THE KEEP OF THE CASTLE OF COLCHESTER, ESSEX.

WHEN Hubert of Rie, standing at early dawn between the church and his castle,

“Entre li mostier e sa mote,”

welcomed, harboured, and under the escort of his three sons, sent forward his hard-bested lord by the road still known as “Le Voye le Duc,” he probably little thought that the incident would become matter of history, and still less could he have anticipated the splendid reward, for this and other faithful services, his sons were to receive, twenty years later, from that same sovereign in a foreign and then unconquered land. Whether Hubert himself took part in the conquest is unknown; he certainly did not desert his mote and mostier in the Cotentin for any English possessions, but of his sons, Ralph and Adam received lands as under tenants in the counties of Nottingham, Derby, and Kent; and Eudo, called by Dugdale the fourth son, but the principal representative of the family in England, appears in the Survey as tenant in chief of sixty-four manors in the counties of Beds, Cambridge, Essex, Hants, Herts, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk.

Of these manors twenty-five were in Essex, in which county Eudo, entitled from his office “Dapifer,” resided, and his possessions there lay in twelve of its twenty hundreds. In Colchester the lordship and demesne of the town were held by the king. Eudo’s interest there was but moderate, consisting of five houses, 40 acres of land, and a claim to the fourth of certain lands held “in elemosina Regis.” How he maintained his military position we are not told, or why he settled in Colchester. The only Essex castle mentioned in Domesday is Rageneia or Ralegh. “In hoc manerio fecit Suen suum castellum,” nor do any of the old mottes, of which there are several, as Bures, Great Birch, Ongar, Plessy, and Stansted, appear to have belonged to Eudo. His office of Dapifer or Sewer he held under the Conqueror and his two successors, and he so witnessed a charter by William at Honfleur in 1074, and others by Rufus in 1093, and by Henry I. Though described as “Dapifer Domini Regis totius Angliæ,” he seems to have belonged to the ducal not the royal court, for the sewer of England, according to Spelman, was the brother of Robert Fitz Hamon of Morganwg, who appears in the Survey in Colchester and elsewhere as “Hamo Dapifer.” It is related that in consequence of the high character borne by Eudo the burgesses of Colchester moved William Rufus to place him in charge of their town. That he was so placed appears from a document quoted by Dugdale, and his connexion with the place is shown by the Pipe Roll of 31 Henry I., in which, among other entries relating to Colchester, are items for “the lordship of the king’s ploughlands of the land of Eudo Dapifer, 8s. 10d.,” and from “the farm of his land, paid into the treasury, £91. 3s. 0d.” This was after Eudo’s death, when Hamo de Clare was in charge. As the crown held the lion’s share of the town, Eudo’s position there must have been supreme. His first step was probably to build a castle, and upon his own land, for when in 1096 he founded St. John’s Abbey, one of its endowments, specified in the foundation charter, was “omnes proventus capellae, in castello de Colcestria,” which endowment is described in a confirmation by Richard I. (1 R. I.) as “capellam castelii Colcestre, cum decimis et obventionibus,” explained by Morant to have consisted in tythes of certain lands in and about the town.

Eudo’s rank, as an Essex and Colchester land owner and the king’s representative in the town, might very well induce him to erect a castle there. The position was a good one for a district destitute of any very striking inequalities of surface. It was within the Roman area, and covered on two sides by the Coln. The ancient wall, originally Roman, had been repaired by Edward the Elder, and included the town and the proposed site. A legendary document, quoted in the Monasticon [i. 724], states that Eudo built the castle on King Cole’s foundation; “in fundo palatii Coelis quondam regis,” which may be taken to show that there was an older building on the spot. If so it must have been Roman. Most of the chief towns in England contained a castle constructed long before the arrival of the Conqueror, though not a building of stone, and of these strong places the king or some great Norman baron usually availed himself, substituting, as occasion served, Norman masonry for the earlier and less perfect defences. Sometimes the castle was within the circuit of the town, as at Chichester, Chester, Leicester, and Lincoln, Roman cities with English additions; sometimes it was outside the town wall, but abutting upon it, as at Carlisle, Warwick, and Winchester. In each case the castle had its own proper defences, so that while, on the one hand, it could be held with the town against a common foe, on the other it could be held against the town, and used to overawe the citizens. Here the castle was placed within the Roman area, in its north-eastern quarter, and stood, not improbably, on the site of some considerable Roman building, to which the existing, but not accessible, sewers are thought to have belonged.

