Colonel John Birch (1615-91) could boast an impressive CV – war-hero, politician, sometime wine-merchant – but he might well have failed an interview with English Heritage, especially had he been quizzed about Goodrich Castle. ‘I humbly conceive it is useless,’ he wrote to parliament in 1646, ‘and a great burden to the country’. As his letter to the house made abundantly clear, the colonel was all in favour of having the castle pulled down.
We may be thankful that his advice was not followed: Goodrich still stands today, perched high above the banks of the River Wye in Herefordshire, and is one of the finest properties in EH’s care. At the same time, one has to sympathize somewhat with Birch’s destructive urges, for in 1646 the castle had given him an awful lot of trouble. That year had seen the conclusion of the English Civil War (the first one, at any rate), during which the colonel and his Parliamentarian comrades had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wrest control of Goodrich, and other castles like it, from the hands of their royalist opponents.
To tackle Goodrich itself, Birch had not only been forced to deploy the usual array of trenches, tunnels and cannon; in addition, he had also been obliged to have a new weapon, nicknamed Roaring Meg, made especially for the occasion. A squat little tub of malevolence, Meg was not a cannon but a mortar-piece, designed to lob 200lb grenades over the castle’s walls and amongst its defenders. Unsurprisingly, once she had been finished and brought out to play, the garrison at Goodrich soon decided it was time to surrender.
Having gone to such lengths, Birch and his colleagues were anxious not to have to repeat the experience, and saw pulling down castles as the answer to their problem. Unfortunately for them, however, but luckily for us, outright demolition also proved to be problematic, owing to the time and costs involved. In the end the Parliamentarians had to content themselves with partial destruction – a process they called ‘slighting’. Castles that were slighted had their defensible parts knocked down or undermined so that they could not be held in future. Such was the fate of Goodrich, which is why it still stands today, albeit in ruins.
Goodrich, of course, was not a new building when Birch and Meg began smashing it up in 1646. Like the vast majority of castles, it was established in the late eleventh century, in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Unfortunately, little is known about its actual beginnings. How it came to acquire its distinctive name is pretty clear: a documentary reference of 1102 reveals that this was once ‘Godric’s Castle’, and Godric himself is named as the local landowner in the Domesday Book (compiled 1086). Who he was, however, and what his castle looked like, is altogether more mysterious: this is Godric’s only brush with the historical record, and nothing survives of the castle’s original structure. The mystery is rendered all the more perplexing by the fact that name ‘Godric’ would appear to indicate we are dealing with Englishman. Precisely how an Englishman came to be holding a castle in Herefordshire in the immediate aftermath of the Norman invasion would have been a story well worth hearing.
But no matter: whatever once stood at Goodrich, the building that stands today is unquestionably finer and has better tales to tell. Apart from its twelfth-century keep – a splendid building, but of uncertain sponsorship – the castle is chiefly the work of William de Valence, one of the most powerful and controversial magnates to have lived in thirteenth-century England.
Valence owed his existence, in a fundamental sense, to King John, who in October 1216 obliged his wife Isabella of Angoulême and the rest of subjects by dropping dead. No sooner was the king in his tomb than the queen had abandoned England and with it her children by her late, unloved husband. Isabella returned to her homeland in France, remarried and had more children – nine more, to be precise. Valence was one of the youngest.
As for his career in England, Valence owed that to King John’s son, Henry III. In 1247, Henry invited his young half-brother to cross the Channel and gave him the hand of a rich heiress, thereby making him the owner of vast estates – including Goodrich Castle. Unfortunately, the king’s indulgence also extended to turning a blind eye to Valence’s excessively violent behaviour, which so angered the rest of the aristocracy that it eventually helped trigger a constitutional crisis – the one usually associated with Simon de Montfort. It was, indeed, Montfort himself who told Valence in 1258 ‘make no mistake about it: either you lose your castles, or you lose your head’.
So Valence wisely chose to forsake Goodrich Castle and go into exile, though only for a short time. His saving grace was his close friendship with Henry III’s son, Edward, later to become the formidable Edward I, who was able to make good use of his half-uncle’s penchant for violence. Valence fought with Edward at the Battle of Evesham (where Montfort met his end), accompanied him on crusade, and assisted the king in the most successful military enterprise of his reign – the Conquest of Wales.
It is the Conquest of Wales that provides the most likely context for Goodrich’s reconstruction, although not in the obvious way that one might imagine. To subjugate his new territories, as is well known, Edward I built a string of celebrated castles – Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris being the most spectacular. His leading magnates followed suit, constructing new castles of their own or upgrading existing ones. In many cases, though, this massive aristocratic investment in stone was less about improving military security, and more about keeping up with the Joneses. Goodrich shares many architectural similarities with its near neighbour at Chepstow, rebuilt in the last decades of the thirteenth century by Valence’s contemporary, the earl of Norfolk. Neither man was really expecting much in the way of trouble from the already vanquished Welsh. But, with everyone’s attention focused on Wales, they were anticipating having to spend a lot more time in the region, with their great households in tow. The pressure was on to outdo each other, to entertain each other, and – occasionally – to entertain the king.
What is striking about Goodrich, therefore, is not so much its strong stone walls as the wealth of luxury accommodation crammed within them. You’ll find many more window seats, fireplaces and toilets than you will arrow-loops. Indeed, with its well-preserved ‘solar’ of private apartments, and its chapel, complete with recently restored stained-glass windows, Goodrich possesses one of the best-preserved interiors of any thirteenth-century English castle. It’s not so much of a fortress; more of a stately home with attitude.
For those who demand their history grisly, however, Goodrich can now boast an additional bonus. In 2003, having languished for many years outside a local museum, Roaring Meg returned. The last surviving mortar-piece of the English Civil War, she sits today within the courtyard of the castle she was specially created to ruin. To those unaware of her past, she must seem an unassuming object, no more terrifying than a cement mixer or a water-butt. But the ghosts of Goodrich Castle know better, and remember the sound of her roar.