Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Second - Anarchy in the UK - Chapter II

Alas, poor King Stephen, slinking back to England after his army slaughtered itself before his very eyes.

Stephen was not the most proactive of rulers. Having attained the throne by simple bribery, whenever something came up his preferred solution was to rush over and throw money at it. The Gesta Stephani has him "running hither and thither all over England," bribing his uppity aristocracy with gifts of earldoms and castles.

Starting in 1136, the granting of earldoms and castles was soon hopelessly out of control and Stephen's royal power and royal finances disappeared down the shitter in short order.

All hell broke loose. The Welsh rebelled, the Scots invaded and the earls and barons behaved like earls and barons.

Welcome to The Anarchy, England's first, full-on civil war since the Norman Conquest. It lasted nineteen years and trashed most of Britain and Normandy.

The Anarchy was a particularly nasty, brutal, scorched-earth, massacre-and-pillage style war, but apart from a small handbag fight, which we shall outline below, the closest the slaughter came to Norwich was Ely, which bore yet another siege, assault and confiscation of whatever body parts were left after the last cull.

To top it all, in 1139, Empress Matilda and hubby Geoffrey Plantagenet invaded England, in league with Matilda's half-brother, Robert of Gloucester and her Uncle, King David the First of Scotland, who took and held much of northern England in her name.

Yet another invasion. Courtesy the interweb.

Quick digression: I don't know why most folk think that the last time England was invaded was in 1066.

Already, by 1135, we've been invaded by Edgar the Atheling (twice), Sweyn Estridsson (twice), Robert Short-Arse (failed through lack of interest - see Part the First) and in this period, both Stephen of Blois, who invaded and was crowned king by the London Mob after exempting them from royal taxes and now by Empress Matilda.

After that come so many invasions it makes your head spin; I'll add a list of them at the end of Part the Second should anyone wish to discover just how invasion-prone we are.

But back to Norwich, where faithful Hugh Bigod, enjoying being Earl of Norfolk and Constable of Norwich Castle was happy to swear fealty to the newly crowned King Stephen and eager to crack on with his flat-roofed porch extension.

1136, and elsewhere in the kingdom trouble was brewing …

Quite early in the Anarchy, having been haring hither and thither around the country, walloping Welshmen, slaughtering Scots and flattening (or bribing) anyone else who got in his way, King Stephen succumbed to his own fit of arse-gravy mayhem and the rumour swept through England that he had died.

Earl Hugh, on hearing the rumour, immediately claimed Norwich Castle as his own, without waiting for news of Stephen's runny demise.

King Stephen - courtesy the interweb

Big mistake!

Occasionally, even in the twelfth century, people's bottoms dried out and they recovered from dysentery.

Inevitably - and you know there's always an "inevitably" in these talks - this was what happened to Stephen.

Newly dry-bottomed King Stephen - once he could sit on a horse again - brought his army up to Norwich and lay siege to the castle.

I like a cliffhanger. Tune in next time to discover the fate of Hugh Bigod and Norwich Castle.

Sources:

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (various): C. Clark (ed): 1970

Historia Novella: William of Malmesbury. In translation as William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen: J. A. Giles: 2016

Historia Anglorum: Henry of Huntingdon: In translation as The History of the English People, 1000 - 1154: Diana Greenway: Oxford World Classics: 2009

The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Volume 3: 1067 - 1140: In translation by R. R. Darlington: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1995

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

Feudal Documents from Bury St. Edmunds: British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales: Donald C. Douglas: 1932

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

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Second - Anarchy in the UK - Chapter I

 

I couldn't resist. One of my all time favourite cartoons.

Anyhoo … to the matter at hand. My long-standing series of monthly lunchtime lectures is supposed to be on historic building conservation, teaching our young graduates stuff they no longer teach at university. Covering one or more of the RIBA's CPD Core Curriculum subjects gives attendees an hour off their annual Continual Professional Development duties. Occasionally I veer a little off topic, hence the opening paragraphs of this one below. Here goes …

Hokay, so I started writing the notes for this presentation and then had to stop at the Matilda versus Matilda smackdown because I found I'd written over ten-thousand words before I even got part way through the Anarchy. And that's just the notes; I hadn't even put in any bum jokes yet.

