Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages

by A. Hamilton Thompson

Fortified closes, abbeys, and bishop’s palaces bring us back to the castle, in the history of which is the epitome of the art of defence. The concentric plan displayed the resources of the defenders in their most scientific form, but the concentric plan, as we have seen, is not very common, and its systematic use in English architecture was practically confined to a single period. The site, as at Kidwelly, did not always allow of the full extension of the outer ward, so as completely to encircle the inner. As a rule, we find that the English castle of the fourteenth century consists, like Richmond and Ludlow in their earliest form, or like Carew or Manorbier, of a single bailey without a keep. This enclosure is flanked by towers at adequate intervals, and is entered through an imposing gatehouse between two drum towers. No English castle of this type can compare with the fourteenth-century castle of Saint-André at Villeneuve d’Avignon ([307]), which kept watch upon the castle of the popes on the opposite bank of the Rhône, or with the Breton castles of Fougères ([250]) and Vitré. The castle of Caerlaverock ([364]), near Dumfries, not the famous castle besieged by Edward I., but a castle founded in 1333 on a new site, is a good instance of a simple plan, in which a single ward is surrounded by a flanked curtain. The castle stands on low and marshy ground near the Solway firth. An island, surrounded by a broad wet ditch, which, in the rear of the castle, assumes the proportions of a small lake, is enclosed by three sections of curtain forming an equilateral triangle. A drum tower, low and of rather slender proportions, covered each angle of the base;[324] while at the apex was a lofty gatehouse, flanked by drum towers, and approached by a drawbridge. The interior of the castle is somewhat confined, and the older domestic buildings were much enlarged in the sixteenth century by a mansion, somewhat in the style of the French Renaissance, which was built against the curtain to the left hand of the entrance. The old hall occupied the base of the triangle, while the kitchen offices were against the right-hand curtain.

Villeneuve d’Avignon

Licences to crenellate mansions are common in the Patent rolls of the Edwards and Richard II. In this way, many private dwelling-houses reached the rank of castles, while still retaining strongly marked features of their domestic object. The fortified house of Stokesay ([306]) in Shropshire, which Lawrence of Ludlow had licence to crenellate, 19th October 1290,[325] is a case in point, where the moated manor-house, with its strong tower, well deserves the name of castle. At the same time, many of the houses for which licences of crenellation were granted were never more than manor-houses to which were added fortifications of a limited kind. This was the case with Henry Percy’s houses of Spofforth, Leconfield, and Petworth, the licence for which bears date 14th October 1308.[326] Markenfield hall in Yorkshire, for which a licence was granted 28th February 1309-10,[327] is still one of our most valuable examples of domestic, as distinct from military, architecture. Such fortifications as these houses had or still have were not designed to stand a siege, but to ensure privacy and keep off casual marauders. Even in the sixteenth century, dwelling-houses like Compton Wyniates in Warwickshire or Tolleshunt Major in Essex were surrounded by a moat or simply by a wall.

Against these minor fortifications, however, we must put the cases in which the process of crenellation definitely meant conversion into a castle. Dunstanburgh, which Thomas of Lancaster had licence to crenellate in 1315,[328] is a military stronghold of the most pronounced type. Its exposed position upon the Northumbrian coast was one reason of its strength: coast castles needed strong defences, and we find that, during the period of the wars with France and later, the fortification of castles like Dover was a constant method of precaution against invasion.[329] Dunstanburgh has much in common with the ordinary strong dwelling-houses of Northumberland. Its base-court is a very large enclosure, occupying most of the area of the promontory on which the castle is situated; while the actual castle consists of a small and gloomy bailey. A wall, flanked at each end by a rectangular tower, shut off the enclosed space from the mainland. In the wall between the two towers rose the great gatehouse, which, standing in the front of attack, gave access to the smaller ward, and contained upon its upper floors the chief domestic apartments. Strongly defended as this gatehouse was, with two drum towers of great size flanking the entrance, the immediate access which it gave to the heart of the castle was evidently a source of danger. At a later date, the entrance was walled up, and a new gateway made in the curtain at a point near by. The gatehouse thus was practically turned into a keep, and the process which had taken place at Richmond towards the end of the twelfth century was virtually repeated, with this exception, that the actual fabric of the gatehouse remained, and was not superseded by a new form of strong tower. Precisely the same thing happened at Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire. This castle, one of the most imposing of Welsh strongholds, stands on a steep and almost isolated hill, where the Towy enters the Bristol Channel. It is divided by a cross-wall into a large outer ward and an inner ward which occupies the top of the sloping summit of the hill. The chief buildings were in the outer ward, and the finest of them was the great gatehouse, situated at the head of the landward slope of the hill, and concealed from the river by the convex curve of the curtain and by a large tower at the eastern angle of the enclosure. This gatehouse is of trapezoidal form: the gateway and its drum towers front the field, but the building spreads inwards, and has two much smaller round towers at its inner angles. It was undesirable, however, that the gatehouse, which, from the military and domestic point of view alike, was the principal building in the castle, should be the point on which the besiegers could concentrate all their force. Consequently, the gateway was blocked not long after it was built, and a new entrance was made beside it in the curtain. The way into the higher ward at Llanstephan was closed by a small rectangular gatehouse, built near one end of the dividing curtain.

Thus at Dunstanburgh and Llanstephan, castles in which the system of defence was not founded upon the concentric plan, but relied upon the strength of an adequately flanked curtain, gatehouses which are worthy of Caerphilly and Harlech, and stand upon the outer line of defence,[330] reverted to the condition of keeps. The possible use of a keep as an ultimate refuge never ceased altogether to have weight with castle-builders. The Percys, after their purchase of Alnwick early in the fourteenth century,[331] although there was ample room for a large mansion in one or other of the wards, built their dwelling as a cluster of walls and towers round a courtyard on the mount between the two wards. Some part of the substructure, the gatehouse with its octagonal flanking towers, and the curious triple-arched recess at the head of the well ([310]), are the most that remains to us of the early fourteenth-century mansion; but with these is incorporated twelfth-century work, which shows that the Percys built their house upon the lines of an older house upon the mount.[332] Thus the dwelling-house at Alnwick is in reality a keep of unusual form, a large building with flanking towers built upon a mount which has been considerably levelled to allow of more room for the house and its internal courtyard ([115]).

Alnwick Castle; Well-head