1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (3 page)

When we see ancient, crumbling stone walls, we think of dungeons and sieges. Instead, we should think of chimneys and fireplaces. Until the twelfth century most castles and great houses were built of timber, and usually one storey high. Heat was provided by open fires or braziers in the centre of the floor, the smoke being drawn out through a louvre in the roof. In stone buildings fireplaces and chimneys were encased in the thickness of the walls and one room could be piled on top of another to make a tower. While early fireplaces usually had short flues, by the later twelfth century it was known that an extended flue produced a stronger draught.

Stone walls were not just fireproof and handy for keeping enemies out, they could also be used for plumbing in running water. The lead pipes in the Great Tower, King Henry II’s keep, at Dover Castle drew water from a well sunk more than 240 feet into the chalk. Thick walls could contain corridors and private rooms – above all, latrines, usually approached round a sharp bend so that the person using it could have some privacy. You no longer had to go outside to use a lavatory.

In 1215 new fashions were beginning to change the way the houses of the aristocracy were designed. For many centuries before this, the residences of the aristocracy had nearly always consisted of a number of buildings within an enclosure. The principal buildings were a hall, for receiving visitors and dining, a chamber block, where the lord’s family had their private space, which it was rude to enter uninvited, a kitchen and at least one privy. These separate units were often linked by covered ways. There would be other buildings too: extra accommodation for visitors or senior servants, stables, a brewhouse, and workshops for jobs such as carding and spinning wool, or retting flax. Poultry and other animals ran freely in the yard.

The hall was at ground level. In his manual of good manners,
The Book of the Civilised Man
, Daniel of Beccles advised keeping pigs and cats out of the hall, but allowed in a ‘gentleman’s animals’: dogs, hawks and even horses. Only those whom the master had expressly allowed to do so could enter the hall on horseback. King Henry II liked to ride into his chancellor Thomas Becket’s hall, jump over the table and join the dinner party. The hall was a public space and some behaviour was frowned upon, as Daniel of Beccles makes clear: don’t scratch yourself or look for fleas in your breeches or on your chest; don’t snap your fingers; don’t comb your hair, clean your nails, or take your shoes off there in the presence of lords and ladies. Messengers should take off gloves, arms and cap before they entered – though bald messengers were permitted to keep their caps on. Urinating in the hall was particularly bad manners – unless you were the head of the household; then it was permissible.

By contrast with the hall, the chamber block often had two storeys, a semi-basement cellar with chamber above – the word ‘chamber’ could mean either a room or a suite. When stone replaced wood, kitchens especially and chamber-blocks were built or re-built in this more durable and less flammable material. Chairs were rare. Often a bed was the only piece of furniture in a room. During the day people sat on beds made up for the purpose – ‘day-beds’. A chair was reserved for a person of status – hence the modern term ‘chairman’ or, nowadays, ‘chair’.

The walls of the grandest rooms in important houses were often painted. Henry II commissioned a mural of an eagle and its four chicks for his Painted Chamber in Westminster Palace. In that room the bed was lavishly decorated, a ‘state-bed’ on which the king received important visitors. Other walls were decorated with embroideries or tapestries. When a household moved from one residence to another, the best of these wall-hangings were packed and taken along, either in carts or on sumpter-horses, as also were costly soft furnishings such as the coverlets with which day-beds were spread.

The king led the way in setting new fashions. Take, for example, the great tower at Orford, a royal castle built on the Suffolk coast in the 1160s. It was architect-designed, based on a precisely calculated geometrical pattern, a 49-foot-diameter circle with three projecting towers. It contained two fine public rooms, one above the other, both circular, each lit by three double windows, the upper room embellished with a dome-effect ceiling. Similarly the great tower at Conisborough in Yorkshire, built for King John’s uncle Hamelin, contained two spacious circular rooms one above the other. At Orford, with a kitchen on each of the two main floors and a bakery, it was possible to provide the five private chambers with what was, in effect, night storage heating. One of these chambers had a well-ventilated privy en suite. In addition a cistern provided running water and three separate privies, although if two people were using a double one, it was not polite, Daniel of Beccles explains, for one to stand up before the other. At Orford the doorways were reminiscent of the pedimented entrances of classical antiquity.

