Elanor Janega: How The Medieval Nobility Was Born

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:04]Life in the medieval period looked like lots of different things to lots of different people. Your place in society could dictate everything from what food you ate, where you could go, how educated you were, and even how long you were likely to live for. Across this series, we'll discover what life was like for those that worked, those that earned, those that learned, and those that played in medieval England.

[00:00:38]In terms of the medieval world, the last group that we're ready to talk about are often the group that gets talked about the most, the nobility at large.

[00:00:51]So who are the nobility? Technically royals are nobility at the very very top of the hierarchy in the secular medieval world. There's a broad swave of people underneath royalty that are also nobles that have a hierarchy within that as well. You might just be a generalized knight and go by sir. You might be a marquee or a marquis. You might be more directly related to the king and be a duke or a duchess. All of these people on the whole are nobility. As a general rule of thumb, nobility writ large are the people who control secular power in the countryside. Whereas royal power is usually concentrated in cities. The benefit that you get in exchange for the huge responsibility of overseeing laws in any particular jurisdiction is taxation. Your surfs are giving you taxes directly. You'll have to give a small percentage of that to the king, but the great majority of it stays with you. But what do the nobility do? It's their job to keep the king's peace, specifically within the countryside. And that's what happens here at Hettingham Castle in Essex.

[00:02:12]Hading is wonderful for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it's an almost archetypical example of Norman style castles. There's two things going on here. The first is that this is a perfect example of what we call a Mott and Bailey defensive structure. So a bunch of people from the local area, probably surfs, would have been forced to come dig out a bunch of ground and build these foundations themselves in a defensive structure. Then on top of that, you have the Bailey. In this case, the keep that you can see here. What we're unfortunately missing here would be what we call a curtain wall. So it would have been a defensive wall on top of the M itself around the edges. That would be where you would defend a castle in the first instance. If everything goes wrong, you then retreat inside the Bailey itself with the entire household.

[00:03:01]Mott and Bailey's also have other features that sort of help when you're attempting to violently subjugate a bunch of people. And one of them is that it's very difficult to get into. By very virtue of the M, you've got to get in over a bridge, of which this is a really fine example. Technically, this is not a Norman bridge. It's tutor. But what it shows us is how well Mott and Bailey architecture works. Even half a millennium later, you still need to build bridges in order to get over it.

[00:03:29]It's a really, really great way of controlling access and egress to your castle and making sure that no other armies or violent mobs can sneak up on you.

[00:03:44]These windows are extremely exciting, not just because they're a great example of Norman Romanesque architecture, which they certainly are, but because they also have some cool little architectural details. So, you'll notice on all of them that they have little columns off to either side. And these are something that we call a false arcade. It's meant to remind you specifically of Roman architectures. They want you thinking of the big ionic and doric pillars that you would see in a Roman villa. But the other thing you'll see going on is at the very top level here. You'll see that zigzag pattern over the arch. This is called a chevron, and it's specific to English Norman architecture in particular. You're not going to find that back on the continent in France.

[00:04:24]Now, it's only here, and it's only brought over by the Normans when they invaded.

[00:04:29]You'll also notice that all of the windows are different. So here at ground level, you just have these slits in the wall, and all that's doing is letting light into the interior. That's because the people on the very bottom level of the castle are the very most common people who are just servants essentially. Further up, that's our guard room. It's got a larger window, but it's still not huge. Above that, that's the banqueting hall. So it's got pretty large windows that they're meant to impress everyone on inside. And then at the top of that, you have these really magnificent chevrons because that's what you'll see from over the curtain wall when you're approaching the Mottton Bailey as a specific example of Norman elegance. It lets everybody know who's approaching the castle, who's in control, and that the land is under new management. As impressive as this keep is, and it undoubtedly is, we can see a few clues that there used to be a lot more here than there currently is. We've got a broken archway here, which is what used to be the chapel. And up on top of the keep, you can see where there used to be roof lines. First, there was a flat one directly over the grand entrance door, and then there are some zigzag ones on top of that. They might have upgraded at a point in time. And all of these are great reminders of the fact that castle is actually a collective noun, and it refers to all of the buildings that would have been inside the curtain wall. So, what kind of buildings are we talking about? Well, you've got chapels that see to the religious needs of the community living in the castle, but you also have things like stables where you would keep all of your horses, cows, pigs, sheep, whatever it is you need. You'd also have stuff like a blacksmith smithy if you're making a lot of armor for any kind of military guys that live inside a castle.

