Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages

by A. Hamilton Thompson

wingfield: bay-window of hall

The kitchen and its offices were not entered in the usual way, directly from the screens. A block of buildings, with its main axis at right angles to that of the hall, intervenes. There are, however, three doorways, as usual, in the west wall of the hall. Of these, the middle and largest was that of a central passage leading to the kitchen. A smaller doorway, on either side of this, gave access to two ground-floor rooms, beneath which were cellars. The whole floor above these, entered by a vice from the large lobby at the garden end of the screens, was the great chamber, which had a high-pitched roof, and was lighted, towards the courtyard, by a large window-opening of four lights, with good rectilinear tracery and transoms, beneath a segmental arch. It need hardly be said that the position of the great chamber, at the entrance end of the hall, is most unusual. The best parallel example is found in connection with the hall of the thirteenth-century bishop’s palace at Lincoln. Here the slope at the north end of the hall prevented the construction of a large block of buildings on that side. At the south end the ground fell away almost vertically, and here, upon a vaulted substructure, was built a block of two stories, the lower of which contained the pantry, buttery, and passage to the kitchens, while the upper was the great chamber. The kitchen was contained in a detached tower, between which and the intermediate block was a bridge, with a covered passage on the first floor. The two-storied block has now been converted into the bishop’s chapel, of which the windows of the great chamber form the clerestory; while the passage across the kitchen bridge has been turned into a vestry.

At Wingfield the great chamber was evidently placed at the entrance end of the hall to avoid the type of construction which had been adopted as a pis aller at Lincoln, and the side of the hall was chosen where the ground was comparatively level. Nevertheless, at the dais end of the hall, where there is a fall of several feet in the ground, there are considerable remains of buildings on the lower level; and it is possible that the first kitchen buildings may have been planned at this end. The position, with easy access to the large cellar, and, by a stair which still partly remains, to the hall, would not have been inconvenient, and expense in building would have been saved by this reversal of the usual arrangement, which placed the more costly great chamber block on level foundations, although at the far end of the hall. The four stairs of the cellar made it easy, whatever the position of the kitchen might be, to serve food directly to the dais, or through the screens to the lower end of the hall. However, whether this was the original arrangement or not, the kitchen block west of the great chamber was an addition made probably a few years after the original planning of the house.[368] The central passage below the great chamber was continued to the kitchen, passing between a large pantry and buttery. Its south wall, next the buttery, is pierced by two broad arched openings, forming a buttery hatch upon a magnificent scale, through which drink would be served. There were upper floors to the buttery and pantry; but the kitchen itself, which contained three fireplaces, filled the whole west end of the block. Its floor is sloped and grooved, to facilitate drainage: the floor-drains were emptied through spouts in the west wall.

The use of the buildings on the south side of the inner courtyard, on either hand of the gateway, cannot be determined with certainty; but the west side of the court is covered by an important range of buildings, between the kitchen on the north and the high tower at the south-west corner of the enclosure. Of these buildings, which belong to the original fifteenth-century work, little remains but the west and the foundations of the east wall, in which were two bay-windows. They were probably a suite of private rooms, containing a smaller hall or private dining-room, such as is found at Conway and Porchester, and in most of our castles from the later thirteenth century onwards.[369] At the south end of this block stands the one distinctively military feature of the manor-house, the tall tower of four stories, which, containing comfortable apartments in time of peace, could be isolated and converted into a stronghold in time of war.[370]

wingfield: strong tower

This provisional arrangement for defence is characteristic of the age. The primary object of the house at Wingfield was comfort and pleasure; and its type is as far removed from the military perfection of Caerphilly or Harlech as it can possibly be. The need of a perpetual garrison was not felt; for, in case of war, siege would be only the last resort of an attacking force. Consequently, the defences of the house, apart from the accommodation for barracks and the safety of refugees in the base-court, and from ordinary strength of the gateways,[371] were restricted to the provision of a tower as a last resource. The house, however, which the builder of Wingfield constructed at Tattershall in Lincolnshire between 1433 and 1443, on the site of an earlier stronghold, took the shape of a brick tower of four stages, with a basement half below the ground ([356]). There is an octagonal turret at each angle, the vice which leads from the ground-floor to the roof being contained in the south-east turret ([357]). The walls are of considerable thickness throughout, but are pierced above the basement with large two-light windows, two in each stage of the west wall. In the east wall are the chimneys of the fireplaces on the ground-floor and first floor; but behind these the wall is pierced by mural passages, lighted to the field. The north wall on the first and third floor also is pierced by passages. These communicated with chambers in the turrets and with garde-robes. The internal features, the vaulted stairs and passages in the thickness of the walls, and the stone fireplaces on the upper floors, with rectangular mantels ornamented with shields of arms,[372] are elaborate and sumptuous; but the tower is a shell, and the floors above the vaulted basement are gone. A peculiar feature of the tower, however, is the covered gallery which is corbelled out on stone arches above each wall of the building between the turrets: the floor is machicolated between the corbels, and the gallery has rectangular windows opening to the field. Such a gallery is seen in French military architecture, as, for example, in the Pont Valentré at Cahors, but appears to be unique in England.[373] In the same part of Lincolnshire, and about the same period, towers of the type of Tattershall are not uncommon. Kyme tower, in the fens north-east of Sleaford, Hussey tower, on the north-east side of Boston, and the Tower on the Moor, between Tattershall and Horncastle, are cases in point: none of these, however, can compare with Tattershall in beauty and size, or can show anything like the same union of defensive with purely domestic arrangements.