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