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

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

Hold your noses, for now we shall step back in time nigh on nine-hundred years and join Mister Tanner and his boy as they return from Mister Skinner's yard with a cart heaped high with fresh-flayed cowhides, splashing their merry way through the pismire to their own yard along the Great Cockey; perhaps in Jarrold's 'Mac' make-over salon or where Patisserie Valerie now dispenses expensive cakes or further up Haymarket under Pret a Manger's kitchen (I do enjoy wandering around Norwich and London, knowing what went on at various locations beneath my feet in the good old days).

I love my job.

Pic courtesy the interweb.

Mister Skinner had left all the bits that couldn't be sold as meat still attached to the hides, so first up, Mister Tanner set his boy to trimming off horns, hooves and the unusable portions of the hide from the belly, head, legs, udders and raggedy edges. Then a good wash in the Great Cockey to get rid of the worst of the blood, dirt and dung.

The horns … ox, cattle, ram and goat, were sold on to horners, who used the outer layers for making such things as combs and small boxes, so for a moment we shall wander away from Mister Tanner's yard and follow Mister Horner with his bag of freshly cut horns to his workshop, also on the Cockey stream.

Mediæval road found in the Castle Fee during excavations in the north-east bailey. Photo courtesy EAA 28

To give some impression of the conditions around the pits and sheds of the tanneries, the photo above is the preserved surface of a road in part of the Castle Fee dating from this time. Those are ox and horse hoof-prints squished into the mud.

When he reached his yard, Mister Horner's first job would be to remove the soft core of the horns (technically known as spongy, brown yucky stuff). Mediæval horners found that the best method for preparing horn in bulk was to soak the horns in tubs of water for a few months.

This smells BAD. Once the blood and mush has rotted and reeked, Mister Horner would use a wooden scraper to remove as much of the mess from inside the horn as he could.

Mealworms, courtesy of the good old interweb.

I have consulted some modern crafters who work with horn and they describe the process as "really disgusting" and "nasty" and they admit that the modern craft method is to go to Pets-R-Us and get a plastic box of live mealworms, wrap them and the horn in an old pair of tights and leave them for a week or so. It still stinks but it saves months … and of course it makes for happy pet mealworms.

The next step is to clean away the rotten membrane from the outside of the horn and then to scour the inside. This was achieved by putting some gravel into the stinky horn once the worst of the soft core was removed and then shaking it like maracas. You worked with finer and finer gravel until the last shakes were done using sand.

Cheers!

Trim off the upper lip to give a thicker edge, less prone to splitting and you have a drinking horn (yay)!

These were a rich man's item and out of the reach of the common folk who used wooden bowls. If you're offered a drink from a horn at a cosplay "Mediæval Banquet" (such as will be held in the restored Great Hall at Norwich Castle in a couple of years' time) you'll know just what you're putting to your lips.

For most purposes, however, the cleaned horns were boiled for a few hours to soften them and then cut. The tips and trimmings Mister Horner would sell to Mister Fletcher for making arrow nocks. The horn was then pressed between two boards and, once it had dried flat, could be cut into shapes to make combs or boxes or simply left flat and used as lamp glass. Horn was the plastic of its day/ Perhaps a return to the stinky old ways would help save the planet.

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 IV

Norwich Castle from the steps of City Hall. Photo: courtesy Old Dive.

The archæological record shows that prior to the Norman Conquest there were no wells in the valley of the Great Cockey. After the Conquest, however, wells got dug left, right and centre. As you're about to find out, once the Normans got settled in nobody wanted beer or laundry from Cockey water any more.

The west elevation of Norwich Castle directly overlooks the Norman marketplace across the Great Cockey valley. Stand on the steps of City Hall today (or last winter, as the photo above) and you're looking straight at the castle's eight great poop chutes, down which poured the effluent from the sixteen communal garderobe toilets. Using those toilets would be the earl and his household and staff, any visiting nobles and their retinues, plus the three-hundred-or-so soldiers garrisoned there and any artisans working in the castle. Pretty much a constant flow … ew.

