 1252 and 1253, which later formed the line of the city walls.

Roger Bigod plonked a stonking great gated tower at the lower end of the Norman bridge, another at the top end and yet another in the middle, as the bridge was the way King Louis had approached the castle and Bigod didn't want a repeat performance.

He also replaced the timber palisade wall around the top of the mound (which had the irritating habit of falling over whenever a half-decent wind blew) with a strong stone wall.

The current castle dungeons are not in fact beneath the keep but stuck out in front, under what was the uppermost gatehouse. The top of the brick vaulted dungeon roof is only a foot or so below current ground level and cannot take heavy loads, so we're having to get everything up to the top of the mound using whacking great cranes.

Whacking great cranes, courtesy Old Dive from my office window.

At around this time, in 1271, a new Shirehall was built on the mound, within the stone wall at a cost of five pounds. Shortly afterwards, Edward the First built a new palace up against the north wall of the castle keep, the foundations of which the archæologists are excavating as I write.

In the 1280s the far more impressive sum of £607.17s.0d was spent on repairing and re-roofing the castle itself after its battering in the two recent sieges.

Looking from the Cathedral Close through the Erpingham Gate into the lower part of Tombland. The leaning building is Augustine Steward House which we shall meet again during Kett's Rebellion.

Photo courtesy Old Dive.

Meanwhile, the simmering tensions between the local population and the friars of Norwich Cathedral boiled over into open hostility during the summer of 1272.

A June Fair was being held in Tombland, the old, pre-Norman marketplace just west of the Cathedral Close. This was outside the precinct of the cathedral but lately the priory monks had been muscling in and claiming Tombland as their own jurisdiction.

Handbag fights between "town and cowl" had been growing into more serious threats and posturing and the cathedral prior employed mercenary thugs from Great Yarmouth as protection.

A scuffle broke out at the June Fair, quickly escalated into a mass brawl and the citizens of Norwich drove the "men of the priory" back inside the Close. Much shouting and gesticulating followed, along the lines of "Your mother was a hamster and your grandfather smelled of elderberries" only swearier; eventually culminating in a "priory man" firing a crossbow into the crowd, killing a Norwich man.

Uh oh …

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter VI

So ended the ludicrous game of musical thrones betwixt King's John, Louis and Henry; the barons were back on side, the Scots stayed north of the border and the boy King Henry the Third's armies were victorious under the leadership of elderly überknight William Marshal.

 In 1221, aged fourteen, Henry stayed at Norwich Castle and seemingly took a liking to it as in 1224 he forced Roger Bigod to surrender it to him. Yet, as Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu notes in East Anglian Archæology no. 132, "Somehow, the Bigod family always seemed to recover favour after the treasons of its members."

 

The interweb's idea of Henry the Third

The picture above does not do Henry justice. According to a contemporary chronicler he stood around five-feet-six and was rather fat, his left eyelid drooped and covered half his eye, giving him a sinister appearance. To cap it all, "His mind seemed not to stand on a firm basis, for every sudden accident put him into a passion."

After being sacked and burned by King Louis, the long-suffering folk of Norwich now had only thirty-odd years to rebuild their city before the Second Barons' War came their way.

By the late 1230s the barons had become heartily sick of Henry's nepotism and the increasing influence of his French relatives in the running of England. Henry married off his sister Eleanor to his French favourite Simon de Montfort and then had a barney with Pope Alexander the Fourth, who threatened him with excommunication for non-payment of a bribe offered to Alexander for his support in granting the Kingdom of Sicily to Henry's infant son, Edmund.

The barons forced Henry to sign what became known as The Provisions of Oxford in 1258, in effect nominating a fifteen member privy council of barons to oversee the country. Then they did what barons always did and quarreled and bickered and the whole thing fell to pieces.

Henry and his queen were hugely unpopular with the common folk and especially the London Mob, who pelted the queen with rotten eggs and vegetables when she travelled the Thames in the royal barge.

In 1261 Henry ripped up the Provisions of Oxford and in 1264 de Montfort defeated Henry's forces and ruled in the king's name, founding an early form of parliament from among the barons. The following year, Roger Bigod - like his father, sick of living in Bungay - switched sides once again and declared against the king, the barons reappointing him Constable of Norwich Castle.

Bad move, Roger … Henry's eldest son Edward stuffed the barons at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Simon de Montfort was killed in the melée and his head displayed on a spike.

