Civic defences c.900–c.1150
In the mid 9th century the defences of Lincoln con-sisted of the Roman walls and ditches of the upper and lower cities. On most sides of the city these walls (and their associated ramparts and ditches) survived as defensive works, although it is possible that they had been breached in places and the ditches silted.
We have no excavated evidence for the condition of the late Roman ditches in the 9th century (the evidence from Motherby Hill west of the Lower City – MH 77 – is ambivalent) but it is likely that they still formed a real barrier. Similarly, we have no evidence from any of the many sections cut across the defences for any 9th-century construction activity on the walls. But it is also the case that there is no archaeological evidence that any medieval work at all took place on these defences after the Roman period, except for the insertion or renovation of gateways. It is doubtful, therefore whether such negative evidence is reliable.
Only in two places is the survival of the Roman walls into the 9th century thought doubtful. The wall between the Upper and Lower Cities, the south wall of the original Roman fortress, had ceased to have a defensive function in the 2nd century with the con-struction of the Lower City defences. Nevertheless, it may have served a symbolic function, separating ceremonial and religious from domestic functions perhaps. Documentary sources show that the eastern part of this wall and ditch was considered to be part of the Castle defences in the early 12th century, when Stephen granted the Bishop the right to build his palace on ground immediately south of the ditch (ed. Foster 1931, 54–5, RA87). This ditch may, however, have been a Norman re-cutting, undertaken at the foundation of the Castle in 1068 and we have no earlier evidence for its survival. Two excavations have taken place along this stretch of wall, both directed by Denis Petch in the 1950s (Petch 1960). From this work it seems clear that the Roman rampart survived to some height in the Middle Ages, but that the build-up of deposits inside the fortress masked its height. The upper parts of Petch’s sections were not recorded in detail (at least, not in the published versions). There is still today a considerable drop to the south of the rampart, and Petch’s work shows that the Roman wall lay halfway down the existing slope outside the medieval Upper City, and inside the Bishop’s Palace. The eastern part of the south wall of the Upper City, then, was rebuilt further north in the Norman period, either when William I constructed his castle or when the wall, effectively, was given to the Bishop together with the grant of the ditch, which initially separated the Cathedral from the Bishop’s Palace. This rebuilt wall formed the southern boundary of the Close.
To the west, much of the line of the fortress south wall was removed in the Norman period for the
construction of the Castle but small stretches ought to survive in the southern side of the Lucy Tower motte and between the observatory tower motte and the south gate. A fragment of wall, traditionally identified as the Roman city wall, is exposed in the grounds of Hilton House but an examination of early maps of this area suggest that wall was curved, and concentric with the Lucy Tower. Most probably, it was part of a rebuild of the city wall following the outer edge of the motte ditch, before heading southwards to join the western wall of the Lower City. From the location of the Lucy Tower motte itself and the likely position of the earliest inner bailey curtain wall (now incor-porated into the Observatory Tower motte) it is likely that the Norman Castle defences lie slightly to the east and north of the original Roman line. On both sides of the south gate, then, it seems that the defen-sive line marked by the south wall of the Roman Upper City was important in the Norman period, but that the wall itself had become disused, possibly because it had suffered considerable erosion in the intervening centuries.
As with the former south wall of the Roman fortress, the extent of survival of the Roman wall along the Witham waterfront is also uncertain. The Salter-gate excavations (LIN 73d) showed that the Roman wall here was used as foundations for a medieval masonry building, although this building is undated.
No records, and few finds, survive from the exca-vation of the Saltergate postern gate, but it is likely that a 10th-century ‘jetty’ with stone foundations retained by timber revetments, found in excavations in 1988–9, was approached through this gate (Donel and Jarvis 1990; Donel 1991b; Chitwood 1991). This jetty was cut away in places by rubbish pits containing 11th-century pottery and it may be that they indicate the closure of the gate at the end of the 11th century (and perhaps the construction of the predecessor of Bank Street slightly to its east). On this rather flimsy evidence, however, we presume that the Roman riverside wall was still standing and defendable in the mid 9th century but was already breached in the 11th century, although we cannot be sure whether this was before or after the Norman Conquest.
The Roman defences were inherited by the Anglo-Scandinavian and Norman inhabitants of Lincoln, then, but any works carried out between the 9th and 12th centuries must have been very limited in scale and extent. Having said that, large areas of the defences, and especially the city ditch, have not been examined archaeologically, whilst many of those excavations which have taken place have been in areas where we might not expect post-Roman activity to survive.
The first Castle, 1068–c.1130
Lincoln Castle was a royal foundation erected as a response to a rising in the North in 1068. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests that it was raised in the same campaign as Nottingham, York and ‘many other places in that part of the country’. The first Castle therefore seems to have been erected as part of a hasty campaign designed to house a garrison and provide a secure base for the King and his retinue when in Lincoln. At its foundation, the need for a fortified enclosure within which military and civil government could be based would have been paramount and the intact Roman fortress would have provided just such an enclosure ready-made. It has always been presumed, since the earliest antiquarian accounts, that the present ditched, banked and walled enclosure represents the Castle of 1068. However, the post-excavation work on several projects, especially those at the west gate (CWG 86), has raised the likelihood that the present castle enclosure is a somewhat later feature in the topography.
