BoAr:BourneCastle:
http://boar.org.uk/abiwxo3Moore’sCastle.htm Latest edit 25 Aug 2007
Web page & commentary© 2007
R.J.PENHEY
The Bourne Archive
John Moore’s Essay on
from “Collections for a Topographical,
Historical and Descriptive Account of the Hundred of Aveland.”
Published at
This document is one of
several dealing with Bourne
Castle.
It was transcribed from a
book lent by the Willoughby Memorial Library, to the trustees of which I offer
my thanks.
It is
presented here as an historical document so the credibility of what it says
should be assessed. The reliability of old essays on history is usually best on
points to do with the writer’s own time. Moore was assembling a larger,
commercial work so it is possible that this material is based on someone else’s
research. Similarities between this and Marrat’s slightly later
publication can certainly be detected.
In later works, one or other of these is usually given as a reference
for the quotation of Peak’s description.
The castelle of Brunne (says Peak)1
ys a verrye ancyent portlie castelle scytewate neare Peterspoole, it contains
thre principal wardes. On the north side
ys ye porter’s lodge2 wch ys now reuinoose,
and in decay by reasone ye floores of ye upper house ys decayed and very
necessarie to be repayred. 3
The dungeon ys sett of a little moat4 made with, men’s handes, and for the most part as
yt were square5. It ys a fare and prattie6
buildinge with IV square toures, Rounde about ye same dungeon upon ye roofe of
ye said toures ys tryme walkes and a fare prospect of the fennes. And in ye said dungeon ys ye
Over ye moat yt surrounds ye
castelle ys a drawe bridge, ye moat is verie fresh and deipe.8 Ther is also a fare parke belonging ye
castelle.’9 This castle is said to have been built by
one of the Wake family. But in this both
Camden, Stukeley, Salmon, and the author of Magna Britannia were mistaken; for
a castle appears to have existed here as early as the year 1062,* before the Wakes possessed the manor. 10
Leland observed, that in his time “there appeared grete
ditches, and the dungeon hill
at the West end of the priory11,
also much service of the Wake’s fee was done to it; and that every feodary knew
his Station and place of service.”‡
In the records belonging to this parish is the
following memorandum, 12 __“October 11th,
1645, Charles I. ye garrison at Burn castle began.” It appears from the above,
that the castle was not demolished, until the time of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants have a tradition, that it was
destroyed by the parliamentary forces under Cromwell, for adhering to Charles
I. 13 It is however certain, that, from
this period, no mention is made of it; neither are there any records of the
time of its demolition. The building,
however, is entirely destroyed; but the foundation walls on the west side are
left nearly entire. 14
The area within the outer ditch contains about eight
acres, the inner about one15, not like a
keep, but flat and covered by a rampart within the ditch. 16 Very large irregular works are still
remaining on the north and west sides between the two ditches; the earth is
raised about twenty yards in length and ten in breadth and a ditch between
every one of those points to the grand moat.** 17
Altogether they look like a piece of ground drained, and are said to
have supported Oliver Cromwell’s batteries against the town. 18
In the inner ditch was the gate-house. It consisted of a round tower thirty feet in
height, embattled on the top, and ascended by a flight of stone steps. In the walls, (which were upwards of six feet
thick) were several niches; and the door of entrance was through a circular
arch, apparently Saxon, in height about eight feet, closed with a massy
door. It was taken down by order of lord
* See Ingulphus’s History of
Crowland, folio 898, who, after mentioning several benefactors of the abbey of
Crowland, says Leofric, lord of the
‡ Itinerary, vol I folio 28.
** Whether this was a device for
the defence of the place or owing to the approaches of besiegers, I cannot say,
having never seen similar elsewhere.
Salmon’s New Survey, vol I, page 250. 17
Commentary.
1. ↑ Peak
seems to have written a manuscript to which early nineteenth century writers had
access but which now appears to be lost.
Its date is vague but seems to be somewhere about 1500. Just possibly,
he was Samuel Pecke though, if he
was, his English style was very old-fashioned for his time. Also, Pecke
flourished in the 1640s and Peake’s description seems to show the castle to
have been in a more complete state in his time, than is indicated by Leland’s
report of the 1540s.
