Hadleigh Castle. Defiant in its decrepitude (Paul Farmer/geograph)
It’s not unknown for someone to buy a house and, within weeks of getting the keys, tearing apart any and all vestiges of the previous owners.
I’ve done it myself. No doubt many of you have as well.
Kitchen? Rip it all out and start again.
Bathroom? Same again.
Carpets up, walls repainted different colours, loft converted and treasured lawn turned into a vegetable patch. Not so much keeping up with the Jones’ as removing any last traces of them and the home they’d made.
This isn’t a new phenomena. The owners of castles did it as well.
The ruins of Hadleigh Castle stand on the fringes of the Thames Estuary at the south of the Essex town from which it takes its name. The Castle was built in the early part of the thirteenth century by a Hubert de Burgh who had served as Justiciar (a role not unlike the present one of Prime Minister) under King John, he of Magna Carta fame.
Hadleigh. A tower in need of a bit of remedial work (John Myers/geograph)
A formidable and influential man then, and one who had powerful friends. One who felt his standing in life deserved, at the very least, a Castle to call his own. He was given the licence to build one by the afore mentioned King John, who had, in 1230, also gifted him the land it was to stand upon.
Such was the size of De Burgh’s ego, his Castle had, by that time, already been completed, meaning that the consent given to him by his monarch to do so ended up being done retrospectively.
Luckily for De Burgh, the King and his court were sympathetic to his sense of self importance and, quite literally, let the matter stand. Try building a Castle today without planning permission and see what happens.
For that matter, try asking for a new dormer window in your home and see how far you get. But blanket bombing a rare wild flower meadow with eighty new Lego-like houses? Ah, that’ll do nicely Sir. Anyway….
…however well De Burgh got on with King John, he was never going to have the same cosy relationship with his successor, King Henry III. The two men rapidly fell out and, in a subsequent act of lordly pique, Henry stripped De Burgh of his ownership of Hadleigh Castle, declaring that it and the lands it stood upon now belonged to the crown. Like rather too many landlords with a property portfolio that they can’t keep up with though, Henry then proceeded to pay scant regard to his new trinket, a surprising decision really, given that Hadleigh was near enough to London to be an ideal weekend retreat, one with great views over the water at that.
A fourteenth century estate agents dream. The view over the water from Hadleigh Castle (Robert Lamb/geograph)
It was Edward III who first fully came to recognise Hadleigh’s potential when he came to the throne in 1327, a hundred years or so after its initial construction had been completed. And, to him, whilst the Castle had a lot going for it geographically and strategically, its look and décor were, well, to put it bluntly, SO thirteenth century.
He promptly got the builders in, their remit being to not only make it ‘fit for a King’ (which would have meant the end of the avocado privy) but bigger and more fit for purpose. This meant it needed to become a fortification that would easily see off a potential attack from the dreaded French but also one grand enough to provide him with (and at last the groat has dropped) with a convenient second home close to London.
But you know what families can be like…
Because, like any petulant teenager, Richard II, Edward’s grandson, reckoned that if Grandad saw Hadleigh as an exciting place to visit and spend time in, then it must have been a really boring place and certainly not somewhere he wanted to take his friends.
The well worn and weathered walls of Hadleigh Castle (Marathon/geograph)
So he neglected it completely meaning that Hadleigh eventually found its way back to the De Burgh family when it was granted to Aubrey in the late fourteenth century.
Keeping up?
Subsequent owners included Edmund of Langley and his son Edward of Norwich, assorted Dukes of York and a Duke of Gloucester as well as Hadleigh eventually forming part of the dowry granted by King Henry VIII to three of his wives; Catherine of Aragon, Ann of Cleves and Catherine Parr.
The gentle, fair minded and even tempered Henry further made full use of the woodlands surrounding the Castle to provide woodland for his rapidly expanding Navy (remember the Mary Rose?) whilst a much later owner, one William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army (who acquired it in 1891) made use of the site for the needs of that organisation, a splendid backdrop, you can be sure, for their happy gatherings.
Hadleigh Castle’s current custodians are English Heritage who, during the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, allowed Hadleigh Park to be used as the venue for the mountain biking competition with the winner of the Women’s Cross Country event being Julie Bresset from France.
From FRANCE?
Edward III would have been turning in his grave.