Recapturing The Castle

£8

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The shield of Aymer de Valence

Bampton Recapturing The

Castle by

Matthew Rice

A Bampton Archive Publication

A Bampton Archive Publication www.bamptonarchive.org

First published September 2015

BCA-30/A September 2015

Bampton Recapturing The

Castle

West front 1890

East front 2015 West front from moat 2015

South moat 2015

West front 1945

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East front 1936

INTRODUCTION

How can you forget a castle? Is it possible to abandon the story of a massive limestone building that dominated a village and the lives of everybody around it? Can Chinese Whispers change the story out of recognition? Yes, yes and yes. It happens again and again.

Great Elizabethan houses that were the centre of large estates, soaring oriel windows, great halls, minstrels’ galleries and a community of servants and their families are reduced to some bumps in a field and a couple of gate piers. Monasteries, where the brothers dragged themselves out of uncomfortable straw pallets to sing their offices before dawn; where fat abbots sat down to a lunch of swan and plovers; and where the pages of illuminated psalters were turned in the guttering tallow candle light, can disappear, living on only in a great timbered barn in a farmyard. A market square once full of shops selling the stuff of everyday life in the village becomes a series of houses that supersede the bicycle deliveries, the stock and busy transactions. They have gone, along with the farthings, the threepenny bits and half crowns.

Bampton Castle was not the scene of a famous siege and it did not form the backdrop for any great moment in British history. It is recorded in the slightest index entries that barely mention its existence. But one or two snapshots remain, along with fragments above and below ground.

They prove beyond doubt that at least one massive masonry wall was completed from a plan to build a large fortified house in Bampton.

Bampton Castle was both manor house and a major property of Aymer de Valence, one of the most powerful and important men in early medieval Britain. At some stage a building whose walls were 7 feet thick, 30 feet high and 360 feet long, and where battlements and arrow slits, towers and a gatehouse, made up a significant piece of fortified masonry, was reduced to a farmhouse. An extensive moat was diminished to a fragment of ditch and whatever medieval buildings were within that enclosure have disappeared without trace.

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There survives a frustratingly small record of clues and facts: a licence to crenellate; documentary evidence of visits; an antiquarian’s description three hundred and fifty years old; a land agent’s description of 1868; and some archeological findings. John Blair’s 1989 reconstruction of the castle draws together this evidence and projects a logical completion of the jigsaw. Investigatory digging carried out since 2010 has filled in some gaps and a scattering of those archaeological finds have provided further proof of some assumptions. Blair’s version of the castle draws from many sources, including antiquarian Anthony Wood’s 1670 account of the building. It shows four main walls, but frustratingly scant physical evidence of the east, south and north walls has so far emerged.

What does remain is the indisputable and visible form of the west gatehouse of a substantial castle that is comparable in scale, design and craftsmanship with other buildings of its date and type. This is supported by the presence of stepped buttresses and defined by two great arches with moulded shafts and a double vault of sharply cut ribs with once-elaborate carved stone bosses. There are two smaller gothic doorways, a spiral stone stair and a first-floor chamber with a refined stone fireplace jettied out on finely carved corbels, its design characteristic of the early fourteenth century. Facing this hearth is a traceried gothic window. To the south is the first 30 feet of a massive medieval masonry castle wall sitting on a plinth with arrow slits and battlements.

This is enough to fix the castle memory: indisputable evidence in limestone and mortar. It justified the village’s telephone exchange and RAF signals station sharing the name Bampton Castle and a smattering of house names—Castle View, Castle Cottage, Castle Close—that make reference to its former significance. But by the late seventeenth century the manor was split and the land and buildings that remained on the castle site were known as Ham Court and Castle Farm. By 1870 the farm was unified under the name of Ham Court.

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West facade as built from 1315 taken from Wood’s description & Blair’s reconstruction.

Fragment of plinth found 2013.

Remaining fragments of C14 fabric.

West elevation of Ham Court 2015.

Proposed extension and modifications including moat.

That the castle walls of Wood’s description have gone is no surprise.