2. This is quite clear: the porter’s
lodge was on the north side. The main gatehouse, doubtless with its guard room
was in the north-east corner of the outer wall of the castle, facing straight
along
3. It is interesting to find the floors
mentioned rather than the roof. It seems that the place had simply been neglected
rather than cannibalized. Cannibalization was clearly in mind around 1500 when
the scrap value of the drawbridge chains was estimated (Jacob
paragraph 9) but the lead or tiles seem not to have been taken before Peak was
there at broadly, the same period.
4. This use of the word dungeon is the
French one. A donjon is a castle keep
rather than an underground prison. This moat is still discernible though it has
no more than a trace of its former depth. It more or less links to the former
lake on the south-east side of the motte and runs towards a link with the inner
bailey moat to the west, as far as the line of the twelfth century curtain but between
there and the late thirteenth century replacement wall, it seems to have been
blocked to provide easier access to the keep, when the castle was converted
into a grand residence. This strip is part of that interpreted by Hibbitt as a
‘possible trackway’ (Hibbitt
fig. 6). This ground will have been made by filling the part of the inner
bailey moat which lay between the earlier and newer walls (ca. 1280), at the
same time as the little, late thirteenth century gatehouse was built.
5. Though this reads as though
the squareness applies to the moat, it is clear enough that it was the keep
which was ‘as it were square’.
6. ↑ Prattie
is a form of the modern word, pretty but its modern meaning has evolved since Peak
used it. He meant craftily or artfully contrived or designed (OED pretty). One of Hereward’s colleagues
was called Leofwine Prat.
7. It
had four towers which will have been one at each corner so confirming the
squareness of the keep. These turrets were themselves square so in keeping with
a twelfth century design. The layout described indicates that it was designed
with its hall to the north so that it was naturally entered from the inner
bailey to the north, into the hall with entry to all else, including the
prison, wine cellar and scullery, from there. For security, there would be no
direct entry to this lower level from outside. The privy accommodation, the
solar was to the warmer, south side, overlooking the defensive lake for a quick
exit were the garrison to mutiny.
8. ↑ The
water supply was from the Wellhead and was indeed, very fresh. How deep it was
would be interesting to discover. Taking sample cores of the soil to answer
this question would be a fairly small job.
9. ↑ The
park belonging to the castle seems to have been that which later belonged to
the Red Hall, though there is a fairly large element of surmise in that
statement. Given that it existed, it had to be somewhere. It probably derives
from the period of the castle’s redevelopment as a residence, late in the
thirteenth century. Certainly the Red Hall park
included former arable land as it had very clear ridge and furrow in it (RJP1). It will have been sold off
and the Red Hall built on it in about 1620. This was more than a hundred years
after Peake will have been describing it.
10. Since
1809, it has become clear that the Ingulph document is unreliable. It seems to
have been forged in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, at some time before
1415 and long enough after the building of the castle for its origins to have
been forgotten. Forgery may be a harsh word to use since monasteries sometimes
lost their documents giving title to property, in a fire and were left with
little option but to try to reconstruct them. Computer owners will know of the
wisdom of backing documents up - before disaster strikes. The reality in Bourne
is that the evidence indicates the establishment of the castle as part of the
scheme in which the Abbey was founded. There is no reliable evidence that
either was on its present site before about 1140. A more exact date hinges on
the abbey charter of 1138 but clearly, the work of planning and building took
more than the one year to complete (RJP3).
The castle entered the Wake family by 1166, through the marriage of Hugh Wake
with Emma, daughter of Baldwin fitz Gilbert de Clare,
its builder (Birkbeck
p.11).
11.
↑ Leland made his tours of
12. According to Foster (p. x), what the
entry actually said was ‘Memorandum
that the Garryson at
13. The decay of the castle had begun
well before the Civil War and the position and layout of the works, facing
across the West Field and along the road down the hill from the west, make it
clear that the work was intended to be defensive of the town. It will have been
sensible to have put another gloss on events after the Restoration in order to
place the town on the ultimately winning side.
14. The mention of lack of more recent
reference to the castle is not entirely true. The name ‘Castle Farm’ was
retained into the twentieth century. The farmhouse is now called ‘Wellhead
Cottage’. It is not clear to what ‘the west side’ relates. In terms of modern
parch marks, the clearest masonry remains are those in the south-west corner of
the inner bailey, which might be said to be on the west side of the motte. This
seems to have been some of the most massive masonry at the original ground
level, that the castle ever boasted and a lighter part of it, the inner bailey
gatehouse seems to have persisted just into the nineteenth century.
