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1. Henry III and Windsor

On occasion the Fine of the Month features a piece which helps put the material on the fine rolls in context rather than being about that material itself. In this ‘Fine of the Month’, David Carpenter and Julie Kanter look at Henry III’s relationship with his great castle at Windsor. It emerges that during his personal rule between 1234 and 1258, Windsor was Henry’s second most favoured residence where he spent 11% of his time. It was, however, more of a private residence for the king and queen than a place where great public assemblies were held. This raises important questions about its accessibility to people wishing to offer money to the king for the kinds of concessions found in the fine rolls. A more general question also arises: is there a rough correlation between the length of time the king spent in any one place, and the number of fines and offers made there, or is there a concentration of such business during the periods which the king spent at the seat of government, Westminster? These further questions will be addressed in another ‘Fine of the Month’.

⁋1In 1263 the Flores Historiarum (‘The Flowers of History’), a contemporary chronicle of events in England, described Windsor castle as ‘that most flourishing castle, of which at that time there was not another more splendid within the bounds of Europe’. ¹ The comment reflected the way the castle had been transformed both as a fortress and a palace since the start of the reign of King Henry III in 1216. That transformation can be seen (at least in part) in the surviving building and can be studied in detail through royal letters commissioning the work. While its main outlines have been clear since William St. John Hope’s architectural history of the castle, published in 1913, later scholars have added and refined many of the details. ² Most recently, ‘The Time Team royal dig’ at the castle in 2006, established for the first time that the great hall of the castle in the lower ward ran east west along the curtain wall and measured approximately 28 feet by a 100 feet, thus being considerably smaller than had been thought, a point to which we will return. In this chapter, using a new analysis of Henry III’s itinerary, we will consider the functions of the castle, to which the building works responded, and will also, utilizing new work on the authorship of the above quotation, consider the impact the castle made on contemporaries.

⁋2A word first about the architectural developments under Henry III. These were partly military. Henry, son of King John, had come to the throne at the age of nine in 1216, during a civil war in which Windsor had withstood siege and been several damaged. Not surprisingly, therefore, during Henry’s minority (he attained full power in 1227), work started on the wall and three great towers which to this day form the west end of the castle, as well as on a new gateway to which a barbican was added in 1249–50 (both of these are now lost.) Also in the minority, work probably started on a wall and flanking towers to protect the southern side of the motte, while the round keep on its top may also have been remodeled. Attention was likewise given to the castles domestic arrangements, with the great hall in the lower ward, probably damaged during the siege, being rebuilt in 1223–24. But it was not till Henry III’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236 that work on the domestic side of the castle started in earnest. Then, in the late 1230s and again twenty years later, Henry built and rebuilt apartments for his queen in the upper ward, together with apartments there for his children. He also commissioned, in 1240, a complete new suite of rooms in the lower ward, consisting of a chapel, and chambers for himself and his queen. All these domestic buildings were magnificently decorated. There was a stone lion on the gable end of the hall and within a royal seat, in the middle of the table, painted in gold with the image of a king holding a sceptre. The queen’s apartments in the upper ward had stained glass with the image of the Tree of Jesse, and windows which opened and shut onto a herb garden. Just enough survives in the lower ward to give some physical impression of this display – the window embrasures and superbly carved capitals in the canon’s house to the west of the hall, the cloister arcading with its purbeck marble shafts, stiff leaf foliage, and painted head of a king, and the western wall of the chapel with its extraordinary door studied with wrought iron spirals and signed proudly by its creator ‘GILEBERTUS’.