The west gate excavations revealed the Roman wall, the Norman gate foundations and a succession of medieval street surfaces, which show that the ground level inside the Castle had been raised considerably during the medieval period, leading to the survival of Norman structures to some height below ground.
Detailed analysis of the excavation records has not yet taken place but an initial survey of the pottery from the excavation shows that there is virtually no 11th-century material present; the post-Roman sequence starts with the 12th century. This cannot be simply due to the fact that levels of 11th-century date were not reached and, indeed, four sherds of middle Saxon pottery were present. It implies that the curtain wall, the bank upon which it is built and the west gate itself date to the 12th century.
This means that we have to reconsider exactly what the Castle founded in 1068 looked like (Fig. 9.8).
Parallels at other urban castles of early Norman date (such as the Tower of London or Gloucester Castle), might suggest that the initial defences consisted of a small bank and ditch cutting off a corner of the Roman defences. At Gloucester this small space was almost entirely filled by a motte. At Lincoln, however, we have the record of Domesday Book, which informs us that in 1086 the Castle covered ground equivalent to 166 households. And it is the reinterpretation of this account that shows us that the first castle at Lincoln occupied the whole of the upper Roman enclosure
Fig. 9.8. Reconstruction study of the Upper City plan c.1090. It is argued here that the whole of the former Roman enclosure served as the Royal castle founded in 1068 (sources, Stocker and Vince 1997; Stocker forthcoming a – drawn by Dave Watt, copyright English Heritage).
(Stocker and Vince 1997; Stocker forthcoming a).
Domesday Book states that Lincoln was assessed as having 970 occupied residences in total in 1066 and only 760 in 1086, and that of the 240 unoccupied residences 166 were ‘waste’ on account of the Castle.
These figures clearly imply that 17% of the city’s taxable property in 1086 was located in the area of the Castle and, as it happens, the area of the Upper City accounts for between 14% and 21% of the occupied property in the city at this date (including the Eastgate, Butwerk and Wigford suburbs, but excluding Newport, New-land and the Westcastle suburb – depending on whether one takes the city to include or exclude the city ditches).
It seems highly likely then, that the Castle in 1086 was not the 12th-century enclosure which we have grown to think of as Lincoln Castle (which is less than 5% of the occupied area of the city) but rather that it was the whole of the former Roman Upper City. The area, in fact, known throughout the medieval period as the Bail. The only other explanation of the Domesday Book entry would be that land in the south-west quarter of the Bail was taxed at about four times the standard rate – but the actual land-toll values recorded in medieval documents are consistently at the standard rate of one penny (Hill 1948, 58–9).
We suggest then, that, in 1068, the King expropri-ated and removed from taxation the entire Upper City, which was previously assessed as being equivalent to 166 residences, or units of taxation, and devoted it to the newly-founded Castle. Lincoln Castle has, there-fore, a two-stage development. The first stage in this development, in 1068, was the expropriation of the whole Upper City, the former Roman fortress. A motte was thrown up in the south-west corner and, defending this motte, some refurbishment of the Roman defences, especially on the exposed southern stretch may have been necessary. A recent study has looked at the north and east gates and concluded that the Roman gates were re-edified during this initial phase of castle building (Stocker forthcoming a).
In 1072×5 the new Cathedral was, therefore, founded within the new Royal Castle, and the early bishops of Lincoln had their palace inside the King’s fortification.
Indeed, in addition to being the sacerdotal head of the diocese, they were also, legally, the principal secular barons in the new Castle, owing a service of 20 knights to the King (Ibid.; Hill 1930; 1948, 86–8). Consequently it was in the Roman Upper City wall (and not in the later Castle enclosure wall), between 1101 and 1115, that the Bishop was allowed to make a door by the King to give him access to his house (ed. Foster 1931, 20, RA21).
Then, in the early 12th century, the decision was taken drastically to reduce the area of the Castle and to exclude the Cathedral. Work began on the construction of the massive earthwork ramparts and curtain wall we see today. Construction of the new ramparts involved the blocking of the original Roman west gate to the Upper City (it still survives buried in the
rampart), and the construction of a postern gate into the city from the west (Fig. 9.9). A new street following the line of the new ramparts and ditch was laid out on the line of modern Westgate.
The Castle between the early 12th and the early 14th centuries
The new enclosure, begun in the early 12th century, is the complex we recognise as the Castle today (Fig. 9.9) (Plate 3.1). The defences consist of two keeps (the Lucy Tower and Observatory Tower), both sitting on mottes, a curtain wall on top of an earthen bank, a corner tower (the Cobb Hall) at the north-east angle of the circuit, the east gate, the west gate and the ditch. Although from the middle of the 12th century the area within the Roman walled circuit but outside the new Castle was de-militarised, it continued to be known as ‘the Bail’, and it had the status of the outer bailey of the Castle.
