Halls and horseshoes
There are ruined castles all over England and their walls
and towers, fragmentary as they often are, give us quite a good idea of the
ways in which medieval fortifications developed. But there’s one part of the
castle that has often vanished completely: the main domestic building or hall. In peace time the hall was the heart of
the castle. It was a combination of dining room, reception room, office, and
even bedroom. It would be built inside the castle walls so didn’t itself have
to be heavily fortified.
There’s
a magnificent hall at Stokesay Castle in Shropshire, but Stokesay isn’t a true
castle – it’s a fortified manor house. What did the hall of a full-blown castle
look like? One answer is found at Oakham where the castle’s hall has survived
while the rest of the castle has disappeared. This hall is a magnificent aisled
building, probably constructed in the 1180s or thereabouts, a spacious interior
with two sets of four round arches separating the aisles from the central
space. One can imagine Walkelin de Ferrers, the lord who held the castle in the
late-12th century, presiding over banquets and meeting dignitaries in this
large room, which, with its decorated arches and carved capitals is the last
word in the domestic design of the period.
The capitals are especially beautiful. They are very similar
to those in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, which was remodelled between
1175 and 1185 under two notable masons called William – William of Sens and the
man known as William the Englishman, to distinguish him from his French
colleague. Perhaps one of the masons working for the Williams was called up to
Oakham to design the hall and supervise its construction. The carved capitals,
with their mouldings and leaf decorations, caught the light beautifully on the
day I visited.
The
hall is also witness to an odd tradition. For centuries the Lord of the Manor of
Oakham has required any visiting peer of the realm (or member of the royal
family, they being members of the peerage too) to donate a horseshoe when first
visiting the town. No one knows how this curious custom began, but it may have
its origins in a pun on the name Ferrers (fer being the French word for iron,
hence a farrier, one who shoes horses). The oldest horseshoe on the walls was
given by King Edward IV in c. 1470, and the most recent come from current
members of the royal family, such as the Prince of Wales. Odd as the ranks of
overgrown ceremonial horseshoes look, there’s something fitting about this
ancient building being the home of such a venerable and whacky custom.