Mostly it was just about ghastly people doing ghastly things to other ghastly people; great fun for me as a mad mediævalist, and I know also for the odder folk among you, but the RIBA CPD Core Curriculum subjects don't specifically include madness, murder and mayhem, or indeed bum jokes, more's the pity and I am required to include at least some history and conservation of buildings to give you a legit hour's CPD.

So instead of a narrative of nineteen years of earls, barons, kings, queens and an empress chasing one another all round the country like the end of a Benny Hill show you'll be getting the bits that affected Norwich Castle … er … mostly.

Henry the First. Courtesy of the interweb.

At the end of our previous talk we left Norwich Castle at Christmas 1121, with the porpoise-eating party of Henry the First and Adeliza of Louvain.

As we learned, Henry lived on until the beginning of December 1135, when his chugging of a surfeit of lampreys caused a week-long, agonising death by bowel cramps and bum-gravy.

So we rejoin our tale in 1135. Plenty went on between 1121 and 1135 but none of the juicy bits occured anywhere near Norwich Castle so for today's purposes we can fast-forward over those years.

First week of December 1135, however, saw Henry the First emit his last, dying, fishy, wet fart and the real life Game of Thrones kicked off.

Let's start with Empress Matilda. Only surviving legitimate child of Henry the First and his queen Matilda, the king had married her off at age eleven to the elderly Holy Roman Emperor, another Henry (I hope you're keeping notes; I'll be asking questions later … though all the answers will probably be Matilda or Henry, there are so many of the buggers).

In 1125, elderly Emperor Henry popped his clogs and two years later Henry the First brought Matilda back to England to be declared his true heir.

A woman? A WOMAN? This was too much for your typical twelfth-century misogynist and the aristocracy let Henry know in no uncertain terms that they would only accept a queen if she was suitably married to a noble who would rule as king; preferably one of their own. But Henry cocks it up … He marries Matilda to Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou, traditional enemy of the Norman aristocracy. Henry had to force the barons to swear oaths of allegiance to Matilda and Geoffrey in 1127, 1128 and again in 1131.

NOT the mummified hand of Saint James, but the severed hand of Sir John Heydon, which you can find in Norwich Castle Museum should you be so inclined. Photo - courtesy Old Dive.

Empress Matilda was a bit of an odd fish in that she carried the mummified hand of Saint James wherever she went. And where she went now was off to Anjou with her new hubby, leaving the barons and earls to grumble and rhubarb amongst themselves.

Enter one Stephen of Blois. Remember him? As Henry's nephew he had a lesser but still legitimate claim to the throne and Henry had married him off to wealthy Matilda (surprise) of Boulogne. He was also the guy who chickened out of sailing with William Adelin on the White Ship as he felt the passengers and crew were too drunk to sail. Smart move.

In another smart move, he gathered his military retinue and raced across the Channel as soon as he heard news of Henry's demise, landing in London on the eighth of December.

The London Mob traditionally claimed a right to elect the sovereign of England (as later they elected Mary Tudor, usurping Edward VI's nominated heir, Queen Jane after only nine days as monarch). They liked the look of Stephen and they liked his promise of tax cuts and bribes even more. 

Stephen's brother - yet another Henry - was Bishop of Winchester and delivered Stephen the support of the church in exchange for his granting the church the right to extort even more money from the people. Bishop Henry bribed Hugh, the son of Roger Bigot to swear that King Henry had changed his mind on his deathbed and had named Stephen his heir in place of Matilda.

This was good enough for the London Mob, so on the twenty-sixth of December 1135, Stephen was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.

Meanwhile, back in Norwich Castle our old chum Roger Bigot, the Norman Knight and ruthless exploiter of the local population was succeeded at the turn of 1136 by his son, Hugh (he of the above bribe), who changed the family name to Bigod (pronounced By-God apparently) and who was named the First Earl of Norfolk and Constable of Norwich Castle.

Hugh was marginally less rapacious than his dad had been and rather enjoyed living at the castle, so recently completed and fitted out as a royal palace.

Like anyone moving into a new home, however, he felt the urge to fiddle with it. The splendid Norman entrance archway was at that time reached by a simple timber stair with a drawbridge at the top. Quite rightly, Hugh felt it kinda let the rest of the castle down.

And so we can lay at his feet the blame for one of the English people's more horrendous perversions as at this point he decided to build England's first known flat-roofed porch extension …

The horror … the horror. Photo courtesy of the interweb.