The eight great poop chutes of Norwich Castle.

Photo: courtesy Old Dive. The rubble you can see is archæological spoil awaiting sieving for artifacts.

We're talking a section of the castle wall around ten yards wide by five yards tall, which would have been permanently covered in a vaguely fan-shaped shit-stain with fæcal effluvia shooting from the chutes, slopping and splashing into a wet pond of pee and poo underneath; all ready to be collected up by some poor sod with a barrow, sieved for dropped valuables and then wheeled down the hill for sale to the tanners.

The stench from this, however, would not be noticed in the marketplace as between it and the castle lay the Great Cockey valley and this stretch of it, from the gloriously-named Rampant Horse Street to the back of Jarrold's [see later map], was used almost exclusively for slaughtering, skinning and tanning. The castle's poop chutes would have been a breath of fresh air by comparison.

When I were a lad you could stand at the Haymarket end of Gentleman's Walk and inhale the piquant mingling of aromas from the fish market on your right and the chocolate factory on your left. It appears that this part of Norwich has been stinking fit to gag a rat for nigh on a thousand years. If you know anyone in Norwich named Tanner, you're about to find out just what their ancestors were up to along the Great Cockey.

Tanners were the only trade allowed to buy the skins of cattle from the skinners for leatherworking. The skinners, however, didn't just skin cattle; they skinned horses, donkeys, sheep, pigs, goat, deer, rabbits, dogs, cats and rats for the tawyers, who dealt in the lower end leathers and the fur trade.

Norwich Haymarket around 1825 looking north toward Gentleman's Walk with St.Peter Mancroft on the left and the Haymarket hill in front of it. The Great Cockey ran under the back of the buildings on the right, most of which are still there today. Pic: courtesy the interweb.

Cattle, old horses, sheep, pigs and goats were herded into the marketplace, driven down to the Great Cockey and slaughtered in heaps. Some blood was kept for making puddings but most of it, together with the more disgusting bodily fluids, went bubbling and steaming straight into the Great Cockey and flowed downhill to the River Wensum.

The meat and offal went a few yards uphill to be sold at the butchers' stalls on the marketplace and the bones went in pits or were boiled for glue-making.

The good folk of Norman Norwich took sacks of dogs, rabbits, cats and rats to the slaughterer and skinner who sold the meat on to the butchers while the tawyers then scraped the skins clean of blood, dirt and manure and any remaining fat and meat before soaking them in a mix of potash alum and salt, adding egg yolks and flour to improve the fur.

This was called 'tawing' and produced a furred hide rather than a leather, which was still putrescible when wet. Furs in Norman times smelled pretty rank.

Jon Snow's putrescible direwolf cloak … Stinky when wet. Pic: courtesy the interweb.

Jon Snow must have stunk to high heaven when it rained on that direwolf cloak.

The tawyers' waste products of blood, dirt, manure, rancid fat and rotting meat got tipped straight into the Great Cockey and washed downstream. Are you gagging yet? If not, this'll help …

During the archæological dig for the Rose Lane multi-storey car park, as reported in the Eastern Daily Press, a "13th century cat and goat hide shop" was excavated.

They found in particular, among the pits of cat bones, a great proliferation of "cut juvenile bone" which suggests that kittens (KITTENS!) were skinned to make fur trims for leather gloves and hats ;

Kitten mittens, anyone?

Kitten Mittens.

You know you want them.

Photo courtesy (where else) the interweb.

Less creepily, they found evidence that the tawyery was of high quality, producing goat and kid skin for vellum, which was sold to the adjacent friaries of Franciscans and Augustinians.

The one thing that was absolutely essential for tanning and tawing (as well as slaughtering and skinning) was a good source of running water, so the tanneries followed the course of the Great Cockey inside the city and also the banks of the Wensum on Oak Street to the north and Mountergate to the east, where the tawyery above was discovered.

If you think that was gross, just wait for the next post …

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