Bodiam – Castle Studies Trust Blog

Bodiam – A Cultural Biography

Professor Matthew Johnson of Northwestern University takes a look the iconic Bodiam Castle.

Many readers of the Castle Studies Trust blog will be only too familiar with Bodiam Castle. It is the most-discussed late medieval castle in England, and probably in Europe. Over the last ten years I have worked with a team of researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Southampton, in partnership with the National Trust. We carried out a new survey of the building, a topographical and geophysical survey of the surrounding landscape, and a synthesis of the extensive ‘grey literature’ on the site. Our work was published in the 2017 volume Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages; digital copies are freely available here. We deliberately avoided older debates, and instead stressed a landscape of work and the variety of lived experiences of different people as they worked and moved around the castle and local landscape.

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In this short blog post, I want to highlight one point: Bodiam needs to be understood as a multi-period site and landscape. One of the mistakes of the old ‘defence vs status’ debates was to see Bodiam simply as a creation of the 1380s and of one man, Sir Edward Dallingridge. Our work suggests rather that the building and its surroundings form a distinctive place with its own cultural biography that should be understood over the very long term, from the Palaeolithic to the WWII pillbox. It is a place that has seen reworking and recasting by different social groups over the centuries and even over the millennia.

The castle viewed from the N, photo taken from the older manorial site, also known as the ‘Gun Garden’ or ‘viewing platform’. The floodplain of the Rother can be seen behind the castle, with the Weald rising up beyond and the linear village of Ewhurst Green strung out along the horizon.

The stone fabric of the castle does, indeed, date largely to the 1380s, and the use-life of the stone structure was relatively short; it was probably derelict and rarely used by the end of the 15^th century. However, its story is not just that of one man. Bodiam was a manor of the Wardedieu family, which Edward inherited through his marriage to Elizabeth Wardedieu. Alice Beauchamp, a wealthy widow and subsequently warden of the infant king Henry VI, married John Dallingridge, son and heir of Edward; John died soon after his father, and Alice became chatelaine of the castle for 35 years until her death in 1443 (Johnson 2020, 321). Usually presented as the creation of a single powerful man, Bodiam then was one of the residences of a powerful woman for much of its active use. The elaborate stacked, double suite of ‘private’ chambers at the upper end of the hall needs to be understood in this gendered context.

Much of the internal fabric, and most of the barbican, was ‘robbed’ of building stone in succeeding centuries; many visitors stopped to leave their mark in the form of graffiti. In the 1830s, ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller bought and restored the site and landscape. Fuller’s wealth came in part from his ownership of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica, as the recent National Trust report describes. In the 1920s, the castle was restored again by ex-Viceroy of India Lord Curzon; Curzon of course was also responsible for the restoration of the Taj Mahal. His activities at Bodiam included the failed construction of a cricket pitch (the selected site, which he named ‘the tiltyard’ but which was in fact the basin of the old millpond, was not an ideal choice). The later cultural biography of Bodiam, then, is part of a story of colonialism and postcolonialism.

University of Southampton students surveying what Curzon termed the ‘tiltyard’, in reality the former millpond, in April 2010. The castle and WWII pillbox are in the background.

However, it is the prehistory of the site – its enduring importance as a critical place in the landscape – before the 1380s that most fascinates me. The castle itself was ‘fitted in’ to an earlier framework of manorial site, village tenements, river crossing and wharf. The whole assemblage sits at the junction of the Weald and the Rother Valley. The Kent and Sussex Weald, with its rolling hills, heavy clay soil and extensive woodland, contrasts with the floodplains below, running out to Romney Marsh. Climatic variation and the troubled history of land reclamation has meant that at different times, the valley has been shallow estuary, marshland, or fertile fields (it will return to shallow estuary in 100 years if climate change continues). Bodiam sits at the lowest crossing point on the river Rother, on a N/S Roman road, at a point which was a ford but which had a bridge from the 12^th century onwards.