But this wasn't just any old flat-roofed porch extension … oh no … this was the utterly blinging flat-roofed porch extension that has become known as the Bigod Tower.

The Bigod Tower today … or rather last March. Photo courtesy Old Dive.

This enclosed the main entrance arch and provided a much grander covered stairway into the castle's Great Hall.

The Bigod Tower and Stair, prior to the Victorians buggering it up. Courtesy Old Dive's personal collection.

 

You can make out the dashed line of the stair and drawbridge on the picture above. This no longer exists since Edward Boardman (of whom much more later) realigned the stair in the 1880s and replaced it with the current, awkward dog-leg configuration. As part of our Royal Palace Reborn project we're going to put it back the way it should be. Yay, us!

Back in early 1136, Empress Matilda was exceedingly dis-chuffed at the news of Stephen usurping the English throne that was hers by right. Matilda and Geoffrey gathered their army and invaded Normandy, trashing and looting as they went in preparation for an invasion of England to take back her throne.

Stephen, king de facto rather than de jure, ventured south across the Channel to stop them. We end today with perhaps the silliest battle in English history.

Stephen's army consisted of his own Flemish mercenaries under the command of William of Ypres together with the personal armies of his Norman Barons. Each side loathed the other. 

Hence, Matilda and Geoffrey were rewarded with the Pythonesque sight of a pitched battle between the two halves of Stephen's army, hacking and slaughtering one another while Matilda's army could only roll their eyes and probably giggle a lot.

The surviving barons then deserted King Stephen, who slunk back to England with his tail between his legs, promising to pay Matilda and Geoffrey 2,000 marks a year to leave him alone.

Next time, the Anarchy really kicks off and Norwich Castle comes under siege again.

Sources:

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (various): C. Clark (ed): 1970

Historia Novella: William of Malmesbury. In translation as William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen: J. A. Giles: 2016

Historia Anglorum: Henry of Huntingdon: In translation as The History of the English People, 1000 - 1154: Diana Greenway: Oxford World Classics: 2009

The Chronicle of John of Worcester, Volume 3: 1067 - 1140: In translation by R. R. Darlington: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1995

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

Feudal Documents from Bury St. Edmunds: British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales: Donald C. Douglas: 1932

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

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

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

 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.

                                                Yikes! Photo courtesy Old Dive. 

"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

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

Wherein the Tyrion Lannister Drinking Game* and a plague of Matildas.

Robert Curthose - International Man of Mischief

1096, and with William Rufus firmly on the throne of England, Robert Short-Arse, Duke of Normandy decided it was time for a bit of slaughter in the sun and toddled off to join the First Crusade, mortgaging his duchy to William to pay for his army.

Robert reportedly did rather well in the field and four years later was returning from the Holy Land to an arranged marriage with a wealthy bride in hopes of buying back his dukedom. At some point on his journey, however, he learned of William Rufus' unfortunate hunting accident and of his younger brother's usurpation of the throne of England.

Understandably miffed, Robert promptly invaded England, landing at Portsmouth to a somewhat underwhelming welcome. Nobody wanted to join him, and Henri - now crowned Henry the First of England - paid off Robert with £2,000 and packed him off back across the Channel.

Robert Short-Arse, once more Duke of Normandy was at his most Tyrionesque (is that a word? It is now) at Easter, 1105. He was due to hear an important and long-awaited sermon from Bishop Serlo but was nowhere to be found.

Turns out that he had spent the day and night beforehand doing some serious drinking while cavorting with 'harlots and jesters' and, while he lay in bed snoring off his drunkenness his drinking buddies stole all his clothes for a lark, resulting in a nekkid and hung-over Robert missing the sermon.

Robert - ever the mischief - somehow managed to annoy his brother so much that Henry invaded Normandy to arrest him.

In 1106, after a series of skirmishes, Henry eventually captured Robert after the Battle of Tinchebray and brought him back to languish quite comfortably in a drunken haze for twenty years in Devizes Castle. He was then - for no historically recorded reason, but probably shortly after Henry's own death - moved to Cardiff Castle where he later died in his early eighties. I have a soft spot for Robert Short-Arse, probably brought on by playing the Tyrion Lannister Drinking Game one too many times whilst watching GoT.

Meanwhile, back in 1100, having been crowned King Henry the First of England, Henry married Matilda, daughter of the King of Scotland and they had two kids, Matilda (another one) and William Adelin.

