Melbourne Castle

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Melbourne Castle on a 19th century print after a drawing from 1602

Melbourne Castle is a ruined castle in Melbourne in the English county of Derbyshire . The castle was built on the site of an older manor house that had served as accommodation for noblemen who hunted in the nearby royal park during the reign of King John Ohneland . Construction of the castle began in 1311 for Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster , and continued until 1322, shortly before his execution. The castle was never completed.

Since the beginning of the 14th century, Melbourne Castle has been mainly owned by the Earls and Dukes of Lancaster and the Crown. Improvements and repairs were made during this period, principally at the behest of John of Gaunt , and the building was in generally good condition throughout the 15th and first part of the 16th centuries. Jean I. de Bourbon was imprisoned at Melbourne Castle for 19 years from 1415 after his capture at the Battle of Azincourt . The castle was also seen as a possible prison for Maria Stuart , even if the events later ensured that she was held elsewhere.

At the end of Elizabeth I's reign , the castle was in decline. The masonry was still in good condition, but the lack of major maintenance work meant that other parts of the building quickly fell into disrepair. In 1604 Henry Hastings, 5th Earl of Huntingdon , who owned his own castle in nearby Ashby-de-la-Zouch , bought the manor of Melbourne. He then gave up the property in Melbourne and the castle served as a source for building materials. Today only a 15 meter long and 4 meter high section of wall and some foundations of Melbourne Castle remain. Nothing is known about the interior layout of the building. The ruin is listed by English Heritage as a historical building of the 2nd degree and it is considered a Scheduled Monument . It is not open to the public.

background

Melbourne is a market settlement in South Derbyshire , near the River Trent , which is believed to have arisen from buildings associated with the royal manor south of the settlement in Kings Newton . Melbourne Castle was built on the site of a previous mansion whose construction time is unknown; It is said that the manor was established around the year 900, during the reign of Alfred the Great , but there is no evidence of this. As recorded in the Domesday Book , the manor of Melbourne and its lands were the property of King Edward the Confessor prior to the Norman conquest of England . Then the property fell into the hands of William the Conqueror . After the creation of the Diocese of Carlisle in 1133, King Henry I gave the manorial power to aufthelwold , the first bishop, for life . Some time later, the diocese had a palace built nearby on what is now Melbourne Hall . When Bishop Æthelwold died in 1156, the manor fell back to the crown.

The royal hunting park near Melbourne was probably created around 1200 at the behest of King John Ohneland and the king is said to have stayed in the manor at least five times. King John refused the manor and the associated lands to Hugh Beauchamp ; but it seems that they soon fell back to the crown and around 1230 by King Henry III. were given to Bishop Walter Mauclerk of Carlisle. The property reverted to the Crown after the bishop's death in 1248 and King Henry gave it to his son, Edmund Crouchback, 1st Earl of Lancaster in 1265 . Later the manor appears to have been given to a Philip Mark , and then it fell to Thomas Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Lancaster , the king's son. This happened in 1298 when he was of legal age, his father having died two years earlier. Early records of the house itself are rare, but there are records of repairs to the gutters in 1246 and the roof of the royal bedchamber in 1248.

description

Print from 1733 of a drawing of the castle from around 1580

The castle was built in the east of the settlement from the 14th century on a slightly elevated site. The outer walls of the castle enclosed an area of ​​about 2.8 hectares, but including the outbuildings, other auxiliary structures and orchards, the entire castle grounds are said to have been at least 8 hectares. The walls were built of rubble and clad with ashlar and even without the earlier smoothed cladding, the walls were about 3 meters thick.

Everything that is still known today about the appearance of the castle comes from contemporary drawings. While modern eyes may seem fantastic, there are better preserved properties that match Melbourne Castle in some details. Tutbury Castle and Pontefract Castle have similar gatehouses and chapels ; the mound of Tutbury Castle and the curtain wall of Pontefract Castle are also similar to those in the drawings. Sandal Castle has a polygonal tower similar to the one shown in Melbourne Castle, and this can be seen in the foundations still standing in Melbourne.

The castle is known to have a bakery, a kitchen and a chapel, as well as a knight's hall , a parade bedroom and a drawbridge , but details of the castle's interior layout are not known.

history

Early years

The end of the preserved wall

Earl Thomas gave the manor in February 1308 to his steward Robert de Holand . In 1311 Robert de Holland received a royal license from Edward II to fortify his mansion (English: License to Crenellate), and so the more modest earlier building was converted into a castle between 1311 and 1322. It is said in the area that the building blocks came from a quarry on the site of what is now Melbourne Pool . Records show that the project cost £ 1,313 in 1313-1314, of which £ 548 was paid to the masons and stone for the facing. Several bricklayers who worked on this project were involved in a brawl in Ravenstone in 1315. The important medieval buildings in Melbourne were built from the local stone , millstone grit . This is coarse-grained sandstone that can be processed into high quality stone. The settlement was built around the church, castle and high street until the end of the 18th century .