These magnificent stone towers were phenomenally expensive when compared with timber buildings. The timber hunting lodge built for Richard I at Kinver in Staffordshire in the 1190s cost £24 18s 9d. For this the king got a hall with a buttery and pantry, a chamber block, a kitchen and a gaol, all enclosed by a 16-foot-high palisade with a fortified gatehouse, plus a newly made fishpond outside the enclosure. By contrast, the luxurious tower at Orford cost nearly £1,000 and Henry II’s great tower of Newcastle-upon-Tyne cost £912. At this date few nobles could afford to build even one such prestigious ‘power house’.

Another design feature that became increasingly common during King John’s lifetime was the window-seat, which allowed the proud owner of a fashionable new house to make better use of the light and enjoy the view. Increasingly the rich had their windows glazed. In 1237, for example, Peter the Painter was paid 5s 6d for making a glass window in Marlborough Castle. At this time, what is now the tiny village of Chiddingfold in the Sussex Weald was the centre of the English glass-making industry. Those who could afford them chose floor tiles in place of beaten earth or stone floors – and fine tiles were meant to be admired, not covered with rushes or rush matting. In
The Romance of Horn
the poet describes a princess’s chamber ‘paved with intricately worked marble and blue limestone’. Tiled floors were easier to keep clean too. Comfort and fashion were of primary importance rather than defence. When the rebellion against John broke out in 1215 it was more than forty years since the peace of the English countryside had been seriously disturbed. In the borderlands people were vulnerable to Scottish and Welsh raids; elsewhere they preferred to spend their money on luxury and pleasure rather than on preparation for war.

Hundreds of churches from King John’s time still survive today, but only a handful of town and country houses. Buildings in which people prayed have been used for many centuries without the need for fundamental redesign, but the same cannot be said of domestic accommodation. Changing ideas of comfort and fashion have meant that homes have been torn down and reconstructed time and time again. For this reason books about medieval architecture are almost entirely devoted to churches. We know very much less about domestic buildings – although, thanks partly to the spadework of archaeologists, we are no longer quite as much in the dark as we used to be. We can see now that in this period the basic design of the aristocratic residence was changing. Once separate buildings were being brought together to form a single whole. Service rooms, later known as the buttery and the pantry, were added at one end of the hall, often with cellar space below. The early thirteenth-century fashion for attaching the other end of the hall to the principal chamber block led to the establishment of what is thought of as the classic ‘English medieval house’, a three-part house, all under one roof, with great chamber and parlour at the ‘upper’ end of the hall. At the ‘lower’ end there were service doors from the buttery and the pantry, often shielded by screens from the eyes of upper-class diners at the ‘top table’. A passage designed to give direct access into the hall from the kitchen – which, for safety reasons, still remained separate – ran between buttery and pantry. For the next three centuries anyone who had any social pretensions lived in this new type of house.

The palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire was a royal residence on which a great deal was spent from Henry I’s time onwards. Nothing remains of it today, and even the landscape in which it stood was drastically altered when Blenheim Park was laid out in the eighteenth century. In King John’s time a spring fed three pools around which gardens and a group of buildings clustered. Henry II kept the most favoured of his mistresses, Rosamund Clifford, ‘Fair Rosamund’, in this rural retreat. It included the ‘king’s high chamber by the pool’, the queen’s chamber, Rosamund’s chamber, the kitchen, a wine cellar, and a chapel. Great houses such as Woodstock were set in ornamental landscapes, often with artificial lakes created by dams, which were appreciated for their beauty as well as for their stock of delicacies such as pike, bream and lamprey – a freshwater eel (Henry I is supposed to have died of a surfeit of lampreys). There was also the pleasure of fishing with rod and line. The Paris-educated Anglo-Welsh intellectual, Gerald de Barri – often known as Gerald of Wales – claimed that his family home, Manorbier Castle, on the Pembrokeshire coast, was the most beautiful place in Wales. He picked out the magnificent pool below the castle walls as one of its finest features, together with its orchard and grove of hazel trees. Gerald described the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Stow as being ‘pleasingly surrounded by woods and pools’; it was here that the most saintly bishop of the day, Hugh of Lincoln, liked to feed his pet swan. Deer parks, orchards, vineyards, enclosed gardens and viewing pavilions, known as gloriettes, were all part of the aesthetic of the country house.