This, however, didn't stop Henry from rutting his way to a bouncing bevy of bastards; at least nine sons and thirteen daughters that we know about.

Queen Matilda was born Edith, but Henry had her change her name on marriage, rather creepily to his mother's name. There are more Matildas in Henry's story than one would wish to waltz with. He renamed his wife Matilda and named three of his daughters Matilda (one legitimate and two bastards); the legitimate Matilda would go on to become Empress Matilda and battle King Stephen (and his Queen  er … Matilda) for the throne of England.

The Matilda versus Matilda smackdown awaits in a later chapter.

And so ("At Last!" I hear you cry) to the castle itself.

Norwich Castle and baileys - 1121 - courtesy Norfolk Museums Service

The new stone keep, showing the extent of the earthworks. The main entrance is about where the ECN/Archant building now stands. The stream between the castle and the new Norman Market is the Great Cockey (more on which later), now running in a brick culvert from St.Stephen's to its exit at a round grille in the river wall opposite the Norwich Playhouse.

William Rufus appears to have taken a dislike to London, despite having given us the wonderful Palace of Westminster. He looked to Norfolk, fast becoming the richest region of the realm but decided that the small timber fort at Norwich was not grand enough for his Trump-like megalomania. He wanted the biggest and most magnificent royal palace in Europe (and would have got it had not Walter Tirel used him for target practice).

Both Heslop and Elizabeth Popescu estimate that the mound alone would have taken around 50,000 man-days to construct and, together with the ditches, banks and surrounding baileys this would have risen to around 70,000 man-days.

This labour would have been unpaid and carried out by locals under the Norman obligation of Trinoda Necessitas, which covered the construction and maintenance of fortifications.

Given that the working population would have been forcibly distracted from more productive and profitable employment by having to build - unpaid - a castle mound, the purpose of which was their own subjugation, one imagines that the good folk of Norwich would have been far from gruntled.

The size of the new castle fee was monumental, covering some 23 acres, making it the largest in Western Europe. Work on the stone donjon itself started around 1096 and was far more elaborate than any other English castle, designed as a royal palace more than a defensive keep.

The location of the keep, curiously squeezed into the south-west corner of the newly enlarged motte is explained by this being the site of the earlier timber fort and therefore a more stable piece of ground than the new-raised areas. 

Next time: Trouble brewing: "What are those huge cracks? Quick, pile some wood up against them and don't tell the king!"

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

 * The Tyrion Lannister Drinking Game: simply take a drink whenever Tyrion does. This doesn't count for Series 8 when he's on the wagon, but the earlier series will result in much hilarity of the vomiting and splitting headache variety.

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

Wherein William Rufus begins work on Norwich Castle.

So … September 1087.

We take leave of the bloated and burst body of William the Bastard, his stone sarcophagus closed and sealed leaving what was left of his corpse to marinate in a nasty soup of reeking intestinal fluids and turn once more to this sons, who gave us the magnificent stone castle we have today.

Eldest son Robert Short-Arse being passed over and compensated with the Dukedom of Normandy, the throne of England now bore the warm bottom of William the Second; William Rufus.

Of William Rufus, we have first the description handed down to us by Geoffrey of Monmouth: he had "a red face, yellow hair, different-coloured eyes, astonishing strength, though not very tall and his belly rather projecting."

Also that "he had a stutter, especially when angry". And he was angry a lot!

The Oxford History of England has this to say of him: "He was a cynical, vain, capricious, ill-tempered man. He was blasphemous and scoffed at religion. The money he extorted from his subjects he squandered on a mercenary army and a licentious court. The effeminate character of his court, the absence of any mention of paramours or bastards, the horror and reticence of the chroniclers regarding his personal conduct make it tolerably certain that he indulged in unnatural vice. From the moral standpoint he was probably the worst king that has occupied the throne of England."

My copy of the Oxford History is the 1951 edition … gay-friendly it is not! I do so enjoy reading successive histories, from primary sources down through the centuries; each generation of historians displaying its unique and wildly varying set of prejudices. Kinda hobby of mine …

So, like the Watchers on the Wall, William Rufus did not marry, nor did he father any offspring.

The mediæval historian Frank Barlow holds that Rufus was "a rumbustious, devil-may-care soldier without natural dignity or social graces, with no cultivated taste and little show of conventional religious piety or morality, addicted to every kind of vice, particularly lust and especially sodomy."