Earl Thomas and other barons captured King Edward's favorite, Piers Gaveston , and killed him in 1312. Nevertheless, in 1314 the king stayed at Melbourne Castle. For a time the Earl, a friend of the Scots, controlled most of England after King Edward's defeat at Bannockburn , but in 1321 the king raised an army and drove Earl Thomas out of the Midlands. The Lancastrian castles in Melbourne and Tutbury were abandoned and looted by local mobs. Earl Thomas was finally defeated in the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 . He was executed quickly and Robert de Holland was beheaded in 1328. The king sent a garrison to Melbourne Castle and appointed a steward, Ralph Basset, to replace the incumbent John de Hardedeshull . In March the raiders of the castle were arrested and by April King Edward had withdrawn his troops. He appointed Robert Tocher and Roger de Beler in 1323 to assist in the administration of his Melbourne possessions using money obtained from the confiscations of the rebel possessions in Staffordshire. King Edward stayed at Melbourne Castle again in 1325 and established the right to levy road tolls for the men of nearby Swarkestone so that the bridge over the Trent could be repaired.

Improvements by the House of Lancaster

John of Gaunt had important improvements made to the castle at the end of the 14th century.

The castle, still unfinished when Earl Thomas was executed, and its lands remained the property of the Crown until it was given to Henry Plantagenet, 3rd Earl of Lancaster , brother of Earl Thomas in 1327 . They later fell to Henry Plantagenet's son, 4th Earl, who was named the first Duke of Lancaster . When the duke died in 1361, Ingram Fauconer was his constable who received a lifetime pension of £ 10, with an additional £ 5 a year going to his wife. Henry Plantagenet's heir was Blanche , the wife of John of Gaunt. Duke John of Gaunt confirmed Fauconer's annuity when he came into possession of the Lancaster lands.

Peter Melbourne was made governor of the lands of Melbourne in 1377. He received an annual income of £ 10 and an additional payment of 66 s 8 d and 10 marks (£ 6 13 s 4 d) 1395 in addition to this in 1386. He received the latter payment provided that he was not in office of the Konstablers or the park governor, which had fallen to his son, whose name was also Peter. Peter Melbourne the Younger was also implicated in the rise of future King Henry IV during the reign of King Richard II . He was reappointed constable and steward of the Derbyshire manor in March 1399, but resigned from office in April of that year in exchange for an annual annuity from King Richard, who had confiscated the Lancastrian lands when John of Gaunt died earlier that year was. After Henry took the English throne, Peter Melbourne was confirmed as constable in October 1399 and his annual salary increased from £ 10 to 100 marks (£ 66). The following year he was given land in Derbyshire which had been confiscated by Thomas Merke , Bishop of Carlisle and co-conspirator against the king.

The Duchy of Lancaster continued to improve and expand the property in the 14th and 15th centuries. John of Gaunt had 1392-1393 glazed the windows in the great hall and in the parade bedroom and also carry out other work. He had the drawbridge repaired in 1393-1394 and in 1399-1400 the water supply improved with pipes that came from a draft two years earlier.

The castle served as a prison for Jean I de Bourbon for nineteen years after he was captured at the Battle of Azincourt in 1415. Nicholas Montgomery the Younger was his guardian . The 19th century historian John Joseph Briggs postulated that in the Wars of the Roses the castle was partially demolished by the Lancastrian forces of Margaret of Anjou , but, since her campaign followed the Great North Road , it was believed to be Melbourne , Cambridgeshire , that plundered it , and not Melbourne in Derbyshire.

In 1545 the antiquarian John Leland reported to King Henry VIII that the property was in good condition so that it could be described as "beautiful and in fair condition", presumably after repairs in the reign of Edward IV , as Sir '' Ralph Shirley, '' a commander in Azincourt who was governor of the castle.

Decline

The foundations of the Tourelle (in the foreground)

When Elizabeth I became queen, she ordered reports on her castles. From a report from 1562 she could see that only ten castles in the north of her empire were worth preserving; Melbourne Castle was not among them. Another report from 1576 mentions that despite the good condition of the masonry (with the exception of a chimney and a window) the wooden parts of the castle had rotted and the roofing was full of holes; one kitchen is said to have been about to collapse and another needed a replacement of the floor. That same year, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury , wrote to the Queen to assure her that the castle was in good condition, was worth £ 1000 and could be repaired for £ 100. Because he was responsible for the entertainment of the captured Mary Queen of Scots and her 140 followers, he hoped that they would be moved to Melbourne Castle. In 1583 the castle was re-inspected to see if it would be suitable for housing the captive queen. Even if the number and quality of the rooms would have been sufficient, the unfinished building was assessed as "incomplete on every corner". The large rooms would need a division, the floors were made of earth and paving and there was no paved courtyard. It was said that “as soon as you were out of the door, you were in the dirt because it was very muddy and uncomfortable to walk around the house in question.” In 1584, Queen Elizabeth decided to move Mary Queen of Scots to Melbourne Castle, just so that you could dropped the plan to kill the English queen after the Babington conspiracy and to put her Scottish cousin on the throne.

