War Halls: Royal Houses from the Saxons to the Hundred Years' War - Simon Thurley

well good evening ladies and gentlemen it's very nice to see you all here and it's extremely nice to be embarking on a new series of lectures and I'm incredibly grateful to Gresham College for putting up with me still and it's very nice that I'm still surviving and not being sacked and what I'm going to talk about over the next few lectures is Royal Palaces some of you may know that that's where I started my research it's my PhD was looking at Henry the eighth's palaces and I'm just embarking on a series of research projects now major one on Windsor Castle but also to rewrite some of the material that sank to my horror I discovered I published over 20 years ago now and that's I suppose what happens to you eventually you sort of make yourself out-of-date but what so what I'm going to be talking about this evening is the the origins I suppose of royal building in England I've just put these Kings up on the screen here just to remind ourselves of the period we're talking about I'm actually going to go back into the Saxon period but I will be very specifically ending with with Edwards the third but before I start I just wanted to explain in a nutshell what I think happens in this early period and what I want to show is that by the death of Edward the third English Royal Palaces had undergone a fundamental change they changed from being a conglomeration of disparate buildings focused around a Great Hall to a well organized carefully planned group of structures that became a machine for ruling in a house of power buildings that were perfectly honed for medieval and kingship and what I want to try and do this evening is explain some of the reasons why this happened and actually how it happened but I think to understand this we need to understand little about how medieval Kings lived and ruled and as an introduction I think a little about what actually constituted a palace and to help us sort of understand this I want to divide royal residences as they were used after the Norman Conquest into three specific categories the manor the castle and the palace now I am in principle rather against creating categorizations that didn't exist at the time but I think it is helpful to adopt this categorization to try and make sense of what otherwise is a bit of a confusing story so let's start with the notion of a palace because this is really quite straightforward because the word Palace derives from the residence of the Roman emperors on the Palatine Hill in Rome and here is the Palace of Tiberius and Caligula there the palace was the principal residence of the ruler and as such there could only be one there could be only one building that was actually called a palace and if you look at English royal buildings in the Middle Ages that is in exactly what you find the only building to be called palladium is in fact Westminster Palace the Palace of Westminster and as the Monarchs principal residence it was an exceptional and unusual in very many ways and we'll come on to look at that in a few moments so there was a palace then there were buildings residential buildings that were essentially in military structures or at least had their origin in military structures today we might want to call them castles places which had the primary role of subduing the local population of overhauling them with their size and strength and accommodating not only the king but also his military retinue if necessary lastly we then have wrestled residences that were undefended set in hunting grounds and designed for Royal recreation and pleasure and these we might call manors but at the time they were normally described as the Kings houses and they were called houses in the plural even though they're related to a single building so a palace like Clarendon which will go on to talk about in a minute was described as the Kings houses and that is a very important point which I will come on to in a moment and in all these three different types of residence the principal component was a large hall a multi-functional space for feasting for the reception of guests and for the accommodation of the row retinue for the dispensing of royal justice and provide presiding over various types of assembly and it was only the very rich and the very powerful who needed or could build such structures because not only did they take very considerable resources in terms of timber and iron and perhaps stone but they required a capable designer and skilled workmen and a large number of laborers to construct and generally speaking these halls were located in the middle of large estates land holdings that would produce the food and the firewood needed to keep a liberal house with lavish hospitality and this is why most of them there were all of the Monarchs and many of the Alistair crafts had many such manners because as they moved around the countryside they consumed rather like a plague of Lotus locusts everything an edible in their path so the halls thus signified lordship and the larger the hall the more important the person was and in this sort of architectural mine's bigger than yours the royal halls were normally the largest and most spectacular so where did this notion of the all actually come from well I suppose the simple answer is is that rulers from time immemorial needed large rooms in which they and their supporters could gather and where they could receive their subjects and feast and you can see this in the buildings of rulers from the very earliest times at the very specific type of Hall that was in fact adopted by the anglo-saxon Kings I think very clearly had their roots in the very large assembly halls built by the Romans and here you see the Roman Roman villa this is a braiding on the Isle of Wight and do I have a pointer here no doesn't look as if I do so this big structure up here is a great big hall great big timber-framed Hall and what is absolutely certain is that after the Roman legions left England many of these halls continued to stand for many