Castle by Marc Morris

construct.
    To the modern reader, of course, these sound like castles at knock-down prices. When you look at the contemporary pay packets, however, you begin to realize that would-be castle-owners had to start saving early. In the twelfth century, an unskilled labourer earned a penny a day, while a skilled labourer might take home tuppence. A fully armed knight, risking life and limb and providing his own kit, would expect to receive a shilling (twelve pence) in return for a day’s military service. Only at the top of the scale did things start to improve. The king’s annual income – which was also the government’s annual budget – was somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 a year. Even for the king, therefore, building a tower like Dover or Rochester would absorb between a quarter and a third of his money for a year, or 3 to 4 per cent of his annual budget spread over a decade. In the twelfth century, then, there were only a handful of people who could afford to build a great tower.
    What our records cannot tell us is how these towers were actually built. We have to wait until the thirteenth century before we get really detailed building accounts for castles (see Chapter Three) . Occasionally, the pipe rolls will record the name of the architect or mason working on a particular building. Henry II’s favourite builder, responsible for the keeps at Dover and Newcastle, was one Maurice the Engineer. In almost every other case, however, the names of the geniuses who designed and erected these wonderful buildings are lost to us.
    The towers themselves, however, provide us with some clues as to how they were built. Rochester, for example, was constructed with two types of stone. Most of it is Kentish ragstone, very probably quarried near Maidstone, and shipped from there up the River Medway to Rochester. The fine details, however – the fireplaces, the window arches, and the cornerstones – are fashioned from a softer stone, more suitable for carving. This is Caen stone, which (as the name suggests) had to be transported from Caen in Normandy, a journey of over a hundred miles. Tons and tons of stone, quarried in northern France, ferried hundreds of miles by scores of ships over dozens of voyages – this is the scale of the enterprise we have to imagine to explain how Rochester Castle came to be built.
    From the enormous cost of their construction and the many years they took to build, it is evident that keeps like Rochester were not simply thrown up without design or purpose. They are complex structures, built to serve the needs of a great lord and his household. Each room in a tower was built with a specific purpose in mind.
    For this reason, there’s a certain sense of disappointment when you step inside the main part of the keep at Rochester, because the interior is open to the sky. At some point after the Middle Ages (it is not known exactly when), a ferocious fire ripped through the tower, destroying the wooden floors and melting the lead roof. If you look closely, you can see the scars left by this inferno on the interior walls. The keep’s present condition, however, does offer certain compensations. In the first place, it allows you once again to appreciate the building’s huge size. The first reaction is to gaze upwards to the roof, but it soon strikes you that you are only observing half the interior space – the tower is divided in two by a cross-wall, which gives the whole structure greater solidity.
    The other advantage of this perspective is that it enables you to see all four floors at once, and appreciate their common architectural features. Each principal chamber has a large ornately decorated fireplace, with a chimney flue that curves into the thickness of the wall. Similarly, there are garderobes (toilets) on every floor, and the well that runs up through the centre of the cross-wall is also accessible at every level. In other words, we have a building with mod cons and creature comforts