[00:06:13]Well, that's where you make it. But the other big thing that you have is your kitchens. One of the major ways that we lose castles is fires. And so you want to keep any kind of cooking that is done with huge fires when you're cooking for a large number of people outside of your main keep. You want to make sure that you're not introducing any way that you can burn the entire thing down. This also introduces a really difficult level for cooking in the castle. If you're bringing a huge banquet up to the banqueting floor, which is on the second floor, you need to make sure that it's piping hot in order to get across the yard, up the stairs, and into the keep itself.

[00:06:55]These stairs wouldn't have actually been extent in the medieval period. And you can kind of tell from what is missing.

[00:07:02]As we can see from the extent roof lines along there, there would have been buildings here. So there's no way you could have had a staircase up as well.

[00:07:09]This was however supposed to be the main entrance to the castle. We can tell that because again you see these great chevrons over the door. It's very fancy.

[00:07:18]It's really elaborate. It's meant to impress you as you come inside. The other thing that we can see here is this rounded roof line. And that's from a later edition chapel that would have been put here. Well, why would you need two chapels? Sometimes people just like to build extra chapels if they have a specific devotion to a saint. So, for example, one sort of chapel that people really like to add on later are Marian chapels. They're specifically devoted to the Virgin Mary and they're for people who feel really piously moved by one individual in particular. Or if you're just a really pious person in general, maybe you want to make your own mark on the family's castle. You want a new architectural style added so you put your chapel on later to remind everyone that you were here.

[00:08:03]So, how does one become a member of the nobility?

[00:08:07]As a very very general rule of thumb, someone gets land and power or titles as member of the nobility in exchange for military service to the king. This is particularly true here in England after the Norman conquests. When the new king comes over from Normandy, in the first place, you need a whole army to fight off the people already living here. And in the second place, the Normans are involved in a violent military occupation of a fairly hostile country.

[00:08:38]You need lots of armed members of the nobility to establish that there's a new king and that there's also a new culture that's taking over in England. This is the case of the Dare family who we're going to be talking about today. Aubrey Dare I comes over with the Norman conquests and we first see records of him in 1089 in the Dongs day book.

[00:08:59]Aubrey De is called Aubrey the Chamberlain, which means that he's specifically tied up with the king's retinue itself. A chamberlain is the sort of person who will help the king by overseeing any deeds that he signs or any charters. If you see any major royal medieval charter, down the bottom, there'll be a list of names of various nobility who have witnessed whatever it is that the king does. The other thing that they do is make sure that everyone outside in that kingdom understands that this has come to pass. As such close proximity to the king indicates, the Dare family are extremely important. And soon enough, they have land in nine different counties throughout England.

[00:09:41]In particular, they have huge holdings in Essex and in Oxfordshire.

[00:09:48]So, come on, let's go inside and see what life would have been like for the Divers.

[00:09:55]As we come in through the main entrance, this is the first room that anyone would enter. And in fact, it's actually the only room that the great majority of people who come to visit the Deve are ever going to enter. This is the guard's room. And as the name indicates, it's where all of the knights and all of the guards of the Dvere family would hang out. There's a reason for that. If you're coming into the castle, the dver want you to see their military power right away. They want you to see how many people that they have in their army, and they want you to understand that they have a great deal of power over the land. Before you get to them, you're going to have to get past their army, quite literally.

[00:10:31]As you can probably tell, this room is currently undergoing some renovations.

[00:10:36]This isn't particularly far off from what you would have seen in the medieval period. We've got a brand new timber floor that's just been put down, and indeed, you would have a timber floor in the period. The major difference is over the top we would probably see some rushes on the floor. And the rushes do two things. One of the things they do is baffle sound. So if you've got, you know, what's essentially a private army of men hanging out in your basement, you probably want to help keep that down.

