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

1345 and Norwich Castle officially becomes a gaol with the sheriff trying to live in the old royal palace and the prisoners in the basement.

Robbed out flintwork. Actually Castle Acre, despoiled by the Duke of Norfolk during the dissolution but pretty much what was going on at Norwich Castle after 1345. Courtesy Old Dive.

So, with the castle now a prison for the felons convicted at the quarterly Shirehall sessions and the Fee walls demolished to help build the city walls, it would appear that the acquisitive folk of Norwich plundered what parts of the keep they could reach to repair their own homes.

By 1371 the sheriff was complaining to Edward the Third that residence in the castle was impossible because it was:

"consumed and spoiled in the houses and habitations, as well as in the walls, timber, lead, as also in other things, so that no man can dwell in it for the safeguard of the castle, nor reside for any other occasion … The stones, timber and lead have been broken down, carried and conveyed away."

By that time, however, Edward the Third was pretty much worn out and couldn't be bothered to reply. Somewhat tardily, in 1390 his successor, Richard the Second authorised extensive repairs to Norwich Castle, bridge, buildings and towers, as the flint walls of the basement had been so robbed out that prisoners could simply walk out through the holes.

The mediæval "floppy" hard hat as seen on the interweb.

Inevitably, just as happens so often today, the masons, plumbers and carpenters of Norwich charged so much that an inquiry followed. Fortunately for our ancestral contractors the Commissioners of Inquiry concluded that 24 marks (£15. 16s. 11d.) charged for the work was justifiable. Further sums spent by the sheriff on the castle over the next decade include an additional £13. 6s. 8d. for "timber, boards, hooks, hinges, nails, lime and sand" plus craftsmen's wages of £12. 2s. 5d. (National Archives: E364/89 13D, quoted in EAA 132).

In general, however, our Norwich ancestors were a pretty slovenly lot. In his 1820s book "The History and Antiquities of Norwich Castle", Samuel Woodward notes that, "Prior to the Fee of the castle coming into the jurisdiction of the city the ditches were kept with great care; but afterwards they were much neglected and were receptacles of the rubbish and filth of the city."

Some of the fly-tippers were caught. At the New Leet of the Castle (trials at the Shirehall) in 1374, one Adam of Hindringham was amerced (fined, in mediæval-speak) for "muck in the highway and carts by day and night, the way deeply fouled and encumbered."

In 1390, Alice, widow of Thomas Norton was presented for allowing her servant to "dump muck near the Shirehouse" and one Thomas Hardegay, "botcher", caused a dead horse to be dumped "in a lane by the Shirehouse".

From here on in the moat and ditches were periodically cleaned but continually re-filled with filth, muck and rubbish by the good folk of Norwich. Blackadder, Baldrick and the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells would have felt quite at home there. The current moat contains - as we discovered in Part the First - at least five yards depth of the stuff, to the delight of today's archæologists.

After Richard the Second's repairs, nothing else was spent on the structure and Norwich Castle fell into sad decline over the next hundred years.

In the meantime, Henry the Fourth, having wrenched power from Richard the Second (and left him to starve to death in the Tower - dontcha just love the English Royal Family?), gave Norwich its charter in 1404.

Norwich Guildhall with possibly non-mediæval octopus, courtesy Old Dive.

The charter enabled the building of Norwich Guildhall on the site of the old toll house at the northern end of the Norman marketplace. Built between 1407 and 1413, with nineteenth century additions (the bit under the octopus), this continued in use as the seat of governance of the city right up until 1938, when the powers that be simply carried their chairs and tables across the road and took their seats in the newly completed City Hall*.

* Avoided by German bombers during WWII as it was Hitler's favourite English building, having the longest balcony in Europe from which he planned to harangue his victorious hordes.

Norwich City Hall on left and Guildhall on right, seen by Old Dive from Cherry Walk.

Henry the Fourth popped his clogs in 1413, most likely from leprosy, leaving young Prince Hal to become Henry the Fifth and to go on to glory at Agincourt.

The suspiciously clean and polite Battle of Agincourt, painted by a monk at St.Alban's who - I venture to say - may not have been an eye-witness to the mud, blood and slaughter.

Anyhoo … In February 1412, one of the many Great Fires of Norwich took out much of the city, including Blackfriars, which was rebuilt shortly afterwards on a grand scale and survives today as Blackfriars and St.Andrew's Hall.

Blackfriars to the right of the tower, St.Andrews' Hall to the left, now a splendid music venue and one of the Norwich homes of the Britten Sinfonia (see many rave reviews in past posts).

