A Medieval Life

Offers a biographical and archaeological exploration of William de Felton, builder of Edlingham Castle.

A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1324 is a biographical fusion of history, geography and archaeology with a focus on landscape and castles studies, set in the reigns of Edward I and II in the context of early attempts to create by force a single nation on the British island. A central theme in the book is how medieval biography can be written about someone relatively ordinary and not famous without straying into generalisation. The existing general market readership for medieval history focuses on ‘kings, queens and battles’, and this book attempts a different perspective.

The book’s origin lies in an archaeological excavation between 1978 and 1982 at Edlingham Castle, near Alnwick, Northumberland. Edlingham Castle was first built in the years around 1300 by William de Felton. It was abandoned in the 1660s after less than four centuries of habitation, to be uncovered by excavation just over three centuries later. This is not a conventional excavation report, nor an architectural survey, but an attempt to excavate a buried and concealed life, that of the castle’s first builder. In the process it creates a context to understand this unusual building. It offers a biographical approach to history framed by archaeological and landscape perspectives: biographies of one man and of groups of people he knew, but also biographies of place and landscape.

William de Felton has been fairly anonymous to historians; his precise birth and death dates are unrecorded, his parentage has always been uncertain, his place of origin unclear. He was relatively wealthy and privileged, perhaps in the upper five or ten percent of contemporary society, but he does not represent the high aristocracy or even the medieval ‘great and the good’, which is the most common subject of medieval biography and history. Although not famous either then or since, William’s story can nevertheless illuminate the lives and landscapes of those around him because his life is unexpectedly well-documented; his career as a middle-ranking servant in and close to the royal households, combined with the bureaucratic habits of Edward I and Edward II, has bequeathed a corpus of about two hundred contextualised medieval documents that mention him.

These contemporary documents could individually be considered banal. Taken together with the documentary evidence for William’s family, friends and colleagues, and located into a known geographic as well as historic context, they enable a reconstruction of his life, and offer windows onto several aspects of life in medieval Britain. They show us William as husband and father, and as a landowner, as an usher of the king’s bedchamber, as a soldier during Edward I’s continual wars, and as a builder, notably for the king in Gascony, but also in his own right at Edlingham. We see him as an administrator or governor of occupied territories, and later as a local official in Northumberland. The contemporary documents about William also illustrate the mechanisms of long-distance travel in the thirteenth century: contrary to the idea that medieval people travelled little, they show us William moving with the king’s armies and household from his native Shropshire, widely around England, into Wales, France, Gascony and Flanders, and Scotland during the first wars of Scottish independence. William’s biography and Edlingham Castle opens windows onto life in the Middle Ages, revealing a world not as dissimilar to our own as we might like to think.