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,

wined and dined and taken hunting by their hosts while the latter awaited a ransom; if not, they wouldn’t, and they might well end up in a nasty dark space. Dodgy rulers, like Thomas ‘Raging Wolf’ de Marle in early 12th century France, might imprison people to extort money and property, Mafia-style. The lack of functioning law and order in some places meant that extortion rackets were common at times: this was the case, for instance, in the chaos of 11th century France, and again in the war-torn France of the mid-14th century. Some rulers exhibited a capricious fury, especially associated with vengeance, which occasionally resulted in long, cruel imprisonment: the Visconti rulers of Milan (whose family badge showed a snake consuming a man) produced generations of people who liked inflicting this sort of thing. Meanwhile rulers, in tandem with the Church, might imprison heretics until they gave up being heretics: notable examples include the many thousands of Templar knights and men-at-arms who languished for years in French dungeons after King Philip IV decided (entirely cynically, I believe) to label them heretics in 1307. This behaviour smacks of the Kims and feels oddly modern, although the Templars were at least able to get out in the end. Finally, and most famously, dynastic squabbles in unstable political systems have resulted in any number of imprisonments and murders, and these, I feel, have enhanced the dark reputation of the Middle Ages because they have a pretty high profile and most people have engaged with history by focusing on kings and other ‘great men’.

Tarascon, Provence: a magnificent castle-palace built by the dukes of Anjou in the 15th century, converted into a large prison in the 17th century. This conversion of medieval castles from grand residences into prisons has been extremely common, and has to some degree unfairly enhanced the reputation of castles (and, by extension, the Middle Ages) as grim and dungeon-filled.

Some of these imprisonments have resonated across the ages, and become part of the colourful story-book narrative that generations have encountered. In England Bad King John would be deemed far less bad without his penchant for starving those who angered him, including 22 French knights he captured at the Battle of Mirebeau in 1202, who died in a grim tower at Corfe Castle, as well as Matilda de Braose and her children. He’s also supposed to have personally blinded and then murdered his nephew Prince Arthur. But we should note that he stands out: considered exceptional for his cruelty, both by his contemporaries and most modern historians. Henry Bolingbroke seems to have let his cousin Richard II starve to death at Pontefract Castle in 1399, Edward II suffered a short imprisonment and (possibly) frightful murder at Berkeley Castle (1327), thanks to his wife, and the mad old Henry VI was dispatched in the Tower of London in 1471 by his cousin Edward IV. None of these people languished for long, at least not compared with William the Conqueror’s elder son Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, who was imprisoned by his brother King Henry I at Devizes and then Cardiff castles for 28 years until he died in 1134: but I don’t think his prisons resembled classic medieval dungeons (he wouldn’t have lasted so long if they had). Most famous and pitiable is the story of the Princes in the Tower (including the young King Edward V), who were probably murdered by their uncle Richard III around 1483. But everything was hushed up because regicide, though common enough, wasn’t really an acceptable thing to admit to.

The high profile nature of these famous prisoners, as well as the dastardly means by which they supposedly met their ends (from red hot pokers to cushions), has charged the medieval narrative with a sense of story-book myth. And that’s met too by the spectacular nature of some of the prisons themselves, including of course the most famous of them all, the Tower of London. Some castles, especially in Scotland and in the north of England (and including Chillingham), have ‘oubliettes’, subterranean chambers beneath a guardroom, accessible only by trapdoor. They are grim indeed and enhance the shudders we feel at the thought of the Middle Ages, but they are not very large and are hardly symptomatic of a society that liked to lock people up in large numbers.

Still, architecture matters. Some of the casual association between captivity and the Middle Ages is likely to be a subliminal response to the fact that many celebrated post-medieval prisons have been in famous medieval buildings: especially urban palaces or citadels which, as fashion and technology changed, rulers didn’t much wish to inhabit or fortify anymore. England’s premiere state prison, the Tower of London (more and more of which, from the 15th century onwards, was given over to prisoners) is a good example, as is the Conciergerie in Paris, which started life as the magnificent ceremonial core of a royal palace but became a prison from around 1400. It ended up housing hundreds of prisoners in the French Revolution, including Marie Antoinette. Today the building still holds the central court of Paris.

Once medieval castles and palaces became unfashionable and uncomfortable to live in, and lost most of their military value, the relative importance of their other functions – as centres of local administration, law courts, or prisons – grew. This has been particularly true of urban royal castles, which – unlike many of their noble country cousins – were not much appreciated by their owners except as functional centres of power. (Most of Europe’s touristy ‘fairy-tale castles’, by contrast (Pierrefonds, Chateaudun, the Marksburg, Eltz, Krivoklat, Warwick, Alnwick, Kenilworth, Windsor – and scores more) are attached to small towns or villages rather than large cities, and they don’t tend to feed the stereotype of ‘gloomy medieval dungeons’ very well). Until recently, courts and large post-medieval prisons still existed in the royal English castles of York, Lancaster, Oxford, Norwich, Chester and Lincoln, among others. And various medieval citadels have exuded a particularly sinister power, captured in literature by Kafka in The Castle (1926), but easily sensed in the actual Prague Castle (the centre of Czech government not only for the emperors who staffed it in Kafka’s youth, but also for Nazis and communists). Moscow’s Kremlin, Paris’s Bastille, Dublin Castle and the Castle of the Seven Towers in Istanbul (Yedikule) are other urban citadels which have in some periods accrued sinister reputations as actual and symbolic centres of oppressive power.