hundreds of years and therefore the early Saxons were able to use these great Roman timber halls themselves and this I think formed the backbone of the reason why these halls were seen as being so important so what do we know about the earliest ones well in the six twenties a remarkable palatial complex was constructed for the Northumbrian king and edwin at yabbering in Northumberland this has been excavated this is a reconstruction drawing what was there and you can see here in the middle of this reconstruction the hall itself 82 feet long 36 feet light wide its entrances but in principle entrances we're in the middle of the long sides of each and inside as far as we understand the archaeology there was there were two internal cross were all walls making some separate rooms at each end and that's probably these this is this structure that you can see here on the on the reconstruction and this Hall had to have big posts it had aisles and so it was a sort of pretty interrupted space so these great halls built by the early anglo-saxon Kings basically continued through the anglo-saxon period Alfred the Great's biographer and a sir writes of him having and I quote royal halls and chambers marvelously constructed of stone and wood and of course this is 250 years after this building is built and in the 8th 90s and here there is a rather austere plan and showing looks incredibly an austere so austere that you can't actually see the bit which I wanted to show you which it's probably because the lights are on the stage but anyway there is a you have to take my word for it there's a great big hole there we've sort of bowed sides again and entered on in the middle of the long sides not at the end and the middle of the long sides constructed by Alfred the Great now I'm a little bit anxious that my next slide won't show up either ah great and it is I think because of the light on the stage but what this slide and would show if you could see it and awesome thank you for giving the likes of me seems to make absolutely no difference whatsoever is some excavated pieces of timber which were excavated in London and are in this very museum which are recovered from a great a Great Hall a timber Hall of the period of Alfred the Great and were reused in the revetments of the River Thames and what this shows is the incredibly elaborate carved woodwork in the upper parts of these halls and from these very precious and survivals miraculously preserved and from the eighth century we know that these halls were very richly carved and and and decorated well perhaps slightly surprisingly the Norman Conquest didn't really bring any significant changes to the nature of royal life or even to the structures that comprised a rural royal Manor and I think we can best illustrate this by looking at the royal manor of Clarendon which was the most important royal house in the West of England spectacularly sited on a hill outside Salisbury and you can still go there English Heritage's put a great deal of money into helping the owner consolidate the remains as a public footpath you can go up there and you can still see there's very important very very early royal and Palace there was a Saxon house there we'd know nothing about it William the conquerer completely rebuilt it extended it and by the reign of henry ii it had become one of the three largest houses in the kingdom and by 1164 it was capable of accommodating a Great Council which had 14 bishops and many lay magnets and you can see from this reconstruction again based on the archaeology that it was a complex of one and two-story buildings with pitched and tiled roofs arranged running in a great long line here with a Great Hall at the centre at this end a conglomeration of buildings detached from the Great Hall probably very sensibly because kitchens were dangerous they caught a light so that square building there is the kitchen detach from the Great Hall and at this end various royal buildings stretching up I'll show you a plan of it in a few minutes stretching up this way and further down here and stables Mills wine cellars granaries and etc and exception and these buildings were linked together by Penta seas and you can see here these these low sort of oysters to allow you to get from one building to the other in the dry but certainly not I guess on cold days in the warm and this building we have an extraordinary a full documentary record of and we learn that the buildings inside were paneled with timber certainly up to date Oh level the timber paneling was painted green with applied gold stars cast and lead and and gilded and the walls above were painted with murals depicting depicting religious scenes very magnificent Chapel and in that the British Museum still today some of you may know this you can see it she may not currently be on show because it's redoing the gallery that this is in I think but this miss fabulous paid em tiled pavement which was one of a number of pavements which was in this house so this was a really luxurious magnificent place and the buildings themselves were set in a much much bigger landscape setting and again I apologize the waiters have bleached out but and this is where the buildings are right in the center here is the the the the the paling the ditch and fence went all the way around the park there were eight lodges different points you can see the little dots around there which allowed access to the park there was a band of woods across the middle which were protected so that the the deer couldn't get in towards the north there were a series of meadows and towards the south the work series of meadows and the whole of the house was was arranged so that as you came in from from slay gate over here you could see the house perched up the Kings houses perched up on the ridge painted white and sort of gleaming in the light and this is the sort of panorama you would have got and you can see I think why they are called the Kings houses Clarendon was the king's houses because there's this very strong sense of a series of individual structures