XVI. QUEENBOROUGH CASTLE AND ITS BUILDER, WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM.

The existing architectural works of William of Wykeham are sufficient, both in extent and magnificence, to place him in the foremost rank amongst the great building prelates of the Middle Ages. His own cathedral of Winchester bears ample marks of his munificence, but the twin educational establishments of Winchester and New Colleges are perhaps a finer monument of the foresight that warned him that the days of monasticism were numbered, and that the founding of a college was a more enduring work than the rearing of a minster.

The precise amount of personal control and guidance exercised by the building prelates over the works that they initiated must always remain a moot point, and modern criticism seems inclined to divest them of all credit save that of patrons of the arts. Nevertheless, it is nowise inconsistent with the extraordinary versatility of the mediæval mind that the great statesman and ecclesiastic should also be an adept at architecture, and this is more than likely in the case of William of Wykeham, whose earlier years were spent in supervising the Royal works.

Born in 1324, he became surveyor, at the age of thirty-two, to the works at Henley and Easthampstead (a Royal hunting-box on the skirts of Windsor Park), and later was entrusted with the more important operations at Windsor Castle. Alterations to Leedes (Kent), Dover, and Hadleigh castles came in turn under his care, and in 1361–7 he superintended the building of the entirely new castle of Queenborough.

In those days prolonged and valued service to the Crown was commonly rewarded by ecclesiastical preferment, a form of recompense agreeable alike to both parties; for, while it cost the donor nothing, it provided a lucrative sinecure for the recipient. Thus Wykeham became a noted pluralist, holding as many as a dozen prebends, besides numerous other offices. He was for some years Dean of St. Martin-le-Grand in London, and in 1366 became Bishop of Winchester, a position he occupied for nearly forty years.

His ecclesiastical works at Winchester and Oxford have long received their due meed of admiration, and it is not with them that we are now concerned, but rather with the remarkable castle of Queenborough, the erection of which he supervised.

Fig. 108.—QUEENBOROUGH CASTLE.

Plan from the

Hatfield MSS.

The Island of Sheppey, on which it stood, is a dreary tract of country, separated by a sluggish waterway from the mainland of Kent, and rising on the north side in the low hills of Minster. Since the destruction of the castle, its sole claims to architectural interest are centred in the priory church of Minster and the fine parish church at Eastchurch. The Castle of Queenborough, of which only the earthworks now remain, was begun by Edward III. about the year 1361, and took about six years to build; but from that time little is heard of it till it entered into the extensive schemes of Henry VIII. for the defences of the southern coast, when the building was repaired and brought up to date. On the triumph of the Parliament, Queenborough, in 1650, was surveyed by their orders, with the other Crown lands, with a view to its sale. In this survey it is described as “lying within the common belonging to the town of Queenborough and containing about twelve rooms of one range of building below stairs, and about forty rooms from the first storey upward, being circular and built of stone with six towers and certain out-offices, all the roof being covered with lead. Within the circumference of the castle was one little round court paved with stone, and in the middle one great well, and without the castle was one great court surrounding it, both court and castle being surrounded with a great stone wall, and the outside of that moated round.” The Commissioners speak of it somewhat contemptuously as having been built in the time of bows and arrows, and it was almost immediately sold and pulled down. Fortunately a careful ground plan, here reproduced, is preserved amongst the Hatfield papers, and a drawing by Hollar taken shortly before its demolition gives some indication of the remarkable form and unusual appearance it formerly presented.

In the history of English military architecture the Castle of Queenborough occupies an isolated position. It was almost the earliest example of the fort, in the modern sense, as opposed to the fortified dwelling-house, and was the immediate precursor of the “castles,” so called, of Henry VIII. Castle-building under Edward I., as exemplified in the great structures reared by that sovereign in Wales, is but little altered in general form from the larger fortifications of the Norman and Angevin kings, the rectangular keep and mound, however, being abandoned. Conway, Carnarvon, and Beaumaris are familiar examples of this period, which was followed by a rapid transition. The tendency became all for compactness and centralisation, the result being a great square block, with towers at the angles and a central courtyard. Numerous buildings of this class, such as Bolton-in-Wensleydale, Wressle, and Sheriff Hutton, were erected towards the close of the fourteenth century, and form almost the latest type of domestic combined with genuine military architecture which this country produced. Queenborough, as we have said, stands quite apart from either class. It provides no domestic accommodation worthy of the name, and its fifty-odd rooms, while imposing in number, were insignificant in size, being placed one above the other in the six lofty circular towers that surrounded the central courtyard. The perfect symmetry of the design is another unusual feature, in which the value of the circular plan, in the defensive warfare of those days, is fully appreciated.

The building which approaches it most nearly in form is the castle of Camber, built by Henry VIII. nearly two hundred years later, in the flat saltmarsh on the seaward side of Rye. Here, however, we have a circular keep in the centre, and the flanking towers are transferred to the perimeter of the polygonal outer curtain; and, furthermore, the danger of lofty towers in the face of artillery has reduced the whole structure to a low, squat form, far different from the aspiring turrets of Queenborough.

Attempts have been made, notably in the Winchester volume of the Archæological Journal , to recover the plan of Queenborough, but the drawing here reproduced for the first time sets at rest all question as to its form, and provides another interesting landmark in the history of architectural development.

—A. W. C.