And so began the English aristocracy … plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In 1094, William Rufus decided to replace the timber castle at Norwich with a stone keep and to make it his royal palace. Our current project is to restore the keep to its original glory.

T. A. Heslop calls it "a megalomaniac project" that "fits well with what we know of the ambitions of King William Rufus."

After Ralph's rebellion and Emma's heroic defence of Norwich Castle, William replaced Ralph with one Roger Bigot, who took over the running of Norwich Castle and the construction of its new keep and proceeded in typical Norman style to lay waste to the surrounding countryside, already depopulated by the depredations of Earl Ralph.

Bigot built himself a palace on Tombland with money extorted from the locals but in 1094 was forced to knock it down as it blocked the western entrance to the new cathedral. Bigot would continue to plague the city during the Great Anarchy and his descendants for many nasty generations more, but for our purposes he now passes out of the story for a bit. Regrettably we shall not see the last of him.

Alas and alack; on the second of August, 1100, with only the basement of the castle keep complete, while out hunting in the New Forest, King William Rufus was shot through the lung with an arrow by one Walter Tirel under … er … not at all suspicious circumstances.

The unfortunately pixellated death of William Rufus - courtesy of the interweb.

As with his father before him, the king's body was abandoned by the nobles and attendants at the place where it fell, even though his younger brother Henri was among the hunting party.

Hmm … curiouser and curiouser, especially as Henri had the most to gain by his brother's death and Tirel had a reputation as a crack bowman and was highly unlikely to have shot his king in the lung by accident.

A peasant later found the corpse of Rufus and a few countrymen carted it to Winchester Cathedral where it was interred, this time in a sufficiently large coffin.

By which time Henri, following his usual behaviour on the death of a family member (see below) had raced to Winchester to secure the royal treasury and thence on to London where he was crowned by the mob before either Archbishop could catch up with him.

William Rufus' death was, to the Bishops, an Act of God; a just end for a wicked king; to the chroniclers it was both fratricide and regicide, so business as usual.

Of Henri's character, the Oxford History of England: 1087 - 1216 records - though not in precisely these words - that back in 1087, on learning of his five-thousand-pound weight of silver inheritance he left his father dying in testicular agony and fled hurriedly back across the Channel to Winchester and to the treasury to make sure and count out every last ounce.

If anyone wonders where George R.R. Martin gets his wonderful characters, they need look no further than the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England: they give us a vertically-challenged drunken hero with father issues, bevies of bastards, backstabbing, bullshit and blame-throwing, heroic levels of alcohol consumption, sex of all varieties, mud, blood and murder - LOTS of murder.

Larks aplenty with Robert and Henri next time and at last the castle walls go up… and then immediately start falling down … er …

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

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

Anyhoo … in happier times William had bred many more bastards along with three legitimate sons: Robert, William (another one) and Henri.

Robert, being eldest, would have been the obvious choice to rule England after the Bastard's death but alas, he was the Tyrion Lannister of this tale, nicknamed by his father "Robert Curthose" or "short pants" for his short legs, but colloquially and more popularly by the Norman-hating Saxons of England as "Robert Short-Arse."

Like Tyrion, he was eloquent and chivalrous, but also like Tyrion he was dissolute, consorting with fools and harlots. His younger brothers being given precedence over him irked young Robert somewhat, especially when, in his teens, William and Henri contrived to dump a full chamberpot over his head.

When his father broke up the resulting, somewhat fragrant brawl, yet refused to punish his favourite younger sons, Robert went off on one and attempted - unsuccessfully - to storm Rouen Castle (as you would).

Chased out of Normandy by his irate father Robert took refuge in Flanders, from where - after a hairwash - he proceeded to plunder any parts of Normandy he could reach.

William was even more enraged when he discovered that his wife had been secretly sending Robert money.

Ah, families … At a battle in January 1079, Robert succeeded in knocking his dad off his horse and wounding him, only refraining from killing him when he recognised William's voice.

It wasn't until Easter the following year that Queen Matilda managed to get them to grumpily shake hands and make up.

After William the Fat Bastard's reeking demise, in September 1087 the throne of England was gifted to his second son, William Rufus. Robert Short-Arse was given the Duchy of Normandy and Henri Beauclerc was left five-thousand-pounds weight of silver; quite a bundle back then, even though it is reported that all three brothers felt short-changed.

