Page 23 - John Barber's Oakham Castle and its archaeology

On the west wall are certain signs of the solar, which once stood there (see Para 6), whilst on the east wall
is a blocked late 16th century window of six lights, which is not visible on the inside of the hall. Also in the east
wall are two blocked up Norman doorways and the remnants of a third. These will be more fully discussed in
Para 7, which treats of the kitchen, buttery and pantry. Suffice it to say at this stage that it has always puzzled
me how two of these doorways can be rounded in the Norman style on the exterior, and pointed in the later
Gothic style on the interior.
On the south side Buck’s drawing
shows the door where the eastern-most
window now is, and a single dormer
window with what look like shutters
(instead of the present row of dormers) in
the aisle roof at the west end.
The main door originally stood opposite
the main gate, and it was only moved to its
present position in the centre of the south
aisle wall early in this century to bring it
opposite to the entrance of the petty
sessions room, by the simple expedient of
swapping over a door for a window and
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vice versa.

Fig. 22. Blocked doors and window in the east elevation of the Hall.

Fig. 23. Roof timbers at the east end of the Hall.

(b) The Interior
1. The roof
No one has really made a full and scientific
study of the roof, but it would be most
surprising if any of the timbers are
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original. Indeed many of those who have
written about the castle suppose that the
original hall probably had a hammer-beam
roof with a windowed clerestory.
Mr Ralegh Radford writes; ‘The present
arrangement with a low window-less
clerestory dates from the reconstruction of
the roof in the early 17th century.
Originally the roof of the nave would have
been carried on massive semi-circular
trusses springing from corbels set in the spandrels above the piers; one of the corbels, a horse’s head bearing a
capital, the top slotted to steady the base of the truss, is preserved in the hall.’ The underlining of horse’s head
is my own: it is in fact a crouching beastie, and may possibly be paralleled by a similar figure in the south aisle
of Oakham Parish Church, this redundant piece of masonry having been taken perhaps from the Castle.
The red oak king posts are generally believed to have been put in by the first Duke of Buckingham, but the
beams in general would seem to be of more than one period. The whole problem of the roof is a very difficult
one. Although one has the greatest respect for Mr Radford’s scholarship, in spite of two proven errors in his
written record (‘the horse’s head’ and ‘the curtain without flanking towers’), there is no surviving evidence in
the spandrels above the piers of any corbels, and the musicians found there are manifestly decorative and never
intended to carry any weight. *Traces of a pointed arch, spanning the whole width of the nave, have recently
(November 1979) been detected in the interior of the west wall of the hall (there is no corresponding sign on the
exterior) during cleaning operations, and may be a possible clue to an earlier roof line. (* Note by Tim
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Clough: ‘These traces, on close inspection, proved to be decorative work, formed in the plaster only, and the
design was in no way structural. The ‘arch’ would have been drawn on a single radius, not pointed.’)

19 Sir Henry Dryden’s plan accompanying C H Hartshorne’s article shows the main entrance still at the east end of the south elevation (Hartshorne
1858, 141), so it seems clear that the alteration was made in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
20 Dendrochronological analysis has now shown JLB’s pessimism to be unfounded, and that some original timbers do survive: see Hill 2013, 189-193.
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Such notes were made by Tim Clough, then Curator of the Rutland County Museum, on the original draft when it was first shown to him by JLB.
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