A BRUSH WITH HISTORY

I read in the paper the other day that we are living through a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. What this means I am not quite sure. It is a rare event and possibly beneficial, so the paper says. It started on 8 June and ends sometime next January, so I am on the look-out. Three herons flew over the house yesterday in formation, so you never know.

What I do know is that orders for our little business are becoming slower. Instead of half a dozen parcels to ship out each day, we are lucky to have one or two. This may have something to do with the triple conjunction (though if it has we shall be broke by next January). Or it may have something to do with the rather less astral World Cup, in which case things may be back to normal a little sooner.

Anyway, these things need to pondered so I took myself off yesterday to the beautifully peaceful grounds of St Quentin’s castle, less than a mile from where we live. The past always helps to put the present in perspective

Although the Castle’s crag above the river Thaw has always been fortified, the ruins that you see today were begun some 700 years ago on the orders of Gilbert de Clare, aged then about 19 and the last male de Clare left. Well, of course you want to build castles at that age, don’t you? What’s more Gilbert even had the wherewithal to stock them with real soldiers.

How much or how little he was involved personally in the building of St Quentin’s we don’t know. (The Castle is named after the Norman Lord who had built some wooden fortifications here in the 12th century). It’s a small castle as castles go (but then there’s not a lot of room on the crag) and just the sort of castle that a nineteen year old might commission.

So, having set the building in motion, Gilbert then went off to join Edward II’s army en route to relieve Stirling Castle. But happily or unhappily, depending from which side of the border your ancestors hail, there was a little skirmish at Bannockburn during which Edward’s army was routed and poor Gilbert was killed. That was in 1314 and before he had managed to sire legitimate offspring of his own. Exit the de Clare line.

As a result they didn’t bother finishing St Quentin’s. There’s a respectable twin towered gatehouse all ready for a portcullis and a drawbridge but nothing much beyond. Still go through the gatehouse and you arrive in an elegant bailey surrounded by curtain wall 5 metres thick in some places but considerably thinner in others. The works appear to have run out of money and then been finished off as quickly and cheaply as possible.

That didn’t matter - for there is no record of the castle being attacked, or defended. It withstood no siege guns or sappers' tunnels. No Maids Marian were held in dungeons waiting to be rescued. No defenders fired blazing arrows at the attackers below or poured boiling oil on soldiers swarming up the walls. Nothing ever happened here.

In fact I’d like to be able to say that is why the place feels so restful today. With its trees and newly mown grass pristine in the evening sunshine it seems more like a park of peace than a structure of war. The lower gatehouse was used as a temporary prison in the eighteenth century but that’s about the grimmest it can muster.

And by then the castle had been ruined anyway. Not by gunfire but by builders come to steal stones in the night. Half the village was built of the dressed stone plundered from the castle.

Yet it is would be an ideal place to hold a pageant. Perhaps that of Gilbert’s mother - Joan of Acre - born to King Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, while they were on crusade in Syria. Joan had a turbulent life and was married twice - the first to Gilbert’s father; the second, scandalously to a lowly squire, Ralph de Monthermer, whom she married for love, in secret, and much to the dismay of her regal father, who then had Ralph imprisoned, I suppose for lèse-Majesté. Fortunately, he relented.

She died, supposedly in childbirth, at the age of 35, when young Gilbert was just 16. It is tempting to think he conceived the idea of this castle as a tribute to his mother and that is why it is so peaceful. She is after all supposed to be saintly. Fifty years after being interred the body was still, so the chronicle relates, in a perfect state. Indeed, when pressed with the hands her nipples ‘even rose up again.’

Goodness, whatever could she have been dreaming of? How does one put that in a pageant?



Photos are of the castle and the peaceful bailey