Eudo died in 1120 at his castle of Preaux in Normandy, and was buried here at St. John’s. He lived, therefore, twenty-four years after his religious foundation, and somewhat more than that time after the construction of his castle. He was also the founder, some time in the reign of Henry I., of the hospital of St. Mary Magdalen, in the suburbs of Colchester. He married Rohaise, whom Dugdale in his Baronage, citing Will. of Jumièges, calls the daughter of Walter Giffard, Earl of Buckingham, and widow of Fitz Gilbert, an error which, admitted into the earlier, is corrected in the later edition of the Monasticon, whence it appears that Rohaise was the daughter of Fitz Gilbert and a preceding Rohaise, and was married to Eudo in her nonage, “ante habiles annos nupta est.” She laid the second stone of St. John’s, Eudo himself laying the first. The issue of this marriage was Margaret, Eudo’s sole heiress, who married William de Magnaville, and was mother of Geoffrey Earl of Essex, and in her right seneschal or sewer of Normandy. Geoffrey, who played his cards to great advantage between Stephen and the Empress Maud, received from the latter the lands of Eudo Dapifer in Normandy, with the office of Dapifer, and an option, under certain circumstances, of the lands of which Eudo died seized in England. These, however, he does not seem to have obtained; in the contemporary Pipe Rolls they are accounted for as in the Crown, and they do not appear in the Inquisitions on Geoffrey’s descendants.

The castle, which from the endowment of its chapel must certainly have belonged to Eudo, came into the possession of the Crown. Morant cites a grant of it by Maud to Alberic de Vere, from an early edition of the Fœdera (xiii. 251), but there is no such deed in the later or the latest edition. He also cites a deed in his own possession, of the reign of Richard or John, showing that with other demesne manors the castle of Colchester and the Hundred were in the king’s hands, and in the custody of the sheriff of Essex. In Stowe’s Annals mention is made of a certain Hubert de St. Clare who warded off an arrow from Henry I. at the siege of Bridgenorth in 1165 at the cost of his own life, and whom Stowe calls Constable of Colchester, and adds that the king gave his daughter to William de Lanvalai. William, who was an Essex baron, certainly obtained the Constableship from King John (2 John), by a payment of 200 marcs. He died 12 John, leaving William his son, who was made Constable 17 John, but soon after joined the rebels. His daughter Hawise was afterwards given in wardship to Hubert de Burgh, who married her to his son John. King John visited the castle six times, in 1203, 1205, 1209, 1212, 1214, and 1216, staying three days during his two penultimate visits, and eleven days during his last visit. In 1214 Stephen Harengot was in charge in succession to Matthew Mantell; also Hugh de Albemunt, carpenter, had an order for 23 marcs for work done, to which, in 1215, 20 marcs were added for repairs, and the burgesses were informed that Harengot was responsible for the king’s rents. In April of that year Harengot was to have timber from a wood near the town, for its defence, “ad illam claudendam,” and Hugh de Neville was to permit the same. In July, John’s suspicious character led him to substitute for Harengot William de Lanvalai, who had married, as already stated, the daughter of a previous Constable. In this year the castle was besieged and taken by Saher de Quincy, who also burned the town. Both were afterwards recovered by King John.

In March, 1216, is recorded a list of one hundred and thirteen persons, knights, squires, and attendants, cross-bowmen and foot-soldiers, from their names probably French mercenaries, to whom the king gave a safe conduct for a passage from the castle of Colchester to London. In April Harengot was again in charge, and in August he had a credit for 100 marcs out of a fine due of a thousand. This was for the payment of the garrison of the castle. In November, 1217, Richard de Mont Fitchet was ordered to give William, Bishop of London, seizin of Kingsworth wood belonging to the castle of Colchester, and to remove thence his own servants. In July, 1218, the king’s bailiffs of Colchester were to respond for the farm of the town to the bishop, as they had used to do when Harengot held the castle. The bishop was at that time negotiating for the king with the French invaders, who for a time actually held the castle. After John’s death the bishop (October, 2 Henry III.) had a credit on the farm of Colchester for £20 expended “in waristura” (munition) for the castle. In 1222 the sheriff of Essex, then in charge, was to transport certain timber, cut by the Constable of Dover Castle, to the port of Colchester. In January, 1223, the bailiffs of the town had credit from the Exchequer for 100s. advanced by them to the Constable of the castle. The Exchequer seems to have guarded the revenue closely, for in 1224 the Bishop of London is called upon to refund £20 paid to William, late Bishop of London, for the repairs of the king’s castle of Colchester. In April, 1225, the Prud-hommes, “probi homines,” of Colchester are to hand over the farm of the town to the Constable for the repairs of the castle. The Bishop of London seems occasionally to have had charge, for in 1227 he is ordered to send to the king some person who may be trusted to deliver over the castle from the bishop to the king.

Hubert de Burgh seems at one time, with the wardship of Hawise de Lanvalai, to have held the Constableship of the castle; so that though not actually hereditary, some regard seems to have been had to descent. De Burgh was dispossessed in 1232, and was succeeded by Stephen de Segrave, and he by Thomas de Clare, who was Constable in 1265–6, when 12 June, 1256, Henry III. granted the castle and the fee-farm of the town to Guy de Montfort for life, he maintaining the castle in repair. He was one of Henry’s unpopular foreign favourites, and was deprived in 1258. William de Wayland followed, who, 18 December, 1273, resigned it to John de Burgh, the last who held the office with any shadow of hereditary claim. In 1275 it was held by Richard de Holebrook, and immediately afterwards the castle became the county prison, in charge of the sheriff, and ceased to possess any military value. In 1347 some of the prisoners taken in France were lodged at Colchester; no doubt in the castle.