Historically, as now, building stone commanded a great price. Even in an area rich in quarries, masonry was expensive. A great part of that value reflected the difficulty of transport in an pre-mechanised age.

Bampton had no quarries. Its underlying geology comprises the gravel beds of the Thames Valley, and that means there is no stone of more than a few inches in any dimension. So as soon as the walls of the castle became less valuable as a defensive structure, or as an expression of political power, they became irresistible as a source of stone.

The idea of a building as quarry is familiar. After the dissolution of the monasteries, sixteenth-century secular builders viewed the cut stone of England’s great religious houses with a beady eye. Just as demolition men bought the outsized country houses of postwar Britain from their embattled owners to be reduced to so many bricks, beams or fireplaces, so the new men of the Elizabethan age dismantled those abbey churches block by block to build the prodigy houses that expressed their own newfound power.

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AYMER DE VALENCE

Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, was a significant figure in fourteenth-century Britain. The size and placement of his monument at Westminster Abbey alone is evidence of his importance. Aymer’s father William was half-brother to Henry III through his mother Isabella of Angoulême, who had previously been married to King John. His Pembroke great-grandfather, William Marshal, was one of the most powerful men in Europe. He was Regent of England while Richard the Lionheart was away on Crusade, and through his role as head of security at court he was known as “the Marshal” or “Le Mareschal”. William himself had been on crusade and was in the Levant in 1187. This would perhaps account for the martlet— the bright-red bird on the Pembroke arms. This bird, depicted as footless— symbolic of its tireless effort and fortitude in that it will never land, is also associated with the Crusades. The legs, and in some cases the martlet’s beaks, are said to have been lost fighting the Moors.

Pembroke’s second wife, Marie de St Pol, survived him and in his memory she established Pembroke college, Cambridge, whose arms contain the same red birds. He had led the English forces against the Scots at Bannockburn and had played a pivotal role in the negotiations between the Lords Ordainer, of whom he became a member, and the Crown.

The Lords Ordainer were grandees led by the earls of Lancaster and Warwick who resented the power of Edward II’s favourite, Piers Gaveston, who was captured by Pembroke and later summarily executed by Lancaster. Pembroke was at the heart of the subsequent fight between the king and Lancaster. He negotiated this tightrope with skill. Even after Edward had been defeated by his French wife and the death (in disgrace) of her lover, Mortimer, he remained active in the service of his successor. Proof of his powerful and trusted relationship with Edward II is found in the great number of letters sent by the king to Pembroke.

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De Valence’s high status has implications for Bampton. A record of his known movements between 1307 and 1324, made by J.R.S. Phillips in his book, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 1307–24: Baronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II, shows him at Bampton only in one entry on June 10, 1311. Pembroke’s movements were prodigious even by twenty-first-century standards. He was at court in Westminster from March to the end of May, during which the licence to crenellate his manor at Bampton was granted. (These permissions were as much a symbol of royal favour and political status as an actual requirement.

The equally powerful Lancaster was granted another for his castle at Dunstanburgh in the same summer.) Subsequently Pembroke travelled to Bois de Vincennes, the French king’s forest on the edge of Paris, back to Kent, to Westminster again then north to York, Newcastle, Alnwick, Barnards Castle, across to Lannercost in Cumberland, back to Morpeth then south through the midlands, all before October.

Phillips also lists the constables of Pembroke’s castles at Goodrich, Castle Acre, Bothwell, Hertford, Mitford and Rockingham, but again his great project in Oxfordshire is notable by its absence.

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The castle built at Bampton was constructed during a period of grand defensive construction. Pembroke and his father, William, had recently completed Goodrich Castle near Ross-on-Wye. This extensive fortification contained three separate halls and chambers, which were built to accommodate the large number of retainers and followers that a great magnate would necessarily have in attendance. In time of war Pembroke had a retinue of 124 knights as menat-arms and even in peacetime he would be attended by 15 to 20. These men would themselves have further followers—servants, grooms, cooks and, one assumes, assorted female attendants.

