Life in a Medieval Castle (11 page)

Administration of an estate required specialized training—in letter-writing, legal procedure, the preparation of documents, and accounting. Beginning in the reign of Henry III, a regular course in estate management was taught by masters in the town of Oxford. The course, which seems to have taken from six months to a year, prepared the young man who had the opportunity of entering the employ of a lord for his practical apprenticeship.

It was a career worth entering. The steward’s legitimate perquisites were excellent and were reputed to be frequently augmented by less legitimate ones. A fourteenth-century book of manners declared of stewards, “Few are true, but many are false,” and the moralist Robert Mannyng commented that dishonest stewards and other servants

…do much wrong in many things; Therefore shall they and their counsel Go to hell, both top and tail.

Henry III’s butler, a knight named Poyntz Piper, enriched himself as a member of the king’s household “by unlawful as well as lawful means,” according to Matthew Paris, progressing from the ownership of a few acres of land to “having the wealth of an earl.” Poyntz’s manors included one at Tedington, where he built a palace, chapel, and other fine stone buildings with lead roofs and established orchards and warrens. Matthew recorded with satisfaction in 1251 that Poyntz had “gone the way of all flesh,” and that his widow had married “a brave and handsome knight,” who fell heir to all of the estates acquired by the deceased.

The pantry, larder, buttery, and kitchen had their own staffs, including dispensers, cupbearers, fruiterers, a slaughterer, a baker, a brewer, a man to look after the tablecloths, a wafer maker, a candle maker, a sauce cook, and a poulterer, each with boy helpers. The chamberlain employed a cofferer, who was responsible for the chests that contained money and plate—silver cups, saucers, spoons. The keeper of the wardrobe employed tailors to make the robes of the lord and the livery of his retainers. A laundress washed the clothes, sheets, tablecloths, and towels (Bogo de Clare’s laundress also washed his hair).

The marshal’s stable staff included grooms, smiths, carters, and clerks. Their duties included transporting household goods, delivering purchases made at the fairs or from London merchants, and arranging for the supply of bran, oats, and hay for the horses, and sometimes procuring horseshoes and nails. The marshal and his clerks bought other supplies (carts, sacks, and trunks for the pack horses), paid the grooms, and checked the state of horses and carts. Horses too old for service were given to the poor. Carts were repaired, their iron fittings replaced, axles greased, harness renewed.

Full-time messengers were indispensable to a great lord
whose holdings were scattered over a large area. They transported receipts and commodities as well as letters, and ranked in status and pay between the grooms below them and the squires and men-at-arms above them. Besides pay they were provided with robes and shoes every year. Messengers encountered an unusual occupational hazard; Matthew Paris reported that Walter de Clifford, a Welsh baron, was convicted in 1250 of having “in contempt of the king violently and improperly treated his messenger, who bore his royal letters, and of having forced him to eat the same, with the seal.” Walter was fined the large sum of 1,000 marks (£667). Later Bogo de Clare’s officials similarly treated an emissary of the archbishop of Canterbury, who arrived at Bogo’s London house with a citation to serve on the noble prelate. They “by force and against his will made him eat the letters and the appended seals, imprisoned him there, beat and maltreated him.” Injury to the messenger was assessed at £20, and damages for contempt of the Church and the king at £1,000, but Bogo succeeded in evading payment.

Another essential department of the lord’s household was the office of the chaplain (or chancellor in a very large household). Besides presiding at mass, the chaplain kept the lord’s seal and wrote his business and personal letters in Latin or French. His clerk took charge of the vessels and vestments for mass, and when the household traveled was responsible for the transport of the portable altar, a wooden table with a stone center to hold relics. Other clerks assisted with the accounts, ran errands, and made purchases.

An important member of the chaplain’s department was the almoner, who had charge of offerings to the poor. The almoner gathered the leftovers from the table and saw that they were distributed among the poor and not pilfered by the servants and grooms. A thirteenth-century manual was emphatic that the king’s almoner ought to

visit for charity’s sake the sick, the lepers, the captive, the poor, the widows and others in want and the wanderers in the countryside, and to receive discarded horses, clothing, money and other gifts, bestowed in alms, and to distribute them faithfully. He ought also by frequent exhortations to spur the king to liberal almsgiving, especially on saints’ days, and to implore him not to bestow his robes, which are of great price, upon players, flatterers, fawners, talebearers, or minstrels, but to command them to be used to augment his almsgiving.