⁋3What then was the purpose of all this building and adornment on which Henry spent more money than on any other palace or castle? That it was partly for hard military reasons there can be no doubt. Few even today, as they drive up and down the M4, can fail to appreciate Windsor’s strategic importance, sticking up on its chalk cliff within the valley of the Thames, and commanding both the approach to London and the way out to Reading and beyond. Windsor, moreover, was the only major royal castle in the London area, apart from the Tower itself, which was often less than secure given the doubtful loyalties of the citizens. The palace at Westminster, of course, was completely unprotected. No wonder then, that the defences of Windsor were rebuilt in so formidable a fashion after the 1215–17 civil war, and no wonder that, in the period of reform and rebellion between 1258 and 1267, control of the castle passed between the king and his opponents at each swing of the political pendulum. ³ When, in September 1261, Henry, struggling to re-assert his authority, ordered three knights from each county to come to him at Windsor, rather than attend a baronial assembly at St. Albans, he was summoning them to a place which would give him absolute security, project his power far and wide over the valley of the Thames, and also, he might hope, awe the knights with the might and majesty his kingship. ⁴ Two years later, in 1263, it was at Windsor, garrisoned with large numbers of foreign mercenaries that, Henry III’s son, the Lord Edward, planned to make his stand against Simon de Montfort, and it was there that his mother, Queen Eleanor of Provence, sought to join him, leaving Henry in the Tower of London tamely to surrender. Later in October 1263, Edward and his father moved from Westminster to Windsor when launching their campaign to overthrow the Montfortian government, summoning earls, barons and knights to join them there with horses and arms. Both the king’s castellan, Drogo de Barentin, and his successor, John fitz John, put in by Montfort after his May 1264 victory at Lewes, munitioned the castle by seizing the goods of neighbouring villagers and forcing them to join the garrison. ⁵ It is scarcely surprising that in this period one London burgess, with land at nearby Horton, left it deserted and uncultivated ‘for fear of Windsor castle’. ⁶

⁋4This menace was equally apparent after Montfort’s defeat and death at Evesham in August 1265. Next month, with London itself still recalcitrant, Henry summoned a large body of magnates to Windsor and threatened to advance on the capital. The threat was enough. The mayor and forty of the leading citizens came penitent to Windsor, where they were first kept outside the castle, and then, on entering, despite their safe conduct, were imprisoned in a ‘tower’ for a day and a night until, in the evening of the following day, all but the ringleaders were released into the bailey. ⁷ One wonders if the citizens had uneasy thoughts about the fate of Matilda de Braose and her son, starved to death by King John in the vaults of Windsor castle.

⁋5Windsor’s aspect, therefore, was never less than military and minatory, yet there was far more to it than that which brings us to the whole question of how often the king himself visited the castle. Here the evidence is plentiful because from the start of King John’s reign in 1199 it is possible to know where the king was on the great majority of days in each year: with John the percentage in fact is 69% and with (between 1234 and 1258) Henry 92%. This knowledge comes from royal letters, which were issued in great profusion and recorded on rolls which are now kept in The National Archives at Kew, the letters usually ending with the statement that they had been witnessed by the king at a given place on a given date. The itinerary of King Henry III was first established from these sources by Theodore Craib of the Public Record Office, in 1923. It was first considered from a Windsor angle by Steven Brindle and Stephen Priestley, as part of their work on the castle for English Heritage, the striking conclusion being that Windsor comes second only to Westminster as the king’s most favoured residence, hence of course all the expenditure on its halls, chapels and chambers. ⁸ What follows explores this conclusion further. It is based on a detailed analysis of the king’s itinerary for the period which historians sometimes call Henry III’s personal rule, that is the period between 1234 (when he first began to govern without great ministers inherited from his father) and the revolution of 1258, after which the itinerary was at the mercy of political exigencies. Within this period, the analysis focuses on the years between 1234 and Henry’s departure in 1242 for his campaign in Poitou, and between 1244 and his departure for Gascony in 1253.

⁋6In these seventeen years between 1234–1241 and 1244–1252, we find that Henry III spent 651 days at Windsor, amounting to 11% of his time. He averaged 7.5 visits a year, the (mean) average length of each stay being 5.1 days, although some were only for a day or so while others lasted for several weeks.