It seems likely from the huge length of the west wall as built, 360 feet, that the plans for Bampton would have included multiple halls within that castle wall. The gatehouse survives. Gatehouses were the architectural and often defensive focus of fourteenth-century castles.

It is not unusual that this one should have both multiple arrow slits and a high-status room attached, perhaps for the use of the constable or for distinguished visitors.

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Berkley Castle. Edward II died here

Tomb of Edward II, Gloucester Cathedral

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ENGLAND 1315 The licence to crenellate Bampton Castle was issued by Edward II. He was a weak king, overly influenced by his courtiers, the notorious Piers Gaveston (whom he made Earl of Cornwall) and later, after Gaveston’s murder, the Despensers, father and son.

Edward was born in 1284, the son of Edward I, known as Longshanks, who famously presented his infant heir to the assembled Welsh at Caenarvon, pronouncing him Prince of Wales. He ascended to the throne in 1307. After a brief period of popularity among his magnates he fell from favour. The Earl of Lancaster, Edward’s cousin, led the Lords Ordainer, a group of noblemen who sought to impose controls on the unpopular monarch’s plans, not least those designed to enrich and favour the hated Gaveston, whose possible homosexual relationship with the king was nationally unpopular.

Angered by the return to court of the banished Gaveston, the Lords Ordainer captured the royal favourite. He was, for a time, kept safe by Pembroke. Whilst acting as custodian of Gaveston, Pembroke left him at Deddington in Oxfordshire, allegedly to visit his wife. (Perhaps she was staying in the chamber at Bampton Castle.) While he was absent Gaveston was seized by Lancaster and his allies, the earls of Warwick, Hereford and Arundel, and was spirited away to Warwick Castle, tried and executed nearby at Kenilworth in 1312. Worse was to follow.

Edward led a campaign against the Scots and was riotously defeated

by Scotland’s king, Robert the Bruce. It was a serious rout with high casualties and Edward fled under the protection of Pembroke. Financial troubles followed as did more political unrest much focused upon his new favourites, the older and younger Hugh Despenser. Bitter rivalry with Lancaster led to their exile and to the king’s subsequent capture and execution of Lancaster. The Despensers were returned to court.

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Edward had married Isabella, daughter of King Philip IV of France, in 1308, but her husband’s intimacy with Gaveston and his alliance with the Despensers had soured their relations and she formed an alliance with Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, which became a powerful political force. From their self-imposed exile in France they planned an invasion. Landing in Suffolk in 1326 and garnering the support of the city of London, the queen’s party prevailed and the king was forced to abdicate. He was replaced as monarch by his son Edward III and was kept prisoner in Berkeley from the spring of 1327. In September he was murdered. In 1329 the new king ousted Mortimer and in his fiftyyear reign became one of England’s most powerful and successful kings.

Edward II’s body was taken to Gloucester Abbey where Abbot John Thokey had agreed to receive it, running the risk of seriously displeasing the queen and Mortimer with potentially lethal consequences.

The disfigured corpse, hidden within a wooden catafalque, was processed around the town. Despite the circumstances, the mourners were led by the queen, Mortimer and his successor, Edward III. Later a tomb was constructed in the Abbey, with a sarcophagus of Purbeck marble topped by a decorative stone structure. It was so delicate, with pinnacles, crockets and cusping, that it might have been carved of wood.

It was the apogee of the 14th-century decorated style. This wondrous monument soon became a place of pilgrimage and in due course both Edward III and Richard II prayed at his shrine.

Pembroke started building his manor house at Bampton in 1315, an unfortunate year to begin construction. The weather was terrible—it rained from spring to September and the harvest failed all over the country. This heralded a period of agricultural failure across Europe that lasted until the relatively improved harvest of 1317. It was known as the Great Famine. In 1315 alone ten percent of the English population died. Soaring prices and a lack of stored corn meant that conditions remained severe until 1325. The weakened villages of Britain had a worse trial in store. In 1346 a ferocious plague struck first in the the steppes of central Asia, spreading with alarming speed and unheard18

of force. Moving southwards to the black sea ports this flea-borne pestilence travelled on ships’ rats and migrated to Europe via the ports of Venice and Genoa. Sixty percent of Florence’s population died that year and great swathes of southern Germany were abandoned. The pandemic arrived in Dorset in 1348 and spread throughout the kingdom.