When I lecture on Bodiam, I like to suggest to audiences primed for discussion of knights, gunports and the Hundred Years War that the critical moment in the biography of the Bodiam landscape is not the 1380s, but rather the Early Bronze Age, when the complex interaction between human and environment meant that peat accumulation in the valley stopped and was replaced by alluvium. And I like to go back still further, to a time in the deep past when the valley was some metres deeper and the surrounding hills some metres higher, giving a less comfortable and more rugged feel to the landscape.

Jacquetta Hawkes (1967) famously said that ‘every generation gets the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires’; the same, arguably, is true of Bodiam. The Bodiam for our generation is, in part, a place of cultural biography and long-term climatic change, where humans have worked with and through the landscape to create, maintain and transform a place that has had an enduring importance over the millennia.

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References

Hawkes, J., 1967. God in the machine. Antiquity 41, 174-80.

Johnson, M.H. (ed.) 2017. Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages: Studies of Bodiam and Other High Status Sites in South East England. St Andrews, Highfield Press.

Johnson, M.H. 20201. Bodiam and the Canterbury Tales: some intersections. Medieval Archaeology 64:2, 302-329. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2020.1835273.

Fragile symbols: gunpowder and castle walls

Dr Peter Purton, FSA, Castle Studies Trust trustee and author of recent works on medieval sieges and medieval military engineers looks at his latest area of research, later medieval fortifications and the impact of the introduction of gunpowder.

Castle studies were once ruled (in England at least) by wealthy amateurs, mostly male (Ella Armitage a stand-out exception) and many with military backgrounds. Every aspect of a castle, for them, was determined by military thinking. The late twentieth century counter-attack turned this on its head, stressing the symbolic role of castle-building as expressions of status and power. Some people challenged any suggestion that changes were driven by the need to upgrade defensive capability; and the same argument has been applied when guns arrived on the scene.

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Those keen to argue the superiority of the English can always point to the first adoption (in Europe – the Chinese were centuries ahead) of gunpowder, and its first use for war. It’s also true that the English were the first to adapt fortifications to use guns, from the mid-fourteenth century, a little ahead of the Low Countries followed by the French, all places affected by the devastating impact of the struggles we bundle up in the title of the Hundred Years war (1337-1453).

Gun loop at the west gate of Canterbury, Kent

Were loops created for guns also symbolic? If you take account of the historical reality of the time, this argument surely evaporates in a puff of (gun)smoke. I’m working on a new history of changes in fortification in the age of gunpowder with Dr. Christof Krauskopf and we delivered a paper at the (virtual) Leeds IMC in July 2020 addressing this question. We can’t answer the question without knowing the context, and what the builder wanted. The first is usually evident, the second is irretrievable. Across southern England from the earliest days of the war there were frequent seaborne raids by the French and their allies that caused local devastation and serious embarrassment (and loss) to the English crown. People could not know when and where the next attack would come. The response was the preparation of defences designed to use guns (at the time, they were not powerful enough to harm stone walls) from East Anglia (the Cow Tower of Norwich, for example) to Devon (Hawley’s Fortalice at Dartmouth), usually adapting existing defences but often building anew. The royal ‘architect’ (an anachronistic shorthand) Henry Yevele was directly involved in the erection of the Westgate and the reconstruction of the city walls at Canterbury and at private castles in Kent (Cooling, for example). Southampton, having been burnt to the ground by the French, underwent extensive reconstruction of its defences, including (early in the fifteenth century) one of the first gun-towers (the God’s House tower).

Amidst all this very expensive work, in 1385, the castle at Bodiam (Sussex) was put up for Sir Edward Dallingridge, set in a lake and pierced with gun loops and now a picture-postcard National Trust attraction. It has been the centre of a battle lasting longer even than the hundred years war. Forty years ago, the late Charles Coulson famously demolished its military pretensions by pointing out its many flaws from a defensive viewpoint. Bodiam became the peaceful retirement home for a military veteran.

