Time for something completely different

A glimpse at the medieval castles class I will be teaching for 5 weeks in the U.K.

In less than two weeks I will be in London. For five weeks. With 80 Baylor undergraduate students, two graduate students, several professors, and various members of my family coming and going. I will be teaching two classes and acting as a non-stop tour guide.

It will be so relaxing.

Not because I won’t be crazy busy (because I will), but because I will be in my element as a medieval and women’s historian.

That is what I am.

Sometimes the evangelical noise is so loud that I can’t hear myself think. I can’t hear the fifteenth-century priests scribbling the sermon manuscripts I study; I can’t hear the bells of St. Paul’s cathedral ringing in morning worship; I can’t hear the “boisterous tears” of Margery Kempe experiencing the presence of God during a church service (which is saying something). Sometimes I can’t hear the medieval scholar I want to be over the modern scholar I have to be (at least for the moment).

Lately, I’ve felt deafened by the noise of the SBC.

A SBC messenger sent me a picture of my book with her ballot at the 2023 convention.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that I can help. I’m grateful that my scholarship, and perspective as a medieval historian, is making a real difference in the lives of women and men. I am grateful I was given the chance to be heard. I am grateful that people are listening.

But two weeks from today, when I finally stand on the walls of a medieval castle, I will get a break. The only sounds will be the questions of my students and the wind whipping the waves below us. Instead of fending off social media attacks, I will be having scones and tea with friends in Canterbury and taking my students on walking tours around London. For five weeks.

I am literally counting the days.

I thought I would give you a glimpse of what I will be doing with my students. I’ll be teaching two classes—U.S in Global Perspective: Votes for Women and Medieval Castles. I’ll tell you about my Votes for Women class later. Today let’s talk about Medieval Castles.

The goal of this class is simple—to use castles as an interpretative framework for learning the history of medieval England, 1066-1485.

Which means castles are the primary focus of this course.

Which means we go to castles.

The soaring walls of Rochester Castle.

Lots of castles—at least 7 and potentially 14 or 15. From the Tower of London, Dover, Hastings, Rochester, Sarum, Caerphilly, Kenilworth, Bodiam, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Ruddlan, Harlech, Warwick, to Windsor, students will be traveling with me (essentially I am an overeducated tour guide on these trips) and independently all over the U.K.

Doesn’t that sound amazing?

It is.

Sometimes, when I’m standing in one of the eight medieval towers of Conwy Castle looking toward the Irish Sea, I can’t believe this is my job.

Some of my 2017 Baylor in Great Britain students at the top of Conwy Castle.

But it is my job. (Y’all, for those of you who don’t believe I am going to walk away from being a public scholar after my trilogy is published, just consider that my day job includes teaching classes like Medieval Castles in England. I am thankful for the current opportunities that I have, but I will not be sad to ‘just’ be a professor again.)

Me teaching students at Baylor in Great Britain in 2017 outside of Bodiam Castle.

Every year students ask me which castle is my favorite. I don’t have a good answer to this. When the walls of Rochester Castle soar above me, I think for sure it is my favorite castle. But then I teach about the the Norman Conquest from the ruins of Hastings, and I am confident it is my favorite castle. Until I watch students at Caernarfon marvel at the place where Edward I invested his son as the first prince of Wales in the thirteenth century, and I know beyond doubt that this largest of the Iron Ring castles is my favorite.

Yet, whenever anyone asks me about teaching castles, the first castle that comes to mind isn’t Rochester or Hastings or Caernarfon. The first castle that I think of is Bodiam.

Do you recognize it?

Maybe this picture will help.

You got it. It is Swamp Castle featured in the 1975 cult classic movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The movie only used the outside of it (they filmed on a tight budget), but even that brief exposure has helped secure the reputation of Bodiam as one of the most iconic castles in Britain. It is so popular that Marc Morris calls it a “pin-up” castle.

Except some don’t think it is a castle.

Now, to be clear, I am not one of those people. But I understand their argument. The basic definition of a castle is a fortified residence or residential fortress (R. Allen Brown, English Castle)—which means a “real” castle is a defensible fortress as well as a home. Bodiam is definitely a home—it contains “no fewer than thirty-three fireplaces and twenty-eight toilets”—indicating lots of en-suite bedrooms, a private chapel with a large Gothic window, a decent sized kitchen, buttery, pantry, and great hall (large enough to seat the household but not much more), and a fancy banqueting hall located on the hill above the castle so diners could enjoy the site of Bodiam’s impressive exterior and picturesque location. (Marc Morris, Castles: Their History and Evolution in Medieval Britain—this is the textbook I use for my class.)

But is it a fortress? It looks like it. “It appears to have everything,” writes Morris. “Towers on every corner, a fine pair of gatehouses, battlements along every wall, and, of course, a splendid moat.” Even the gatehouse seems fitted out to perfection—”it has all the paraphernalia of military might…oak doors, portcullises (three of them), and murder-holes.” (Here is a quick guide to castle features if you need to catch up.)

Except it is questionable if the defenses work.

You can drain the moat (although since the 28 toilets dumped into the moat that might be ill advised…); the murder-holes are too small; there is no mechanism in the gatehouse for pulling up the drawbridge; the number of windows (including two large ones on the outside) vs the lack of arrow-loops scream vulnerability; no effective mechanism exists to bar the thin doors; and the back entrance has little protection—”no drawbridge, thin doors, and puny murder-holes…the bridge runs directly up to the doorway.” As Morris summarizes, “why go to all the trouble of securing the front door if you are going to leave the back door unlocked?”

So if a castle is a fortified home, is it a castle if the fortifications don’t work?

You see the problem.

But is it really a problem?

Bodiam is a castle built in the late fourteenth-century—a rather different context from when the massive keep of the Tower of London was built in the late 11th century or the towering battlements of Caernarfon in the late thirteenth-century. The social-climbing family that asked Richard II to give them a license to crenellate (i.e. build Bodiam as a castle instead of a manor house) was in a rather different place than the Norman knights who built castles to conquer England three centuries earlier.

This is what my class will be learning during our 5 weeks in England—that historical context matters—even for castles. As we adventure from castle to castle, fish-in-chips shop to fish-in-chips shop, we will be learning that historical continuity is still shaped by historical change. A castle is a castle, but that doesn’t mean all castles are the same.

And if that sounds familiar to you (all you readers of The Making of Biblical Womanhood), it is because the historical methodology my class will be learning to apply to castles can also be applied to social structures like patriarchy…..

My students with my daughter at the Tower of London in 2017.