Joseph Gies - Life in a Medieval Castle

To Lynn, who builds castles

Chepstow Castle, with the River Wye in the right background: At the eastern end of the castle (to the right), Martens Tower and the great gatehouse, leading to the lower bailey or courtyard, flanked on the side toward the river by the thirteenth-century living quarters. Beyond, a gate guarded by a round tower leads to the middle bailey. At the narrowest point of the ridge rises the Great Tower, built about 1070. Beyond it, the upper bailey leads to the barbican (advance fortification) and western gatehouse. (Department of the Environment, U.K.)

NORTH OF THE NEW SEVERN SUSPENSION BRIDGE, on the Welsh border in Monmouthshire, Chepstow Castle rises from a narrow ridge commanding the River Wye, a broad, shallow stream that fluxes daily with the tidal Severn from a navigable river to a nearly dry mud flat.

From the opposite bank of the Wye, the castle presents the image of a rugged and almost intact stone fortress, of immense length (nearly seven hundred feet), oriented east-west, its battlemented walls buttressed by several powerful towers, both square and cylindrical. The stone, varying from gray limestone to yellow and dark red sandstone, reinforces the towers suggestion of more than one period of construction.

Entry to the castle is through the Great Gatehouse at the eastern end, leading to a large grassy courtyard some two hundred feet square. South from the gatehouse extends a forty-foot-high wall that ends at the castles southeast corner in an enormous tower, flat on the inner side, semicircular on the outer, known as Martens Tower, a designation it acquired late in its history when Henry Marten, a seventeenth-century political prisoner, was confined in it for the last twenty years of his life. On the north side, facing Martens Tower, an array of thirteenth-century buildings known as the domestic range hugs the wall overlooking the river. Examined more closely, the domestic range resolves into two large stone halls, with chambers, cellars, storerooms, andpositioned directly over the riverlatrines.

This easternmost court is known as the Lower Bailey. Beyond it to the west, with access through a tower-guarded inner gate, lies the Middle Bailey, another walled enclosure. At its farther end, oriented like the entire castle east and west and almost completely occupying the narrowest part of the ridge, rises the Great Tower. Now a floorless, roofless shell with half its upper story destroyed, the Great Tower is the oldest part of Chepstow, originally built in the eleventh century, and until the construction of the domestic range the center of the castles life. Twice remodeled, with a third story added to its initial two, Chepstow Castle in its earliest form can here be identified by masonry and architectural detail: huge yellow stone blocks in the base supporting walls of smaller, rougher yellow stone, pierced by small round-headed (Romanesque) windows and doorways with similar arches, or with square lintels. The first remodeling, in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, marked by rough limestone masonry, added a third story to the western third of the tower and enlarged the openings of the second story, converting them into pointed-arch (Gothic) windows and doors, with elaborate carved decoration. The final addition late in the thirteenth century of the eastern two-thirds of the upper story is indicated by the use of roughly-squared rubble and red sandstone.

On the northern side of the Great Tower runs a

Chepstow Castle: The great (eastern) gatehouse and Martens Tower. (Department of the Environment)

passageway known as the Gallery, once timber-covered, squeezed between the Great Tower and the wall fronting the river. Another fortified gate (now gone) once guarded the entrance from the Gallery into the third and westernmost courtyard, the Upper Bailey, at the end of which stands a rectangular tower built to command the western gateway of the castle. This entry was further strengthened by the addition of an outer walled enclosure, or barbican, with its own gatehouse, marking the western extremity of the castle.

Despite the disappearance of timber roofs, floors, and outbuildings and the dilapidation of the upper part of some walls and towers, Chepstow Castle is exceptionally well

Chepstow Castle: The western gatehouse and barbican. On the right, the eleventh-century Great Tower. (Department of the Environment)

preserved. In size, strength, and setting, it is one of the most imposing of the great medieval castles of Europe, the more impressive for the fact that it is unmarred by modern restoration. Its assemblage represents three centuries of castle-building; its lords were four powerful Anglo-Norman families. The weathered stones speak in unmistakable accents of an age of hardihood, few comforts, and much danger, an age dominated by Chepstow and all the other castles from Scandinavia to Italy. Everywhere in Europe in the High Middle Ages the castle played a crucial role: military, political, social, economic, cultural. In England an extraordinary historical context made its career especially dramatic, and England today has one of the richest collections of medieval castle ruins of all the lands where castles appearedone authority asserts there are remnants of at least fifteen hundred.

How such castles came to be built, their function in history, and especially the life that filled them during their thirteenth-century day of glory, is the subject of this book. Because Chepstow illustrates many of the features of castle architecture and living arrangements, and because its lords were among the foremost barons of their time, the story will center around Chepstow. Other castles, in England and on the Continent, will also be freely drawn on, since the exploration of one castle, even a Chepstow, does not suffice to illustrate all the many facets of the life within and surrounding the medieval castle.