Sometimes you only see what you want to see. Actually, Dallingridge wasn’t retired: he was commissioned to review the defences of the coast, for the king, and was actually wounded in a French attack. His gun loops may not have worked very well and his lake could have been drained – but a French raiding party was unlikely to hang around long enough to find out. In the context, the most that can be said is: we don’t know what he intended.

England swiftly lost its leading position in the race to build fortifications adapted for and against artillery as it became significantly more powerful during the course of the next century, a time when the gap between what princes and their subjects could afford expanded greatly. But many nobles did make provision for guns, and kings still put comfort first (Edward III’s work at Windsor). Between the two extremes of fortresses with evident military purpose and castles designed as palatial homes, others tried to provide for both functions, with numerous examples across the continent.

Perhaps that was what the medieval castle had always been?

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Bodiam Castle and the exploration of space

Bodiam Castle is well known in castle studies; whether it was a fortified structure or built to display the status of the owner. This debate has been explored elsewhere, particularly by Professor Matthew Johnson^[1]. Traditionally the building has been considered from the exterior, with a few notable exceptions^[2], further until recently only ground floor plans of the building have existed. As part of the Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages project we undertook a survey of the building and created plans of each floor level and some elevation drawings^[3]. To undertake the survey we used a Leica reflectorless Total Station linked to download in real time straight into AutoCAD using the software TheoLT. This allowed us to view the survey data as work progressed and to record the building in three dimensions (3D).

Having the results of the building recorded in 3D allowed us to start thinking about the space beyond the traditional drawings, we had generated and we could think about the building in a number of new ways. The 3D data was used as a basis for creating models of the building in the medieval period; rebuilding the fallen walls, reroofing the apartments, and furnishing the rooms. These models can be used to create beautiful illustrations of the spaces, but they can also be used to tell us about living in those spaces.

A visualisation of part of the private apartments at Bodiam Castle

This can be seen when considering the private apartments on the eastern elevation. Previous interpretations^[4] see them described as comparable; they lie one above the other and appear to consist of a similar layout of rooms; an unheated outer chamber, an inner chamber with fireplace and window seat, and a further inner chamber with fireplace. However, in 3D they begin to look very different; the roof converts the upper apartment; making the space much more open and the slightly different arragements of windows on the curtain wall combined with the position of the Great Hall will affect the outer chambers.

Comparison between the upper and lower apartments when considered in three dimensions

We can also use the models to consider the lighting of the spaces over the course of a day. A lighting analysis demonstrates how dark these rooms are and how they change over the course of the day.

A lighting analysis of Bodiam Castle showing the changing conditions in the upper apartments over the course of the day

Finally, in furnishing the rooms we can consider movement through the spaces. Floor plan can allow us to see how spaces connect and their size. But in furnishing the rooms the movement through that space can be considered within the frame of reference of an inhabited building.

A visualisation showing a fully furnished room, a different space to negotiate than the empty spaces depicted in floor plans

These examples show just some of the ways to consider how we are thinking about the use of space; in this case at Bodiam Castle and how it is beginning to raise new thoughts on the experience of living within the building.

^[1] These drawings and the results of the project have recently been published Johnson 2017 available http://www.oxbowbooks.com/oxbow/lived-experience-in-the-later-middle-ages.html
^[2] Faulkner, P. A. (1963). Castle Planning in the fourteenth century. The Archaeological Journal, 120, 215–35. DOI: 10.1080/00665983.1963.10854241.
Simpson, W. D. (1931). The Moated Homestead, Church and Castle of Bodiam. The Sussex Archaeological Collections, 72, 69–99.
^[3] Johnson, M. H. (2017). Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages. (M. H. Johnson, Ed.). St Andrews: Highfield Press.
^[4] Faulkner, P. A. (1975). Domestic planning from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. In J. T. Smith, P. A. Faulkner, & A. Emery (Eds.), Medieval Domestic Architecture (Vol. 115, pp. 84–117). Leeds: The Royal Archaeological Institute.
Goodall, J. (2011). The English Castle. London: Yale University Press.
Nairn, I., & Pevsner, N. (1965). The Buildings of England: Sussex. London: Penguin Books.