⁋7

⁋8This table and chart go some way to contextualise the place of Windsor in Henry’s itinerary. Clearly it was dominated by Westminster, to which Windsor comes a poor second. Clearly too, Henry liked to spend the bulk of his time at his palaces and palace castles in the south. Westminster, Windsor, Woodstock, Clarendon, Marlborough and Winchester all come into that category. Even Woodstock, the most northerly, was only sixty-five miles from London. The only other place to figure in the chart, Reading, was of course the great royal abbey founded by Henry I. Beyond his two campaigns on the continent, Henry was taken out of this congenial round chiefly by pilgrimages to Canterbury and the East Anglian holy sites, by his campaigns in Wales and by his journeys to the north to deal with the affairs of Scotland. Such excursions, together with the numerous stop over places on all his journeys, account for the 34% of ‘other locations’ in the above chart. ⁹ This itinerary, and the place of Windsor within it, was very different from that found under Henry’s father, King John. John spent just ninety-three days at Windsor during his seventeen year reign, which makes it his ninth most favoured residence, where he spent only 2% of his time. The average length of his stays was 2.2 days as opposed to his son’s 5.1. This was not because Windsor had been eclipsed in any significant way by more favoured locations. The fact was that John travelled his dominions with a speed and frequency quite unlike that of his son and dwelt nowhere long. Even Westminster and the rest of London absorbed only 9% of his time there, as opposed to Henry’s 28%. The contrast was partly one of circumstance. The loss of the great continental empire meant that Henry did not have to shuttle back and forth across the channel like his Angevin predecessors. But it was also one of personality. Henry III liked a comfortable and easy life. The construction and adornment of the chambers and chapels at Windsor and his other palaces and palace castles was the result.

⁋9Our understanding of the place of Windsor in Henry’s itinerary, and why it was so favoured, can be taken further by considering the circumstances of his visits. ¹⁰ These have two main patterns. The first shows how perfectly situated Windsor was between Westminster and Henry’s favourite palaces and palace castles to the west. For beyond Windsor lay Reading and then the routes both to and from Woodstock (often via the castle of Henry’s brother at Wallingford) and to and from Winchester, Clarendon and Marlborough. Again and again Henry’s stays at Windsor were part of an itinerary going one way or the other along this east-west axis. Once Henry reached Windsor coming from the west, he very rarely went anywhere onwards other than to Westminster, a remarkable testimony to the latter’s pulling power. The second pattern starts and finishes with Westminster, for it was Henry’s frequent practice to leave his palace there, spend time at Windsor, and then go back to Westminster. Sometimes Henry made the journey to and from Westminster direct, but equally, he might make brief stays along the way at his small palace at Kempton or at Merton priory. Occasionally too, the tour would take in Guildford castle and reach out as far as Reading. Some combination of this Westminster-Windsor-Westminster pattern occurs at least thirty-four times during the course of Henry’s personal rule. ¹¹

⁋10It is absolutely clear from both these patterns that Henry liked living at Windsor. Occasionally, when moving along the east-west axis, he might make merely an overnight stop, but more often he was there for longer, as he was also when he came out to spend time there before returning to Westminster. As we have seen the mean average of his stays was 5.1 days, and often they lasted much longer. What then was the attraction? It is worth starting here by reflecting on what Windsor was not, because that also helps explain why it ran Westminster such a poor second. In the first place Windsor was not an ecclesiastical centre with a great church and a saint to whom Henry could intercede. Westminster, by contrast, had Edward the Confessor, and an abbey Henry was rebuilding in his honour. By the same token, Windsor was unsuitable for the great ecclesiastical festivals, and Henry rarely spent them there. Secondly, Windsor was not the seat of government. It was Westminster which was the home of the Exchequer and the court of common pleas. It was likewise Westminster which was the usual venue for parliament. Indeed, in a new analysis by John Maddicott of parliaments and great councils held between 1235 and 1257, only three of the fifty four met at Windsor, as opposed to over forty at Westminster. ¹²

⁋11This clarifies Windsor’s position. In Henry’s peacetime years, it was not a place for great public events, religious or secular. Rather it was a private domestic palace castle, for the king, his household and the immediate court. One suspects indeed, that the frequent visits to Windsor between stays at Westminster were to ‘get away from it all’, or at any rate to get away from the pressures of business and the ever present public eye. At Windsor Henry could relax in the privacy of chambers and chapels protected from clamorous petitioners by castle walls, as Westminster was not. He could also relax in the great park, again unparalleled at Westminster, using it perhaps less for hunting (for Henry was little known for that) than for promenades and picnics. Indeed, was it this rural aspect of Windsor to which the Flores Historiarum alluded when describing it as the ‘most flourishing’ of castles? The Latin word here, hard to translate, is vernantissumum, the superlative of vernus meaning verdant, blooming, flourishing, spring like, and hence the English word ‘vernal’. It was certainly not a term one could apply to the Tower of London.

