Today’s virtual presentation as at the Cleveland & Teeside Local History Society. The speaker was Erik Matthews.

The main purpose of the lecture was to present an alternative perspective on the fundamental nature and purpose of medieval castles. While they are popularly believed to be first and foremost military strongholds, with luxury and decoration being a later development, research since the 1980s has found that even in their Medieval heyday a lot of these buildings were primarily status symbols and luxury homes with actual defensive capability being a distant afterthought.

Matthews’s main case study was Whorlton Castle in North Yorkshire. Whorlton was developed in three stages, the first beginning shortly after the Norman Conquest. The town of Whorlton developed at the foot of the castle in the thirteenth century, but decline in the seventeenth due to the growth of nearby Stokesley, which had better access to the Tees.

With few exceptions, Whorlton was not generally employed as a defensive building, and Matthews identified several features which gave this away, most notably the gatehouse with its wooden portcullis which would not have stopped an army, or the false gun ports through which a proper sight would have been impossible. He also noticed other features of the estate’s former grandeur, such as the elaborate water gardens supplied by an artificial leat and dam, or the compartmented gardens where high-status guests could socialise. There were also signs of earthwork boundaries which would have been dug to divide the estate into smaller burghages. He highlighted an outer enclosure, which could have been the site of the town’s fair.

He spoke more briefly about other locations, such as Sigston Castle, set in the kind of watery landscape which was often crafted to create optical illusions which would make the estate look bigger than it really was. He also said that the moat around a castle was not necessarily to keep out human invaders but rather to deter pest animals and form a liminal space which marked the boundaries between places of different social status. Also included was Harewood Castle, constructed in 1340 by Sir William Aldeburgh, then split in abeyance between his daughters with a timeshare arrangement, then Barnard Castle, then Dunstaburgh, then finally Pendragon Castle in Mallerstang, which he noted was surrounded by hills from which an attacking army could claim the advantage of high ground.

I was reminded of the BBC Radio 4 series “Short History Of…”, whose episode on British Castles also made the point that most of them were mainly used as comfortable residences for the wealthy and thus the conversion of so many of them into hotels in the modern age should be no surprise.

Paull Holme Tower, my own family’s castle (or at least part thereof) has yet to reach a habitable state, but hotel conversion is one of the options regularly suggested as an endpoint for its restoration.