Countess Eleanor de Montfort’s almoner, John Scot, was provided with an average of four pence a day for the poor in her accounts of 1265, in addition to table scraps and an occasional full dinner. Not all the nobility were as generous. Bogo de Clare, an avid collector of rich benefices, was notoriously stingy. Bogo gave a banquet in 1285 for which the food-and-drink bill was a sizeable eight pounds six shillings, with additional payments of six shillings eight pence to one wafer maker (the king’s, incidentally), four shillings to another, and five shillings to a harpist. At the end of the list of the day’s expenses came the item: “On the same day in alms, one penny.”

Besides the official departments of the household, there were personal attendants: the ladies-in-waiting, who were not servants but companions, of slightly lower rank than the lady of the castle; the chambermaids; the barber, who also functioned as a surgeon, bloodletter, and dentist; and the doctor.

A large retinue moved with the lord from one of his castles to another. Pack horses carried household goods—one horse loaded with the lord’s dismantled bed, sheets, rugs, furs, and mattress, another with the wardrobe, another with the buttery, others with kitchen furniture, candles, portable altar, and chapel furnishings. Two-wheeled carts and less maneuverable but more capacious four-wheeled wagons, built of timber with wooden wheels rimmed with
iron strakes, studded with nails with projecting heads that aided traction, carried the heaviest goods, such as wine, cloth, and armor. Sometimes they carried window glass from castle to castle. Lord, lady, children, and guests rode chargers and palfreys with embroidered and gilded saddles. Matthew Paris described the traveling household of Earl Richard of Gloucester on a trip to France in 1250 as including “forty knights, equipped in new accoutrements, all alike, mounted on beautiful horses, bearing new harness, glittering with gold, and with five wagons and fifty sumpterhorses.”

By the late thirteenth century, the usual horseback travel was supplemented for noble ladies by the covered chariot. Devoid of springs, the new vehicle represented little technological advance over the baggage carts. Not until the late fourteenth century did the “rocking chariot” (
chariot branlant
) appear, with strap or chain suspension. What the thirteenth-century chariot lacked in comfort it sought to make up in elegance, often being painted or gilded and covered with leather or fine wool cloth in bright colors.

If travel was uncomfortable for lords and ladies, it was rougher for the staff. When night fell on the road, the best, or only, available lodgings went to the lord’s family and chief officials. Peter of Blois, a member of the household of Henry II, found that traveling even with the king was an ordeal. He and his fellow courtiers, wandering around in the dark at the place of bivouac, were fortunate if they came upon “some vile and sordid hovel,” which they sometimes fought over with drawn swords.

Though most of the permanent staff, comprising the chief servants, journeyed with the lord and lady, many casual servants hired locally—grooms, huntsmen, kitchen boys, tenders of mews and kennels—were dismissed to be rehired on the lord’s return. It was an opportunity to weed out bad servants, a chronic problem for every lord of a castle. Bishop Robert Grosseteste advised the countess of Lincoln to
observe servants’ behavior to see that porters, ushers, and marshals were courteous to guests, and to see that her liveried knights and gentlemen were carefully dressed and did not wear “old tunics, dirty cloaks and shoddy jackets.” Servants should be kept on a tight leash and seldom allowed to go home for a holiday. He concluded: “No one should be kept in your household if you have not reasonable belief that he is faithful, discreet, painstaking, and honest, and of good manners.”

T
HE CASTLE HOUSEHOLD WAS ASTIR AT DAYBREAK
. Roused from their pallets in the attics and cellars, servants lighted fires in kitchen and great hall. Knights and men-at-arms clambered to the walls and towers to relieve the night watch. In the great chamber, the lord and lady awakened in their curtained bed.

They slept naked, and before rising put on linen undergarments—drawers for the lord, a long chemise for the lady. After washing in a basin of cold water, they donned outer garments, essentially the same for both: a long-sleeved tunic, slipped over the head and fastened at the neck with a brooch; a second tunic, or surcoat, over it, shorter, and either sleeveless or with wide, loose sleeves, and often fur-lined; finally a mantle, made from an almost circular piece of material, lined with fur and fastened at the neck either with another brooch or with a chain. The lord’s
garments were shorter than the lady’s, with looser sleeves. Both wore belts tied at the waist or fastened with a metal buckle. The man’s costume was completed by long hose attached to the belt that held up his drawers, while the woman’s hose, shorter, were suspended from garters below the knee. Both wore shoes—slippers for the house, low boots for outdoors.