Back in Norwich, I shall let Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu take up the tale …

"After Simon's defeat his supporters were deprived of their lands and, though redemption terms were agreed in October, many of them remained dissatisfied. They became know as 'the Disinherited'. In the middle of December, a party of them and their followers who had a stronghold in the Isle of Ely and had no doubt exhausted the food in that district marched on Norwich.

The Lannisters moving 140 carts of loot from Norwich to King's Landing … possibly.

They overcame the resistance of the citizens, sacked and burned buildings and took a large number of prisoners for ransom. Plunder said to have been worth 20,000 marks and to have filled one-hundred-and-forty carts, was removed to Ely."

From there the rebels marched on London and took it, apart from the Tower. Eventually peace was negotiated but Norwich had to rebuild once again.

Norwich Castle was attacked but not taken during the sacking of the city. For his stout resistance, the sheriff was rewarded by Henry the Third with 100 marks (one mark being two-thirds of a pound, thirteen-and-fourpence).

Roger Bigod somehow managed to get himself restored as Constable of Norwich Castle in 1273, but stupidly conspired against the king yet again and was kicked out of Norwich and this time had to give up Bungay Castle, too.

Yet the Bigod luck held, no matter how many times they rebelled, and soon after his latest treasonous episode Roger was restored to Norwich and got Bungay Castle back, too.

This Roger Bigod, son of Hugh Bigod, who was son of Roger Bigot, now begat another Hugh Bigod, who begat another Roger Bigod. This Roger Bigod had no male heirs so the line passed to a younger son of Hugh Bigod called … Roger Bigod.

And you wonder why I look so confused all the while.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter V

Wherein King Louis does little to endear himself to the good folk of Norwich and Roger Bigod bravely runs away.

Roger Bigod the Second (of many). Courtesy Old Dive.

So we've just had two rival kings swinging handbags at one another: John, the king by right of birth and Louis by invitation of the barons, declared king but not yet crowned. At this point, in keeping with family tradition, most of John fell out of his bottom in a lingering and fatal attack of arse gravy and the crown passed to nine-year-old Henry the Third, whose army now faced off against King Louis and we're back with two kings again.

Step back a year, to 1215 and King Louis and the barons were on the rampage. They approached Norwich and Roger Bigod the Second, Earl of Norfolk and Constable of Norwich Castle, took one look at them and wisely ran for his life, hiding out in Bungay Castle.

Signs of burning (Caen stone tinged pink by extreme heat) in the Bigod Tower.

Courtesy EAA 132.

Louis attacked and besieged Norwich Castle and it is at this point that it is thought the Bigod Tower was mined. Oil-soaked timber was packed into the lower arch and set alight in an attempt to demolish it and breach the walls.

In the small store above the castle quiet room (photo above) is a vaulted ceiling of Caen stone which was turned pink due to the intensity of the heat. You can still see it if nobody's about and you step over the rope barring the way to the little stone spiral stair in the corner (I didn't tell you that). [update: the castle design team has since decided - after much lobbying by me and Tim the archæologist - that this room is too important to be a store and so we now intend to open it to the public with interactive displays telling its story].

The mine was unsuccessful but King Louis took the castle by storm and then set about systematically plundering and burning the city itself. It was only with a monster bribe of £7,000, together with safe passage out of Norwich Castle guaranteed for his men and their plundered loot, that Louis quit the smoking remains of Norwich and rejoined the barons for an attack on Winchester.

By-the-bye, according to the Bank of England's gloriously addictive online inflation calculator, that £7,000 bribe in 1215 would have the equivalent value today of £13,140,662. 06p. Don't forget the sixpence.

King Louis and the baronial armies had captured the greater part of the kingdom when news spread of King John's pungent demise. One can imagine Louis' spuffling apoplexy when he learned that most of the barons now decided to switch sides and declare for the boy Henry.

Things now began to turn bad for Louis. He headed for Lincoln and besieged the castle in 1217. Head of the royalist forces, William Marshall, now aged seventy but still a renowned warrior, relieved the castle in the Second Battle of Lincoln, a splendid scrap that saw Louis' commander, the Comte de Perche, utterly routed.

Louis regrouped at Dover but was tricked into sending his fleet chasing after some English ships, which joined the main English fleet off Sandwich, turned and destroyed the French fleet. Louis gave up his claim to the English throne and retreated to France, becoming King Louis the Eighth in 1223 on the death of his father, having been a king of England for fourteen months. It is rumoured that King Louis went on to rule the Bandar Log as King of the Swingers and the Jungle VIP (sorry).

