Castles by Marc Morris

Author:Marc Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

While Edward was rich, however, he wasn’t super-rich. His estates were worth at least £200 a year, but that placed him on only the lower rungs of the aristocracy. He was a prosperous knight, but still a knight and not a titled nobleman. Men like him generally had to content themselves with manor houses rather than castles, because castles cost thousands and thousands of pounds. This, then, is the first part of the mystery—how could Edward Dallingridge, knight, afford to pay for Bodiam Castle?

Several options were open to him. It is quite possible that he borrowed some money, either locally from friends or from moneylenders in London. We know that from 1381, as part of his drive to develop the Bodiam estate, he began to sell off his wife’s properties in the Midlands, and this would have raised quite a lot of cash.

Edward had also made plenty of money from another source. Once again, the clues lie in the castle’s heraldry. Around the back of the castle, above the doorway of the rear gatehouse, are three more stone shields.

Those on the left and right are blank, but the angled one in the middle has a heraldic design carved onto it. It is the coat of arms of Robert Knowles, perhaps the most notorious individual of his age. Born and bred in Cheshire of peasant stock, Knowles, like Dallingridge, had taken the quick route to fame and riches. His rapid rise was due to his skill as a soldier—a soldier of fortune. He owed his reputation to his own savagery; even in a brutal age, Knowles stood out as a man more brutal than any other. His fortune had been gained through making war in France—raiding cities, towns, and villages, burning and destroying, plundering and looting, ransoming and killing. French peasants, it was said, would throw themselves into the river at the very mention of his name.

His arms are displayed over the postern gate at Bodiam because, for a time, he was Edward Dallingridge’s captain in a conflict known as the Hundred Years’ War. Edward had been in France with Knowles, indulging in the same get-rich-quick schemes, and committing the same atrocities. Pretty little Bodiam, England’s favorite fairy-tale castle, was built with blood money.

The Hundred Years’ War is not, obviously, a contemporary term. It was, like most convenient historical tags, invented in the nineteenth century by a French historian to describe a series of intermittent wars between England and France in the late Middle Ages. As such tags go, the Hundred Years’ War is tolerably accurate (the wars started in 1337 or 1340, depending on your viewpoint, and lasted until 1453) and perfectly serviceable.

The origins of the conflict can be traced as far back as the Norman Conquest. William the Conqueror may have been king of England, but he was also duke of Normandy, and he and his successors continued to hold extensive lands in what is now modern France. These reached their greatest extent under Henry II who, through a

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