The colors of tunics, mantles, hose, and shoes were bright—blues, yellows, crimsons, purples, greens—and the fabric of the garments was usually wool, though fine silks such as samite, sendal (taffeta), and damask (a kind of brocade) were occasionally worn. Camlet, imported from Cyprus, was sometimes used for winter robes, woven from camel’s or goat’s hair. The fur trimmings and linings were of squirrel, lambskin, rabbit, miniver, otter, marten, beaver, fox, ermine, and sable. Tunics and mantles were decorated with embroidery, tassels, feathers, or pearls. For festive occasions belts might be of silk with gold or silver thread, or adorned with jewels. Both men and women wore head coverings indoors and outdoors. The lord usually wore a linen coif tied by strings under the chin, sometimes elaborately embroidered, or decorated with feathers and buttons; the lady wore a linen wimple, either white or colored, that covered hair and neck. Outdoors, hoods and caps were worn over the coifs and wimples. Elegant gloves, sometimes fur-lined, and jewelry—gold rings with stones, pins, necklaces, hairbands, shoebuckles, and bracelets—completed the costume.

The lady might arrange her hair with the aid of a mirror—an expensive article, usually small and circular, mounted in a wooden or metal case, and made either of polished steel or of glass over a metal surface. Despite the disapproval of preachers and moralist writers, ladies wore cosmetics—sheep fat, and rouge and skin whiteners with which they tinted themselves pink and white—and used depilatory pastes.

After mass in the chapel, the household breakfasted on bread washed down with wine or ale. The morning was spent in routine tasks or amusements, depending on whether the castle had guests. The lord had his round of conferences with stewards and bailiffs, or with members of his council; the lady conversed with her guests or busied herself with embroidery and other domestic projects. Knights and squires practiced fencing and tilting, while children did their lessons under the guidance of a tutor, commonly the chaplain or one of his clerks. Lessons over, the children were free to play—girls with dolls, boys with tops and balls, horseshoes, bows and arrows.

Archery was a favorite pastime with boys of all ages. In the twelfth century the son of the lord of Haverford Castle in Wales, and two other boys sent there for their education, made friends with an outlaw confined in the castle who fashioned arrows for their bows. One day the robber took advantage of the negligence of the guards to seize the boys and barricade himself in his prison. “A great clamor instantly arose,” recorded the chronicler Gerald of Wales, “as well from the boys within as from the people without; nor did he cease, with an uplifted axe, to threaten the lives of the children, until indemnity and security were assured to him.”

In the castle courtyard the grooms swept out the stables and fed the horses; the smith worked at his forge on horseshoes, nails, and wagon fittings; and domestic servants emptied basins and chamber pots and brought in rushes for the freshly swept floors. The laundress soaked sheets, tablecloths, and towels in a wooden trough containing a solution of wood ashes and caustic soda; then she pounded them, rinsed them, and hung them to dry. In the kitchen the cook and his staff turned the meat—pork, beef, mutton, poultry, game—on a spit and prepared stews and soups in great iron cauldrons hung over the fire on a hook and chain that could be raised and lowered to regulate the temperature.

Boiled meat was lifted out of the pot with an iron meat hook, a long fork with a wooden handle and prongs attached to the side. Soup was stirred with a long-handled slotted spoon.

Meat preservation was by salting or smoking, or, most commonly and simply, by keeping the meat alive till needed. Salting was done by two methods. Dry-salting meant burying the meat in a bed of salt pounded to a powder with mortar and pestle. Brine-curing consisted of immersing the meat in a strong salt solution. Before cooking, the salted meat had to be soaked and rinsed.

In addition to roasting and stewing, meat might be pounded to a paste, mixed with other ingredients, and served as a kind of custard. A dish of this kind was
blankmanger,
consisting of a paste of chicken blended with rice boiled in almond milk, seasoned with sugar, cooked until very thick, and garnished with fried almonds and anise. Another was a
mortrews,
of fish or meat that was pounded, mixed with bread crumbs, stock, and eggs, and poached, producing a kind of
quenelle,
or dumpling. Both meat and fish were also made into pies, pasties, and fritters.

Sauces were made from herbs from the castle garden that were ground to a paste, mixed with wine,
verjuice
(the juice of unripe grapes), vinegar, onions, ginger, pepper, saffron, cloves, and cinnamon. Mustard, a favorite ingredient, was used by the gallon.

