Going Medieval: Inside The Lives Of Medieval Lords And Priests

Life in the medieval period looked like lots of different things to lots of different people. Your place in society could dictate everything, from what food you ate, where you could go, how educated you were, and even how long you were likely to live for. Across this series, we'll discover what life was like for those that worked, those that earned, those that learned, and those that played in medieval England. When we talk about medieval Europe, it's almost impossible to talk about one of the most important subsections of medieval society, those who pray. And by that, I mean the clergy. There's a lot of different ways to be a clergy member. In general, it means that you've dedicated your life to religion and the church more specifically. We have to remember that in medieval Europe, when we're talking about Christianity, we're actually talking about Catholicism. And in many ways, the story of medieval Europe is the story about the Catholic church coming to primacy. Probably the most common form of clergy member is just parish priests. Parish priests are responsible for giving sermons to their community in the vernacular language to explain what it is they just heard. The other thing that parish priests do is give sacraments. Sacraments are particularly important because partaking in them is, by definition, what makes one a Christian. These are things like baptism, reconciliation or confession, marriage, eucharist, and last rites, which is what is performed right before somebody dies. Parish priests are responsible, therefore, for all these incredibly important Christian things, and parish priests are very common as a result. You need to make sure that there are enough parish priests that they can actually administer to everyone in their area. So, in the countryside, in peasant communities, you'll have one church that will see to, oh, maybe 50 people or so, and they'll be dotted around in the countryside as a whole. We are here standing on top of Castle Headingham in Essex. This is a great example of how parishes work in the countryside. As you can see here, immediately, there's one parish church in the town surrounding Headingham Castle. Beyond there, you can see another on the horizon. If you live three miles away every Sunday, you're not going to want to have to walk or take a horse all the way over to another parish. It can be a really long way on a Sunday morning. This means that it takes out all of the travel and you have a dedicated priest in your community who knows what's going on with you. So, parishes work differently in different places. In cities, there will be many more parishes in a much smaller space. That's because there are a larger population to see to. The guild members in London are going to want to make sure they're getting top-notch pastoral care, and so there may be one church every few blocks to make sure that every single person in that area is getting everything that they need. We are here on top of the initial early medieval tower of St. Michael's in the North Gate. What you can see from up here is how dense a city Oxford actually is. Obviously, it's larger now than it would have in the medieval period, but still, this is an outstandingly large place. This is because all of the colleges and all the various clergy members who have set up shop here attract more and more people to cater to them and cater to the community as a whole. What you can also see up here are the various steeples that dot the skyline. These are all individual parish churches, so they're seeing to the needs of the general community within Oxford itself. They want to have Eucharist given to them. They want to have their children baptized. They have to be buried somewhere, and it's the parish churches that see to that. John, thank you so much for meeting me and bringing us here to St. Michael's at the North Gate. It's a fantastic church. It's the earliest church in Oxford, and I'd be glad to show you what it's like inside. I think that it's probably one of the most unique churches in England, certainly, but I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about its functions as a parish church in the medieval period. This is one of those towns characteristic of high medieval England where you have a very great number of churches crowded into a very small space. In Doomsday Oxford, that's at the time of the Doomsday Book in 1086, there were five named churches in Oxford, and St. Michael's was one of them. By 1200, there are 20 churches, nothing like Norwich, which has 61 churches, and London, which has 200, but given that Oxford is much smaller than any of those places, 20 within a small area is quite a lot. The parishes are all small and very often have fairly low incomes. St. Michael's had a parish which ran inside the north side of the wall and didn't take in a great deal of commercial property, and of course it's commercial property from which the church derives a large part of their income. One of the problems about medieval churches is knowing how they were founded, and that's something we're very ignorant about, but there are various suggestions, of which the most likely, probably, in a town like Oxford is that they were founded by groups of neighbours. We can't prove that, but it seems to be the case in continental towns that that's often the case. An alternative explanation is that they may have been founded by local lords. Lords in the countryside very often had town property and would found town churches, probably with the object, amongst other things, perhaps primarily, of making a profit. Above the regular parish clergy, there's a next level, the bishops or the princes of the church. Bishops are kind of like regional managers. They oversee all of the parish priests in their vicinity, and they do so specifically within a cathedral. The thing about a cathedral is that it doesn't just mean a large church. It's a name for the administration that happens underneath the bishop. There has to be somewhere for the parish priests to go to learn. It's also a place where the bishop might be overseeing local schools, where anyone local can go and receive a tutelage in Latin. When I say anyone, I mean any boys. Women are usually excluded from this, but every cathedral is also a functioning school. Cathedrals are also often sites of worship. They'll have very specific relics of saints that people will go and pray to, and it might be somewhere that people go on pilgrimage. For example, the Canterbury Tales, one of the most widespread pieces of English medieval literature, is all about a group of pilgrims going from London down to Canterbury to pray at the tomb of Thomas a Beckett, a very, very important medieval saint. We know a lot about what happens from the 13th century onwards, because it's in the 13th century that we have a great deal of episcopal legislation, legislation drafted by bishops. Bishops are very keen on seeing that local priests do their job in relation to the congregation, and what that involves, for example, is seeing that parish priests teach the basic Christian doctrines, see that everybody knows the Creed, the Pater Noster, the Our Father, the Ten Commandments, in the vernacular, which is interesting. How far all this was carried through, of course, we can't always be sure about, but it's in that period rather than in the 12th century that pastoral care really takes off at a local level. 