Kenilworth Castle

Kenilworth Castle by Esther Singleton

Kenilworth Castle* by Esther Singleton is a detailed historical and architectural survey of one of England's most storied medieval fortresses, tracing its evolution from Norman origins through the Tudor period and beyond to its eventual ruin under Cromwell. The castle was founded by Geoffrey de Clinton, treasurer and chamberlain to Henry I, who built the original massive square Norman keep atop a site that had already served as a Saxon fortified dwelling. Clinton's keep — a plain late Norman structure with immensely thick walls, large corner turrets, mural chambers, and a vaulted basement — anchored the inner ward of a rectangular enclosure of nearly one and a half acres, defended on three sides by a broad lake and on the north by a deep ditch. This Norman foundation gave the castle its essential bones, and those bones proved durable enough to receive and survive centuries of successive additions. The work traces how ownership passed from the Clinton family — through compulsion — to King John, who spent vast sums strengthening the outer curtain walls, adding flanking towers, and constructing royal accommodation. Henry III subsequently granted Kenilworth to his sister Eleanor upon her marriage to Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and it became the de Montfort stronghold during the Barons' War. De Montfort provisioned it with siege engines not then known in England, and after his death at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 his son Simon held it through one of the most formidable sieges in English medieval history — six months of assault by land and water, including barges transported overland from Chester, before the garrison of 1,200 men finally yielded to famine. The surrender of Kenilworth ended the Civil War. Henry III then bestowed the castle on his youngest son Edmund, created Earl of Lancaster, and under the Lancastrian earls Kenilworth became a seat of baronial splendour. A spectacular tournament was held there in 1279 under Edward I, introducing the knightly game of the Round Table. Edward II, fleeing his own barons, was brought to Kenilworth as a prisoner and received there the formal announcement of his deposition, at which he fell senseless; he was removed shortly afterward to his death at Berkeley Castle. Under John of Gaunt, who acquired Kenilworth through his first wife Blanche, daughter of Henry Duke of Lancaster, the castle underwent its greatest medieval transformation. Gaunt erected the great hall — described as one of the most beautiful examples of Early Perpendicular work in England — along with the range known as Lancaster's Buildings on the south side of the inner quadrangle. The wealth that Kenilworth helped concentrate in the house of Lancaster enabled Gaunt's son Henry of Bolingbroke to depose Richard II and ascend the throne as Henry IV. The castle reverted to the Crown and passed through royal hands until Elizabeth I granted it to her favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who spent the extraordinary sum of £60,000 transforming it into a palatial Renaissance residence. He erected a great gatehouse on the north, the range known as Leicester's Buildings, a gallery, and extensive stabling; he replaced the Norman windows of the keep with more fashionable ones; and he designed the whole enterprise around the entertainment of his Queen. That entertainment came in July 1575, when Elizabeth visited for seventeen days of lavish festivities costing Leicester £1,000 a day — masques, tilts, hunts, water pageants, and fireworks staged on and around the broad lake that still half-encircled the castle. It is during an earlier visit in 1572 that Elizabeth, hunting near the castle, received while riding the news of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Leicester bequeathed the castle to his brother Ambrose and thereafter to his son Sir Robert Dudley, whose legitimacy he chose to cast in doubt — an act that gave James I the pretext to force a nominal sale to Henry, Prince of Wales, at a fraction of its value, a sum never paid. The dispossessed Dudley withdrew to Florence, where he died around 1650. The castle's physical destruction came under Cromwell, when an army commission stripped it of furniture and fittings, felled the timber, killed the deer, and sold the walls and roofing for the bare value of their materials — only seventy-five years after Leicester had entertained his Queen within them. Charles II granted the manor to Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester; it eventually passed by marriage through the Essex family to the Villiers family, in whose possession it remained at the time of writing. Singleton surveys the architectural remains with precision: the Norman keep's single vast upper room of thirty-four by sixty-four feet and forty feet in height; the outer ward of nine acres enclosed by 750 yards of curtain wall with its six major towers — the octagonal Swan Tower, Mortimer's Tower, the Warden's Tower, the Water Tower, Lunn's Tower, and Leicester's Gatehouse; the great dam of eighty yards spanning the valley; and the ruins of John of Gaunt's hall and Lancaster's Buildings. The castle is presented as a living architectural document, each period of construction legible in the surviving fabric, tracing English military and domestic architecture from Norman severity through Perpendicular grace to Elizabethan display.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1901 · Genre: History, Architecture, Non-fiction · 3,711 words

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SIR JAMES D. MACKENZIE

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architecture · English history · medieval history · historic buildings · castle · British heritage · historical documentation · travel literature · cultural heritage · archaeology · fourteenth century · historic sites

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