Standing on dignity
In the first of two articles, John Goodall looks at the development of a castle, the history of which is inextricably bound up with the lives and fortunes of the medieval Archbishops of Canterbury
John Goodall looks at the development of Saltwood Castle, Kent
ON Sunday, April 30, 1390, six men—john Wendreton, John Bey, John Fostal, William Heyward, John White and Hugo Peny— performed a public penance at Wingham, Kent. Walking ‘with slow steps humbly and devoutly’ in single file, wearing neither hoods nor shoes, they processed around the collegiate church. On their backs, they carried open sacks displaying their contents of hay and straw (Fig 1).
This penance had been meted out to them at a tribunal assembled at Saltwood Castle by their overlord, William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a mark of his intense displeasure at their manner of undertaking a customary duty to carry straw to his palace at Canterbury. The straw had been delivered ‘not openly in carts for his glory, but closely in sacks upon their horses backs for their own convenience’.
The first historian of Kent, William Lambarde, writing in 1570, viewed this episode as a tyranny. The Archbishop, he said, ‘shewed himself as hot as toast with the matter’. He went on: ‘What was it… for this proud prelate thus to insult over simple men for so small a fault (or no fault at all).’ As we shall see, however, this episode and its context help explain the castle we see today.
The early history of Saltwood Castle is very poorly documented. The manor formed part of an Anglo-saxon endowment of Christchurch Canterbury, the great Benedictine monastery within the walls of the city in which the Archbishop of Canterbury acted as abbot. It would probably have been lost to this institution but for the labours of the first Norman Archbishop, Lanfranc, after the Conquest in 1066. During the 1070s, he put Christchurch back on its feet institutionally and commenced the reconstruction of a vast new cathedral church.
After the conspirators had murdered Becket, it was to Saltwood they returned
At the same time, he reasserted control over the estates previously granted to Christchurch and divided these clearly between himself and the monks. Saltwood became a possession of the Archbishop, in whose hands it would remain until the Reformation. By the date of Domesday in 1086, however, Lanfranc had granted it to Hugo de Montfort, one of William the Conqueror’s most trusted companions in arms and a veteran of Hastings.
In the early years of his reign, William was concerned to secure the south coast of England, particularly Sussex and Kent. Not only was it vulnerable to invasion, as he had proved in 1066, but the ports along it connected England with Normandy. Moreover, the five most important—the Cinque Ports—were already a powerful maritime confederation.
In largely obscure circumstances, therefore, he created a series of new, geographically coherent estates, termed ‘honours’, to maintain major castles along it: the Rapes of Sussex, supporting castles at Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings. Saltwood would be a logical extension to this group, plugging part of the gap between them and the strategically vital castle of Dover. It also stands on a hill commanding Hythe, one of the Cinque Ports.
Creating territorially coherent honours in the manner of the Rapes was, however, a messy business, because it involved carving up existing landholdings. Working with two such trusted allies, it’s possible that a castle was established at Saltwood in a rather different way. De Montfort otherwise enjoyed extensive estates in the area and was also responsible for Dover, so he could, therefore, assume responsibility for a castle here without a large landed endowment.
If this is what happened, a castle must have come into existence at Saltwood before the death of de Montfort in the late 1080s. It probably took the form of an earth-and-timber fortification and, presumably, stood on the site of its modern successor, although the instability of the coastline here does raise the possibility of it having been elsewhere. In relative terms, therefore, Saltwood was
a building of strategic significance, commanding a haven with an easy passage to Boulogne, but—crucially for the future—it was a castle with a relatively small associated estate.
De Montford’s descendents kept control of Saltwood and it passed—probably by marriage—in the mid 12th century into the possession of Henry of Essex, an administrator and royal constable. Henry is generally credited with creating the architectural bones of the present castle: an oval enclosure (the huge encircling ditches possibly inherited from Hugh’s first castle on the site) entered through a single gatehouse tower with two further towers to the north and west. It is a peculiarity of all three towers that they project inside the line of the curtain wall rather than beyond it.
The attribution of the stone castle to Henry is plausible, in part because the refortification of earth-and-timber castles in stone was common in the mid 12th century. In addition, Henry is recorded as patronising— albeit very modestly—a nearby religious foundation, the failed Premonstratension priory of Blackwose. Patronage of this kind often went hand in hand with the rebuilding of castles and this could be the case here.
Henry’s reputation was seriously damaged at the Battle of Counsylth, fought against the Welsh in 1157. In the heat of battle, he heard a rumour that the King was dead. In response, he threw away the royal standard and rode off the field shouting out the news. Unfortunately for him, the King was very much alive.
Several years later, in 1163, Robert de Montfort, one of Hugo’s descendents, who contested ownership of some of Henry’s property, denounced him as a traitor. In the trial by armed combat that followed, Henry was left for dead, but later recovered under the care of the monks of Reading, where he lived for the remainder of his life.
The King confiscated all of Henry’s property, including the castle of Saltwood.