Exactly when the change in the Castle’s size oc-curred remains uncertain, and it may, anyway, have been a developmental process (Stocker and Vince 1997; Stocker forthcoming a). It is clear however that, whereas in the last quarter of the 11th century, the entire Roman enclosure was looked upon as the Castle of Lincoln, with its defence being shared by the Bishop, the Earl and the Sheriff, by the mid 12th century the Castle was considered to be the inner bailey alone and the responsibility of lay lords holding the office of ‘custodian’ of the Castle. A significant point had been reached in the early 1130s when the bishop was given leave for his knights to undertake their ‘castle-guard’ at the bishop’s castle at Newark (ed. Foster 1931, 35, RA51) and the King gave the east gate of the Bail to the bishop for use as his palace (ed.
Foster 1931, 43, RA49). The relative sequence of construction of the inner bailey defences is fairly clear but the precise chronology is not. Both the west gate and the earliest phases of the east gate can be dated by their architectural form to the early years of the 12th century, a conclusion which is supported, in the case of the west gate, by excavated pottery.
The west gate was built to accommodate the massive western earthwork rampart and so is probably con-temporary with it, whilst the equally massive northern earthwork rampart looks similar in type and scale and is unlikely to be significantly later in date. Both are very high and broad, rising at least 6 metres above the bailey and even higher above the surrounding Bail (Figs. 9.9 and 9.10). Along the eastern side of the enclosure the earthwork is quite different in scale and character, being less massive. To the north of the east gate it reaches only about 3 metres high and to the south of the east gate there is no rampart at all, merely the motte on which the Observatory Tower stands. The eastern defences may be somewhat later in date than their northern and western counterparts – perhaps belonging to the second quarter of the 12th century.
The two lengths of wall on the eastern side are unlikely
to be contemporary with each other, however, as they are on markedly different alignments. It is worth observing that the eastern wall, from the east gate northwards until just before Cobb Hall, runs on the alignment of the Roman street grid and follows the projected line of the north–south street bounding the Roman forum/basilica complex on the west side. Its precise position may therefore have been determined by the survival of an element of the Roman topography.
This length of curtain wall is also free of herringbone work and so could also be a generation later in date than the northern and western walls. This stretch may, however, be somewhat earlier than that from the east gate to the Observatory Tower, as the latter stretch seems to have been built of a piece with the tower. This stretch incorporates mid 12th-century windows, which belonged to a range built against its west face. This wall, like the range built against it, is likely to belong to the same mid 12th-century campaign of building as the Observatory Tower itself. There is little doubt that the Observatory Tower, in the south-west corner of the inner bailey, is that built by Ranulph and referred to in the charter from Stephen given in 1149. Ranulph was,
Fig. 9.9. Reconstruction study of the Upper City plan c.1150, following the withdrawal of the Castle to the newly constructed enclosure in the south-western corner of the Roman enclosure (sources, Stocker and Vince 1997; Stocker forthcoming a – drawn by Dave Watt, copyright English Heritage).
however, in intermittent control of the Castle through-out the civil war and it may be that the 1149 grant was to a certain extent retrospective permission for works already underway. Even so it seems clear that the defensive circuit was largely complete by the middle of the 12th century.
The new inner bailey earthworks were surrounded by a wide, rock-cut ditch, which runs parallel with the earthworks, including those parts that are thought to be mid 12th-century features. Descriptions of this ditch in the 17th century and later show that it remained a recognisable feature throughout the medi-eval period (Hill 1948, 99). The spoil from the ditch is likely to have provided the material for the earthwork ramparts themselves and, consequently, they will contain much inverted Roman and early medieval evidence. It may therefore be of some significance that the 1974 excavations on the Observatory Tower site produced a significant quantity of early and middle Saxon potsherds.
The massive earthworks of the new inner bailey of Lincoln Castle were topped by masonry walls (Fig.
9.10). Almost all the curtain wall was refaced on both
sides in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as part of refurbishment associated with the prison, and has been refaced again in the last thirty years. In several places the masonry curtain wall running along the crest of these earthworks has been observed to sit on a timber framework resting directly on the Castle bank (Elliott and Stocker 1986, 28–30). It has been suggested that this feature indicates that the wall is later in date than the bank, but there is no reason to think this is so. Furthermore, the complete absence of 11th-century pottery from both the Castle west gate (CWG 86) and The Lawn excavations (which investigated the small extra-mural suburb which grew up outside the west gate – LH 84/LA 85/L 86) suggests that the earth-works are of 12th century date. By contrast, both sites produced quantities of pottery of the early 12th century. The presence of herringbone work in the curtain wall skins towards the north-west corner has been noted by antiquarian authors and its significance for the dating of the Castle has long been debated.
Sometimes its presence has been taken as a sign that the walls are 11th-century in date, but herringbone work is present in several Lincolnshire churches
Sometimes its presence has been taken as a sign that the walls are 11th-century in date, but herringbone work is present in several Lincolnshire churches