Next time, the utterly predictable Second Barons' War sacks and burns Norwich … again.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter IV

Heeeeere's Johnny!

And so we bid farewell to the twelfth century. Henry the Second, having started out so well, lost the plot and declared war on his three eldest sons, then popped his clogs, the throne being claimed by the thoroughly repellent Richard the Lionheart. 

Mercifully, gangrene did for Richard, leaving John in possession of England, Normandy, Anjou and various chunks of Aquitaine. While John was being crowned in Westminster Abbey, his nephew Arthur, together with Philip the Second of France and the French aristocracy combined against him and, after many battles, murders and marriages that do not concern us here, kicked John out of Northern France and back across la Manche to England. Lacking the martial skills of elder brother Richard, John's capitulation led contemporary English chroniclers to label him euphemistically "John Softsword".

Fans of the thoroughly silly Robin Hood stories know King John as a money-grubbing bad hat and that's just about the only thing in those stories that is based on fact. John declared that he would rule England with "force and will". He was the first English king to make the insane claim that he had a "divine right" to rule.

Being the gittiest of a succession of gits did little to endear him to noble or peasant alike and he taxed the trousers off everybody to raise enough money to buy himself a mercenary army with which to take back his lost French lands.

By 1214 he had extorted sufficient funds and his forces invaded Normandy, only to be promptly thrashed at the Battle of Bouvines.

Magna Carta, courtesy the British Library.

When John limped back to England, his tail between his legs, he found the barons in revolting demeanour. In 1215, in council in London he tried to thrash out a compromise but the rebel barons tooled up and, calling themselves the Army of God (twats), stormed and took London. At Runnymede near Windsor, John was forced to sign a peace agreement, ceding various royal powers to the barons.

What became known as Magna Carta proposed no taxes on the barons without baronial assent and protected the rights of the aristocracy (I refuse to use the term 'nobility' as there's nothing noble about the feckers) against the crown. Contrary to popular opinion it did bugger all good for the common folk. Inevitably, within months both sides had torn it up and the First Barons' War kicked off with a big barney at Rochester Castle in Kent.

King John did pretty well in the war, booting baronial arse all over England, then stuffing the Scots and chasing them back over the border.

French dauphin Louis the Lion … Not actually a lion at all.

Courtesy Alamy stock photos.

Desperately short of siege weapons and cash, the barons offered the English crown to French dauphin Louis the Lion, who had shedloads of both. King John tried to stop him crossing the Channel but his fleet got dispersed in a storm and Louis landed his forces unopposed in Kent in May 1216.

Between May and October of that year, England suffered under two rival kings, with disastrous consequences for Norwich Castle and the city itself. We'll deal with that in the next chapter, but first we have to kill off Johnny.

Which manner of death should we give him? Yup; the traditional death of mediæval kings: arse gravy! Travelling to the port of King's Lynn in Norfolk to organise reinforcements from the Continent, John went down with dysentery, allegedly from a surfeit of peaches. Taking a short cut across The Wash to get back to his power base he appears to have forgotten about the massive tidal surge and the royal treasury (including, legend has it, the Crown Jewels) together with much of his wagon train was lost beneath the waves.

John made it as far as Newark where he farted out his last peachy f'squirch and passed from our story.

The future Henry the Third was but a nine-year-old kid, looked after by the only decent knight in English history, William Marshal. So we have two kings again: King Louis, King Henry the Third, a bunch of rebel barons and a whole lot of mercenaries on the board. Next time, the Game of Thrones reaches Norwich and it's not pretty.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter III

Wherein, we need to talk about Richard …

Sean Connery as Dick the Dick, in full, wrong-period armour, riding to the rescue of Robin and Marian.

A bunch of Hollywood hooey.

At the siege of Nottingham Castle eyewitness accounts have him clad in light mail and "an iron hat" as full armour was impractical in the Middle East and light mail was what Richard "was used to."

 

Over here in Norwich, nothing much went on for quite a while with Richard the First away on the failed Third Crusade, sacking, burning and destroying in the name of the Pope, ravaging Cyprus but not quite getting to Jerusalem thanks to Salah-al-Din, brilliant commander of the Islamic armies, known to us as Saladin. At the siege of Acre, Richard, with the typical sub-human viciousness of a religious zealot had 2,700 Muslim men, women and children beheaded within view of Saladin's forces. Lovely …

 

In 1177, Earl Hugh Bigod breathed his last and Norwich Castle passed to his son, Roger Bigod, who continued to tax the teeth out of the locals. Down at the Cathedral the friars started getting uppity, encroaching on Tombland, but all was relatively peaceful; an edgy calm before a whole shedload of storms.