Its effects were immense. Communities were destroyed and entire villages wiped out. (In Oxfordshire, both Tusmore and Tilgarsley were entirely depopulated.) The disease was particularly virulent amongst men, the young and the poor. The obvious and immediate effect of this was to dramatically reduce the working population of peasants. The manorial system relied on the lord of the manor receiving payment in kind, in the form of labour, to work his own farm, his demesne.

The wages of the newly empowered peasants were much increased: a ploughman’s wage in Cuxham rose from 2s in 1348 to 3s in 1349 and to 10s in 1350. This led to a diminishing area of land being farmed by the lord and a gradual move toward monetary rents and a greater mobility of the workforce. The European population was slow to recover due to recurring outbreaks of plague and economic decline. Even in 1430 there were fifty percent fewer Europeans than in 1290.

Edward’s unwelcome claim to the French throne led to the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Not long after, significant unrest among the population led to the peasants revolt in 1381. This was the historical background to the building, and rather short life, of Bampton Castle.

Pickering Castle

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Map drawn from 1864 survey for Jesus College and subsequent survey of Castle Farm (Talbot Estate).

Birdseye view of reunited Ham Court at Jesus College purchase of 1870 but before demolition of Ham Court house and ruinous farm buildings.

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After the death of Aymer de Valence in 1324 the manor of Bampton passed through his sister Joan Comyn to his niece Elizabeth (d. 1372), wife of Richard Talbot. Gilbert Talbot (d. 1387) leased the castle to Sir Robert Tresillian in 1382. It seems likely that the building was of limited interest or importance to its owners as by 1422, barely a century after its construction it was described as containing “a stone house with granges (barns) and other “ruined buildings�. During the seventeenth century the property was divided into two. One half was to remain part of the Talbot (later Shrewsbury) Estate whose ownership stretched for over 500 years. The other passed into the Coventry family. The castle site was inconveniently divided by an irregular line that ran to the south of the remains of the castle. As to what buildings the site comprised there are only fragmentary records until the nineteenth century.

Birdseye view of the site in 2015 showing demolition of modern farm buildings and re-emergence of castle moat dug between 2010 and 2014.

Also addition of mound, orchard and restored kitchen garden.

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Castle gatehouse, east elevation

Castle gatehouse, west elevation

Castle barn north elevation

Chicken house north elevation

Cruck barn as it might have looked

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Long barn, south elevation Redrawn copy of Buckler’s 1821 drawing of cruck barn truss.

THE BUILDINGS

While the great house fortified by Aymer de Valence is all but occluded there are still substantial remains of the castle at Ham Court. In the last four years, while most of the modern farm buildings on the site have been demolished, these fragments of the fourteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings have become easier to see and understand. Most important is the castle gatehouse, whose vaulted gate arch comprised the westerly entrance to the enclosure. The gateway is built beneath a shallow gothic arch with a finely cut hood mould with return. On the east side of this range (the top drawing) you can see an elaborate decorated gothic window, also under a hood mould (there is a more detailed picture of this on the next page).

To the left (south) of the arch is a circular stair, whose walls are mainly nineteenth century. To the right (north) is a vertical area of stonework which by its combination of ashlar (cut stone) and rubble implies that a wall may have joined the gatehouse at 90ยบ. From the west side (the drawing immediately beneath) the gateway arch is again clearly visible and on either side of the gatehouse, which projects from the remaining fragment of castle wall, are some finely carved stone buttresses. These are repeated on the return wall. The main castle wall has three merlons (the bits of battlements that stick up) and two crenels (the gaps in between). The third merlon was mainly rebuilt in the nineteenth century.

