The Hall
The Kitchen
Accomodations
and Domestic Buildings
The Water
Supply
The Chapel
Home
hether on the motte, in the bailey, inside
the walls of the shell keep, or as a separate building within the
great curtain walls of the 13th century, the living quarters of a
castle invariably had one basic element: the hall. A large
one-room structure with a loft ceiling, the hall was sometimes on
the ground floor, but often, as is Fitz Osbern's great tower at
Chepstow, it was raised to the second story for greater security.
Early halls were aisled like a church, with rows of wooden posts
or stone pillars supporting the timber roof. Windows were
equipped with wooden shutters secured by an iron bar, but in the
11th and 12th centuries were rarely glazed. By the 13th century a
king or great baron might have "white (greenish) glass"
in some of his windows, and by the 14th century glazed windows
were common.
In a ground-floor hall the floor was beaten earth,
stone or plaster; when the hall was elevated to the upper story
the floor was nearly always timber, supported either by a row of
wooden pillars in the basement below, as in Chepstow's Great
Hall, or by stone vaulting. Carpets, although used on walls,
tables, and benches, were not used as floor coverings in Britain
and northwest Europe until the 14th century. Floors were strewn
with rushes and in the later Middle Ages sometimes with herbs.
The rushes were replaced at intervals and the floor swept, but
Erasmus, noting a condition that must have been true in earlier
times, observed that often under them lay "an ancient
collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement
of dogsand cats and everything that is nasty."
Entrance to the hall was usually in a side wall near the lower
end. When the hall was on an upper story, this entrance was
commonly reached by an outside staircase next to the wall of the
keep. The castle family sat on a raised dais of stone or wood at
the upper end of the hall, opposite to the entrance, away from
drafts and intrusion. The lord (and perhaps the lady) occupied a
massive chair, sometimes with a canopy by way of emphasizing
status. Everyone else sat on benches. Most dining tables were set
on temporary trestles that were dismantled between meals; a
permanent, or "dormant," table was another sign of
prestige, limited to the greatest lords. But all tables were
covered with white cloths, clean and ample. Lighting was by
rushlights or candles, of wax or tallow (melted animal fat),
impaled on vertical spikes or an iron candlestick with a tripod
base, or held in a loop, or supported on wall brackets or iron
candelabra. Oil lamps in bowl form on a stand, or suspended in a
ring, provided better illumination, and flares sometimes hung
from iron rings in the wall.
If the later Middle Ages had made only slight
improvements in lighting over earlier centuries, a major
technical advance had come in heating: the fireplace, an
invention of deceptive simplicity. The fireplace provided heat
both directly and by radiation from the stones at the back, from
the hearth, and finally, from the opposite wall, which was given
extra thickness to absorb the heat and warm the room after the
fire had burned low. The ancestor of the fireplace was the
central open hearth, used in ground-level halls in Saxon times
and often into later centuries. Such a hearth may have heated one
of the two halls of Chepstow's 13th-century domestic range, where
there are no traces of a fireplace. Square, circular, or
octagonal, the central hearth was bordered by stone or tile and
sometimes had a backing of tile, brick or stone. Smoke rose
through a louver, a lantern-like structure in the roof with side
openings that were covered with sloping boards to exclude rain
and snow, and that could be closed by pulling strings, like
venetian blinds. There were also roof ventilators. A couvre-feu
(fire cover) made of tile or china was placed over the hearth at
night to reduce the fire hazard. When the hall was raised to the
second story, a fireplace in one wall took the place of the
central hearth, dangerous on an upper level, especially with a
timber floor. The hearth was moved to a location against a wall
with a funnel or hood to collect and control the smoke, and
finally, funnel and all, was incorporated into the wall. This
early type of fireplace was arched, and set into the wall at a
point where it was thickened by an external buttress, with the
smoke venting through the buttress. Toward the end of the 12th
century, the fireplace began to be protected by a projecting hood
of stone or plaster which controlled the smoke more effectively
and allowed for a shallower recess. Flues ascended vertically
through the walls to a chimney, cylindrical with an open top, or
with side vents and a conical cap.
