Mediæval Military Architecture in England, Volume 2 (of 2)

by George Thomas Clark

Wyman & Sons, Gᵗ. Queen Sᵗ. London.

NOTTINGHAM CASTLE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Whatever may have been the extent of the castle in its great days, its remains in masonry are confined to a single tower, now in a very dilapidated condition. This tower is an octagon, described within a circle of about 29 feet radius, the faces, not quite equal, averaging 22 feet 6 inches. The walls, casing included, were 10 feet thick; the interior faces, therefore, average 14 feet 9 inches, and the interior diameter from face to face is 38 feet. At each angle is set a buttress of 4 feet projection and 2 feet breadth, rising to the summit, or nearly so, of the building, now about 60 feet high, and which, the parapet and part of the wall being gone, may have been 8 feet higher. As the tops of some of the upper windows remain, it may be inferred that the height, when complete, did not exceed 68 feet.

GROUND PLAN OF ODIHAM CASTLE, HANTS.

The material of the tower is a conglomerate of small flint nodules grouted in a large quantity of very good mortar. The whole exterior seems to have been faced with small ashlar blocks, possibly of Caen stone. The casing is gone, but the mortar has preserved the beds of the stone more or less perfect. The same stone was used in the interior for dressings for the openings, and for a band about 4 feet high at the base of the wall, and for the groining of the internal angles. In these two latter positions, some of the ashlar has been left undisturbed. About one-third of the tower, including most of the two western faces, has fallen; but though the remainder is very rough and a mere mass of flint conglomerate, held together by the excellence of the mortar, the cores of the buttresses remain, and enough of the recesses of the window openings to show something of their original form and dimensions.

The tower is composed of a basement and two stories. The basement floor is about 6 feet below the exterior ground level. It was about 12 feet high, and six of its eight faces appear to have been pierced. Of these openings, five commence within at 4 feet from the floor. They were round-headed and 4 feet wide. They converged upon an ordinary loop, and as the cill rose by six steps, the base of the loop was about a foot above the exterior ground level. Three of these recesses are tolerably perfect; another, judging from an appearance in the wall above, may have been the door into the base of a well-stair, ascending in the wall to the summit. Such a stair there was likely to have been, and the hollow in the wall is more like that for a staircase than for a chimney-shaft or a garderobe vent, and the weakening of the wall by such staircase would account for its having fallen on this side. The stair, if such it was, occupied the south end of the south-west face. Two of the openings in the basement have been called doorways of entrance from without. What remains scarcely leads to this conclusion, and it is exceedingly improbable that there should have been a door on the ground level when there certainly was one on the first floor. Sir E. Home’s plan, mentioned below,[11] shows a sort of staircase in the centre of the tower, as though descending to a sub-basement floor. Of this not a trace is visible, and in so wet a soil a chamber much below the surface would be usually full of water. As regards the ground-floor entry, it is very possible that here, as usual, a basement window may, in modern times, for the convenience of entry, have been converted into a door, and so the present appearance produced.

The first or state floor was about 30 feet high. Its south face was occupied by a very capacious fireplace, with a bold hood and mantel-piece of ashlar, now gone, and it had a round back and a large circular chimney-shaft carried up vertically in the thickness of the wall. Of the other seven faces, two are gone, and four are pierced with lofty, round-headed arches, about 8 feet broad, and slightly splayed. These, no doubt, terminated in small coupled windows. In the east face is an opening without splay, evidently a doorway, and, no doubt, the main entrance, with an exterior stair, as at Brunless and Coningsburgh. In an adjacent face is a large square locker.

The upper floor also had a fireplace, a smaller one above that on the state floor, and in front of its chimney-shaft. This lesser shaft seems to have been of ashlar. The arch of the fireplace is of three rings, each of large, thin red tiles, having a very Roman aspect. In this floor the window recesses were ranged in pairs, two in each face. Of these, three and a half pairs, or seven window arches, remain. In the east face is a small locker. This story may have been 18 feet high.

The floors were of timber, and composed of large beams, laid about 6 inches apart. As the wall is the same thickness throughout there are no setts-off, and the walls are pierced with square recesses for the beams. As these recesses are not parallel but radiating, it is clear that the floor rested, as in the Wakefield Tower in the Tower of London, upon a central pier or post.