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).
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.
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.
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.
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
2 comments:
I especially like your own photos in this post. The city walls are very pretty. Do you know if this part of the wall was made from the Castle Fee's walls?
This particular part was, Petrea, as it's in Chapelfield Gardens, which was then the French (Norman) Quarter.
I have a lovely little survey, "Report on the City Walls of Norwich" from 1964 which details which parts and towers and gates were built and by whom.
In the early 1960s the imbecile planners put in the Norwich Inner Ring Road which meant demolishing hundreds of historic buildings.
About the only good part of it is that a lot of these buildings had been built leaning against both sides of the old city walls, which were now exposed to view for the first time in hundreds of years, enabling archæologists to study and protect them.
Post a Comment