In the 13th century the castle kitchen was still generally of
timber, witha central hearth or several fireplaces wheremeat
could be spitted or stewed in a cauldron. Utensils were washed in
a scullery outside. Poultry and animals for slaughter were
trussed and tethered nearby. Temporary extra kitchens were set up
for feasts. In the bailey near the kitchen the castle garden was
usually planted with fruit trees and vines at one end, and plots
of herbs, and flowers - roses, lilies, heliotropes, violets,
poppies, daffodils, iris, gladiola. There might also be a
fishpond, stocked with trout and pike.
In the earliest castles the family slept at the extreme upper
end of the hall, beyond the dais, from which the sleeping
quarters were typically separated by only a curtain or screen.
Fitz Osbern's hall at Chepstow, however, substituted for this
temporary division a permanent wooden partition. Sometimes
castles with ground-floor halls had their great chamber, where
the lord and lady slept, in a separate wing at the dais end of
the hall, over a storeroom, matched at the other end, over the
buttery and pantry, by a chamber for the eldest son and his
family, for guests, or for the castle steward. These second-floor
chambers were sometimes equipped with "squints,"
peepholes concealed in wall decorations by which the owner or
steward could keep an eye on what went on below.
The lord and lady's chamber, when situated on an
upper floor, was called the solar. By association, any private
chamber, whatever its location, came to be called a solar. Its
principal item of furniture was a great bed with a heavy wooden
frame and springs made of interlaced ropes or strips of leather,
overlaid with a feather mattress, sheets, quilts, fur coverlets,
and pillows. Such beds could be dismantled and taken along on the
frequent trips a great lord made to his castles and other manors.
The bed was curtained, with linen hangings that pulled back in
the daytime and closed at night to give privacy as well as
protection from drafts. Personal servants might sleep in the
lord's chamber on a pallet or trundle bed, or on a bench. Chests
for garments, a few "perches" or wooden pegs for
clothes, and a stool or two made up the remainder of the
furnishings. Sometimes a small anteroom called the wardrobe
adjoined the chamber - a storeroom where cloth, jewels, spices
and plates were stored in chests, and where dressmaking was done.
In the early Middle Ages, when few castles had large permanent
garrisons, not only servants but military and administrative
personnel slept in towers or in basements, or in the hall, or in
lean-to structures; knights performing castle guard slept near
their assigned posts. Later, when castles were manned by larger
garrisons, often mercenaries, separate barracks, mess halls, and
kitchens were built.
Except for the screens and kitchen passages, the domestic
quarters of medieval castles contained no internal corridors.
Rooms opened into each other, or were joined by spiral staircases
which required minimal space and could serve pairs of rooms on
several floors. Covered external passageways called pentices
joined a chamber to a chapel or to a wardrobe and might have
windows, paneling, and even fireplaces.
Water for washing and drinking was often available at a
central drawing point on each floor. Besides the well, inside or
near the keep, there might be a cistern or reservoir on an upper
level whose pipes carried water to the floors below. Hand washing
was sometimes done at a laver or built-in basin in a recess in
the hall entrance, with a projecting trough. Servants filled the
tank above, and waste water was carried away by a lead pipe
below, inflow and outflow controlled by valves with bronze or
copper taps and spouts. Baths were taken in a wooden tub,
protected by a tent or canopy and padded with cloth. In warm
weather, the tub was often placed in the garden; in cold weather,
in the chamber near the fire. When the lord travelled, the tub
accompanied him, along with a bathman who prepared the baths.
The latrine, or "garderobe," not to be confused with
the wardrobe, was situated as close to the bed chamber as
possible (and was supplemented by the universally used chamber
pot). Ideally, the garderobe was sited at the end of a short,
right-angled passage in the thickness of the wall, often a
buttress. When the chamber walls were not thick enough for this
arrangement, a latrine was corbeled out from the wall over either
a moat or river, as in the domestic range at Chepstow, or with a
long shaft reaching nearly to the ground.
An indispensible feature of the castle of a great
lord was the chapel where the lord and his family heard morning
mass. In rectangular hall-keeps this was often in the
forebuilding, sometimes at basement level, sometimes on the
second floor. By the 13th century, the chapel was usually close
to the hall, convenient to the high table and bed chamber,
forming an L with the main building or sometimes projecting
opposite the chamber. A popular arrangement was to build the
chapel two stories high, with the nave divided horizontally; the
family sat in the upper part, reached from their chamber, while
the servants occupied the lower part.
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