12th century, I think, much less so. Over and above bishops, there are then what we call archbishops. As the name indicates, they are more important bishops, and the most important archbishop in England is the archbishop of Canterbury. So they are the managers to the regional managers that are bishops, and oftentimes they'll be in even more fancy cathedrals. Above archbishops are cardinals, and cardinals are people who work directly in the Roman curia underneath the pope. In order to become a cardinal, the pope specifically has to select you to become one. Cardinals have a number of specific functions, the most important of which is that they are responsible for electing the pope when the last pope dies. Oftentimes, cardinals are also intermediaries with people back home. A local cardinal, for example, who starts off as the archbishop of Canterbury might be someone who's particularly well suited for translating messages from Rome back to England later. And then, of course, at the top of all of these is the pope. The pope is God's representative on earth, and he's elected by cardinals to oversee the church as a whole. A good way of thinking about the pope is that he's sort of the king of the church. He is the person with whom all of the power eventually stops, and he has ultimate say over most religious matters. The higher echelons of the church, such as bishops and cardinals, and especially popes, don't come from common families. While it's theoretically possible, for example, for someone from a peasant family to become a priest and not uncommon, it's extraordinarily unlikely that they are going to rise so far through the echelons of the church that they will one day be bishop. Instead, we tend to see that noble or royal families feed to the higher parts of the church. It's not uncommon if you're a younger son within a noble family that you will be sent to the cathedral school to be trained with the understanding that it's possible that you may become someone like a bishop. In this way, powerful noble families are able to exercise religious power as well as worldly power in their own households. Outside of the hierarchy are what we call non-regular clergy members. The largest group of non-regular clergy members are monks and nuns. We've come inside Denny Abbey because I want to talk about the original settlers who were clergy members here, the Benedictines. We have all these clues and hints about what was here before the initial huge abbey building. One of these clues is right here in the wall, this pillar here, and it's from the original Benedictine church that was founded here in the 12th century. The Benedictine monks are really interesting because they're the ones who sort of came up with the initial idea of living in a community outside of the regular world. Monks refer to this as ora et labore, or prayer and work, and the idea is if you take yourself out of normal society completely, you can focus entirely on the Lord. Monks, therefore, will join a monastery and they will pray multiple times a day, and they will also involve themselves in work that they see as serving God. A lot of the time for the medieval world, this specifically means copying out books, because remember, this is a world without a printing press, so they're out there making sure that books stay in circulation and can get to people in order to praise God. Later in the medieval period, though, a new type of monk arises. These are called the mendicant orders. They start with Saint Francis of Assisi in the 13th century, and instead of deciding to leave the world to work behind walls for the glory of God, they decide that they are going to go out into the world to administer directly towards the people. Mendicant technically means beggar, and the idea here is that the mendicant orders have devoted themselves to the concept of apostolic poverty. They want to live like Jesus and the apostles did, and they want to be out in society asking for an exchange of goods for their preaching. So they will say to you, I will give you a sermon on any number of subjects, and in return, please make sure that I eat for the night. So in the medieval world, when mendicants came along, this was almost like a new form of entertainment. People wanted to hear new and exciting religious views that didn't come from the parish priests that they've grown up under and known their entire lives. These are people with different experiences who had new things to say about something that was very important in the medieval world, which is religion. Parish priests often see this as the mendicants intercepting tithes that would rightfully go to the local church. As a result of this, sometimes parish priests will attempt to block mendicants from preaching in their own town, just to make sure that the money is going to the right place. They also might object to what the mendicants have to say. If you're a very well-to-do parish priest, you might not want someone coming in who's preaching apostolic poverty and the idea that everyone in the clergy should be living in poverty. A lot of people were flocking to the priors' churches to hear sermons, who were, of course, very pastorally minded. Great preachers would preach in the vernacular. The parish church had somehow to rival the friars and to provide the sort of services which the friars could provide. You've got to remember, of course, in the Middle Ages that the service is entirely in Latin, and the priest is facing the altar for most of the time, so facing away from the congregation. So how much direct contact there was between priest and