⁋12Something of the relative quietude of Windsor is reflected in the household rolls, the rolls which recorded the costs of the royal household’s daily food, drink and stables. Thus in July 1260 the average daily cost of four weeks at Westminster was £20. The daily cost of the week at Windsor which followed (Henry travelling via Kempton) was £13. This was equally the rate of Windsor’s daily costs early in October before Henry moved to Westminster for the greatest event of his religious year, the feast on the Translation of Edward the Confessor on 13 October. The costs on that day approached £230. ¹³ Windsor’s role as a cherished domestic residence helps, of course, to explain why the royal apartments were built and rebuilt to make them all the more comfortable and congenial. It also explains why the great hall in the lower bailey was left aisleless and comparatively modest in size. Since Windsor rarely hosted great public events a larger one was unnecessary.

⁋13This domestic role of Windsor castle was intimately bound up with Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, whom, as we have seen, he married in 1236. The building of apartments for her in both the upper and lower ward was because Windsor, as a great deal of documentary evidence shows, became the primary base for herself and her children. (The first, the eventual, Edward I, was born in 1239, and four more followed down to 1253.) ¹⁴ Almost certainly many of the visits Henry made to Windsor between periods at Westminster were to be with the queen. Just how much time Eleanor spent at Windsor on her own probably varied, but it could be considerable, as is shown by her own household rolls which cover part of 1252 and 1253 (the only ones to survive), the rolls, that is which record the daily costs of her own food, drink and stables. Thus in 1252 she was there alone from 23 August to 29 September before moving towards Westminster to join her husband for the feast of the Confessor. In 1253, after Henry had left Windsor for Westminster, Eleanor, in the early stages of pregnancy, remained at the castle until 20 June, with Henry making two brief visits, on the first coming from and going back to Westminster. ¹⁵

⁋14All of this brings us in conclusion to the impact of Windsor on contemporaries, and the encomium from the Flores Historiarum with which this article began: ‘that most flourishing castle, of which at that time there was not another more splendid within the bounds of Europe’. This striking claim is well known. ¹⁶ What has not been known is that it comes from someone well placed to make it. It has been assumed almost universally that the Flores Historiarum was written at this point by a monk of St Albans who was continuing the chronicle of the abbey’s great historian, Matthew Paris. In fact, as recent work has shown, the Flores here were actually being written by a monk of Pershore, who was himself deriving much of his information from his abbot Eleurius. Now Eleurius was a remarkable man. He was a monk of Fécamp in Normandy who had crossed the channel to look after his abbey’s interests in England. In the 1250s (and hence his promotion to the abbacy of Pershore), he rose very rapidly in the service of the king, becoming the escheator south of the Trent, and then a baron of the Exchequer. Eleurius kept in close touch with Normandy, and also knew other parts of France, having been on a pilgrimage to Pontigny. He was thus a man of international experience, and almost certainly supplied the Flores chronicler with his detailed information about the ‘European’ dimension of the 1263–1265 English civil war. When, therefore, that chronicler commented that there was no finer castle than Windsor within the bounds of Europe he knew what he was talking about.

⁋15What then impressed Eleurius? It was certainly in part the castle’s military might. The very context of the comment was military, for it comes when narrating the Lord Edward’s intention to make a stand at Windsor with his foreign mercenaries in 1263. The Pershore chronicler, moreover, again doubtless getting his information from Eleurius, was interested in castle fortifications for he comments on how Simon de Montfort had rebuilt Kenilworth in a remarkable fashion and had fortified it with ‘machines’ hitherto unseen in England. ¹⁷ If the strength of Windsor projected military power during war, it equally projected psychological power during peace. This was a period when castles were supposed to ‘fight’, an age when no one would have been impressed by the show castles of the later middle ages which merely looked the part.