[00:11:01]The other thing that they do is help to keep it warmer. As you can see from the giant fireplace behind me, and you could probably tell from a large stone room this big, it would be quite cold in the winter. So you're going to want any extra help that you can get. The new floors in here are actually a great reminder of how powerful and rich the Dare family were. When you build a castle, it doesn't just stay pristine.

[00:11:24]You have to constantly be updating it and renewing parts of it. Especially when you have hundreds of people coming and going through it. There's wear and tear that's extremely costly to keep up.

[00:11:35]And only an extremely wealthy and powerful family like the DV would be able to do that. From the guard room, we can continue through the castle via the staircase here. staircase can take us into one of two places. We can go downstairs into the sellers and into the dungeons. Or if we're particularly important, lucky, or in some kind of legal trouble, we can go upstairs to the main bankrooting table and into the presence of the diver.

[00:12:04]A big thing that nobles do is get involved in war.

[00:12:09]Almost everyone who was involved in the Norman conquest fought alongside the king. when the king came here. But members of nobility are also saying that they're willing to get involved with any sort of military conflicts in the future. In the medieval period, there can be a lot of fighting back and forth between various royal houses. This can happen because the way that inheritance works is very complicated, especially if you're a group of Normans who come from what we call now France and are controlling things in England. France is an extremely wealthy place. It's got a lot of money. So, you're going to be interested in making sure that you continue to control that even if the center of your power is here in England.

[00:12:48]So, in exchange for beating people up, the nobility get huge tracks of land wherever it is the king might have them.

[00:12:55]Since they are having all of their needs met by the peasants that they oversee, they can spend all of their leisure time training for military purposes. This means that they are training in sword combat from a very, very early age. And they also are trained in chivalry. The term chivalry comes from the French word chevali and it has specifically to do with chevals horses and what people who are going around on the medieval equivalent of tanks should do in order to be polite to the people around them.

[00:13:26]When we talk about chivalry a lot of the time what we're talking about is what knights consider to be their duties to God, to their local lord and to each other. for knights. One of the best things about war is you have an opportunity to capture other knights because once you do, you can take him back home and ransom him for all of the money that his family has. So, one way of thinking about medieval warfare is thinking about it like rich guy tag. So, knights often have a great deal of respect for each other, even if they're on opposite sides of the battle lines.

[00:14:00]Not just because there's some chivalic ideal of respect, but because there are real monetary benefits to being nice to guys that you take advantage of. This is just another way that noble life is completely different to the life of commoners.

[00:14:20]As you come up the stairs here, you will notice that it's a long way up from the guard's room. And this is kind of on purpose. When you come into the presence of the deve here in the main banqueting hall, they want you to be a little off-put. You'll be out of breath and you'll be slightly discombobulated by the grandeur that you're coming into.

[00:14:40]Why are you coming in to see the divers here? Well, it might be for any kind of jurisdictional or legal proceeding. The dvers of Oxford by the time that Aubrey III is on the throne here. They also own most of the land from here all the way to the sea coast. There is Oxford itself and there are also lots of parcels of land scattered across England in general and if you get in trouble or you need any property dispute taken care of you need to come here to Hettingham and have the dve sorted out. So what's it like to be in the banqueting hall here and in the presence of the divers? It's kind of overwhelming. If you look above us that's a minstrels gallery. So as you come in, you might be hearing wonderful music by all the musicians in the employee of the diver. You'll see the beautiful paintings on all the walls.

[00:15:29]Look at all the chevron work over every one of these windows. And look how many windows there are. That's incredibly expensive. How many masons were working on that? Say you're lucky enough to be at one of the diver banquetss. You're sitting here enjoying wonderful food that's come from the kitchens outside down two flights of stairs and across the yard. How many people does it take to cook that and then bring it up and serve it? This is an absolutely huge house that the divers are running. And the divers are letting you know when you're at a banquet how powerful they are, how rich they are, and exactly how many people are in their employ.

[00:16:07]As extremely grand as this room obviously is right now, this isn't quite what it would have looked like in the medieval period. Medieval castles were actually very brightly painted. So all the stone work that you can see coming through the plaster here wouldn't have been seen. All the plaster work over the top would have been painted with bright geometric shapes. They're not unlike the chevrons that we see over the arches here. Medieval people loved color and they loved patterns. So when we think about castles now, we tend to think of them as a little bit dark and a little bit dingy, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were actually really fond of color in ways that we would find a little bit goaudy ourselves.