congregation is difficult to say. Just behind me here, we have some really great examples of the varying kinds of arches you can get across medieval architecture. You'll notice here on the right, there's the really big rounded arch. We know that dates to the 12th century, and that's what we call a Romanesque arch. It's called Romanesque specifically because they're trying to make it look Roman. That's why you have the big pillars on either side, and the roundedness is supposed to bring to mind and conjure images of Rome and the greatness of the empire. Medieval people loved Rome, and they liked connecting themselves to that idea. On this side of the abbey, we have some really new and exciting architecture, and this is all established when the poor clairs take over the area. In the 14th century, this land is given to a local countess who uses it to establish one of her favorite orders, the poor clairs. As part of this, the poor clairs build some wonderful new gothic architecture. General rule of thumb, if it has a peak in the arch, that means it's gothic. Another great rule of thumb with arches like this is you can kind of tell when they were built based on how many fingers you can fit in the arch, more or less. This arch tells you that it's 14th century because it more or less follows the peak of four fingers on a hand. Here at St. Bart's in London, we can see an example of a 15th century arch. You can fit all five fingers of your hand inside of it, but it's still got a tiny little bit of a gothic peak to it. Another great little detail here are these floor tiles which are still extant in the abbey, and this is a nice reminder because a lot of the time when we see medieval abbeys, they're in states of disrepair, and that can make us think that the people within them were walking around on dirt floors because, well, we're walking around on dirt floors when we visit them. But that's not always the case. Specifically within churches, we would often see really great ornate terracotta tiles, and this is a reminder of exactly what was here before. The last kind of non-regular clergy who you might not expect are actually scholars and students. Anyone who works at a university is necessarily a member of clergy, and crucially, so were all university students. Just like now, university students in the medieval period were notoriously rowdy. They would get in trouble with local communities for things like running out on their bar tabs, not respecting the locals, flirting too much with the girls, and being a member of the clergy meant that when they did so, they wouldn't be seen in local courts. Instead, the clergy would look after other members of the clergy, so if you don't pay your bar tab and you get in trouble with a local innkeeper, it's much better for you to go in front of a clergy court who will give you a slap on the wrist and send you back to class than it is for you to go in front of the city constabulary where you'll be fined and possibly thrown in jail. The fact that students are clergy members is actually an origin of an interesting phrase that we still use now to talk about relationships between universities and the cities that they're in, and this is town-gown relations. Town, of course, means anybody within the town, but gown refers to these students who are members of the clergy who are wearing clergy gowns. With all these different types of clergy, it's really common for them to also be overlapping in different ways. This is especially true of places like university towns. Here in England, of course, the two university towns are Oxford and Cambridge, both of which were established in the medieval period. This is because universities themselves were established during the medieval period. More specifically, universities come into being in the high medieval period in the 11th century. The way that many universities work is that the individual colleges within them will be connected to a particular order of monks. This is true, for example, of Canterbury College in Oxford, which we want to talk about particularly today. Canterbury College started out specifically connected to Benedictine monasteries, so Benedictines from all over England would send their brightest pupils to Canterbury to study at the University of Oxford. One such Benedictine was a man called Thomas Wycliffe, who will become very, very important within Oxford generally, and Europe as a whole. We're here on the Oxford streets to enjoy a beautiful spring day, but also to have a look specifically at Merton College here, because it's here that Wycliffe starts his career. In 1356, he writes a thesis that's called The Last Age of the Church, and it's particularly interesting for a 14th century document because it talks about what he perceives to be the cause of the Black Death. Now, there are a lot of sermons and plenty of pamphlets around in the 14th century blaming specifically the average person for the plague. These preachers say the average person is too lustful, the average person is too lazy and and for these reasons, God has visited the plague upon the earth. This isn't how Wycliffe sees it. Wycliffe sees the plague as a sort of divine retribution and justice for sinful clergy members. As far as he's concerned, these people are meant to be looking after their flocks, living a life of apostolic poverty, and in general, devoting themselves to God. One of Wycliffe's overarching concerns with religion in general was what he saw as the undue wealth of the church writ large. But he also had specific objections to parishes themselves. He thought that parishes were too interested in what he called pomp and celebration. He thought they were spending too much money on festivals and they were bringing in too much money from their parishioners. Of course, what Wycliffe says is very catchy and it definitely speaks to people who feel quite under the thumb. If you're tithing a large percentage of your money every year to a church, you might not want to see your living particularly well. But it wasn't just parish churches that Wycliffe had a fundamental problem with. Overall, most of his complaints were reserved for the mendicant orders or the friars. In 1380, he writes a pamphlet called Objections to the Friars. In it, Wycliffe refers to the mendicant orders as the pests of society, the enemies of religion, and the patrons and promoters of every crime. What he's interested in here is what he sees as the undue wealth of the mendicant orders. He considers that the preaching orders were