linked together with these Penta sees and so the palace and its grounds and in its Park and its own gardens were designed very much with the intention of providing pleasure for the monarchs who used it Henry the first and in a second John Edward the first and Edward the third they all hunted here they all stayed here and used it as a sort of relaxing and countryside and retreat so I hope that you can see I'm looking at Clarendon that although it was large richly decorated and carefully sited in a in a designed landscape the core buildings actually were not materially different in layout from the the it's Saxon predecessors there was basically a sort of axial planning around a Great Hall so this is a plan of Clarendon you see here with as I said before the Great Hall in the center these rooms here the King's chambers there are some rooms here for the Queen here's the chap here's the chapel and wine cellar this is it slightly more perhaps more sophisticated version of what the Saxon Kings themselves were living in these this is of continuity of plan between these very early Saxon houses and these met these early medieval houses and I think suggests a continuity of function with these royal houses households living very much like their predecessors these were war bands they were living eating drinking sleeping communally always on the move Restless hungry busy and at the heart of their life was still the hall a structure of fundamental importance to anyone of any means and pretension not only just to royalty this Hall signified the owners social standing and was the center of their public life and very very few of these early ones survived but the one that I think is the most evocative it isn't a royal one is it oakum in Rutland it was built around eleven ninety and it's of four bays it's got low aisles you can see the low aisles here ignore those little dormer windows there later the entrance door has actually been moved and it would have it's been moved into the center the entrance door was really originally down here and if we look inside you'll see these great great big aisles the normal decoration this bizarre thing if you've have been this bizarre thing of the horseshoes we might might wonder what it is but every time a member of the royal family visits oakum which you wouldn't often but they do they give a horseshoe and the whole shoe is put on the walls the thing it was very charming very nice but you're going in there you do get this this extraordinary sense of one of these very early halls and if you somehow can half close your eyes and imagine the big tables down that the center huge amounts of alcohol and food being consumed lots of junk and singing you could be back in the times of beer wolf virtually so it does seem that as well as that the halls the word these separate buildings often completely detached for the King which meant that he didn't actually have to sleep with his retinue in the Great Hall although uncertain II doubt the retinue did sleep in the Great Hall and at Clarendon as you see on the plan here there was a separate room for the Queen giving them both a measure of privacy now I'm very cautious about using the word privacy in in this context because in the early Middle Ages at privacy as we understand it just simply didn't list the king was never alone there were always people with him there were always people sleeping and the same room as him the king himself would have slept probably in a curtain enclosure and surrounded by his affinity around him now none of these manners like Clarendon was permanently used and this is because as I've already suggested the court was continually on the move now of course there were lots of reasons for this but I think perhaps the most important in the period that we're looking at this evening is that the monarchy still had of course territories on both sides of the channel so a king like King John might spend a great deal of time abroad in fact King John spent four of his first 10 years on the throne out of the country but Kings also needed to move around their houses and castles and here you see a map you don't need to read anything you can just see the blobs and you can see the number of possessions they needed to move between these places to rule hands on ruling to dispense justice to administer their lands and this didn't assess it ate this highly mobile lifestyle and in those first 10 years that I was talking about King John moved more than a hundred and fifty times a year traveling on average thirty five to forty miles a day henry ii was marginally less frenetic he moved 80 times a year and of course moving the medieval court was a phenomenal operation hundreds of horses and carts were required when crossing the channel for instance an English King usually took with him a thousand horses a thousand horses across a channel at a normal residence there would be stabling for perhaps 300 horses and some of these horses were ridden by the king his family in the aristocracy but many many more most of them probably were pack horses used to carry goods either in law saddlebags or by cart so in 1285 Edward the first used 41 pack horses just to move his Chapel Royal Chapel Royal Goods the kitchen silver his clothes and his bed and these incredibly valuable objects would be packed up in massive chests bound with iron and securely bound with strong locks to make sure nobody pilfered anything along the way and of course these medieval kings were attended by a sizeable household so in 1306 the size of Edward the first household was around 200 people and these were just his servants of course so who were they well there was a wardrobe keeper he had a chaplain two surgeons two messengers two porters two trumpeters extremely important seven valence of the chamber three Grim's of the chamber two chapel keepers fifty-five people in the kitchen and 68 some Pater's and Sumpter's were the men who if you like with us in furniture removers the people who are responsible for moving him from place to place and on top of this number of