[00:16:48]One of the most incredibly exciting things about this room is this glorious Norman arch here. In fact, this is thought to be the largest still extent Norman arch in existence. It's about 28 ft wide. This is an incredible feat of architecture. And just this arch is responsible for holding up almost the entire weight of the castle. Think about what that means about 900 years ago. the architecture that needs to go into that, the engineering, and all of this has been made without any kind of calculators. It's all done by hand, and it's all done by actual hand tools. The amount of money and influence that it takes to get something like this built is absolutely incredible, and we're really lucky that it's still standing.

[00:17:34]So, the great majority of the banqueting hall is about display, but also there are some little secrets and things you aren't supposed to see. So, say you've come to see the deve on a legal matter and maybe you're not in the best mood.

[00:17:48]You come up the stairs, you're overaued by everything you see and there they are on either side of the fire. Part of that is because they don't want you to notice that this is where the guards are.

[00:17:59]That's specifically at your ey line and you won't be able to turn around and see it. So, say things don't go your way legally and you decide you're going to take matters into your own hand. If you rush the deve, their guards will come out of this niche and they will block any kind of violent attack. Guard spaces like this are extremely important because when you're this powerful and rich, you don't always make a lot of friends. A lot of the diveres find out the hard way what happens when you come up against common people who don't have your interests at heart. When you're enforcing your power through violence, it engenders violent reactions. People like this need guards on hand all the time because they're doing violent things and it means that ordinary people oftentimes feel like they have no recourse other than violence themselves.

[00:18:50]All of this money and all of this power, however, doesn't necessarily insulate you from everything that happens in the world. If you're involved in very violent things and you are a devout Christian, which again most Europeans are at the time, you might be worried about the state of your soul when you die. The dees do this with the Cole Priy in Essex. There they endow an entire group of monks to pray for their family souls later on. It's a bit of a win-win.

[00:19:18]The monks get somewhere to live. The Dores don't have to worry so much about all the violence that they do in life.

[00:19:23]The second Aubrey Dare is killed at the hands of a London mob in 1141. His body however is taken back to the Cole priaryy and he's buried there along with his father and his soul is prayed to into perpetuity by the monks. The Dare story does not stop there. However, the third Aubrey Devare is named the Earl of Oxford by the king. This is an indication of how entwined the house of Dvare is with the kings here in England.

[00:19:49]Earls are a particularly high up section of the nobility. So this means that dees have come up even further in the world than they were before.

[00:20:01]As a general rule of thumb, the further up you go in a castle, the closer you are to the inner circle of the family who lives there. Certainly true of the dver.

[00:20:11]But because the divers are so incredibly wealthy, while you're on the way to their private chambers, you've got one stop on the way, and that's the minstrel gallery. This particularly ornate Norman stonework is a kind of medieval signage.

[00:20:25]It lets you know that you're still in a public place. It's so incredibly intricate that it lets you know this is still something for the average person.

[00:20:35]Anything beyond this is going to be private and strictly for the Deve family themselves.

[00:20:41]From up here in the minstrel gallery, we get a really cool idea of what it looks like down in the banqueting hall. But we also have a really interesting way of looking at the arches. You might notice that here in the banqueting hall, the exact opposite thing is true from the windows outside. Outside, we have the chevron windows up at the very top of the castle where everyone will see them.

[00:21:02]Here, the chevron arches are at the bottom and closer to your ey line. And we have the simpler arches with just the columns up near the top where you're less likely to be looking when you're at a banquet. As we exit the minstro gallery, we can go up the stairs. Again, our first stop ordinarily would be the Deve family rooms. They are undergoing construction right now, which is actually great news because it means that we can prime their private lives for generations to come once that's done. But even more exciting, we can go up one more again and get onto the roof of the castle.

[00:21:44]Look at the view. I haven't just brought you up to the top of Castle Hadingham to look at the view. However, I want to talk a little bit about the roof. And that's because this is kind of close to what we would expect to see from a medieval castle roof. It would probably be lined with lead, which helps keep the rain off. We probably would see some major ridging like this to keep the water flowing down. This gives you an idea of how responsive medieval architecture can be to its place. You wouldn't guess on a day like this, but obviously Essex can be very rainy.