founded on a consideration of apostolic poverty. That means they should be living in poverty. By the 14th century, however, they'd amassed great fortunes. And so Wycliffe felt that they were living contrary to the very reasons that they were founded. But why were they founded? Well, in parishes like this, we're not exactly sure whether or not the parishioners would have been getting access to the sermons that they wanted to. What friars offer is a sort of traveling sermon service. If you want to hear a religious speech, and medieval people did, that was very interesting for them, you could get one while you were walking to market. What Wycliffe and the Lollards do is they train their own preachers. So they're doing the same thing that the mendicants would be doing out in society. They're giving sermons to the lay people of Oxford and preaching about the things that they think are important. This is in one way to counter the friars, who they think shouldn't be bringing in as much money, but it's also to put out their vision of religion to the world. It's actually a form of mass communication in the medieval period and a really great way to argue your corner. So there can be huge clashes theologically or about money within the church itself. There are also often clashes between the clergy and the laity in general. A lot of these also have to do with money. As we've already seen when we talked about peasants, clergy are often landlords. Primarily it's the local lord who founds parish churches, and this is part of a wholesale reorganization of the countryside, which happens in the 9th, but more probably more particularly in the 10th century, when villages are formed, peasants are brought in to particular centers, and part of that process of nucleation is the foundation of a parish church for the new community, partly for religious reasons, but as in towns also as a piece of property. The lord would expect to take a share in the offering. Oftentimes laity resent the clergy because of this. They feel that the clergy should devote themselves to God and should not be accumulating so much wealth on earth. Some members of the laity, especially poorer laity, also resent the clergy because of their direct links to people like the nobility. If a noble family wants to make sure that there's someone praying for their souls after death, they can set up a community of monks and nuns on some of their own land. That creates a new landlord where there wasn't one before, and a new opportunity for resentment between peasants and the clergy. If you are wondering why an organization called the Poor Clares is living in a building like this, which is obviously pretty fancy, you wouldn't be the only one. The answer in the specific instance of Denny Abbey is that the countess who endows the abbey also lived here. The countess really likes the Poor Clares. That's part of it. The other part is that she, like many other members of the nobility, wanted to retire here and be a part of the religious order. A countess is going to want to live in some style, so she made sure that the abbey here is, well, stylish enough. It's things like this that really get under the skin of individuals like John Wycliffe. The Poor Clares are a member of the mendicant orders. They're specifically the women's arm of the Franciscan movement, so they're supposed to be living in apostolic poverty, technically. The hint is in the poor part. So for him, taking money from a countess, setting yourself up as a fancy enough place for a countess to live, is the exact opposite of what religious orders should be doing. St. Michael's is an excellent example of the competing interests of various religious institutions in the medieval period. It's overseen by the bishop in Lincoln, but it's connected to the college here in Oxford, and it oversees and administers to the various lay people within Oxford itself. This means its job is to see to the pastoral care of an average person in Oxford, but it takes their money and kicks it up to the college itself. There can also be disputes between the clergy and local nobility about who owns what land where. Who exactly owns which peasants? When you yourself are not working in the land that you depend on for your money, it very much matters who is doing the work in order to get food to your table. The clergy are capable of creating entire cities like Oxford, which initially exists specifically to serve the religious people there. When you have a lot of students, someone needs to cook for them. Someone needs to clean for them. People move to the local area to service the clergy, and then you have a city. The complicated relationship with the clergy and the laity in the medieval period can also lead to serious scrapes with major powers like the king. The fact that the clergy control so much land and have so much money here is actually a huge part of their downfall in the early modern period when Henry VIII is on the throne. Sure, Henry VIII wants to be able to get divorced without anyone telling him what to do, but he doesn't mind taking all the land that the monasteries own as well. One of the ways that you know we're talking about the medieval period is that the clergy are still balancing on this knife's edge very successfully. They can be major religious players and major landowners without it being called into question. You can tell that something is modern when people like the nobility, who we'll hear more about in the next episode, are able to counter the church and sometimes take some of that control back. Life in the medieval period looked like lots of different things to lots of different people. Your place in society could dictate everything, from what food you ate, where you could go, how educated you were, and even how long you were likely to live for. Across this series, we'll discover what life was like for those that worked, those that earned, those that learned, and those that played in medieval England. In terms of the medieval world, the last group that we're ready to talk about are often the group that gets talked about the most, the nobility writ large. So who are the nobility? Technically, royals are nobility at the very, very top of the hierarchy in the secular medieval world. There's a broad swathe of people underneath royalty that are also nobles that have a hierarchy within that as well. You might just be a generalized knight and go by sir. You might be a marquis or a marquis. You might be more directly related to the king and be a duke or a duchess. All