Pic courtesy Rawcliffe and Wilson: Mediæval Norwich.

In 1422, Henry the Fifth died, tragically young, of - you guessed it - arse gravy, the royal disease. His death was described at the time as by "the bloody flux" (dysentery): stomach cramps, fever, vomiting, exhaustion and day after day of non-stop bum gravy.

Next time, things get toasty for the Norwich Lollards.

Sources:

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

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

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

1349 and the good citizens of Norwich had just enjoyed what was likely the best four years of their history, being safe inside their walls, untaxed by the Bigods, un-sacked by pillaging armies and happily sniffing up great lungs-full of the fragrant air along the Great Cockey (see Part the Third).

Just their luck then, that this summer saw the arrival of pretty rings of reddish-pink markings on the tops of people's feet.

Buboes courtesy Hieronymus Bosch via the interweb.

Everyone form a ring and sing,

"Ring-a ring-o'-roses,

A pocket full of posies,

A-tishoo, a-tishoo,

We all fall down."

Say hello to the Black Death (omnes: "Hello, Black Death").

Bubonic plague ravaged the city in 1349, with further outbreaks in 1361, 1362 and 1369. While not as deadly as the later pneumonic plague (black buboes in armpits, crotch and neck rather than red, and transmissible Covid19 style rather than by flea bite), it still wiped out a third of Norwich's population (around 25,000 souls before the arrival of the Black Death).

To add to the woes of the good folk of Norwich, Edward the Third had kicked off the Hundred Years War in 1337 and, after the glorious yet almost accidental victory at Crécy and the success of the siege of Calais, he was fast running out of cash to pay his mercenaries. Death and taxes; as inevitable in mediæval times as today.

By 1375, Edward had lost all his French lands except Calais and was gagging for groats, so he hit the English citizens with three crippling poll taxes in four years. What with the earlier "maltolt" wool and linen taxes, the textile workers of Norfolk felt by 1381 that enough was enough. 

Wat Tyler, sporting a Norman name tag, via the interweb.

Great hat, Walt.

Cue the Peasants' Revolt (yay)! The revolt in Norwich was only one of many across the realm, popularly led by anti-poll-tax activist and all-round good egg Walter the Tiler from Kent, known to history as Wat Tyler.

Our own local part of the revolt was led by a dyer from Felmingham, one Geoffrey Litster. Under his leadership the disgruntled textile workers of Norfolk gathered on Mousehold Heath before marching over Bishops' Bridge and Whitefriars' Bridge, up through the city to the castle, where they simply walked in and took over.

King of the Commons … possibly.

Litster held feasts in the Great Hall and was crowned "King of the Commons". He planned to 'liberate' a huge pile of gold from the wealthy and profiteering textile merchants of Norwich and to march to London to bribe the king for a pardon and a charter promising no more poll taxes.

Unfortunately, Litster's men ran into the thoroughly unsavoury Bishop Henry le Despenser, who chased them to North Walsham and summarily executed Litster and other leaders. So ended the Norwich chapter of Wat Tyler's heroic Peasants' Revolt.

Henry le Despenser. Courtesy King's Lynn Minster.

And speaking of revolting … Le Despenser afterwards styled himself the "Fighting Bishop" and carried on the family tradition of heading off abroad to slaughter, rape, loot and burn his way down to Avignon, via a failed siege of Ypres, from whence he was brought back in disgrace and impeached in parliament.

His ancestors included his grandad Hugh le Despenser, a vicious thug and part of Pope Urban V's mad mercenary army, followed by Hugh le Despenser 'the younger', Henry's father, who was convicted of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered.

You really wouldn't want to live next door to them …

Next time: poo, plunder, rubbish and filth, the return of death by arse gravy and more of the stuff that makes history so much fun but that gets left out of school history books, dammit.

Sources:

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

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

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Norwich Castle Keep external detailing. Photo courtesy Old Dive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy EAA 132.

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Piers and Eddie, from the interweb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time, things get grim at Norwich Castle.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward the First, Courtesy Westminster Abbey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nasty death for a nasty man …

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

King Edwards.

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

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

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

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: courtesy Old Dive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty much like the Yarmouth of today, then …

 

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

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

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

We shall learn more of Edward the First next time.

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy Old Dive.

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

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

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

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

Uh oh …

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The interweb's idea of Henry the Third

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy EAA 132.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heeeeere's Johnny!

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

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

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

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

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

Magna Carta, courtesy the British Library.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Alamy stock photos.

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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