people there were his affinity his family members of the aristocracy who attended him and I think towards the end of Edward the thirds reign right at the end of the period we're talking about tonight the total size of the royal household on the move was between 350 and 400 people and so moving this lot about could be a very slow process given the state of the roads and the crudity of the wagons and carts they had but the court actually achieved a surprising speed in November 1200 King John left maulbronn a hurry and arrived at Lincoln a hundred and fifty miles away in four days from there to there that's not bad Edward the first moved from Bamburgh which I can't even reach right at the top there and got down to Windsor in let me just check the number of days we've been down here in 18 days that's 360 miles slightly slower pace so these are quite big feats and they're quite you know long journeys they're making and sometimes in quite a hurry and organizing this itinerary moving between these places was a very precise task it wasn't a random series of moves it was very carefully planned quite apart from anything else the monarchy spent particular times of the year in specific places and particularly in the great religious feasts of Christmas with Easter and witson they would need to be in particular places for crown Waring's and for in particular ceremonies and they'd also want to appear at provincial residences to reinforce their and judicial responsibilities their administrative or their military policies and of course crucially have a nice time to hunt in the forests and so these royal houses and castles which you see on the screen formed the points around which the court gyrated and the king's preference dictated where they went what was repaired what was built what was extended and in each of the counties a sheriff was responsible for and keeping an eye on the royal residences in his area for organizing royal construction projects but gradually as time went on just as bishops and Abbot's and Dean's employed architects to oversee big construction projects so the King began to have in his household engineers or designers to oversee his buildings and the first of these about whom we know anything was a man called Al North who was around in the 11 50s particularly working at Westminster and under under him were the master craftsmen the mace the carpenters and others technical experts who were able to build these buildings and decorate them lavishly so so far I've characterized these royal manors in the countryside with the court moving from place to place now let me move on to our second category of residents and these we should call towers or castles places clearly designed to combine residents with the need to project power and provide security now we know that from the 11th century saxon and aristocrats were beginning to build such places here is Porchester of course in a roman fort again it's very difficult to see this it looks like someone spilled a cup of coffee over this slide here that a series of walls in the middle here are the Saxon buildings which include here a very substantial masonry tower presumably a tower containing residential accommodation for the Saxon Lord but William the conquerer scrubbed out all of these and he and his immediate successors built on an imperial scale expressing power in the language of ancient Rome and the best-known building the most important building of course is the White Tower in the Tower of London I think equally important but unfinished is its sister structure in Colchester these were palaces be under no illusion these were palaces made for the Duke made King they contained Suites of reception rooms it is a reconstruction around 1100 Oh golly I'd say the screen in front of me shows these absolutely beautifully and crisply and so sorry and but what you might Begley be able to discern here you might not be is a big hall a chamber and a chapel you all know the White Tower you've been in there hundreds of times before you don't need a slide to see it they had fireplaces with chimneys probably not going to be any better no there they are and of course they were hung with rich textiles brightly painted furniture etc now at English Heritage we recently completed a very interesting and exciting project which was to try and work out what one of these great early norman palaces actually looked like and we had a huge and complicated research project to try and work out what the great tower at Dover Castle would have been like in the reign of henry ii now henry ii built this huge great Tower Great Palace at Dover and spent nearly seven thousand pounds on it between 1180 and 1190 it was erected on the very highest point of the site and it was surrounded by a huge wall with 14 projecting towers and great gates but the great tower inside which you should read great Palace was approached by this extraordinary those have you been there will know this extraordinary great run of staircases passing a little chapel on the way up leading to a first floor entrance and at this entrance in the chapel you could perhaps pray give thanks for a safe journey you then dress possessed over a drawbridge and past a guard room and went into the palace itself and on the ground floor were the kitchens and we had a go at working out what they perhaps might have looked like and then there were two floors above containing magnificent Suites of rooms one for the king we think containing some sort of throne room and what isn't accurate in this view is the roof this is a great brick fault that is inserted in this room during the Napoleonic Wars so sort of ignore that you should have seen a flat ceiling but this idea of of textiles frieze and Thrones a sort of canopy this is a sort of very colorful sight that you would have seen a bedchamber next door with with a beard again quite open a room where many other people would have slept in many other beds that the King certainly would have been in there and a chapel also in there and in the floor above this a another suite of rooms set