15. This information might be used to estimate
the extent to which the site had been levelled. Eight acres is 32,375m2.
By counting ten metre squares drawn on an Ordnance Survey 25 inch map, it is
possible to estimate the area of the combined outer (East) and middle baileys.
That is the area between the outer edge of the middle bailey moat and the
inside of the outer/middle bailey curtain wall. This can not be done with
complete accuracy as some of the space was occupied by the curtain wall and the
core of this will have been used to make the moat narrower, so that in parts,
it is hard to know where to place the edges. However the estimated area comes
to about 19,300 m2. So the eight acres seem to represent the whole
area within the outer curtain wall and bounded by the Motte and lake to the
south. It includes the inner bailey and its moat so the figure is not as
informative as might have been hoped.
On the face of it, a similar argument
in relation to the inner bailey makes the one acre look like a serious
under-estimate. One acre is 4,047 m2 and an estimate of the area
within the inner bailey curtain makes it about 7,000-7,400 m2. It
could be that the moat around the north and east sides of the motte was
significantly wider than it now appears. In Hibbitt’s plans, there is a strip
of relatively high resistance which might mark the northern and eastern side of
the moat, beginning east of the gatehouse which might mark a wall along its
margin on the inner bailey side (Hibbitt figs. 4, 5 &
6).
One thing we can do is place the site
and plan dimensions of the curtain wall exactly at two points, as it is visible
in the section drawn by Cope-Faulkner
(his contexts 070, 082/005, 006 & 032 and robber trench cuts 034 & 039).
This allows us to calculate that the inner bailey moat was close to 34 metres
wide.
16.
↑ It is clear from Cope-Faulkner’s
observation that the inner bailey curtain at least, was composed of a pisé core
faced with stone (Cope-Faulkner’s contexts 082/005 & 032 faced with 070
& 006 and the former contents of cuts 034 & 039 RJP2). The use of the term ’rampart’
here seems to imply that in Moore’s time (1809), the stone facings had gone but
the weathered core remained in situ. In
Cope-Faulkner’s section, the washed-out pisé appears as contexts 081 & 069.
The demolition deposit from robbing the facing appears as contexts 083 &
027. The corresponding demolition deposits outside the wall will be below the
depth to which the section was taken and in the south-western case, perhaps removed
by the seventeenth century re-fortification works of October 1645 (Foster and RJP2), depending on whether the
stone-robbing had been done at that stage.
The weathered core had clearly been moved
into the moat by the time the
17. These works are now partially destroyed and
partially buried by the formation of the Horse Pool and the new leat in around
1870-80. They are platforms designed for mounting artillery as part of a
defence of Bourne against a Royalist threat from the direction of Belvoir. The
work was undertaken in October 1645 but the form taken by what remains makes it
clear that it was never finished. While the
18.
↑ The
design of the works is clearly one of defence of the town rather than use in
attacking it. After the Restoration in 1660, it was no doubt sensible to
interpret them as indicating Bourne’s position on the by then, winning side.
19. The demolition of the gatehouse clearly
happened before 1809 but
He refers to ‘this lodge’ but it may
be better to read it as ‘the Lodge’ since he places the lodge at the north end
of the Castle Barns. This is clearly inconsistent with its being the gatehouse
‘in the inner ditch’. It is possible that ‘the lodge’ was the middle bailey
gatehouse, of which we know only by remote implication. The bailey just inside
the outer gate of the castle, which in general terms, was the outer bailey, was
known as the East Bailey. But the combined middle and outer baileys lie on the
east, north and west sides of the inner bailey so a middle bailey is implied by
the East bailey nomenclature. In any case, we were told at the outset that
there were ‘thre principal wardes’. The division is likely to have been
somewhere about the Castle Barns site. The lie of the ground hints at a site
just to the west.
Alternatively and more likely, the ‘Lodge’
was the main, outer gatehouse, of which the site is in the corner of South
Street car park, behind both Boot’s and the Masons’ Arms (TF 0955 2000) (RJP3).
It is hard to reconcile
Archive contents Printable version