In Time of Lockdown: Reflections on Locks, Lockdown, Isolation

The Myth of Medieval Dungeons Christopher Moule (CR, Head of Academic Scholars, Head of History) Deep inside Chillingham Castle, a rugged Northumbrian pile owned by Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law, there’s a large ‘dungeon’ full of skeletons in cupboards, mannequins on the rack or in cages or tied to wheels, spiky chairs, nasty uncomfortable shoes made of iron, and a lot more of that sort of thing. I can’t remember if there were background groans and whimpers when I visited, though I’ve certainly heard them in equivalent exhibitions. The substantial space given over to this cheerful display at Chillingham wasn’t actually intended to be a dungeon when it was built; but the original prison spaces in Chillingham and its cousins were pretty small, and they wouldn’t have been able to house all the mannequins and visitors all together. Nor would they really have supported the spooky ‘Gothic’ image that Chillingham projects as ‘the most haunted place in Britain’.

Chillingham is not alone in its anachronistic approach: in Bamburgh Castle the gloomy ‘medieval dungeon’ and its ghoulish exhibits occupy some Victorian cellars near the shop, and in Duart Castle in the Hebrides there are poor isolated prisoners, survivors from the Spanish galleon that sank in Tobermory Bay in 1588, still cooped up in cells that were created as part of the kitchen area in 1911. Many a touristy castle makes great play of dungeons, feeding that general and tenacious sense of the Middle Ages as a time devoted to barbarous and gloomy imprisonment.

Indeed, for centuries dungeons have provided some of the most pervasive and influential images of the Middle Ages. Not only are they at the core of many a ‘medieval’ narrative, from Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon to modern Dungeons and Dragons games, but they have even helped to spawn a major cultural genre, the modern Gothic (of the 18th century to the present, as opposed to the medieval Gothic), which is devoted to pseudomedieval darkness and which manifests itself in anything from literature, movies and music to clothes and jewellery.

But the medieval period wasn’t really a great age of imprisonment, at least compared with many that came before or after it. For mass incarceration no period rivals the 20th and early 21st centuries: the prison systems of modern countries, whether large and small, democratic or dictatorial, all easily outdo those of the Middle Ages in scale; often they are, or recently have been, far more vicious and unpleasant too, with systematic and ‘scientific’ cruelty. Prison states such as Stalin’s Russia, Nazi Germany, or the Kims’ North Korea match the myth of Gothic gloom and horror far more fully than any medieval state, and the numbers of prisoners involved have been vastly greater; and such prisons remain common in today’s world. Meanwhile large-scale slave labour has been more a feature of pre-medieval societies (including Greece and Rome) and post-medieval societies (including the British Empire, America, Russia and China). Though serfdom permeated much of the early medieval countryside, the system was breaking down in much of Europe, including England, Italy and large parts of France, from the 12th century: it would be wrong to single the Middle Ages out as a period of mass slave labour.

So the common association between the Middle Ages and imprisonment is misleading, and a ‘dungeon’ association for almost any other period would be more appropriate. That’s not to say that there wasn’t viciousness and cruelty in the Middle Ages: of course there was, as in all ages. But it more often took the form of instant violence: immediate corporal or capital punishment (very often public), or the removal and destruction of property. It’s hard to generalise about a period of nearly a thousand years, covering most of Europe, though it’s very often been done, but it’s fair to say that it was often a violent and unstable age (as indeed were most ages in most places). However, prisons and prisoners are expensive, and prisoners were usually not deemed to be of much use to society except as slave labour or hostages, and medieval authorities weren’t much inclined to bother.

Why then does the myth endure? Well, I should start by admitting that there were of course plenty of prisoners and dungeons in the Middle Ages, even though there were fewer than at most other times, and some of these have become disproportionately famous due to nature of national histories and the cultivation of a particular perception of the period. Medieval authorities – kings, nobles, petty knights, the Church – used imprisonment when they believed that it would advantage them to do so: debtors, political rivals and hostages (including prisoners of war) were most commonly held. If the prisoners were rich, like King John the Good of France (captured by the Black Prince in 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers), they would be imprisoned comfortably, 22