The Perfect King (57 page)

At Nottingham
Castle
in
1358
a major programme of remodelling and repair began, costing more than a thousand pounds. The most obvious result was the construction of Romylow's Tower, the rebuilding and reglazing of the chapels, the rebuilding of die king's kitchen, the queen's hall, the constable's hall and the great kitchen. All of this work was destroyed in the early seventeenth century. In the same year he began work at his great palace of Sheen, near Richmond, at which William of Wykeham administered more than
£2,000
on an exquisite new royal house, with fishponds, gardens, tiled courtyards, and chambers with large fireplaces, glazing in the windows, and another one of Edward's favourite additions to any residence: a 'roasting house', somewhere for his meat to be spit-roasted. Edward's work at Sheen was probably entirely destroyed by Richard II after his wife died there in
1394.
Anything left standing was destroyed by fire in
1499.

In February
1359,
Edward started work on remodelling his father's favourite house at King's Langley. There he spent more than three thousand pounds, including the rebuilding of the bath house. Bathing was a high priority of Edward's, as with other medieval kings. The water supply to the bathroom in the Palace of Westminster had been controlled by bronze taps in the shape of leopards, probably attached to metal cisterns, since at least
1275.
Edward II had had the bathroom tiled. But hot water itself in these places had had to be heated in earthenware pots in a furnace, and then poured into a cistern in the bathroom. At Westminster in
1351
Edward made a breakthrough, introducing what was probably the first English bathroom with hot and cold running water, with one bronze tap for hot and
Another
for cold. This was the system he seems to have replicated at King's Langley, where the accounts record a payment for a 'large square lead for heating water'. This hot water would then have been piped - several of his accounts record payments for pipes — into the bathroom, and, having 'turned the water on' (by giving the order for the furnace near the cistern to be lit), he could then control the flow of hot and cold water into his bath as he desired. Sadly Edward's bath house and all the splendid buildings which he, his father and grandfather had built at King's Langley were allowed to f
all down by the Tudors. Henry VII
I's wives were each granted the manor but spent nothing on it, and what remained was demolished in the seventeenth century.

It was also in
1359
that Ed
ward began work on Hadleigh Castl
e. Parts of this do survive - a few jagged pieces of tower masonry - but nothing of the great royal apartments which were the focus of Edward's attention. Over the next ten years he spent more than
£2,300
on the
castle
, creating an Essex shoreline residence to balance his planned Kentish shore residence on the Isle of Sheppey. By this stage Edward was beginning to link all his multi-thousand pound residences along the water of the Thames. From Windsor, his chivalric palace, he could travel by royal barge to Isleworth (which he repaired) and Sheen (which he was rebuilding) to Westminster, the Tower of London, and Rotherhithe, a short ride from Eltham. It only required him to add his Isle of Sheppey residence and Gravesend manor for him to have a whole suite of royal palaces and
castle
s which he could reach swiftly. These he began in the early
1360s.
In
1362
he acquired the manor of Gravesend from the earl of Suffolk and began yet another lavish building, spending more than
£1,350
over the next five years on improving the royal chambers and facilities and decorating the buildings he retained.

If any loss is to be lamented as much as St Stephen's Chapel, it is Queenborough
Castle
. It was the only new royal
castle
of the later middle ages and it is-remarkable in that it was the last truly military English royal residence. Edward himself took a key role in overseeing the works. This in itself was nothing new: he always had involved himself personally with his acts of patronage, from laying the foundation stone of William Montagu's priory at Bisham (a foundation plaque for which still survives) to overseeing the rebuilding of Roxburgh, Eltham and Windsor. What is interesting about Queenborough is that it seems to have been Edward's own statement in stone about his ideas of defensive building. I
t was, in some senses, an amuse
ment, almost to show off that he could design a building which was as militarily strong as his grandfather's
castle
s in North Wales or Richard the Lionheart's Chateau Gaillard (none of which Edward had seen for himself, incidentally).

There is no
castle
quite like Queenborough. Moreover, there
was
nothing quite like it, for today not a single stone survives. It is known from one seventeenth-century survey and an Elizabethan plan. Work began in spring
1361,
Edward himself being present at the start. It was basically an enormously strong encircling wall, three hundred feet in diameter, with no towers except those overlooking the two gates. These gates, which were opposite one another, led into the
castle
, but not in a usual way. The main gate led to a passage which gave no access to the central part of the great fortress. Instead it acted as a barbican: anyone breaking through the main gate would have found himself trapped in this area, susceptible to arrows and other objects being thrown at him from above, on all sides. If an attacker had escaped from this he would only have been able to reach the outer court. This circular, outward-looking court, which circled the high central part of the
castle
and its six great circular towers, was built largely to house the trebuchets and the cannon which guarded the sea approach to London. In
1365
Edward installed two great cannon and nine small ones here, making it one of his three permanent artillery fortifications along with Dover (where there were nine cannon by
1371)
and Calais (where there were fifteen). The postern gate also was guarded by a barbican, but this one gave way to the inner court of the central stronghold. It was around this inner court that the king's residence was planned. Thus at Queenborough as nowhere else we have the culmination of the royal
castle
as a palace, fortification and gun emplacement, an architectural masterpiece which 'exemplifies the principles of cylindrical and concentric fortification carried to their logical conclusion with perfect symmetry'. It cost Edward over twenty-five thousand pounds. He might have thought that such a huge and impressive construction would guarantee its permanence. Alas, its defensive foresight was probably its undoing. Although the mid-seventeenth-century parliamentary commissioners thought its potential as a gun emplacement was small, its concentric self-protection meant that it was too powerful and strategically important to risk letting it fall into enemy hands even at that late date. Parliament ordered it to be pulled down.