[00:22:15]Things like channeling water to the right place really means something. If you have a huge stone building like this, you need to make sure that water gets off of the roof and ideally as far away as you can possibly get from the foundations itself. This will keep you nice and dry once you spent a bunch of money on a really expensive building.

[00:22:32]One of the differences that we see here from the medieval period is actually all this great woodland. In the medieval period, you wouldn't want this much wood around for a number of reasons. The first is if you're a noble and all of the money that you make to keep stuff like your great castle going comes from the countryside, you need that to be farmland and you want it to be working.

[00:22:52]Castles aren't just somewhere to live, and they're not just a fortification for somewhere to bring armies out of.

[00:22:59]They're also a really potent and powerful symbol of who controls the land. You can see how high up we are here, even in the 21st century. In the 11th century, this is a huge building.

[00:23:09]It's monumentally large. This reminds all of the peasants in the surrounding countryside who controls you and who's watching over you.

[00:23:22]We've come into the Georgian house on the grounds here of Hettingham Castle to have a look at some of the documents associated with it. This wonderful document right here is a 19th century scroll showing the lineage of the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward Dair. And very interestingly, it shows us one of the ways that you can become very important to the king's court. So up top we can see the D family itself but here with the two lions is William the conqueror and we can see on here that his sister Beatatrice gets married to Aubrey De.

[00:24:01]Great way to make sure that you are part of the king's inner circle. Just marry into it. This is a really interesting document because it shows us how noble houses like the dys can track their lineage in a really intricate way over centuries. That's because if you're as important as the dair, you tend to stay important. It's really difficult to alienate wealth like that from a family.

[00:24:26]This is exactly the opposite of what we see from the peasant families. However, your family can lose everything in just a decade if you have a poor enough harvest and you get into debt. That's not something that happens with families like the dees. What we've got here is a really lovely rendering of what the castle grounds would have been like in the medieval period. So, as you can see, there's a lot less forest and everything is essentially cultivated. Each one of those strips would represent a particular family's holding for the peasantry. This is a really exciting document because it shows us the lands around the castle itself. So, in the middle we see the castle, but up here we see the great park and over here we see the little park. And in particular, one of noble people's favorite aspects of owning a castle, the multiple deer parks and hunting lodges. A huge way of spending your time when you're a noble is to go deer hunting. And all of the deer in those parks would be protected and earmarked for you. Having ready access to venison is a really big deal at the time. And it's also just essentially a very popular sport.

[00:25:36]The interesting thing about the Aubbery's dair is that I can say that to you, the Aubry's Dev. And there's a reason why you continue to name your son exactly the same thing. What these names are doing is underlying the generalized power of this specific household. It can mean that we sort of forget the individual intricacies of one person's life over another. And this is kind of ironic because these are the people that we know the most about.

[00:26:04]When we come to places like Hettingham, it's easy to forget about any aspect of medieval society other than the nobility. That's pretty much by design.

[00:26:13]The Dir family only wants you to think about them, their power, and their authority when you see this building.

[00:26:18]However, it's not just the diver who live here. Let's not forget that there are clergy members who are working at the two chapels here on the property as well as at the Cole Priaryy further away here in Essex. All of this power and privilege is also maintained off of the work that peasants are doing in the countryside. It's the peasants working in fields, paying their taxes and paying their rent to the divers that allows them to live such an incredibly lavish lifestyle. All of the luxury goods inside of a castle like Hettingham will be supplied by people who are working in what will become guilds in the 14th century. All of those tapestries, all of the fine cloth, all of that is as a result of very skilled people who are the best at what they do. When we think about the medieval period, it's easy to think it was a landscape that was entirely populated by knights who live in castles. And nothing can be further from the truth. It's just that castles are one of the few remaining physical symbols of a world that it's really difficult to see at times. The thing to take away from a place like Hettingham is not just that the Deve are an incredibly important family, but it's that their prestige is made possible by thousands of people that we don't see whose lives were every bit as important.

[00:27:49]Come on.