⁋16Eleurius, however, had done far more than simply gape at Windsor from without. Like any top royal official he had also been within. Indeed, we can see him there in September 1251 attesting a royal charter with other royal servants and favourites. ¹⁸ For Eleurius, therefore, in terms of impact, Windsor’s walls and wall paintings worked together. Both made it ‘splendid’. We have said that Windsor was a private domestic castle, unaccustomed to great assemblies. Yet that did not make its projection of the majesty and mystique of kingship any less important. For the people who exercised in the verdant park, walked through the new cloister with its images of royal heads, worshipped in the new chapel with its door by Gilebertus, and dined in the new hall with its golden figure of a king painted behind the royal seat, were those whom it was vital to impress – on the one hand the king’s own servants, like Eleurius, and on the other the great and good of the realm who visited the king at the castle. The witness lists to royal charters show that most of the leading bishops and barons were visitors at one time or another, even outside the few parliaments which were held there. The castle’s private nature made such access all the more privileged, and the king’s guests were royally entertained. The costs of the daily fare may have been less than at Westminster, reflecting the smaller size of the court, but they were still considerable. The £13 a day averaged for the week at Windsor in August 1260 was only two pounds less than the annual income required to qualify as a knight. Not even the greatest earl lived on anything like this scale.

⁋17Henry also did his best to make up for Windsor’s lack of church and saint. His new chapel in the lower bailey was dedicated to Edward the Confessor and staffed by four chaplains. By the early 1250s there were as many as eight chaplains in the castle although the number was later scaled down. ¹⁹ When Henry was at the castle, he continued his usual practice of feeding 150 paupers every day when the queen was with him (as she usually was). For the first three days after his arrival with Eleanor in August 1260, he fed 200 a day, a number which he increased to 300 on the vigil of the feast of the Assumption (the kind of lesser feast that might be celebrated at the castle). ²⁰ On other feast days, when absent, the king could order all the halls of the halls of the castle to be filled with feasting paupers. ²¹ Thus Windsor was home not merely to the royal family, to ministers and magnates, but also, in Christ-like fashion, to the poor, praying assiduously for the king’s welfare. At Windsor, as elsewhere, Henry made very clear that his was a kingship sanctioned and guided by the hand of God. And it had its effect. When the Montfortian captain, John fitz John, took over in 1264, a member of the displaced garrison refused to join him: he would take no oath ‘save for the benefit of the king and his sons’. ²² One wonders too about the knights summoned to Windsor in 1261. They might certainly, as we have suggested, have been awed by Windsor’s power, but they would also see at first hand the king’s benevolent almsgiving. They would thus be all the more likely, as Henry put it, to ‘see and understand that we propose to do nothing save what we know is for the honour and common utility of our kingdom’. ²³

⁋18Windsor thus projected both the might and majesty of kingship. It equally projected a powerful image of queenship. While at Windsor, Eleanor maintained herself in some state. Her household departments mirrored those of the king so that her rolls record the costs of her pantry, buttery, kitchen, scullery, saucery, almonry, hall and chamber as well as stables. The daily costs of her household’s food, drink and stables seem to have run at half, or over half, of that of the king which meant they were a good deal larger than that of all but the wealthiest earls. On Whitsunday 1253, which Eleanor, celebrated at Windsor without her husband, her costs rose to over £16. ²⁴ What made the atmosphere all the more secure and sympathetic was that through much of this period, the castellans of Windsor were her own men, being drawn from her mother’s house of Savoy or its servants and connections. One can understand Steven Brindle’s comment that ‘for the baronial opposition, Windsor must have been one of the principle symbols of the Queen and her Savoyard faction, and their foreign grip on the government’. ²⁵ Yet there was another side. The queen and her party integrated far better into English life than the king’s Poitevin half brothers, and indeed were not marked out for attack until 1263. At Windsor, Eleanor, as many must have known, was surrounded by her offspring. Matthew Paris remarked quite naturally that she was living there with her children when a great storm damaged the castle in 1251. ²⁶ The stained glass window with the tree of Jesse, which Henry had placed in the gable of one of her chambers, pointed to her duty to continue the royal line. At Windsor, Eleanor demonstrated her triumphal success in fulfilling this primary function of queenship. ²⁷

⁋19Windsor castle under Henry III and Queen Eleanor, the castle Abbot Eleurius so admired, was thus both a palace as it has always remained, and also a castle in real fighting sense, as it gradually ceased to be in the later middle ages. In the reign of Henry III, serving both functions in ‘splendid’ fashion, Windsor was at its apogee.