In 1597 the castle served as a cattle collection point, although a 1602 report assured Queen Elizabeth that it was a "beautiful old castle" in the hands of Gilbert, Earl of Shaftsbury . The constable's annual wage of £ 10 was the same as Ingram Fauconer had received 140 years earlier.

In 1604 Henry Hastings, 5th Earl of Huntingdon , bought the castle and lands for £ 4,700. His family seat, Ashby de la Zouch Castle , was only seven miles away. Between 1610 and 1637 Melbourne Castle was demolished and the building materials used for other construction projects. By 1629 all of the above-ground masonry was probably demolished. Sir John Coke of Melbourne Hall received permission from the Bishop of Carlisle that same year to remove building blocks from the castle's foundations. Some stones from the facing were used to repair the weir at King's Mill , in which some saw fulfilled the words of a local prophet who said, "Let the waters of the Trent flood the towers of Melbourne Castle." The Hastings lands were gradually sold and the castle grounds were sold by Earl Moira in 1811.

Ruins and archeology

The houses at 43 Castle Street and 45 Castle Street are clad with ashlar from the old castle.

A section of wall about 15 meters long and 4 meters high has been preserved to this day, which was integrated into the north side of an outbuilding of an adjacent farm. The ruins and the later farm are listed together as historical buildings of the 2nd degree and the remains of the castle are considered a Scheduled Monument . The area south of the remains of the wall was excavated and the stone foundations of two polygonal towers were discovered. The excavation site is east of Castle Street in a private garden that is not open to the public.

Some of the bricks removed from the castle ruins were used in the mid-18th century to build the homes at 43 Castle Street and 45 Castle Street , which are also listed as Grade II Historic Buildings, and other homes that are no longer listed exist because they were demolished to make way for the Castle Mill textile factory to be built. The mill, which also no longer exists, is said to have been built on the up to 4 meter wide foundations of the castle; 15 Castle Street also stands on old foundation walls. It is likely that building blocks from the castle were also used to build the former Melbourne Furnace (iron smelting) and the barn of the Furnace Farm .

Excavations at the beginning of the 19th century unearthed underground spaces "of considerable size and very well crafted", and excavations towards the end of the same century revealed substantial foundations in the Castle Farm garden . On the construction area of Castle Mill there is a now overbuilt, 2 meter wide and 15 meter deep well and construction work in 1961 brought to light massive, 5 meter wide foundations east of the old mill in line with the piece of wall that has been preserved to this day. Excavations in 1969–1971 revealed an extensive network of stone-clad walls, a door post, the lower part of a spiral staircase and evidence of an outer courtyard. Many of the stones had stonemason's marks . During construction work in 1988, masonry with quarry stone cores of two walls running in an east-west direction were found in test trenches. With the exception of the area of ​​the tower foundations near the remains of the wall that has been preserved to this day, none of the archaeological finds are visible.

