Page 21 - John Barber's Oakham Castle and its archaeology

Fig. 18. Oakham Castle Hall in 2011.

(a) The exterior
The stone fabric of the Castle has been so altered over the years that at only one point can we still see anything
of the original polychrome masonry (courses of freestone ashlar alternating with bands of ironstone rubble),
and that is at the west end of the north aisle. In this aisle only the two westernmost windows survive of the
original four: the easternmost one is blocked up and the remaining one is now a doorway leading into the petty
sessions room.
On the exterior of both east and west walls there are shallow buttresses, four in all, opposite the line of the
interior pillars, and these were probably inserted to give additional strength and support to the hall itself when
all the domestic offices (solar on the west end, buttery, pantry and kitchen on the east end) were demolished
and levelled out.
We know that as early as 1521, as I have already mentioned in Para 4, the castle was in a bad state of repair
(no doubt because of the numerous changes in tenancy during the years following its reversion to the Crown in
1204), and it would appear to have deteriorated more and more until, probably in the early 17th century (in the
time of the first Duke of Buckingham), the domestic offices were levelled out and the hall refurbished as an
assize court for the Lord of the Manor (the selfsame Duke) now resident at Burley-on-the-Hill.
The inscription below Buck’s picture of the Castle in 1730 more or less says as much: ‘There is nothing
remaining but the outer walls facing the Ditch, the Castle having been demolished. The building which stands
now where the Ancient one stood, is the County
Hall for Assizes and sessions, built with Materials
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of the former’.
This process of rationalisation came to terms
with a situation already in existence for some time
– a situation which must have given increasing
embarrassment up at the big house at Burley. In
this paper I shall frequently have reason to refer to
this tidying up process, and I shall call the
accumulated debris which lies all over the site
beneath the present turf ‘the destruction level’.

Fig. 19. Original north aisle windows
and the only surviving polychrome masonry.

18 Notwithstanding the evidently poor state of repair of the buildings, the implication that the Great Hall had been rebuilt is patently untrue. However,
this statement by the Bucks perhaps refers to the extensive repairs undertaken by the Duke of Buckingham a century earlier.

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