of these people, on the whole, are nobility. As a general rule of thumb, nobility writ large are the people who control secular power in the countryside, whereas royal power is usually concentrated in cities. The benefit that you get in exchange for the huge responsibility of overseeing laws in any particular jurisdiction is taxation. Your serfs are giving you taxes directly. You'll have to give a small percentage of that to the king, but the great majority of it stays with you. But what do the nobility do? It's their job to keep the king's peace, specifically within the countryside. And that's what happens here at Heddingham Castle in Essex. Heddingham is wonderful for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it's an almost archetypical example of Norman-style castles. There's two things going on here. The first is that this is a perfect example of what we call a Mott and Bailey defensive structure. So a bunch of people from the local area, probably serfs, would have been forced to come dig out a bunch of ground and build these foundations themselves in a defensive structure. Then on top of that you have the Bailey, in this case the keep that you can see here. What we're unfortunately missing here would be what we call a curtain wall. So it would have been a defensive wall on top of the Mott itself around the edges. That would be where you would defend a castle in the first instance. If everything goes wrong, you then retreat inside the Bailey itself with the entire household. Mott and Baileys also have other features that sort of help when you're attempting to violently subjugate a bunch of people, and one of them is that it's very difficult to get into. By very virtue of the Mott, you've got to get in over a bridge, of which this is a really fine example. Technically this is not a Norman bridge, it's Tudor. But what it shows us is how well Mott and Bailey architecture works. Even half a millennium later, you still need to build bridges in order to get over it. It's a really, really great way of controlling access and egress to your castle, and making sure that no other armies or violent mobs can sneak up on you. These windows are extremely exciting, not just because they're a great example of Norman Romanesque architecture, which they certainly are, but because they also have some cool little architectural details. So you'll notice on all of them that they have little columns off to either side, and these are something that we call a false arcade. It's meant to remind you specifically of Roman architecture. They want you thinking of the big Ionic and Doric pillars that you would see in a Roman villa. But the other thing you'll see going on is at the very top level here, you'll see that zigzag pattern over the arch. This is called a chevron, and it's specific to English Norman architecture in particular. You're not going to find that back on the continent in France now. It's only here, and it's only brought over by the Normans when they invaded. You'll also notice that all of the windows are different. So here at ground level, you just have these slits in the wall, and all that's doing is letting light into the interior. That's because the people on the very bottom level of the castle are the very most common people, who are just servants essentially. Further up, that's our guard room. It's got a larger window, but it's still not huge. Above that, that's the banqueting hall, so it's got pretty large windows that they're meant to impress everyone on inside. And then at the top of that, you have these really magnificent chevrons, because that's what you'll see from over the curtain wall when you're approaching the Mott & Bailey, as a specific example of Norman elegance. It lets everybody know who's approaching the castle, who's in control, and that the land is under new management. As impressive as this keep is, and it undoubtedly is, we can see a few clues that there used to be a lot more here than there currently is. We've got a broken archway here, which is what used to be the chapel, and up on top of the keep, you can see where there used to be roof lines. First, there was a flat one directly over the grand entrance door, and then there are some zigzag ones on top of that. They might have upgraded at a point in time. And all of these are great reminders of the fact that castle is actually a collective noun, and it refers to all of the buildings that would have been inside the curtain wall. So what kind of buildings are we talking about? Well, you've got chapels that see to the religious needs of the community living in the castle, but you also have things like stables, where you would keep all of your horses, cows, pigs, sheep, whatever it is you need. You'd also have stuff like a blacksmith's smithy. If you're making a lot of armor for any kind of military guys that live inside a castle, well, that's where you make it. But the other big thing that you have is your kitchens. One of the major ways that we lose castles is fires, and so you want to keep any kind of cooking that is done with huge fires, when you're cooking for a large number of people, outside of your main keep. You want to make sure that you're not introducing any way that you can burn the entire thing down. This also introduces a really difficult level for cooking in the castle. If you're bringing a huge banquet up to the banqueting floor, which is on the second floor, you need to make sure that it's piping hot in order to get across the yard, up the stairs, and into the keep itself. These stairs wouldn't have actually been extant in the medieval period, and you can kind of tell from what is missing. As we can see from the extant roof lines along there, there would have been buildings here, so there's no way you could have had a staircase up as well. This was, however, supposed to be the main entrance to the castle. We can tell that because, again, you see these great chevrons over the door. It's very fancy, it's really elaborate, it's meant to impress you as you come inside. The other thing that we can see here is this rounded roof line, and that's from a later edition chapel that would have been put here. Well, why would you need two chapels? Sometimes people just like to build extra chapels if they have a specific devotion to a saint. So, for example, one sort of chapel that people really like to add on later are Marian chapels. They're specifically devoted to the Virgin Mary, and they're for people who feel really piously moved by one individual in particular. Or, if