Richard the First … Not Sean Connery.

Richard the First of England, named the Lionheart by his Norman allies, only spent about six months in England, leaving it in the care of his youngest brother John Lackland (the evil King John of Robin Hood infamy) while Dick jollied off Crusading.

Before he went, however, he refused to honour the enormous loans he had extorted from the Norwich Jews and forced them to wear the Star of David in public, something that happened again in 1930s Germany and we all know how well that turned out.

Lionheart, my fat hairy arse. According to contemporary chroniclers, King Dick the Dick was a vicious bully and an all-round git as well as being an anti-Semitic bigot. At his coronation in Westminster Abbey on July 20th 1189, among those presenting gifts to the new king were Jewish leaders.  Richard had his courtiers strip them, whip them and throw them out of the abbey, prompting a murderous pogrom by the London Mob.

Nice chap …

 

When Richard's forces made it back to England from the Crusades he was not with them. On his way back he had gotten himself captured by Duke Leopold and was locked up in Dürnstein Castle. To pay his ransom, Richard bankrupted the English exchequer.

In the meantime, John Lackland had been plotting to take the throne in Richard's absence but was then in France, sending to England one Adam of St.Edmunds with orders to resist Richard's forces. On the Lionheart's return only Lackland's forces in Nottingham Castle held out.

This was then just a timber palisade and bailey with stone walls only to the upper parts and it took but one day of slaughter, two further days of trebuchet and mangonel bombardment and the hanging of prisoners in sight of the castle walls for the forces to surrender. The de Militari website has as good and detailed an account of the siege as any (https://deremilitari.org/2014/03/the-siege-of-nottingham-castle-in-1194/).

Richard now headed to France to sort out his brother. However, having heard rumour that a hoard of Roman gold had been unearthed in Châlus-Chabrol, he besieged the town to steal it for himself.

While Dick strolled around, setting up his siege lines, he spotted a young boy atop the town walls, armed with a crossbow and a saucepan for a shield (I kid you not), reportedly one Pierre Basile.

King Dick, being the git he was, taunted the boy who, by some fluke, managed to shoot him in the shoulder with a crossbow bolt. This rapidly and happily turned gangrenous and that was the end of the Lionheart.

Richard's personal chroniclers relate that he pardoned the boy and rewarded him for his bravery, but that was not the kind of man he was. Poor little Pierre, for his heroism, was flayed alive, à la Ramsay Bolton and then pulled apart by horses.

 

Sausage.

Anyhoo, the Lionheart was dead, and a good thing, too, except that now, in 1199, John Lackland became king of England and Duke of Normandy.

Next time: the utterly predictable King Louis joke (again) …

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter II

Wherein, surprise, surprise, Hugh Bigod rebels against the king …

The foule murther of Thomas Becket, as seen on the interweb.

Here we go again with the real life Game of Thrones. Henry the Second's "little misunderstanding" with Thomas Becket didn't just piss off folk on this side of the Channel, it seriously dischuffed Henry's missus, Eleanor of Aquitaine and a lot of her mates. On top of that, Henry decided to marry off his youngest and favourite son, John, known as "Lackland" for having three elder brothers who would snaffle up most of Henry's inheritance, and bequeathed to him three castles on his eldest brother's lands.

You'll recall the brotherly love of the Normans from William the Bastard's murderous brood. Well, plus ça change, etc. Henry's eldest son … er … Henry, encouraged by his mum and the two middle brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, conspired to bribe the French counts with captured lands and promptly invaded Normandy for a bit of patricide, fratricide and regicide, long a family trait.

Over here at Norwich Castle in July 1174, also following a long-held family trait and encouraged by the dastardly Earl of Leicester, chief of the Norman aristocratic rebels, Earl Hugh Bigod traitorously rebelled against the king and claimed Norwich Castle, manning it with eight-hundred soldiers (which must have made a real mess of the poop chutes). He also - for no other apparent reason than his being a git - burned a great part of the city.

Henry the Second drummed up a massive mercenary army to hold Normandy and crossed to England with five-hundred seasoned warriors to kick baronial arse for the second time in his reign. He stormed into Norwich and captured Hugh Bigod, who amazingly weaseled his way into retaining his head, though one of his castles at Thetford was razed to the ground to teach him a lesson.