In Lent or on fast days fish was served fresh from the castle’s own pond, from a nearby river, or from the sea, nearly always with a highly seasoned sauce. Salt or smoked herring was a staple, as were salted or dried cod and stockfish. Fresh herring, flavored with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, might be made into a pie. Other popular fish included mullet, shad, sole, flounder, plaice, ray, mackerel, salmon, and trout. Sturgeon, whale, and porpoise were rare seafood delicacies, the first two “royal fish,” fit for kings and queens. Pike, crab, crayfish, oysters, and eels were also favorites. A royal order to the sheriff of Gloucester in the 1230s stated that

since after lampreys all fish seem insipid to both the king and the queen, the sheriff shall procure by purchase or otherwise as many lampreys as possible in his bailiwick, place them in bread and jelly, and send them to the king while he is at a

Roasting pigs on a spit, from the Luttrell Psalter. (Trustees of the British Museum. MS. Add. 42130, f. 206v)

distance from those parts by John of Sandon, the king’s cook, who is being sent to him. When the king comes nearer, he shall send them to him fresh.

The most common vegetables, besides onions and garlic, were peas and beans. Staples of the diet of the poor, for the rich they might be served with onions and saffron. Honey, commonly used for sweetening, came from castle or manor bees; fruit from the castle orchard—apples, pears, plums, and peaches—was supplemented by wild fruits and nuts from the lord’s wood. In addition to these local products, there were imported luxuries such as sugar (including a special kind made with roses and violets), rice, almonds, figs, dates, raisins, oranges, and pomegranates, purchased in town or at the fairs. Ordinary sugar was bought by the loaf and had to be pounded; powdered white sugar was more expensive.

At mealtimes, servants set up the trestle tables and spread the cloths, setting steel knives, silver spoons, dishes for salt, silver cups, and
mazers
—shallow silver-rimmed wooden bowls. At each place was a trencher or
manchet
, a thick slice of day-old bread serving as a plate for the roast meat. Meals were announced by a horn blown to signal time for washing hands. Servants with ewers, basins, and towels attended the guests.

At the table, seating followed status: The most important
guests were at the high table, with the loftiest place reserved for an ecclesiastical dignitary, the second for the ranking layman. After grace, the procession of servants bearing food began. First came the pantler with the bread and butter, followed by the butler and his assistants with the wine and beer. Wine, in thirteenth-century England mostly imported from English-ruled Bordeaux, was drunk young in the absence of an effective technique for stoppering containers. Wine kept a year became undrinkable. No attention was paid to vintage, and often what was served even at rich tables was of poor quality. Peter of Blois described in a letter wine served at Henry II’s court: “The wine is turned sour or mouldy—thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch. I have sometimes seen even great lords served with wine so muddy that a man must needs close his eyes and clench his teeth, wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering the stuff rather than drinking.”

The castle bought wine by the barrel and decanted it into jugs. Some was spiced and sweetened by the butlers to go with the final course. Ale, made from barley, wheat, or oats, or all three, was drunk mainly by the servants. A castle household brewed its own, hiring an ale-wife for the task and using grain from its own stores. At the royal court, according to Peter of Blois, the ale was not much better than the wine—it was “horrid to the taste and abominable to the sight.”

Ceremony marked the service at table. There was a correct way to do everything, from the laying of cloths to the cutting of trenchers and carving of meat. Part of a squire’s training was learning how to serve his lord at meals: the order in which dishes should be presented, where they should be placed, how many fingers to use in holding the joint for the lord to carve, how to cut the trenchers and place them on the table.

The solid parts of soups and stews were eaten with a spoon, the broth sipped. Meat was cut up with the knife and
eaten with the fingers. Two persons shared a dish, the lesser helping the more important, the younger the older, the man the woman. The former in each case broke the bread, cut the meat, and passed the cup.

Etiquette books admonished diners not to leave the spoon in the dish or put elbows on the table, not to belch, not to drink or eat with their mouths full, not to stuff their mouths or take overly large helpings. Not surprisingly, in the light of the finger-eating and dish-sharing, stress was laid on keeping hands and nails scrupulously clean, wiping spoon and knife after use, wiping the mouth before drinking, and not dipping meat in the salt dish.

The lord and lady were at pains to see their guests amply served. Bishop Robert Grosseteste advised the countess of Lincoln to make sure that her servants were judiciously distributed during dinner, that they entered the room in an orderly way and avoided quarreling. “Especially do you yourself keep watch over the service until the meats are placed in the hall, and then…command that your dish be so refilled and heaped up, and especially with the light dishes, that you may courteously give from your dish to all the high table on the right and on the left.” At his own house, he reminded the countess, guests were served at dinner with two meats and two lighter dishes. Between courses, the steward should send the servers into the kitchen and see to it that they brought in the meats quietly and without confusion.