Those who lived in such houses had plenty to keep them busy and entertained. For the staff, nearly all of whom were male and lived in, the day was long, and especially so for the chief officer of the household, the steward or marshal: he was often the first to rise and the last to retire. In summer the porters opened the gates at five in the morning and closed them at about ten in the evening. In winter they opened two hours later and closed an hour earlier. The kitchen staff were next on parade. Lunch (
prandium
), the main meal of the day, was taken at what we would now think of as mid-morning, so even if breakfast consisted only of bread, cheese and ale – and some households did without – the staff was kept busy. Not only was there the food to be prepared, there was also the hall to be cleaned, wall-hangings shaken or beaten, tables (boards on trestles), stools and benches had to be put in place or stacked away. Servants who lived outside the household arrived, often women who worked as laundresses or dairymaids.

When the lord and lady got up, servants and maids helped them wash and dress. They used a soft soap made by boiling mutton fat in wood ash and caustic soda, and a twig, probably springy hazel, to clean their teeth. Men’s and women’s dress was similar. Both wore stockings (
chauces
) made of wool or silk, then a shirt (
chemise
) with long sleeves, which were often detachable and worn so fashionably tight that they had to be stitched on each time the shirt was worn. Detachable sleeves were a favourite gift, especially as a love-token. A tunic or gown (
bliaut
) went over the shirt, secured with a brooch; above a full skirt a lady’s gown had a tight-fitting bodice, while both
chemise
and
bliaut
might be slashed and laced above the waist to reveal her bare skin. Then came a coat, or surcoat, and in cold weather a fur-lined
pellice
, often sleeveless, might be worn on top. Out of doors on a cold day a mantle was thrown over everything, fastened at the shoulder with another brooch. The poor wore shorter garments; for the rich the sheer length of their clothes was a way of displaying wealth – although the young Henry II became known as Curtmantle when he reversed the usual trend and set a fashion for short cloaks. Since clothes were made without pockets, coins and valuables were commonly carried in a purse attached to the belt, though they could be tied into a skirt or shirt sleeves. A cap could be worn either in or out of doors. They wore thin-soled leather shoes. It was said that the shoes of an elegantly dressed gentleman would fit so well that no one could see how he had got into them or imagine how he would ever get out of them again.

The one important difference between men’s and women’s clothes was that men wore underpants (
braies
), while women often went naked under the chemise. When King Henry I’s illegitimate daughter Juliana was forced to jump into a castle moat in February, the chronicler who described her misfortune thought in particular of the numbing effect of the freezing water on her bare buttocks. A woman’s hair was usually arranged in two plaits, the longer the better. Ivory or bone combs, but more commonly boxwood, survive from this period, as do small compact mirrors with concave glass for a fuller image. The fashionable look was for white skin and rosy cheeks, and make-up was available for those who needed help with this.

After morning prayers the senior members of the household either breakfasted or got straight down to the day’s business. The management of a manor of two – or in the case of the great nobles, dozens of manors – with their farms, tenants, gardens, fishponds, barns and buildings generated a great deal of thought, supervision and decision-making for the head of household. Not that every morning was devoted to business. There were plenty of festivals and holy days – and holidays were not for working. None the less, on most days there was much to be done. Only stupid lords – of whom, naturally, there were always some – left top management entirely in the hands of their senior staff. The estate had to generate a profit, money had to be spent, investments made if you and your children were to continue to enjoy an aristocratic lifestyle. Daniel of Beccles quoted the Roman poet Ovid, ‘It’s low class to count your flocks’, only to disagree with him. Daniel’s advice was: ‘Keep a sharp eye on your property. Aim to improve the yields of fields and livestock. This way you can afford to be generous.’ Sometimes the head of the household was a woman, a widow or a wife looking after things in the absence of her husband. Ambitious men were often away from home, consulting their lawyers in London or following the royal court. Other husbands were so keen on hunting that even when they were in residence the lady of the house was the real manager of the estate.