As a result, its ownership now became a point of dispute in the celebrated confrontation between Henry II and his sometime friend Archbishop Thomas Becket. Famously, Becket provoked the monarch by his uncompromising assertion of Church privilege. In 1163, according to the monk chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, and as part of wider disagreements, he demanded from the King the return of ‘custody of the castle of Rochester, the tower of Saltwood and also of Hythe’.
In the ensuing quarrel, Becket fled the kingdom and Henry II granted control of the archiepiscopal estates to one Ranulf de Broc, a royal servant. Ranulf occupied Saltwood and retained control of it even when the Archbishop and Henry II briefly patched up their differences in 1170 (despite an explicit grant by the King restoring the castle honour to Canterbury).
Thus, Saltwood was a natural meeting point when, after Christmas in 1170, Ranulf and his four co-conspirators gathered as self-appointed agents of the King’s rage against the Archbishop. After they had brutally murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and ransacked his palace, moreover, it was to Saltwood that they returned.
When the murder so spectacularly backfired, it was inevitable that Saltwood would be returned to the Archbishops. This restoration was confirmed by King John in 1199. Thereafter, it became one of many manorial seats they occasionally used and, at one occasion, it accommodated Edward II. Despite this, it was not a building of importance.
The gradual silting up of Hythe and the decline of the town undermined its strategic importance even during the invasion scares of the 1370s. That all changed, however, amid another crisis in the life of the see and the nation in 1381: the Peasants’ Revolt.
This uprising was not only focused in Kent, but its animus was particularly directed at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, who was murdered by a mob that broke into the Tower of London. His decapitated head can still be seen at his home church in Suffolk. One of the underlying tensions behind the violence was resentment at the extraction of feudal dues from a population so greatly diminished by the Black Death from 1348.
As a result, when Sudbury’s successor, William Courtenay, was elected about six weeks later, he faced the task not only of reforming his estates, but also of restoring the prestige of his office. As a castle in the heartlands of the see’s possessions, Saltwood must have seemed perfectly matched both to the task and the febrile political atmosphere. Consequently, in 1382, Courtenay received permission from the cathedral chapter to pull down buildings in several manors and sell off the materials in order to restore the castle.
With the money, Coutenay rebuilt the south side of the castle, where he created a splendid new residence. Its principal apartments —a great chamber (Fig 5), kitchen block, hall (Fig 9) and what is probably an audience chamber (Fig 8)—ran along the line of the
wall and overlooked what would have been a wide, water-filled moat retained by a dam.
The first and last rooms in the main sequence were raised up on the first-floor level, the great chamber above a huge surviving, vaulted undercroft. These new chambers communicated with two wall towers, as well as a chapel, probably that dedicated to St Mary and St Thomas à Becket, which was consecrated in 1401. It was an arrangement that closely resembled the grandest contemporary palaces as, for example, the abbot’s lodging at Westminster Abbey (Country Life, January 6, 2010) or Portchester Castle, built for Richard II in 1396–99.
As protection to these new buildings at Saltwood, a new stone outer curtain wall with towers was built parallel to the main curtain wall (Fig 4). It then swelled out in front of the main gate to create a subsidiary bailey with its own gatehouse (Fig 2).
At the same time, the existing gatehouse was transformed with a new twin-towered façade (Fig 3). It is enormously tall by the standards of the period and decorated with carvings of his arms. To the rear of each tower is a battery of latrine shafts, an unusually fulsome provision that may suggest the gatehouse was a lodging block (Fig 6). All the circumstances and technical details of Courtenay’s work, as well as his wider architectural patronage in Canterbury, make it a near certainty that the new building was designed by prolific royal mason Henry Yevele.
The gatehouse interior may not have been finished by Courtenay’s death in 1396 and its interior has been both rationalised and adapted in later restorations. The first of these took place in the 15th century, when the inner end of the entrance passage was vaulted (Fig 7). Before this, only a single vault with a ring boss had been completed immediately inside the gateway. It is possible that the present internal steps accommodate what was once a ramped approach.
It was to this new castle that Courtenay summoned his tenants of Wingham in 1390. In failing to perform their feudal duties correctly, these men were echoing the insubordination that had led to the murder of his predecessor. The penance he imposed forced them publicly to perform a menial and pointless task in a humiliating manner; it was a parody of their feudal duty and a considered return for the insolence he believed that they had offered him.
It may have been tyrannous, but it was a response to something he had reason to fear and its message—that the Archbishop would have his dues come what may—was aggressively reinforced by the castle itself.
Courtenay’s medieval successors continued to use Saltwood and Archbishop Arundel is known to have interrogated the Lollard William Thorpe here in 1407. In this period, the Archdeacon of Canterbury also castellated his nearby house at Lympne (Country
Life, June 29, 2016). In 1540, however, Saltwood was one of many estates surrendered by Archbishop Cranmer to Henry VIII. It marked a new departure in the story of the castle that we will pursue next week.