Standing On Dignity- Saltwood Castle, Kent, part I The home of Jane Clark

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

ON Sunday, April 30, 1390, six men—John Wendreton, John Bey, John Fostal, William Heyward, John White and Hugo Peny— performed a public penance at Wingham, Kent. Walking ‘with slow steps humbly and devoutly’ in single file, wearing neither hoods nor shoes, they processed around the collegiate church. On their backs, they carried open sacks displaying their contents of hay and straw (Fig 1).

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.