Heading back south of the Channel once more, King Henry, his four sons, the French barons and King Louis the Seventh of France engaged in a chaotic dance of switching allegiances and chasing around the Angevin territories like the Keystone Kops. By the end of September 1174, Henry and his mercenaries prevailed, forcing the brothers and Louis to accept a settlement and end the rebellion.

He was still royally pissed at Richard, however, who came grovelling and weeping and laid himself at his father's feet for mercy, which was grudgingly given.

The brothers were then tasked with destroying the castles and power bases of the very barons who had been their erstwhile allies, a task which Richard in particular took to with alarming violence and cruelty.

When Henry the eldest son died in 1183, Richard should have become heir to the throne, but Henry distrusted him (with good reason as we shall see in the next chapter) and sent John south to Aquitaine to capture or kill him.

Instead, to simplify what was an insanely complex web of deceit and betrayal, John sided with his brother and, together with Louis's successor King Philip of France defeated Henry at Ballans in July 1189. Two days later, at Chinon, Henry the Second was dead and Richard succeeded him as King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou.

Richard and John would become the next two kings of England and both England and Norwich, city and castle would suffer for it.

Next time: We Need to Talk About Richard …

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Fourth - Under Siege: Norwich Castle During the Barons' Wars - Chapter I

… Wherein King Louis uses the power of man's red flower to sack and burn Norwich, the barons rebel and … er … sack and burn Norwich and the good folk of Norwich become understandably revolting.

So let us wave a fond farewell to Mister Tanner and his boy and clamber back up the steep hill and the castle mound, away from the reek of the Great Cockey and its attendant trades, tread carefully past the pee and poo pool beneath the great poop chutes of Norwich Castle and up the stairs of the Bigod Tower, through the grand Norman arch and into the Great Hall itself.

It is late 1153 and our old friend Hugh Bigod still kicks his heels in Bungay Castle while King Stephen's son William of Blois enjoys Norwich Castle and the earldom of Norfolk.

Together with one Ranulph of Chester (who had committed a cheeky Red Wedding style banquet massacre at Lincoln Castle, thus kicking off the First Battle of Lincoln; tremendous fun, but alas not a part of our tale), Hugh Bigod threw his support behind the future Henry the Second when he invaded from Normandy.

It was the final throes of the Anarchy and when, the following year, King Stephen succumbed to a fatal fit of apoplexy, Henry was crowned king. Hugh, for his support, was reinstated as Earl of Norfolk and Constable of Norwich Castle and moved back in, the dispossessed William skulking off back to Blois.

Norwich Castle in the Twelfth Century, courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

The Great Cockey is in the foreground, the sheds, yards and pits of the foul trades line this bank, the Norman marketplace sits to the lower left and the Castle Fee extends to the right of and behind the castle mound.

Roger Bigot and his son Hugh Bigod both had a hand in the early development (and flat-roofed porch extension) of Norwich Castle. I hope you're taking notes because the Bigods star in our tale for several generations more, committing treason left, right and centre and somehow, miraculously getting away with it.

Anyhoo, Henry the Second inherited a trashed, burned and depopulated Britain after the ravages of the Anarchy and Normandy was in a pretty poor state, too. As Henry lived in Normandy and only ever spoke Norman-French and Latin, Normandy became his priority and for the next ten years, the surviving Britons were left pretty much to their own devices, which meant more ravaging of the poor folk by the barons and living here became not unlike the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Shitty …

Henry the Second … or at least what the interweb thinks he looked like.

Norfolk was one of the few places left relatively unaffected by the devastation of the Anarchy and with Hugh Bigod back in Norwich Castle things toddled along quite nicely for a decade or so. By 1163, however, Henry had sorted out his French domains and finally turned his attention to this sceptered isle.

First up came a big crackdown on crime, using travelling justices and force of arms to confiscate stolen goods and lands.

The barons got a good and well-deserved arse-kicking; all the counter-castles and most of the other castles built during Stephen's chaotic reign were now pulled down. Henry reformed the currency and the legal system and disinherited those earls and barons created by Stephen.

None of which really concerns Norwich Castle, but it helps the narrative to know that Henry the Second smacked the country like a naughty child (you could do that back then) and it started to behave itself for the first time since the Romans left, more than seven-hundred years before.

The rest of Henry's life was spent in France, where he appears to have gone off the rails big time. All he did concerning England during this period was to throw an almighty paddy about the behaviour of his old mucker Thomas Becket, at which four idiot Norman knights took him at his word, crossed la Manche* and hacked Becket to death in Canterbury Cathedral.

