Despite its ruination, continuity has been a recurring theme of Kenilworth Castle. While many major lordly estates of the Middle Ages were gradual accumulations, all the defining components of Kenilworth – castle, park, mere and indeed priory – were apparently created within a single decade, the 1120s, by a single man, Geoffrey de Clinton. (1)
While each of these elements would be elaborated in later years, the ambition of de Clinton’s original creation meant that even John of Gaunt was embellishing more than replacing 12th century Kenilworth.
Military importance and the siege of Kenilworth
While Kenilworth’s magnificence as a palace is undeniable, it was also a military stronghold, in which capacity it came spectacularly to the fore after Simon de Montfort’s rebellion against Henry III. Kenilworth had been de Montfort’s headquarters and it was there that his supporters retreated following his death at Evesham in August 1265. After a year Henry III determined to flush the rebels out and began a siege on the castle that lasted for an extraordinary six months.
The rebels acted with great vigour and violence, cutting off the hand of the king’s messenger’s and mounting daring sorties. The fact that Kenilworth was never taken, a truce on mutually agreeable terms being finally agreed, testifies to the military might of the early castle. (2)
The palace of John of Gaunt
John of Gaunt’s work at Kenilworth between 1370 and 1393 counts as one of the most significant and ambitious building campaigns of the 14th century. (3) Replacing existing structures in the inner ward, Gaunt created a complete suite of apartments, curving round in an arc from the kitchens, adjacent to the keep, to the inner rooms looking south to the park.
They were, it seems, conceived and built as a whole: using the same red sandstone, and with a coherent architectural programme governing, and unifying, their form and facades. This unified treatment had first been achieved on any scale by Gaunt’s father, Edward III at Windsor Castle in the 1350s. Gaunt’s work at Kenilworth represented the start of its transmission to other buildings. (4)
In scale and magnificence the buildings also excelled: the hall was the widest roofed space in England after Westminster Hall, the walls enriched with decorative stone panelling and huge windows with elegant tracery, allowing views to the castle and its landscape.
Altogether the buildings comprised a palace that commanded the mere and hunting parks to the west and south, of a scale, splendour and stylistic sophistication which embodied the princely status and regal aspirations of its builder.
The range of accommodation provided within these buildings was extensive and remarkable in a single range of apartments. They included service spaces, rooms of state and a striking number of high status rooms beyond these, presumably more private in nature.
The fact that these served with so little alteration or addition for the next two hundred years is testimony to their precociousness. Despite their ruination in the 17th century, the buildings have been said to represent ‘the finest sweep of semi-royal apartments of the later middle ages to survive in Britain’. (5)
The medieval landscape complex
Kenilworth is remarkable not just for its building, but for the scale and splendour of the great landscape that surrounded it. From the first, in the relationship between the castle and the man-made pool, the estate was conceived with a care for the theatre of the whole.
The windows and chambers of John of Gaunt’s apartments were designed to give commanding views of the pool and the park beyond, while the earl of Leicester’s creation of the chase, into which he fenced the mere and the top edge of the old park, created the arena in which the hunting party could bring the beasts to ground in the pool in full view of the castle spectators.
An extensive man-made landscape around a castle is not unusual, but the size and legibility of what remains at Kenilworth is remarkable. By the end of the Middle Ages the parks contained well over 4,000 acres, the pool measured half a mile across, a great moated retreat stood at the far end of the water, mills operated on the rivers, fishponds were kept stocked, rabbit warrens teamed and quarries provided stone for the castle: all these features are recorded in the documentary sources and remain legible in the landscape today.
The Elizabethan progress
As the only surviving house of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and the site of perhaps the most lavish progress entertainment of the century, Kenilworth offers a unique window on the Elizabethan court. The detailed accounts of the 1575 entertainment by Robert Langham and George Gascoigne, combined with the extensive survival of the castle give a startlingly complete picture of the queen’s extended summer visit.
Furthermore Kenilworth reveals much about Elizabeth I’s favourite. Though a young man of his age, Leicester hankered after an ancestry that the great Midlands castle represented. He cherished the very oldness of Kenilworth: removing little of the medieval masonry, and building new structures to blend in subtly with the old: the mass and material of the new lodging block, for instance, being designed to balance de Clinton’s great tower. In detailing, Dudley’s work effortlessly combined Gothic and classical grammar in single features, showing how little these were felt to be opposing styles.
Theatrical Kenilworth
Kenilworth has an exceptionally long and rich history of representing ancient Englishness. In 1279 the castle hosted a ‘round table’, an Arthurian assembly of ‘great antiquity’ involving a 100 knights in tournaments and festivities.
The theme of the earl of Leicester’s entertainments for Elizabeth were the glorious characters of English history: the Lady of the Lake rising from the mere, the minstrels telling tales of King Arthur and Merlin.
Precisely these associations seem also to have appealed to Henry and Charles as princes of Wales in the early 17th century, while in the 19th century, thanks to Walter Scott, Dudley and Elizabeth themselves joined the cast.
The 1939 Kenilworth Pageant featured 2,000 players performing thrilling episodes from Kenilworth’s history, while regular modern reenactment events continue the tradition. (6)
(1) D Crouch, ‘Geoffrey de Clinton and Roger, earl of Warwick: new men and magnates in the reign of Henry I’, BIHR, 55 (1982), 113–24
(2) Dugdale, 'Antiquities of Warwickshire', 162–3
(3) John H Harvey, 'Side-lights on Kenilworth Castle', The Archaeological Journal, 101 (1944), 95
(4) Christopher Wilson, Laurence Keen and Eileen Scarff (eds), 'Windsor: Medieval Archaeology, Art and Architecture of the Thames Valley', British Archaeological Association, Leeds, 2002, 15–94.
(5) Anthony Emery, 'Greater Mediaeval Houses of England and Wales 1300–1500', II, 399.
(6) 'The Times', 17 June 1939