The archway was filled, definitely by the mid-seventeenth century if not before. On the east side, this infill is of finely cut limestone (ashlar), possibly reused from elsewhere in the castle building. On the west, the infill is of inferior rubble. This may have been replaced during the nineteenth-century restoration, certainly the stonework of the windows is of substantially lower quality work than the smartly cut work on the east side.

There are two barns of seventeenth-century construction. Both make use of large blocks of limestone for quoining, which would appear to be reused from the castle. Both have timber roofs of this period. The barn shown at the bottom of the page no longer exists, but the drawing of the timber truss is a copy of one made in 1821 of one truss of a seven-bay cruck barn extant at that date. The perspective drawing is what it might have looked like.

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It is impossible to see the gateway arch as it was in 1320. The insertion of a floor and walls in the former void divides the volume into four rooms and a corridor. Before this modification the finely cut stone ribs of the vault, meeting in two elaborate carved foliate bosses, would have been an impressive site on arrival at the castle. The central wall obscures two fine chamfered stone posts that support the joint of the two vaults. The inside face of the arch has a double-wave profile, an indication of the high status of this building. Several buildings in this area dating from 1310 to 1330, including St Mary’s church Bloxham, use this motif, all of them connected to works carried out at the chapel at Merton College, Oxford.

There are two seven-foot-high arrow slits in the remaining section of castle wall (and three smaller ones in the merlons, one of which appears to have been reused in the Victorian addition to the south of the medieval fabric).

This is in the form of four rooms, two up and two down, added in 1865 by Jesus College. The arrow-slit embrasures are semicircular and are cut into the 7�-thick masonry walls.

The traceried window is of high quality, again an indication of a generally very-high-status building. It has two cusped lights with a quatrefoil above and two blind cusped panels. The window has a very refined hood mould with returns and a neat relieving arch with uncut voussoirs.

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JESUS COLLEGE HAM COURT

CASTLE FARM

FIELD LOTS 19 house 21 the orchard 24 the rick yard 18 strip

25 paddock 26 yard 23 Mill close 16 Butt green 20 straw close

Jesus College Oxford purchased the two halves of the Ham Court estate between 1865 and 1868. Acquiring farms made good sense for Oxford and Cambridge colleges as they were generally—and indeed still are—safe investments yielding a secure income. Prior to the purchase of the Ham Court farm, the college commissioned a survey furnished by E. David of Cardiff. This document gives a snapshot of the property in November 1864.

‘The farm buildings situate adjoining Ham Court, include a timber, plaster and slated granary, a stone and tiled boiler house, trap house with loft over. Garage, stable, harness room with loft over, stone and tile Carthorse stable, and large barn, adjoining range of Boxes and Piggeries; stone and slated...range of loose box, with 5 bay open sheds used for milking. Milk cooling house and 4 bay open shed. A detached 4 bay open shed and box, with stone and slated barn adjoining, and 28

detached stone and slate 6 bay wagon lodge. The farm buildings are not good and are all covered with thatch, a considerable outlay will be at no distant period have to be incurred to modernise them. If this property can be had at any sum not exceeding nine thousand five hundred and fifty pounds, £9550, including the timber thereon, we think it will be a desirable purchase’.

This accounts for the Ham Court portion. The Earl of Shrewsbury’s Castle farm estate (in terms of buildings) is described more briefly: farm house, barns, stable, gardens and outbuildings and a messuage or farm house with several closes or parcels of land belonging thereto known as “The Castle Farm” with a small garden near thereto all of which premises are situate in the parish....

The two halves of the original manor were reunited in 1870, when the seventeenth-century house pertaining to the Savile-Coventry portion was demolished and the original Shrewsbury house was added to, with four generous rooms of the type likely to appeal to a suitable farming tenant, or to his wife. At the same time most of the old farm buildings, being in poor condition, were demolished and a new set of improved Victorian barns and steadings were built in their place. It seems likely that the seven-bay cruck barn drawn by Buckler in 1824 was demolished about this time. Some time after 1890 an octagonal projecting bay was added to the south of the drawing room.