* La Manche (literally "the Handle") is Frogspeak for the English Channel.

This didn't go down too well over here but across the water Henry hit the big red "disaster" button, kicking off the Great Revolt in Normandy.

Other than Britain, Henry ruled Normandy and adjacent Anjou and - through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine - a big chunk of the bottom-left of France along the coast of the Bay of Biscuits.

Next up, we shall learn what went wrong for Henry and how disaster across the Channel spelled disaster at Norwich.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976

The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994

Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994

Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Third - Life in the Mediæval Castle Fee - Appendix: Let's Make an Arrow

As my next talk will involve the use of the English longbow, I feel that those of you so inclined might want to make a longbow arrow so here's how to do it.

You'll need a straight stick, around three-and-a-half feet long, a bagful of tools and a credit account at Mister Tanner's, Mister Horner's the smithy and the armourer.

From the Anarchy through Crécy to Agincourt the pre-eminent super-weapon of the English was the legendary longbow. Developed from the hunting longbow by the English and Welsh during the Norman occupation, they were originally four-and-a-half to five feet long and drawn only to the chest, which was fine for short-range work or for arrow-storming, but no good for delivering heavy, lethal arrows accurately at great distance.

The interweb can actually be a pretty handy place to find stuff.

Enter the famous bi-coloured yew longbow. The average length of those recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose was six feet, six inches. They were cut from the junction between the sapwood and heartwood of mature English yews and carved to a 'D' section; the front of the bow being of sapwood and almost flat, the back being of heartwood and curved. This natural lamination made the longbow tremendously powerful.

The freshly cut yew wood was air-dried in open sheds for two years and then slowly worked into shape for up to another two years. These things were for life and often got passed down through generations of archers.

The mediæval longbow had a draw strength of an incredible 100 to 180lbf (compared to a modern hunting bow of 50 to 60lbf) and archers were trained up from childhood, leading to the development of the unequal arm bones and musculature found on skeletons of archers of the period. One arm like Popeye, the other like Olive Oyl.

Instead of holding the bow straight and pulling back on the bowstring, longbow archers would hold the bowstring at their right shoulder and lean forward into the bow using their whole body weight, releasing their arrows with such devastating force that they would travel accurately for well over three-hundred yards and would pierce plate armour and thick, underpadded armour at closer range.

The yew longbow was such an incredible weapon that by the late 1200s England and Wales were depleted of mature yew trees. Henry the Fourth gave his bowyers the right to enter anybody's private land and cut down their yews. The demand was so great that by 1472 every ship coming in to an English port had to bring with it four yew bowstaves for every tun carried (a tun was a wine, oil or honey barrel holding 252 gallons of liquid volume).

Arrows fletched using grey lag goose wingtip feathers.

Bowstrings were made of hemp, flax, or occasionally silk if you were rich enough. The tips of the bow were protected with ox-horn nocks (Mister Horner's work, you'll recall), slotted to take the bowstring.

Arrowheads came in all manner of shapes and sizes with a variety of wide, barbed points for hunting. War arrows, however, usually had either a "short bodkin point" which was designed for piercing armour plate or driving chain mail deep into flesh, a "broadhead" for cutting through flesh and deforming armour, or a small, barbed point for use against horses or infantry.

By the late 1400s the fearsome-looking "plate-cutter bodkin" arrowhead was introduced to rip through heavier plate armour and do massive internal damage.

Compared with the time-consuming yet basically simple process of making bows from bowstaves, the making of a war arrow involved a lot more processes and people. In 1351 the crown ordered 51,530 bowstaves each with twenty-four arrows; a total of 1,232,400 arrows, each one hand made.

The arrow shafts were most commonly of aspen, birch or poplar. These would have been cut to square sections and then carved to a particular profile using a hand plane. Each was around thirty to thirty-six inches long.

While modern arrows are parallel along the shaft, designed for target archery or hunting, longbow arrows had a 'bobtail' profile, with the thickest part of the shaft just behind the arrowhead, tapering down toward the nock. This helps in distance, accuracy and hitting power.

Considering the massive draw strength required for a classic English longbow, the arrows needed reinforcing at the nock. This involved slitting the nock end of the arrow shaft and forcing in a sliver of cow or ox horn (again bought from our Mister Horner), leaving a short section protruding behind the shaft. The groove for the string was then cut against the grain of the horn, making a very strong nock. The nock would be gently eased into the shaft to prevent the wood from splitting further and then clamped and glued.