out and probably for the kings and guests so this was at our attempt to try and convey something of the colour something of the softness of these great early Norman palaces which when we visit them now because they're ruined always seems so hard edged and so gray and so so monotone but Dover was no ordinary castle it was built in a retrospective style these great towers these Great Palace Towers were going out of fashion and it was built to emphasize a royal gravitas and dynastic durability so these these these great palaces in in the towers were very much produced by a militarized society and they were really underpinned by this developing code of conduct which can best be summed up by the term chivalry so from the Norman Conquest the upper classes began to develop a code of behavior code of manners if you like which centred on physical prowess generosity courtesy and loyalty now quite how these values which I think you can easily understand in the context of the sort of banqueting-hall at Clarendon actually applied to the utterly gruesome business of medieval warfare is very difficult to comprehend but this very exotic aristocracy culture was the way I think that the church managed to rationalize the activities of this highly militaristic and society the way for instance the brutality of the Crusades could be fitted into a Christian world and in this cult of chivalry King Arthur and his knights were a vital component with kings and knights modeling themselves on the legendary King and on his companions Edward the first himself was a guest at the extraordinary excavation of King Arthur's grave by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey I mean it was absolutely obviously a fake nothing to do with him and he ordered the construction of a round table that still hangs at Winchester Castle today and his grandson Edward the third I really hope this one comes out just about built this astonishing building at Windsor Castle in 1334 a great circular building 200 feet in diameter to accommodate the knights of the round table and they would have all sacked the Knights with their backs to the wall this great circular table here going round covered by arches as part of this cult of King Arthur and his chivalry and these romantic and militarized ideas were very much converted into architectural style these castles were obviously designed to defend their occupants from aggressors but actually the style in which they built was increasingly stylized turrets battlements Michiko lations drawbridges and moats were just as much elements of style as they were and functional components so just as a 18th century aristocrat might have had a venetian window so a 14th century or a 13th century magnate would have had his arrow loops and the most obvious expression of all this was the obsession with heraldry and here you see a little bit later than what we're talking about but these that the shield's held by the angels in the roof of of Westminster Hall put up in Boston British in the seconds reign but from 1198 English Kings adopted the red shield with the three leopards on and plastered their buildings with it and it was very much I think Henry the thirds lavish use of his badges everywhere that triggered this fashion for everybody to put their heraldic devices all over the buildings and they built so finally with this picture of Westminster on the screen let's move on to Westminster itself because it was Edward the Confessor who established Westminster as the seat of the monarchy and it was he who created that extraordinary combination which you still get a sense of today of royal palace and royal Abbey the Abbey that became the coronation Church in the Royal mausoleum and the palace which gradually undertook the guise of a permanent headquarters for the monarchy but we mustn't get ahead of ourselves because initially Westminster was just one of the places in which the monarchy resided and although symbolically the most important it was not in any sense a sort of capital in the modern sense it was only in the 13th century that the Peripatetic household began to leave in one place of its administrative functions and slowly monarchs took less and less of the administrative apparatus they needed with them on tour as it were and left it in the care of clerks at Westminster who then had offices built for them there well absolutely tragically we don't really know anything about the sacs and residences at Westminster the archaeological evidence was probably destroyed when parliamentarians decide to dig a big car park in front of Westminster Hall an underground car park in the 1970s that wiped out any information we had about that but of course what we do have is the fabric of Westminster Great Hall the centrepiece of the Norman royal palace at Westminster 240 feet long sixty seven and a half feet wide and of course at that time without this roof that is added later this roof it's added by Richard Richard the second and the first Hall had great trusses huge beams stretching across the hall like this with the trusses creating this extraordinary open space but Westminster Hall was a piece of architectural megalomania it was not in any sense a practical solution to the everyday needs of the monarch indeed it was only used for very specific and limited series of functions it were used for coronation ceremonials receptions of foreign emissaries emissaries for councils occasionally for Parliament for demonstrating royal liberality some charity events and of course on a day-to-day basis for the accommodation of the lower members of the court as a sort of giant Doss house or giant dormitory and for this reason when Henry the third came to the throne it was joined by another hall to the south which you can't really see him afraid and by other buildings I've got a better plans I will show you in in a in a moment and these these lesser halls you see on the screen here were used on a day-to-day basis and the most important of these was the painted chamber which you see here in a record drawing before it was