We shall return to their doings presently …

In the meantime let us step back to 1068, when William the Bastard, having declared himself King William the First of England, tasked one Herbert the Ditcher and one Rabel the Engineer with building a motte and bailey timber fort with defensive ditch and palisade at Norwich for the suppression (and of course taxation - that being the whole purpose of the Domesday Book after all) of the local populace.

Herbert the Ditcher picked the highest and most prominent spot he could find, the site of the present castle, inconveniently occupied at the time by Norwich citizens.

The Domesday Book records, "and on that land over which Harold had jurisdiction there are fifteen burgesses and seventeen vacant houses which are in the occupation of the castle. And in the borough are one-hundred-and-ninety empty houses there which were in the jurisdiction of the king and the earl, and eighty-one in the occupation of the castle."

T. E. Heslop states that "The broad implications of this information are clear; that the castle had been set up within a quite densely built part of the town …" resulting in at least ninety-eight homes being demolished within the boundary of Herbert's ditch.

Around the time that Herbert and Rabel were flattening the townsfolk's homes and building their fort, there were - unsurprisingly - not a few local rebellions, including that of Hereward the Wake and Morcar at nearby Ely, which kept William the Bastard and his army busy, bewitched and wet for a bit (see preface).

By 1075 the fort was up and running and William popped back to Normandy to sort out his other kingdom. He left the Breton Earl Ralph in charge of Norwich's timber castle, which was not perhaps the wisest thing to do.

Earl Ralph was to marry Emma, sixteen-year-old daughter of William Fitzosbern and younger sister of Roger of Breteuil. Ralph and Roger, together with Earl Waltheof, conspired at the wedding feast to rebel against the king on his return from abroad.

Archbishop Lanfranc, then tasked with country-sitting for William learned of the plot and wrote to the king assuring him that he could deal with the rebels. He then set siege to the timber castle at Norwich.

The timber castle and bailey at Norwich, 1068 - 1094, courtesy Norfolk Museums Service

Earl Ralph bravely ran away, leaving behind his teenage bride in charge of his Breton soldiers. Emma successfully held the castle for three months, eventually forcing Lanfranc to allow her and her army unmolested right of passage back across the Channel. She left with - in Lanfranc's words - "three-hundred men in armour with armour with them, with crossbowmen and many artificers of machines."

Thanks to Emma, Norwich Castle had withstood its first siege.

Shortly afterwards, William the Bastard and his terminally torn testicles passed away and William Rufus was crowned King William the Second of England.

We shall have more adventures with William, Henri and Robert in the next post and see the rise of the current castle.

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

James F. King: Norwich Castle Keep: Dates and Contexts: British Archæological Association: 2015

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

Once upon a time …

THE RISE OF CASTLE BLANCHEFLEUR - September, 1066 to Christmas 1121

Being the Tale of the Building of Norwich Castle - with Some Reference to the Doings of William the Bastard and of his Sons: Robert Curthose, William Rufus and Henri Beauclerc.

First up: a bit of background on the characters who gave us our castle. A veritable Game of Thrones it is, too.

I love mediæval names and this tale involves some corkers, though regrettably no Queen Sexburga this time.

Our story starts back around the year 911, when Rollo the Viking persuaded French King Charles the Simple (probably with not too much difficulty) to cede him the lands around Rouen. These lands became known as Normandy, from "North Men," ruled by Rollo's Vikings and their descendants, who became known in their turn as the Normans.

A little later, over on this side of the water, Swein Forkbeard - another Viking - drove Æthelred the Unready out of Northern and Eastern England, ruled for a bit and popped his clogs, leaving the kingdom to his son, Cnut … careful how you spell that one.

That's Cnut on the right, at least that's what the artist of the Kings and Queens of England cigarette cards though he might look like.

Back in Normandy, at Falaise Castle, probably in early 1028, Robert, Duke of Normandy, AKA Robert the Devil, impregnated one of his servant girls, Herleva, daughter of Fulbert the Embalmer (nice) and nine months later she begat William the Bastard.

William the Bastard became known - though not until long after his death - as William the Conqueror, for defeating the exhausted army of Harold, mere days after Harold's men had beaten off a Viking invasion (another Swein) at the other end of the country.

And it was this William who launched a massive campaign of castle building throughout his new realm, which resulted in the creation of our own castle at Norwich, the current stone keep of which was constructed by his younger sons, William Rufus and Henri Beauclerc (later Henry the First).