Next up, a trip to the smithy to pick up a bucket of arrowheads. Depending on how evenly these were made a varying degree of sanding and shaping of the shaft would need to be carried out to ensure a tight fit before gluing.

Now you've got your pointy end and your tail end, the arrow shaft must be waterproofed (if you're headed across the Channel to Agincourt you don't want to get there with soggy, floppy arrows). This would be done using flax or linseed oil, which was first boiled with lead oxide in yet another smelly and dangerous process. Two coats were applied, just to be sure.

Fletching for longbow war arrows was very long and slim, around seven-and-a-half inches in length and a flat triangle in shape about an inch from the shaft at the apex.

Archæological evidence indicates that longbow war arrows were fletched with grey-lag goose wing tip feathers, each arrow with feathers from the same wing to force the arrow to spin and improve accuracy.

These were fixed to the shafts with hide glue (from Mister Tanner's yard) and verdigris, scraped from copper plates by the local armourer. It appears that the verdigris was used to prevent rodents eating the glue while the arrows were in storage or transit.

Modern fletchers tend to cheat and use templates and double sided carpet tape to hold and cut their feathers before fixing them to the shaft, but a mediæval fletcher would be skilled enough to cut the feathers once they were fixed in place.

Silk whipping to the feathers.

To reinforce the glue the feathers were "whipped". This involved hand-winding linen or silk thread around the shaft and between the barbs of the feathers, separating the barbs with a knife before wrapping the thread. This helps keep the feathers in good shape and ensures they fly aerodynamically.

Once the thread was tied off (from the Mary Rose arrows this was done by wrapping tightly for six turns and then gluing), the whipping itself was glued and waterproofed, again using Mister Tanner's hide glue mixed with verdigris from the armourer up at the Castle Fee, who would leave sheets of copper to tarnish in his yard for this purpose.

Now off you toddle and make yourself an arrow.

Sources:

The Worshipful Company of Fletchers and The Worshipful Company of Bowyers

Weapons of Warre: The Ordnance of the Mary Rose (Vol.2): Portsmouth: Mary Rose Trust

Archery in Mediæval and Renaissance Europe: E. Roth: 2012

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Third - Life in the Mediæval Castle Fee - Chapter VII

Wherein we bid farewell to the Castle Fee with a final brief flurry of gloriously gratuitous grossness and get back to actually learning stuff.

To add piquancy to the olfactory horrors of the Great Cockey valley, up at the top of the Norman marketplace, along what is now the delightful Memorial Garden was sited the Norman fish market.

Barrels of herring from Great Yarmouth had to be shipped upriver to be taxed at Norwich before being shipped downstream again and on to London and beyond for sale.

However, daily boatloads of wet fish were landed, carted up the hill to the fish market to be gutted, cleaned and sold to the public. The reeking guts and carcasses were washed down the marketplace, through the fruit, veg and other food stalls, through the tanners' yards and straight into the Great Cockey.

Rotting offal, for your olfactory delight. Interweb again. 

 

With no refrigeration the day's leftover piles of fish and shellfish would add their pungent aroma to the mélange of rotting fruit, decomposing cabbage, rancid fat and offal assailing your nostrils. Mobs of gulls, feral dogs, cats, rats and flies would feast on the filth of the marketplace … like mediæval road-sweepers.

At last, the promised market map, courtesy of Old Dive. To orient yourself (as my north point appears to have disappeared) north is to the right and the castle is off the bottom of the map.

Here's a plan of the Norman marketplace showing what was going on where. The most disgusting trades are coloured - inevitably - brown. Memorise this for the next time you visit the market or stroll along Gentleman's Walk.

So that concludes our fragrant mosey around the Castle Fee and the Great Cockey valley in the twelfth century. Who'd want to be a time-traveller?

Considering that the good folk of Norman Norwich would have had hideously bad breath from poor diet and rotting teeth, unwashed, lice and flea-ridden hair, filthy bodies and clothes and a rancid body odour that these days would fell an ox at ten paces, it is pretty certain that their olfactory glands would have been blasted into insensitivity within days of their being born.

To them, it would all be perfectly normal …

In my next talk, less pee and poo, but Norwich Castle is attacked by King Louis (not the ape) and his cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

First up, however: who wants to make a longbow arrow? Nobody? Ah, well … If you feel so inclined my next post will tell you how.

