In the first of two articles, John Goodall looks at the development of a castle, the history of which is inextricably bound up with the lives and fortunes of the medieval Archbishops of Canterbury
This penance had been meted out to them at a tribunal assembled at Saltwood Castle by their overlord, William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a mark of his intense displeasure at their manner of undertaking a customary duty to carry straw to his palace at Canterbury. The straw had been delivered ‘not openly in carts for his glory, but closely in sacks upon their horses backs for their own convenience’.
The first historian of Kent, William Lambarde, writing in 1570, viewed this episode as a tyranny. The Archbishop, he said, ‘shewed himself as hot as toast with the matter’. He went on: ‘What was it… for this proud prelate thus to insult over simple men for so small a fault (or no fault at all).’ As we shall see, however, this episode and its context help explain the castle we see today.
The early history of Saltwood Castle is very poorly documented. The manor formed part of an Anglo-Saxon endowment of Christchurch Canterbury, the great Benedictine monastery within the walls of the city in which the Archbishop of Canterbury acted as abbot. It would probably have been lost to this institution but for the labours of the first Norman Archbishop, Lanfranc, after the Conquest in 1066. During the 1070s, he put Christchurch back on its feet institutionally and commenced the reconstruction of a vast new cathedral church.
この記事は Country Life UK の November 28, 2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Country Life UK の November 28, 2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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