Ely Cathedral

In 1071, as we learned in our talk on Ely Cathedral, William the Bastard was busy besieging the Isle of Ely, watching the flower of his Norman army sink into a swamp, employing a witch to curse and waggle her wrinkled bottom at Hereward and Morcar and eventually storming the city and confiscating the eyes, hands and feet of the defenders.

A charming man. What else do we know about him?

William the Bastard stood five-feet-eight-inches tall, but that's about all we know of his appearance and we only know that by a re-measuring in 1983 of all that is left of him: a single femur.

We can infer that he was - how shall I put this - burly and robust, especially in later life as the sorry tale of his death relates.

In July, 1087, in the process of invading his Norman neighbours' lands and seizing the town of Mantes, William suffered a gruesome, yet strangely hilarious injury to his 'lower person' from his horse's saddle pommel.

He was taken to the Priory of St.Gervais in Rouen where he passed painfully and infectedly away on the ninth of September and, such was the reverence felt for him that - as soon as he had gasped his last - his attendants looted his belongings and fled, leaving his nekkid carcass athwart his bed.

From there, the corpse was taken by cart to Caen, by which time it must have been pretty ripe.

William's funeral was interrupted by an angry heckler protesting loudly that the Abbey had been built on his father's stolen property and that he had received no compensation.

Much ado and hubbub ensued and it turned out that the allegation was true and he was hastily laden with silver so that the funeral service could continue.

To finish this woeful tale, we must relate that William's bloated corpse proved too fat to fit into his stone sarcophagus and that, when the monks tried to force it in, his distended bowels burst, filling the Abbey with such as stench that all fled save the officiating clergy who inhaled incense to stay conscious.

The man sure knew how to go out in style.

More fun with William's family in the next post …

Sources:

The Oxford History of England: 1087-1216: From Domesday Book to Magna Carta: Austin Lane Poole (ed.) 1951

Gesta Herewardi (later translation)

Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Preface

Here beginneth Old Dive's Complete and Utter History of Norwich Castle, taken from a series of lectures I gave to the Castle project team over the past year. 

References to earlier lectures may creep in, as for example my talk on the Lantern of Ely Cathedral involved the splendidly monikered Queen Sexburga, a king called Anna, a local witch employed by William the Bastard to cast spells on Morcar and Hereward and display her naked arse to them, plus the sinking of the Norman army in a swamp; all of which has some bearing on the History.

The witch got burned by-the-bye. It's all in the Gesta Herewardi, a contemporary account by the monks of Ely.

I shall have to chop the lectures up into little pieces as there are eight of them and each is around an hour long. Fæcebookland folk appear to have lost the ability to read more than a sentence at a sitting, the poor dears, so I shall keep each post as brief as I can and include some pretty (and some totally gross) pictures to accompany them.

Watch this space …

What I Did On My Blog-Holiday

So what have I been up to during my extended sabbatical from dear old Blogville?

Well the fools let me loose on the Tudor panelled rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge and then plonked Norwich Castle in my lap.

The Castle project, called Royal Palace Reborn, intends to return the gutted Keep to how it was at Christmas, 1121, when Henry the First and his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain, moved in and threw a big old partay.

So I've been building this here model. It's a little unwieldy, being currently around three-quarters of a terabyte, but it's my baby. All the construction detailing and information is stored in the model so they can build from it. This view shows the new Great Hall with minstrel's gallery and the archæological exhibit below.

Here we see the King's Chamber (with the red curtains) and the Great Hall on the right. The tinkly light things above the archæology are "Ghost Arches"; the original arches having long disappeared, we're putting back ghosts of them with thousands of little LEDs.

We're putting a big viewing platform on the roof so you can see the whole city, and for the first time in 900 years, making the whole thing accessible to all, from dungeons to roof.

So anyhoo, as part of the project, Old Dive, as Architect and historic buildings expert, put together a side project: a series of lectures telling the history of the Castle. As these were for internal company use only, they tended to get a little Dive-ish and in places exceedingly silly and gross. 

In my next post I shall begin posting a potted version as I know Petrea especially loves old history.

Hope you enjoy it. In the meantime, the archæologists are digging furiously away in the basement and there's a massive tower crane looming over the Keep so that we can start work (Covid safely).

This is the view of it from my office, where I'm working on the Castle three days a week and hopefully posting some bloggery in between.