Sources:

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004

Eastern Daily Press website: "13th century cat and goat hide shop excavated."

A Brief History of Arrowmaking: Veronica-Mae Soar; Clerk to the Craft Guild of Traditional Bowyers and Fletchers: The Worshipful Company of Fletchers: online resource

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 112: Dragon Hall, King Street, Norwich: Excavation and Survey of a Late Mediæval Merchant's Trading Complex: Norfolk and Norwich Heritage Trust

East Anglian Archæology Vol 28: Excavations Within the North-East Bailey of Norwich Castle: 1979

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

The Pipe Roll Society: Archive Editions (various): online resource

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Third - Life in the Mediæval Castle Fee - Chapter VI

In which we mosey on back along Gentleman's Walk to Mister Tanner's yard, carrying our newly purchased stinking drinking horn and catch up with Mister Tanner and his boy.

Mister Tanner at work, courtesy the interweb.

Mister Horner will be accompanying us as he wants to sell all the stinky paste (weirdly, stinky paste is an anagram of Patsy Kensit; don't say you never learn anything useful in these talks) of his horn cores back to Mister Tanner, who will boil the paste up with his hooves and scrap leather to make glue (and another awful stench … are you seeing a pattern developing here?).

In the meantime, Mister Tanner's boy has been sprinkling his cowhides with lime and stale human urine (no need for a urinal at the tannery) and folding them hair-side inward to encourage the rotting of the hair follicles.

This process takes many weeks so the yard would be stacked with rotting, reeking, pee-soaked piles of cowhide, crusted with flies. Once each hide was sufficiently rotted, Mister Tanner would remove the hair with a blunt knife, turn the hide over and scrape off any remaining putrid fat and flesh with a sharper knife.

I love the smell of warm dung in the morning. Courtesy once again of our friend the interweb.

The hides were then re-washed (in the Great Cockey of course, which was not exactly running clean and clear as the rotted hair, putrid fat and flesh had just been tipped into it). Mister Tanner now had two choices of fragrant methods for de-liming and softening his hides.

The first method was lengthy immersion in an alkali-rich solution of warm dung (dog and human). The second method was an equally lengthy drenching in a solution of stale beer and human urine. Pee and poo both carted down the hill from the castle's poop chutes and sold by the barrowload.

Whichever method he chose, the Great Cockey valley was possibly not the best place for a romantic stroll back in the twelfth century.

Mister Tanner's boy washed the hides again and then agitated them in a solution of crushed oak bark. After being layered one atop t'other with ground bark between, the hides were laid in a pit filled with weak tanning solution followed by transfer to another pit containing strong tannins. This part of the process would take between twelve and eighteen months.

After this long soaking the tanned hides were rinsed (in lovely fresh Cockey water), smoothed, using a two-handled setting pin, which was like a giant, blunt-triangular-section rolling pin, and hung up to dry slowly in a shed. Mister Tanner and his boy would then load the dried, tanned hides onto their cart and trundle them along the banks of the Cockey to Mister Currier's yard, where Mister Currier's lads would stretch and shave the hides and soften them with grease (often cow-brains).

The leather was then ready for sale to saddlers, clothiers, armourers, cobblers, bookbinders and whatever passed for the fetish-wear community back then.

The interweb is a wonderful place.

Next time you don your leather jacket, tighten your leather belt, slip on your leather shoes and slide into your leather car seat (or gimp suit), you'll know just where it's come from and how much pee and poo it got soaked in.

One iPhone case coming right up.

Of course these days in the west, modern tanning methods are marginally less fæcal than of old, substituting sodium sulphide for human urine with their lime, though they are still chemically stinky and disgusting.

On the other hand, your iPhone case is likely to have come from rural China.

Just saying …

More grossness in the next post, together with the promised map of the Norman Marketplace.

Sources:

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009

The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010

Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004

Eastern Daily Press website: "13th century cat and goat hide shop excavated."

A Brief History of Arrowmaking: Veronica-Mae Soar; Clerk to the Craft Guild of Traditional Bowyers and Fletchers: The Worshipful Company of Fletchers: online resource

East Anglian Archæology Vol. 112: Dragon Hall, King Street, Norwich: Excavation and Survey of a Late Mediæval Merchant's Trading Complex: Norfolk and Norwich Heritage Trust

East Anglian Archæology Vol 28: Excavations Within the North-East Bailey of Norwich Castle: 1979 

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 to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951

The Pipe Roll Society: Archive Editions (various): online resource