The Key of Redesdale

Henry III loved building and complained that the privy chamber of his wardrobe smelt badly, and advised no one to build such a style again. A wardrobe was a small room next to the great chamber, usually with a latrine beyond a kink in the corridor. The wardrobes were used as changing rooms, store rooms for clothes hung on rods like towel rails. Rich silks and furs would be put in great chests and scented with herbs and perfumes. Sometimes a scribe or secretary had to work in a wardrobe.

I think if you click on the pic you'll get a larger view. and be able to read the legend. It is part of the edisplay board at Harbottle Castle.

D shaped towers

In King John’s reign, castles appeared with larger gatehouses and outer ditches that were deeper and wider. Nearby streams were diverted in order to flood them. The lord’s hall continued to be in the bailey rather than boxed up in a keep, whose importance slowly dwindled. They were built as austere towers, a place of safety in time of need rather than for everyday living; a bolt hole when attacks came. D shaped towers appeared, and were thought to give a better view of enemy activity.

The pic looks east from the motte at Harbottle.

Shell-keeps

Late in Henry’s reign, shell castles , or shell-keeps, appeared. High walls, sometimes 36 feet high, formed an outer shell on the top of the motte, sometimes in circular shape, sometimes polygonal. They enclosed the area at the top of the motte, but were not roofed.

Sometimes the motte was not stable enough to supposrt the weight of a keep and the walls, and in such a case, the walls were deemed more important than the keep. A flight of steps led up from the inner bailey to the shell-keep. Domestic buildings, roofed and built in the normal way, leant against the shell wall on both left and right, leaving a courtyard or garden in the centre space.

At Harbottle, the gatehouse defended the entrance to the inner bailey and therefore access to the shell keep. Towers strengthened the curtain wall, and the gatehouse was a twin-towered affair with a central passage over the actual gate and living accomodation above.

The lord’s hall was often built in the bailey, allowing for a more spacious building than could be built in the shell keep. A garrison might be housed inside the shell walls. The pic shows what is left of the massive gatehouse that once stood at Harbottle.

Hall-Keeps

Before the Norman invasion, castles and defensive buildings had been built in wood. Timber palisades were built around defensive buildings on the top of a motte, or mound of earth. Domestic buildings were often outside, below the motte, but if the place was attacked, everyone fled inside and hurled stones and arrows at the attackers.

Once the Normans started building in stone, castle architecture moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Stone curtain walls enclosed the bailey, sometimes called courtyard or ward, and protected the domestic buildings and formed a first line of defence for the castle. Any towers built into the curtain wall were called mural towers. Sometimes the curtain wall had a gatehouse tower that acted as the keep, or strongest building in the castle. There was always a postern gate in the curtain wall to allow for a night time escape from a difficult situation.

Tower keeps followed, and slowly domestic functions moved from the bailey into the tower keep. Strong, rectangular towers, usually higher than they were wide, with the hall, reached by an outside staircase, on one floor and the Great Chamber, or solar, providing the living accommodation for the lord and his family, on the next storey. Latrine shafts emptied into ditches, or deep pits like the one at Richmond in Yorkshire, said to be so deep it never had to be cleaned out. No convenient ditch or pit? Then some unlucky person had to remove the disgusting piles from the bottom of the latrine shaft.

There was always a chapel, but they sometimes remained in the bailey.
Hall-keeps appeared. Usually wider than they were high, they brought the Great chambers and the hall together on the same floor, with a latrine, or garderobe, not far away. Hall, Great Chamber, chapel, keep and storerooms now fitted into the one rectangular tower. Walls were often 14 feet thick, with slit windows on the lower levels. Larger windows appeared higher, well out of reach of scaling ladders. Storerooms needed to be vast and hold food to see the occupants through a siege. A well was a necessity. Now they were found on the inside, accessed through the storerooms.

The French called a hall-keep a donjon and the word corrupted into dungeon, often associated with prisoners.
Kitchens were often ignored. Cooking was done over open hearths and in timber kitchens outside in the bailey. Square keeps of this period, like Newcastle, often had a gallery running through the thickness of the walls at the upper storey level. Openings let in daylight, and provided a view of the countryside; a man could turn and look down on the activity in the hall below him.

Royal castles housed a garrison, always on the lower floor. If the lord was not in residence, then a skeleton staff remained: the castellan, or constable, the man in charge, his household, the chaplain, a few soldiers, a watchman and a porter.

The first pic shows the ditch surrounding the curtain wall at Harbottle, and the second looks north to Scotland from the meadows around the outer bailey on the west side of the castle.

The sad castle

Harbottle Castle was built by the Umfraville family on the order of Henry II around 1120. A major medieval route into Scotland, Clennel Street, passes Harbottle, and the Roman Road from Low Learchild to High Rochester crosses the valley at Holystone a few miles to the south. Only 12 miles from the border, it was well used to Scottish aggression.

The motte is located on the south side of a kidney-shaped bailey, later divided into two halves by a crosswall defining the inner and outer bailey.
Large sandstone blocks bonded with hard grey-brown gritty mortar made up the crosswall, which was reported as 9 yards high in 1536. It once had a tower at the Nort-east corner. Back in 1318 damage by the Scots under Robert the Bruce was so severe that no building was left at Harbottle to contain prisoners of Redesdale justice and Prudhoe Castle, also an Umfraville property and some distance away on horseback, was used for the next twenty years.
By 1400 Harbottle Castle was habitable and defensible again, and housed 20 men-at-arms and 40 archers. In 1432 conscript builders and labourers restored the castle walls. In 1435 the Umfraville line died out for lack of an heir, and the castle passed through the female line to the Tailbois family in Norfolk. Like most absentee landlords, the family spent neither time nor money at Harbottle. William Tailbois fought for the Lancastrians at the battle of Hexham in 1464, and was executed in Newcastle.
By 1509 Lord Dacre was in residence and in 1515 ex-Queen Margaret Tudor-Stewart fled from Edinburgh to the Border where she was met by Lord Dacre and escorted to Harbottle. She gave birth to Lady Margaret Douglas within a fortnight of her arrival.

By 1523 the castle was in sore decay once more and by 1538 it was declared unfit for the Keeper of Redesdale to inhabit. But as the Anglo-Scottish wars developed around 1543, the Castle was required and repairs were made. Harbottle passed into the care of King Henry in 1546. More repairs, and provision made for artillery. By 1552 it was reported as the best residence for a Warden of the Middle Marches. Elizabeth spent money on it, but by 1604, when the crowns had merged, there was little use for Harbottle and decay began in earnest. By the 1700s stone was quarried away to build new homes in the village.