Coventry Castle

Sorry both it was posted on FB by my mate Tony McSweeney. I'll reach out to him to see if it was dated and where it originated from.

Tony has confirmed back for that clipping - it was in the Telegraph - dated 23rd May 1974.

I think that it's the same map as Anne's here. There is an updated version out but it used to be available online.

As mentioned in the Allwoods & Atkins and Turton / Martins Bank topic, there was a good article written about Coventry's Castle in the Coventry Herald on the 22nd January 1938.

An interesting read. My take is that the cellars dotted about the city centre were later than the castle but might well have been sunk into existing ditches. The area had some very big merchant's houses and they did indeed use their cellars to trade from. In later years smaller businesses traded from the cellars, and the bigger ones were split up with brickwork partitions. The more I look at ancient cities but Coventry in particular, the more I suspect that the ancient past influenced the less ancient versions. Perseverance. While a Lord could demand any area he fancied, it would have been a faff to clear and former inhabitants could and would get their own back in little ways. So an area that was already set aside for previous Lords and civic operations, would make the logical place to build the next versions. Since Lords moved about, there was no problem with having to dwell elsewhere as the new abode was being constructed. When Lords were away, their halls were used for the equivalent of council business, including where lower levels of justice were decided. While the Lords had the final say on important stuff, men would have been tasked with the mundane decisions when he was away. The Lords moved to Cheylesmore as soon as it was safe enough to do so, but the civic and judicial side of things stayed in the Pepper/Bayley Lane area. The area is also one of the highest points in the centre, although it's matched by a a smaller rea on the other side of the High Street. I think the broad gate was an entrance to the fortified town, not the castle but that the castle was doubly protected because it was within the fortified town.

Thanks to Tony McSweeney who kept a collection of great snippets from the Telegraph. Dated 21/01/81

to Neil and Tony. It's sad that all these years later the answer to where the castle was, is still a mystery.

It's a shame really that parts of the Council House were built too close to the rear of Caesar's Tower and the guildhall, because it would've been nice to be able to excavate the location where we think there could've been a mirror-image tower, forming a wedge-shaped entrance to a castle. I'd also love to know if the two rather substantial parallel (or not?) walls, in this old library picture below, were part of such an entrance?

It would be a great subject for the city's experts to pull all the evidence together and combine with knowledge about how castles were designed. In Troughton's drawings there are random bits of wall that look like they could have originally belonged to something else. Various digs have found ditches but I've never seen them all plotted on one map. I think that the older cellars also have something to say about the oldest ditches too. I think that Shelton would have made more discoveries if he had had access to the Board of Health map as he describes in some of his dig finds, features that were still visible above ground in 1850. Sadly the round tower he found near Derby Lane turned out to be a much later garden feature.

Another one from Tony - I think this one must be the bit at the back of Browns/Metropolis by the side of St Mary Street -

This area on the bottom left, looking left and slightly towards the Council House?

I think so Helen yes. The area is now all boarded off and hidden away again for some reason.

That was the area they were re-excavating recently. There have been multiple finds of a ditch running along the back of St Mary's Hall. I think that it was the ditch surrounding a bailey and most probably it extended east to the other side of Bayley Lane and north to cut under the north half of St Michael's (which has crypts). A corner of the spire is partly on a ditch but I'm not sure if they've determined its purpose. My theory is that the cellar under the entrance to the Herbert was also sunk into the ditch. It would explain why there was a window as it might have looked along the dip of the ditch as it ran north. Why dig a new hole in the ground if there was already one there that needed filling? It's the west end that's more unknown and the area where the castle proper was sited. Was there another inner bailey, encompassing a keep, or just a keep? The castle keep was essentially a set of panic rooms and not meant to be palatial, even if later versions became so. It would contain the essentials for life, including a small chapel room and a well. The entrance was usually quite physically difficult to access which made the keep inconvenient for day to day use, even in times of trouble. When no longer needed as a keep, a doorway was sometimes knocked through at ground level and the building reused. Directly outside the keep there could be small number of buildings, circled by a wall and ditch, that could be abandoned or even torched by soldiers if that inner bailey was breached. The next bailey outwards contained the main kitchens, halls, comfortable accommodation, stabling and main chapel (St Michael's). One thing about keeps was that they were sometimes/often repurposed as prisons once they were no longer needed as panic rooms. The prison on the 1749 map was on the junction of Pepper/Gaol Lane and Cuckoo Lane but it might have shifted location over the years before that. There was a ditch running up to the corner Hay Lane and Bayley Lane (under the chapel destroyed by the war). Was the keep in the area to the east of that ditch or to the west? Because the later prisons were to the west of it, my feeling is that the keep was to the west of that ditch. The other reason I think the keep/inner bailey was to the west of Hay Lane is because I think that Bayley Lane was the road leading out into the bailey from a gatehouse. I also don't think Bayley Lane ran around the outside of the bailey. I think that the castle bakehouse, discovered near St Mary's Hall served the comfy part of the castle.

I have mooted the idea that the keep for the castle might have been reused as the gaol. As they often were. I know that the gaol in 1749 was on the corner of Cuckoo Lane and Gaol/Pepper Lane because it's on Bradford's map, but it was a rebuild, some time after the Civil War (and before the current Courthouse). It's very hard to know if older buildings were demolished and then rebuilt or a new building was built on a new plot and then the old one demolished. However while trufflling through the Herbert records I found this about a messuage which Richard Pryste inhabits on the western side of Cuckoo Lane, lying between the poulterer Richard Tullye's tenement on the north and the gaol hall on the south thus pinpointing the gaol in 1575. It is believed Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned at the Guildhall when she was brought to the city in 1569 from Tutbury. From memory the remains of the castle (no mention of the gaol) were deemed too rundown to house her. What do you think? The smaller house in the picture below might be Mr Pryste's house. I believe it had stone walls on the ground floor and timber framing above.

I think we need to bow to your infinite wisdom Helen! Awesome work