destroyed by the great fire that destroyed the medieval Palace of Westminster so famously painted by Turner and everybody else who who rushed to record its destruction and this room contained an extraordinary series of murals painted on the wall and in it was the king's bed sorry this is again not very good but it's good enough to see so here is the lesser Hall and here is the painted chamber here's the King's chapel just off it and in this area here in a curtain'd enclosure with lackeys of Tabernacle really like a tabernacle in a in a church was the was the Kings bed and it may well have been that this bed was placed on the very spot where they believed that Edward the Confessor had died the bed was part part bed but part shrine and very very closely linked via this little this little thing with with the kings chapel in fact it was a squint through the wall which allowed him to look from his bed enclosure at mass being celebrated in the chapel and in fact there was also a gallery which linked from here to some Stephen's Chapel the main Palace chapel up there and of course the palace was not just a palace standing by itself because it was a complex which also embraced the abbey itself and the structures of the abbey were very much part of this the chapter house for instance which you see here was always intended for royal use right from the beginning a meeting place for Parliament and for other great councils but by the time the Westminster was being developed by Henry the 3rd that had begun to be some crucial developments in palatial architecture as we've seen up until the 12th century the houses of the rich were generally an agglomeration of separate structures Hall chamber and kitchen and this was in fact why the Kings rural residences were known as the houses Laurel name though a bit like a village but from the 1180s houses began to adopt a new arrangement that was to become the standard layout tear right we'll do it with this one instead standard layout for all houses of pretension for the following four hundred years now this is the Bishop's Palace and Lincoln and what came came about was the Great Hall with a kitchen link to it at the end with a buttery and a pantry with three doors the three doors of giving access to the kitchen to the buttery and to the pantry and then at the other end of the Great Hall access to the the Royal chambers or the chambers of the bishop with a access of a porch to have access at the lower end the lower end with the kitchen which led to a dais here and then a streams passage here a screen here and then a dais at the top end there with a with a bank bay window and this layout that develops I think first in Episcopal palaces and soon becomes the the norm for everybody else let's just see here yes so there you see the ruin of Lincoln this is the Great Hall here and here are those three doors going to buttery pantry in the kitchen and that big wall there is the the back part of the kitchen its itself so what are these changes which I started off in in Episcopal palaces mean for the royal palaces well as we shall see they eventually led to a radically different sort of royal residence but although a Bishop's Palace had quite a lot in common with the royal residence the to just simply weren't the same very least a royal palace had to accommodate a king and a queen whereas bishops were celibate and lived by themselves but I think more importantly these palaces the bishops palaces were occupied by the bishop for the time being they weren't handing them on to members of their families quite unlike Kings who were wanting quite often to create a dynastic memorial and so we we start to see in the in in royal buildings and enthusiasm to create something that was a little bit more coherent so here is the White Tower they move on to the oh dear scanning and today but this sit so this is the White Tower you can see at the back and at the back here and what I'm showing you is Henry the Third's and Edward the first additions to the Tower of London a Great Hall chamber for that for the Queen a chamber for the King an inner chamber or bedchamber of the Queen and for the king and here on the river the San Thomas's Tower and built by an Edward the first and so you see that by the reign of Edward the first we start to get a much more sort of Kohi and view of the way these buildings are planned and perhaps we can see it better here at Conway castle so this is about 1300 and you can see how incredibly meet this little Palace is this is the first floor rooms so you have a sort of a hall it's a presence chamber just off it the King's tower containing some little private rooms and beyond that an inner room and a study or a closet and below that a beer cellar or wine cellar probably a buttery and then the kitchen linked by stairs which allowed things to be brought up to these chambers so you have this book because of the nature of a castle a much more compact design much more compact than you get in the the kings and houses at places like like like Clarendon and so let's move on finally to Edward the third extraordinary king living through extraordinary times an incredibly warlike King for 60 years between 1290 and 1350 England was sort of continuously at war these wars weren't Skutt skirmishes they involved huge armies 20,000 men or more fighting each other ships horses castles extended supply lines you sort of name it really heavy taxation and then of course in the midst of all this in 1348 the Black Death half the population killed you know it's all incredibly inconvenient basically and it's amazingly a mazing that amongst all this catastrophe war tax death Edward the third and continues to pursue the Hundred Years War first quite successfully and capturing the king the King of France eliciting a half a million pound ransom which is very handy in building castles which you can talk about in a moment and but then later as he gets older losing everything that he'd won and ending in rather a sad state having alienated large amounts of the population so this extraordinary background