Few improvements were made over the next century. Some minor repairs were carried out and the original panelled medieval chimneys were replaced with poor replacements in the 1970s, when the dormers in the east elevation were also removed. During the Barlow Vaughan tenancy (1936–2011) more stone buildings were demolished and a series of larger modern buildings better suited to modern farming were erected. These have almost all now been demolished.

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Bampton Castle from across the west moat as it might have looked in 1330

VISITING BAMPTON

A series of drawings and watercolours of the ruins of Bampton Castle were painted in the early nineteenth century. These were more than the amateur renderings of skilled amateur water colourists. They are sophisticated works, topographically and architecturally accurate, and are most useful evidence of the state of the building two hundred years ago. This was a period when a lot of English gothic buildings were in a poor state. Churches in particular were frequently in a ruinous condition—long term effects of the Dissolution. This was also the result of fewer resources allocated for church buildings and of the near total hegemony of the classical language for new ecclesiastical architecture.

These buildings, masonry crumbling were languishing under glistening blankets of ivy, with their secular relations—castles and manors—became objects of intense Antiquarian interest.

Antiquarians are not exactly historians; they are people for whom physical remains and archaeology are of especial interest, their concern being with places, objects, monuments, collections and buildings rather than with political ideas. Amassing collections of artefacts for the study of local history was a particular focus.

Anthony Wood, or Anthony A’ Wood as he subsequently styled himself, was just such a man. He lived from 1632 to 1695 and devoted his energies to serious research of the city of Oxford and its county. His drawing of the castle (overleaf) is the only representation of the west elevation before its destruction in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

John Buckler was an antiquarian and topographical artist who produced more than 13,000 pictures of English buildings, ruins and remains before his death in 1851. His three remaining drawings of Bampton castle are reliable and show forgotten details such as the retrained baroque porch on the east front. Other drawings are by Beasley (he published a lavishly illustrated history of Banbury, his hometown) and by anonymous artists.

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WOOD’S ENGRAVING

Wood records the castle remains with a short description: At the west end of Bampton Church scarcely a stones cast distant, are the ruines of a castle, that hath been maoted round [reported to have been built by K John] and built quadrangular. It had a round tower at each corner, which was ascended to by stone steps: and for speedier conveyances up to the said wall they were besides these four towers, a large and high gatehouse (tower like) on the west and east sides (some say on every side) of which this here represented was the west tower.

The accompanying drawing of 1664 is a quandary in that while it gives a clear indication of what was standing at that date and is a scheme borne out by the existing remains it does not look like a drawing done in situ. Rather it feels as if it were drawn either from memory or from a description. His accompanying note says the ‘castle had a round tower at each corner’ and that ‘hath been moated round’. Neither phrase indicates that it is a sketch from life. The later engraving makes a more ordered looking picture but it is drawn from the same shaky source.

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John Blair, professor of Medieval History at Oxford, who has made a study of the building, has extrapolated a measured drawing that is more believable. However, except for the remaining sections of the existing house that correlate with the drawing, it must still rely on the original Wood drawing. A small section of foundation has been unearthed to the north of the gatehouse, which further underpins this interpretation.

The projecting turrets are like those at Pickering Castle in Yorkshire and the plan of tower, wall, turret, wall, gatehouse, repeated can be seen at Herstmonceux.

Early maps and the Beasley drawing imply some remaining moat to the west. Excavations during the current owners’ excavation of the moat have followed silt lines to trace its original plan forming a rectangle of water around the site. It is possible that the changing fortunes and subsequent death (without a male heir) of de Valence meant that this was the only elevation built and that the other walls were of a less distinguished design and construction. During building works several fragments of stone have been unearthed, particularly during the digging of the south moat. These include capping stones that exactly reflect those of the existing merlons.

More discoveries about Bampton Castle will no doubt be made as work continues—a good reason to revisit this text with a greater understanding of the site.

First Floor (chamber only)

Ground Floor

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MATTHEW RICE BAMPTON AUGUST 2015