you're just a really pious person in general, maybe you want to make your own mark on the family's castle. You want a new architectural style added, so you put your chapel on later to remind everyone that you were here. So, how does one become a member of the nobility? As a very, very general rule of thumb, someone gets land and power, or titles, as member of the nobility in exchange for military service to the king. This is particularly true here in England after the Norman conquests. When the new king comes over from Normandy, in the first place, you need a whole army to fight off the people already living here. And in the second place, the Normans are involved in a violent military occupation of a fairly hostile country. You need lots of armed members of the nobility to establish that there's a new king, and that there's also a new culture that's taking over in England. This is the case of the de Vere family, who we're going to be talking about today. Aubrey de Vere I comes over with the Norman conquests, and we first see records of him in 1089 in the Domesday Book. Aubrey de Vere is called Aubrey the Chamberlain, which means that he's tied up with the king's retinue itself. A chamberlain is the sort of person who will help the king by overseeing any deeds that he signs, or any charters. If you see any major royal medieval charter, down the bottom there'll be a list of names of various nobility who have witnessed whatever it is that the king does. The other thing that they do is make sure that everyone outside in that kingdom understands that this has come to pass. As such close proximity to the king indicates, the de Vere family are extremely important, and soon enough they have land in nine different counties throughout England. In particular, they have huge holdings in Essex and in Oxfordshire. So come on, let's go inside and see what life would have been like for the de Veres. As we come in through the main entrance, this is the first room that anyone would enter, and in fact it's actually the only room that the great majority of people who come to visit the de Veres are ever going to enter. This is the guards room, and as the name indicates, it's where all the knights and all the guards of the de Vere family would hang out. There's a reason for that. If you're coming into the castle, the de Veres want you to see their military power right away. They want you to see how many people that they have in their army, and they want you to understand that they have a great deal of power over the land. Before you get to them, you're going to have to get past their army quite literally. As you can probably tell, this room is currently undergoing some renovations. This isn't particularly far off from what you would have seen in the medieval period. We've got a brand new timber floor that's just been put down, and indeed you would have a timber floor in the period. The major difference is over the top, we would probably see some rushes on the floor, and the rushes do two things. One of the things they do is baffle sound. So if you've got, you know, what's essentially a private army of men hanging out in your basement, you probably want to help keep that down. The other thing that they do is help to keep it warmer. As you can see from the giant fireplace behind me, and you can probably tell from a large stone room this big, it would be quite cold in the winter. So you're going to want any extra help that you can get. The new floors in here are actually a great reminder of how powerful and rich the de Vere family were. When you build a castle, it doesn't just stay pristine. You have to constantly be updating it and renewing parts of it, especially when you have hundreds of people coming and going through it. There's wear and tear that's extremely costly to keep up, and only an extremely wealthy and powerful family like the de Vere's would be able to do that. From the guard room, we can continue through the castle via the staircase here. Staircase can take us into one of two places. We can go downstairs into the cellars and into the dungeons, or if we're particularly important, lucky, or in some kind of legal trouble, we can go upstairs to the main banqueting table and into the presence of the de Vere's. A big thing that nobles do is get involved in war. Almost everyone who is involved in the Norman conquest fought alongside the king when the king came here. But members of nobility are also saying that they're willing to get involved with any sort of military conflicts in the future. In the medieval period, there can be a lot of fighting back and forth between various royal houses. This can happen because the way that inheritance works is very complicated, especially if you're a group of Normans who come from what we call now France and are controlling things in England. France is an extremely wealthy place. It's got a lot of money, so you're going to be interested in making sure that you continue to control that, even if the center of your power is here in England. So in exchange for beating people up, the nobility get huge tracts of land wherever it is the king might have them. Since they are having all of their needs met by the peasants that they oversee, they can spend all their leisure time training for military purposes. This means that they are training in sword combat from a very, very early age, and they also are trained in chivalry. The term chivalry comes from the French and it has specifically to do with chevals, horses, and what people who are going around on the medieval equivalent of tanks should do in order to be polite to the people around them. When we talk about chivalry, a lot of the time what we're talking about is what knights consider to be their duties to God, to their local lord, and to each other. For knights, one of the best things about war is you have an opportunity to capture other knights, because once you do, you can take him back home and ransom him for all of the money that his family has. So one way of thinking about medieval warfare is thinking about it like rich guy tag. So knights often have a great deal of respect for each other, even if they're on opposite sides of the battle lines, not just because there's some chivalric ideal of respect, but because there are real monetary benefits to being next to guys that you take advantage of. This is just another way that noble life is completely different to the life of commoners. As you come up the stairs here, you will notice that it's a long way up from the guards