*

In the layout of Queenborough and the creation of the naval gun emplacement we can see that a technological mind was at work. In the luxury of the hot and cold running water in the bathrooms at Westminster and' King's Langley, we can see a similar technological approach. If we knew nothing about Edward and his strategies and patronage of guns and his adapting of longbow crossfire as a fighting method, we might wonder whether these developments were not due to his capable advisers. But the point at which all these technological developments meet is Edward himself. And this brings us to Edward's key area of patronage which has most definitely lasted. The use of the mechanical clock.

The earliest mechanical clock in Europe for which we have clear evidence is often said to be the one put up at Milan in
1335.
Earlier attempts to make a mechanical clock, using a weight and ratchet system, were certainly underway in the late thirteenth century, for in
1271
it was recorded that clockmakers were trying to mak
e a wheel which would make exactl
y one full turn every day.*' Early in his reign (probably in
1332)
Edward saw for himself the realisation of such ideas when he stopped by the monastery of St Albans and found the abbot, Richard Wallingford, building his clock.
Wallingford had succeeded in making a machine which both chimed regular hours and showed the movements of the sun and stars. At the time Edward did not recognise the importance of this, especially as it was apparent that the abbot was neglecting his spiritual duties. But by the early
1350s
he realised he had been wrong. In
1352
he paid three Italians - one described as 'the master of the clock' - to make him a mechanical timepiece in London. This and a suitable bell on which it would regularly chime the hours were transported from London to Windsor and set up in the great tower there. It had no face but rang the intervals hourly.

Edward's first mechanical clock is a very interesting development in itself, but, when one thinks of the social implications of regulating time in this period, it suddenly becomes apparent that Edward was at the forefront of a profound European revolution. Medieval people divided the day into the twelve hours of the night and the twelve hours of the day. The day started with daylight: so each of the twelve 'hours' of daylight in summer was approximately twice as long as an 'hour' of daylight in winter. Edward, in introducing a regular timepiece, was attempting to standardise time. Moreover he was doing this in his own
castle
in Berkshire within fifteen years of the introduction of the practice in one of the most advanced cities at the heart of Renaissance Italy. There is something remarkable about this, especially in a war leader. Nor was it just an idle experiment. The clock at Windsor lasted, so that it needed a new bell by
1377
(at which date it was described as being called 'clokke', the earliest recorded use of the English word, derived from the French word
cloche,
meaning 'bell'). Long before then Edward had purchased additional mechanical bell-striking clocks for his palaces at Westminster and Langley (notably the two palaces with hot and cold running water) and his great castle at Queenborough. At Westminster he built a bell tower to contain a great bell inscribed 'Edward'. This weighed four tons, rang the hour at Westminster for more than three hundred years, and has been described as the original 'Big Ben'. The implication of all this is that he was regulating his household and his own life not around the traditional long and short hours of the day but with a standard unit of time measurement.

Although none of Edward's clocks have survived, they nevertheless had an important cultural influence. In the same way, his buildings, paintings and other commissions - even his long-lost plate and costumes - had an influence. Just as Edward's preference for mechanically regulated hours was soon adopted by others, with mechanical clocks being introduced at Salisbury Cathedral in
1386
and Wells Cathedral in about
1390,
and soon after that elsewhere around the country, so too his vanished palaces affected architectural development in later generations. Hence it would be foolish to say that his buildings or costumes are somehow less important because they have not survived to this day.

This draws our attention to those other aspects of Edward's cultural patronage which have been obscured by destruction. Literature was never thought to be an area in which Edward scored highly except in regard to his employment of Chaucer. So when one modern scholar discovered that Edward kept a library of one hundred and sixty books at the Tower of London, not counting his books kept in other places, and that these were regularly loaned out to members of the court, the view of Edward as anti-scholarly and unbookish was exposed as a presumption based mainly on a lack of evidence. Also, among the books borrowed by Isabella in
1327
were a history of the Normans and Vegetius's
De Re Militari,
then the best-known and most trusted military guidebook of all. Isabella had no interest in warfare, but her fourteen-year-old son certainly did. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence which suggests that Edward
was
bookish. In
1335
he gave the huge sum of one hundred marks
(£66 13s
4d) to Isabella of Lancaster, a nun at Amesbury, for a book which he kept for his own use.
He borrowed books too; we know this because he often failed to return them. Some lavishly illuminated texts carry the arms of England and Hainault, and can therefore be said to have been commissioned by him or his wife, or presented to them. Edward's wardrobe accounts also mention romances given as occasional gifts, and list many liturgical books (graduals, missals, antiphons, chorals, martyrologies and gospels). That three or four of these are psalters accords with the idea that Edward himself only normally commissioned books for routine liturgical use or extravagant display. Texts containing historical information which he wanted he either borrowed or purchased from other magnates or ecclesiastical libraries.