against which he really becomes one of the greatest builders of the Middle Ages Henry the third and then Edward the third building extraordinary really and his two big important works one is at Westminster where he spends thirty thousand pounds and then at Windsor Castle where he spends over fifty thousand now I don't really want to talk about Westminster a lot but here you see the undercroft of some Stephen's Chapel which still survives it's used by an MP's the superstructure above has gone but this is the incredibly lavish original Chapel that is built by Edward the third when I say original I mean innovative based on the San Appel in Palace to be the principal Chapel of the principal royal palace but although this is incredibly influential some stylistically the building I really want to talk about is Windsor Castle because here Edward the third sets the standard for a hundred and fifty years of royal and aristocratic building over a period of 18 years at a cost of 51 thousand pounds he rebuilds the royal lodgings in the upper Ward so there's a lower Ward here that Scots and George's Chapel in it you've got the Norman Motte with a keep on the top and here we have in the upper ward Edward the thirds an extraordinary royal palace replacing and buildings that who had been and put up there by Henry the third and so this building which you see an elevation of here is Henry's is Edward the third palace to us it may look incredibly austere and monotonous but the contemporary observer it was a radical building it's a huge secular facade much bigger than anything else had been built before it gave no clue of the individual buildings within it just just carried on with this repetitive fenestration unlike any other building that had been built before the Kings houses where each structure expressed a building within this is just a great block within which the buildings that the lodgings are arranged and the first enter entering through one of these great gate houses you had a choice through which one you entered and probably normally the left one you could enter since George's Hall Edward the third Great Hall which you see here in the reign of charles ii as depicted by halle and here you see the plan of the rooms themselves this is the one the bottom one here that you want to look at this is that Great Hall I've just shown you approached by a great stair here and visitors who had been to this hall would go along a choice to here pass the chapel so this is the great facade I just showed you behind that facade that the chapel the hall and the other side of the gatehouse are the King's rooms so if you're a visitor you'd have caught to the hall you'd have walked along this cloister entered this antechamber here is that vast King's a great chamber is outer chamber here is his tower here is his presence chamber and here is his bedchamber looking out over the that the Thames Valley and then here as a series of smaller rooms and the Queen's rooms and coming around on on this side you can see how coherent this is this is a building that has been carefully thought out that has been built in a single campaign that deliberately seeks to bring those disparate structures that had been characteristic of royal houses together in a single coherent whole so what we have seen take place this evening is a big transition first of all the monarchy and the country acquired a oops a headquarters this is Westminster Hall a Capitol if you like in the reign of Henry the third the exchange came the Court of Common Pleas followed one hundred years later by the court of the King's Bench and the arrival of these courts in Westminster made it both the administrative headquarters of the kingdom and the King's principal residence so that's the first thing that happens you got Westminster becoming the headquarters secondly royal houses like the houses of the episcopate and the aristocracy moved to be more compact more coherent both in design and in function standardized arrangement developed still centered on a Great Hall but with functions disposed around the hall in a regular and logical fashion thirdly the range of accommodation available to the monarch expanded no longer was the separate building which the king could retreat away from the hall but there were one two and eventually three chambers beyond the hall into which the monarch could retreat and beyond this may be a study or an oratory m2 and many of these houses had private towers fourthly standards of luxury and comfort in the principal residences like Westminster Windsor clarendon hugely increased for instance Edward the third built a bathhouse at Westminster it had hot and cold running water controlled by two large bronze taps he was also responsible for building a clock tower complete with a clock which the public could see and I just mentioned these refinements just to illustrate how luxurious these places have got so there are some fundamental changes but I think it is difficult to say that the court of Edward the third was much less of a war band than that of his predecessors and more importantly we will see when I continue next month on the 12th of March that although Windsor was big and magnificent the richest of his courtiers were building houses of similar pretension Kings were still leaders of armies of a band of soldiers and not much more elevated above them than those who were under their command and this as we shall see will lead to many complications but also eventually to a resolution under the Tudors in the early sixteenth century so I hope you will join me next month to see what happens next between the death of Edward the third and the accession of

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 22,403

Keywords: history, architecture, royal architecture, british history, norman england, william the conqueror, palaces, castles, manors, royal palaces, royal castles, royal building, great halls, war halls, archaeology, plantaganets

Id: SSAy5WAaUU0

Length: 55min 34sec (3334 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 16 2014