room, and this is kind of on purpose. When you come into the presence of the devirs here in the main banqueting hall, they want you to be a little off-put. You'll be out of breath, and you'll be slightly discombobulated by the grandeur that you're coming into. Why are you coming in to see the devirs here? Well, it might be for any kind of jurisdictional or legal proceeding. The devirs are the earls of Oxford by the time that Aubrey III is on the throne here. They also own most of the land from here all the way to the seacoast. There is Oxford itself, and there are also lots of parcels of land scattered across England in general, and if you get in trouble or you need any property dispute taken care of, you need to come here to Headingham and have the devirs sorted out. So what's it like to be in the banqueting hall here and in the presence of the devirs? It's kind of overwhelming. If you look above us, that's a minstrels gallery. So as you come in, you might be hearing wonderful music by all the musicians and the employee of the devirs. You'll see the beautiful paintings on all the walls. Look at all the chevron work over every one of these windows, and look how many windows there are. That's incredibly expensive. How many masons were working on that? Say you're lucky enough to be at one of the devirs' banquets. You're sitting here enjoying wonderful food that's come from the kitchens outside down two flights of stairs and across the yard. How many people does it take to cook that and then bring it up and serve it? This is an absolutely huge house that the devirs are running, and the devirs are letting you know when you're at a banquet how powerful they are, how rich they are, and exactly how many people are in their employ and their command. As extremely grand as this room obviously is right now, this isn't quite what it would have looked like in the medieval period. Medieval castles were actually very brightly painted, so all the stonework that you can see coming through the plaster here wouldn't have been seen. All the plaster work over the top would have been painted with bright geometric shapes. They're not unlike the chevrons that we see over the arches here. Medieval people loved color and they loved patterns, so when we think about castles now, we tend to think of them as a little bit dark and a little bit dingy, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were actually really fond of color in ways that we would find a little bit gaudy ourselves. One of the most incredibly exciting things about this room is this glorious Norman arch here. In fact, this is thought to be the largest still extant Norman arch in existence. It's about 28 feet wide. This is an incredible feat of architecture and just this arch is responsible for holding up almost the entire weight of the castle. Think about what that means about 900 years ago. The architecture that needs to go into that, the engineering, and all of this has been made without any kind of calculators. It's all done by hand and it's all done by actual hand tools. The amount of money and influence that it takes to get something like this built is absolutely incredible and we're really lucky that it's still standing. So the great majority of the Banqueting Hall is about display, but also there are some little secrets and things you aren't supposed to see. So say you've come to see the De Vere's on a legal matter and maybe you're not in the best mood. You come up the stairs, you're overawed by everything you see, and there they are on either side of the fire. Part of that is because they don't want you to notice that this is where the guards are. That's specifically at your eyeline and you won't be able to turn around and see it. So say things don't go your way legally and you decide you're going to take matters into your own hand. If you rush the De Vere's, their guards will come out of this niche and they will block any kind of violent attack. Guard spaces like this are extremely important because when you're this powerful and rich, you don't always make a lot of friends. A lot of the De Vere's find out the hard way what happens when you come up against common people who don't have your interests at heart. When you're enforcing your power through violence, it engenders violent reactions. People like this need guards on hand all the time because they're doing violent things and it means that ordinary people oftentimes feel like they have no recourse other than violence themselves. All of this money and all of this power, however, doesn't necessarily insulate you from everything that happens in the world. If you're involved in very violent things and you are a devout Christian, which again most Europeans are at the time, you might be worried about the state of your soul when you die. The De Vere's do this with the Kolm Priory in Essex. There they endow an entire group of monks to pray for the family souls later on. It's a bit of a win-win. The monks get somewhere to live. The De Vere's don't have to worry so much about all the violence that they do in life. The second Aubrey De Vere is killed at the hands of a London mob in 1141. His body, however, is taken back to the Kolm Priory and he's buried there along with his father and his soul is prayed to into perpetuity by the monks. The De Vere story does not stop there, however. The third Aubrey De Vere is named the Earl of Oxford by the king. This is an indication of how entwined the house of De Vere is with the kings here in England. Earls are a particularly high up section of the nobility, so this means the De Vere's have come up even further in the world than they were before. As a general rule of thumb, the further up you go in a castle, the closer you are to the inner circle of the family who lives there. Certainly true of the De Vere's. But because the De Vere's are so incredibly wealthy, while you're on the way to their private chambers, you've got one stop on the way and that's the minstrel gallery. This particularly ornate Norman stonework is a kind of medieval signage. It lets you know that you're still in a public place. It's so incredibly intricate that it lets you know this is still something for the average person. Anything beyond this is going to be private and strictly for the De Vere family themselves. From up here in the minstrel gallery, we get a really cool idea of what it looks like down in the banqueting hall. We also have a really interesting way of looking at the arches. You might notice that here in the banqueting