Another great house, dating largely from late in the fourteenth century, is Kenilworth Castle, which, though primarily a place of strength, has much that is interesting purely as domestic architecture. It has been held by kings and great nobles; some of the most celebrated names in English history are linked with its story; it has withstood sieges, when its walls enclosed despairing and disease-stricken men; it has witnessed the most gorgeous pageants of a gorgeous age. Reality and romance have vied to make it famous. It is worthy of far more careful study than can be bestowed upon it here, where it can only be briefly used to throw its light on the progress of domestic architecture through some four centuries. As a fortified place of dwelling it goes back to Saxon times; as a stone house it was occupied between four and five hundred years; it has been a ruin for nearly three hundred. In extent the site is very considerable, embracing some eight or nine acres of fortified enclosure (Fig. 26), but the walls, the towers, and the gateways which made its defences; the ditches, the moat, and the pool or lake which further secured it, do not fall within the range of the present inquiry; it is only the inner or upper ward which need detain us. The earliest of the buildings which form this ward is the great keep, situated at the north-east corner, the home of the family in Norman times. In its main characteristics it resembled the other large keeps which have been already described (Chapter II.), and its date may be placed at the end of the third quarter of the twelfth century. There must have been other contemporary buildings somewhere in the vast enclosure, mostly of wood, but some also of stone: they have, however, all disappeared, and it is only from scattered fragments of early work that their character can be surmised. Doubtless during the next two centuries the descendants of the builders, the Clintons, or those who displaced them—the king, Simon de Montfort, Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, son of Henry III., Roger Mortimer, and the rest—added to the meagre and comfortless accommodation of their predecessors. Indeed it is on record that large sums were expended on buildings and repairs during the reigns of John and Henry III. But anything they may have built must have been swept away in the great rebuilding undertaken by John of Gaunt towards the end of the fourteenth century, about 1392; and it is not improbable from the irregular shape of the plan that his new buildings followed the main lines of those they superseded. By far the greater part of the upper ward is of this date. Starting from the west end of the keep, the kitchens on the north (now almost entirely gone), the great hall on the west, the white hall and other chambers on the south, are all John of Gaunt’s work. Where he left off, Dudley, Earl of Leicester, began, nearly two hundred years later; and although Leicester’s buildings are fairly large in themselves, they are small in comparison with those of “time-honoured Lancaster.”
26. Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire.
Ground Plan.
- 1. Site of Kitchens.
- 2. The Strong Tower.
- 3. The White Hall.
- 4. Garde-robe Tower.
- 5. Leicester’s Buildings.
- 6. Henry VIII.’s Lodgings.
- 7. Elizabethan Gatehouse.
The range of chambers built by John of Gaunt shows how enormously domestic requirements had increased since the days when the restricted accommodation of a keep had sufficed for the housing of the lord and his family; or those when the subsidiary rooms attached to so fine a hall as that at Oakham were merely four “chambers” and a kitchen. The great hall, 90 ft. long by 45 ft. wide, occupied nearly the whole of the west front. It stood on a vaulted undercroft (see section, Fig. 27), and was entered at the north end of its east side up a flight of steps, which eventually led into the “screens.” To the right or north of the entrance were the buttery, the kitchen, and other servants’ quarters. Beyond them, and projecting on the west front, was a tower called the Strong Tower, used as a place of detention for persons of consequence, some of whom have here, as others in the Tower of London, left melancholy mementoes of weary hours in the shape of their coats-of-arms scratched upon the walls.
27. Kenilworth Castle. The Great Hall (cir. 1392).
The upper figure shows the plan of one side: the lower is the longitudinal section through the hall and undercroft.