Individual references and comments

  1. ^ A b c d e Philip Heath: Melbourne: Conservation Area Histories, District of South Derbyshire . South Derbyshire District Council. Pp. 1-2. 2005. Archived from the original on October 14, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 15, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.south-derbys.gov.uk
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g John Joseph Briggs: The History of Melbourne, in the County of Derby: Including Biographical Notices of the Coke, Melbourne, and Hardings Families . 2nd Edition. Bemrose & Son, Derby 1852. pp. 43-49.
  3. ^ A b c Derbyshire Archaeological Society: Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society . The Society, Derby 1895, pp. 92-93 (accessed July 15, 2016).
  4. ^ A b Gill Stroud: Derbyshire Extensive Urban Survey Archaeological Assessment Report . Chapter: Melbourne . Derbyshire Archeology Data Service, Matlock 2002. pp. 1, 5.
  5. ^ Diana E. Greenway: Bishops of Carlisle . In: British History Online . Institute of Historical Research. Archived from the original on October 20, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 15, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / british-history.ac.uk
  6. ^ A b c Samuel Lysons: Magna Britannia: Being a Concise Topographical Account of the Several Counties of Great Britain . Volume 5 Chapter: Derbyshire . Cadell, London 1817. pp. 209-210.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Howard Usher: Melbourne Castle in Derbyshire Miscellany, the Local History Bulletin of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society . Issue 12 (1991). Issue 5 Stafford. Pp. 126-133.
  8. ^ Gill Stroud: Derbyshire Extensive Urban Survey Archaeological Assessment Report . Chapter: Melbourne . Derbyshire Archeology Data Service, Matlock 2002. pp. 25, 28.
  9. ↑ a b c Anthony Emery: Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300-1500 . Chapter: East Anglia, Central England and Wales . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996. ISBN 0-521581-31-1 . P. 422.
  10. ↑ As a comparison, the average annual income of the 27 greatest barons at that time was £ 668.
  11. ^ Norman J. Pounds: The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Political and Social History . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993. ISBN 0-521458-28-5 . P. 147.
  12. ^ Mel Morris: Melbourne Conservation Area Character Statement . South Derbyshire District Council. Pp. 6, 17. 2011. Archived from the original on October 21, 2013. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  13. ^ Mel Morris: Melbourne Conservation Area Character Statement . South Derbyshire District Council. S. 4. 2011. Archived from the original on October 21, 2013. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  14. ^ John Rickard: The Castle Community: The Personnel in English and Welsh Castles, 1272-1422 . Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2002. ISBN 0-851159-13-3 . P. 168.
  15. ↑ {Henry Plantagenet had no male offspring, so his title of Duke of Lancaster was obliterated on his death. It was recreated for John of Gaunt, who was also the 1st Duke of Lancaster, albeit from the second creation. The Duchy of Lancaster had been a royal privilege since 1413.
  16. ^ Privy Purse and Duchy of Lancaster . Royal Household. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  17. ^ Anne Curry, Gwilym Dodd (editor): Henry V: New Interpretations . Chapter: The Finances of the Young Lord Henry . York Medieval Press, York 2013. ISBN 1-903153-46-8 . Pp. 18-20.
  18. ↑ A statue of a knight in Melbourne Church shows the Melbourne coat of arms: a chevron and three scallops .
  19. ^ A b John Benjamin Firth: Highways and Byways in Derbyshire , Erichsen, Nelly (illustrator), Macmillan and Co, London 1905, p. 20 (accessed July 18, 2016).
  20. ↑ De Bourbon received 20 s per day for himself and his entourage and 33 s 4 d when he was traveling. He was allowed to visit the Duke of Orléans , who was imprisoned at Pontefract Castle , and also to go to London.
  21. ↑ The original source (Stowe: Annals of England ) listed the following looted settlements: Grantham , Stamford , Peterborrow ( Peterborough ), Huntingdon , Royston , Meleborne and "all cities on the way to St Albans ". The Melbourn mentioned here is 2 miles from Royston.
  22. ↑ Of the 258 castles Leland reported on, only 91 were described as in good condition.
  23. ^ Michael W. Thompson: The Decline of the Castle . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2008. ISBN 0-521083-97-4 . P. 104.
  24. ^ Gill Stroud: Derbyshire Extensive Urban Survey Archaeological Assessment Report . Chapter: Melbourne . Derbyshire Archeology Data Service, Matlock 2002. pp. 14-17.
  25. ^ A b Jeremy M. Black: A Military History of Britain: From 1775 to the Present . Praeger, Santa Barbara 2006. ISBN 0-275990-39-7 . P. 18.
  26. ↑ John Goodall: Ashby de la Zouch Castle . In: History and Research . English Heritage. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  27. ^ A b Gill Stroud: Derbyshire Extensive Urban Survey Archaeological Assessment Report . Chapter: Melbourne . Derbyshire Archeology Data Service, Matlock 2002. p. 14.
  28. ^ Gill Stroud: Derbyshire Extensive Urban Survey Archaeological Assessment Report . Chapter: Melbourne . Derbyshire Archeology Data Service, Matlock 2002. p. 10.
  29. ^ Philip Heath: Melbourne: Conservation Area Histories, District of South Derbyshire . South Derbyshire District Council. S. 4. 2005. Archived from the original on October 14, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 15, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.south-derbys.gov.uk
  30. ^ Castle Farmhouse and Ruins of Melbourne Castle and Outbuildings, Melbourne . In: British Listed Buildings . britishlistedbuildings.co.uk. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  31. ↑ Melbourne Castle Fortified Manor and Earlier Medieval Manorial Remains . In: Historic England . English Heritage. Archived from the original on December 23, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 18, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / list.english-heritage.org.uk
  32. ↑ 43 and 45, Castle Street, Melbourne . In: British Listed Buildings . britishlistedbuildings.co.uk. Retrieved July 18, 2016.

Web links

Commons : Melbourne Castle  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Koordinaten: 52° 49′ 21,8″ N, 1° 25′ 26,8″ W