hall, the exact opposite thing is true from the windows outside. Outside, we have the chevron windows up at the very top of the castle where everyone will see them. Here, the chevron arches are at the bottom and closer to your eye line, and we have the simpler arches with just the columns up near the top where you're less likely to be looking when you're at a banquet. As we exit the minstrel gallery, we can go up the stairs again. Our first stop ordinarily would be the De Vere family rooms. They are undergoing construction right now, which is actually great news because it means that we can prime their private lives for generations to come once that's done. But even more exciting, we can go up one more again and get onto the roof of the castle. Look at the view! I haven't just brought you up to the top of I want to talk a little bit about the roof, and that's because it's kind of close to what we would expect to see from a medieval castle roof. It would probably be lined with lead, which helps keep the rain off. We probably would see some major ridging like this to keep the water flowing down. This gives you an idea of how responsive medieval architecture can be to its place. You wouldn't guess on a day like this, but obviously Essex can be very rainy. Things like channeling water to the right place really means something if you have a huge stone building like this. You need to make sure that water gets off of the roof and ideally as far away as you can possibly get from the foundations itself. This will keep you nice and dry once you've spent a bunch of money on a really expensive building. One of the differences that we see here from the medieval period is actually all this great woodland. In the medieval period, you wouldn't want this much wood around for a number of reasons. The first is if you're a noble and all of the money that you make to keep stuff like a great castle going comes from the countryside. You need that to be farmland and you want it to be working. Castles aren't just somewhere to live and they're not just a fortification for somewhere to bring armies out of. They're also a really potent and powerful symbol of who controls the land. You can see how high up we are here even in the 21st century. In the 11th century, this is a huge building. It's monumentally large. This reminds all of the peasants in the surrounding countryside who controls you and who's watching over you. We've come into the Georgian house on the grounds here of Heddingham Castle to have a look at some of the documents associated with it. This wonderful document right here is a 19th century scroll showing the lineage of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. And very interestingly, it shows us one of the ways that you can become very important to the king's court. So up top we can see the de Vere family itself but here with the two lions is William the Conqueror. And we can see on here that his sister Beatrice gets married to Aubrey de Vere. Great way to make sure that you are part of the king's inner circle. Just marry into it. This is a really interesting document because it shows us how noble houses like the de Vere's can track their lineage in a really intricate way over centuries. That's because if you're as important as the de Vere's, you tend to stay important. It's really difficult to alienate wealth like that from a family. This is exactly the opposite of what we see from the peasant families however. Your family can lose everything in just a decade if you have a poor enough harvest and you get into debt. That's not something that happens with families like the de Vere's. What we've got here is a really lovely rendering of what the castle grounds would have been like in the medieval period. So as you can see there's a lot less forest and everything is essentially cultivated. Each one of those strips would represent a particular family's holding for the peasantry. This is a really exciting document because it shows us the lands around the castle itself. So in the middle we see the castle but up here we see the great park and over here we see the little park and in particular one of noble people's favorite aspects of owning a castle. The multiple deer parks and hunting lodges. A huge way of spending your time when you're a noble is to go deer hunting and all of the deer in those parks would be protected and earmarked for you. Having ready access to venison is a really big deal at the time and it's also just essentially a very popular sport. The interesting thing about the Aubrey's de Vere is that I can say that to you. The Aubrey's de Vere. And there's a reason why you continue to name your son exactly the same thing. What these names are doing is underlying the generalized power of this specific household. It can mean that we sort of forget the individual intricacies of one person's life over another. And this is kind of ironic because these are the people that we know the most about. When we come to places like Headingham it's easy to forget about any aspect of medieval society other than the nobility. That's pretty much by design. The de Vere family only wants you to think about them, their power, and their authority when you see this building. However it's not just the de Vere's who live here. Let's not forget that there are clergy members who are working at the two chapels here on the property as well as at the Colne Priory further away here in Essex. All of this power and privilege is also maintained off of the work that peasants are doing in the countryside. It's the peasants working in fields, paying their taxes, and paying their rent to the de Vere's that allows them to live such an incredibly lavish lifestyle. All of the luxury goods inside of a castle like Headingham will be supplied by people who are working in what will become guilds in the 14th century. All of those tapestries, all of the fine cloth, all of that is as a result of very skilled people who are the best at what they do. When we think about the medieval period it's easy to think it was a landscape that was entirely populated by knights who live in castles and nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that castles are one of the few remaining physical symbols of a world that it's really difficult to see at times. The thing to take away from a place like Headingham is not just that the de Vere's are an incredibly important family, but it's that their prestige is made possible by thousands of people that we don't see whose lives were every bit as important.