The practical appeal of medieval castles as prisons is obvious: their thick walls, small windows and relatively few entrances, though built for security from without, might equally serve for security within. So it’s common enough to find pitiful prisoners’ graffiti all over castle walls, for instance at London, Portchester, Carlisle, Tarascon, and Loches (where, in one subterranean cell, Ludovico Sforza, formerly Duke of Milan (and Leonardo’s patron) spent a long time writing his name). But most of these reflect post-medieval periods when such places were sometimes stuffed with prisoners (Portchester, for instance, housed French prisoners of war in the early 19th century). The very term ‘dungeon’ did not originally mean prison, but rather the ‘great tower’ (the donjon) of a castle, which often (as at Portchester) formed the most secure place to put prisoners in later times: the etymology reflects the change of function.

No doubt people notice castle prisons more than the far larger prisons of later times because castles are much more appealing, prominent and accessible to visit, and because the historical, functional and aesthetic diversity of castles puts them on the map rather more. Moreover, a ghoulish enjoyment is experienced by many people when they encounter dark story-book oubliettes in a crumbling old castle tower, and this is quite at odds with the emotions likely encountered at HMP Oakwood on the one hand, or amid the doleful wastes of Terezin and Auschwitz and the old prisons of Nazis and communists on the other. The London Dungeon and similar kitsch exhibits milk ‘medieval’ gloom; but they steer clear of equivalent modern horrors, which are taboo for good reason.

So the prominence of dungeons in our perception of the Middle Ages is enhanced by our sense of history and myth as well as our likely experiences as tourists. But the most interesting side of all, in this matter, is the degree to which this attitude has been deliberately and enthusiastically cultivated by later ages. Since the

16th century (or, in Italy, even earlier) the chief characteristics of medieval society have been regularly portrayed as barbaric, backward, violent and primitive; even when (as is usually the case) subsequent ages have more than matched the medieval for barbarity and violence. But it’s suited generation after generation to write off and condemn the Middle Ages, mostly in order to glorify themselves either as overtly ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ by comparison, or at least to show that they are more in tune with Ancient Romans or Greeks, who have generally been portrayed as far more advanced and cultured than medieval people.

Such condemnation of the Middle Ages has occurred in different ways. Initially, in the 15th–17th century Renaissance, it was fed by a notion of the superiority of the classical world in the arts and in letters. This has seduced historians right up to the present. The textbook from which I teach the A level ‘Renaissance’ course is full of assumptions that Renaissance society was gentler, brighter and more open than medieval society: that cultured Renaissance princes, suddenly freed from their grim castle keeps and basking in the loggias of their classical villas (reading Virgil? listening to lutes?), were somehow less aggressive than their medieval forebears. But even a cursory examination of violence (including wars, massacres, slavery and mass imprisonments – especially for heresy) between 1400 and 1650 does not support this view. Certainly, more of the gentry could read than before, and scientific advances multiplied; but so did dungeons in the age of the Reformation and wars of religion, of the witch trials, of the conquest of the Americas and the slave raids across the Mediterranean.

A related but more intellectually effective critique of the Middle Ages developed during the 18th century Enlightenment, when philosophers such as Voltaire and Kant condemned medieval superstition and what they considered the infantile nature of medieval institutions, contrasting this with the development of modern reason, science, and civilised values. Such views were boosted by the noble, liberty-loving sentiments on display in the American and French revolutions. This pitching of ‘modernity’ against the medieval has remained at the core of our casual dismissal of the Middle Ages as a ‘dark age’ ever since, and of course it has much to recommend it. But when it comes to the history of prisons, post-Enlightenment societies could hardly be correct in boasting that imprisonment was more characteristic of the Middle Ages than their own. Indeed, there’s a paradox: as Enlightenment values started to focus on the ‘improvement’ of malefactors (however honourable or cynical that has been), the numbers of prisoners and prisons really mushroomed, and vast purpose-built prisons were constructed in large numbers for the first time. When Stalin died, there were about 2.5 million people in his concentration camps, many of whom were being ‘improved’ with educative communist propaganda, and between 1.2 million and 3 million more had already died in them. In America, democratic land of the free, 2.3 million people were in prison in 2020 (698 per 100,000 people – a higher proportion than almost anywhere else in the whole of history). King John, Bernarbo Visconti, Thomas de Marle and other medieval villains would be staggered at such figures, let alone the especially cruel and intrusive systems and conditions to be found in so many modern prisons.

It’s not just earnest philosophers who have propagated the myth of the medieval dungeon: the greatest contribution of all has probably come from those literary and cultural figures who, from the late 18th century to the present, have celebrated and exaggerated Gothic gloom, largely because they liked it! The modern ‘Gothic’ movement, initially developed as an anarchic response to the buttoned-up platitudes of the Enlightenment, exhibits a vigorous environment of medieval dungeons, gloomy cliff-girt towers in forests, dragons, torture chambers, vampires, phantoms clanking chains, evil barons, Templars, corrupt monks and exotic heresies. And what started as a provocative hobby for a few very rich authors and patrons, like Horace Walpole (who wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and built the ‘Gothick’ Strawberry Hill in Twickenham) soon found a mass market. Though Jane Austen satirised the trope in Northanger Abbey (1817), savagely mocking her heroine Catherine Morland for her attachment to the lurid gothic fantasies in Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, the movement went from strength to strength (Bram Stoker’s Dracula is of 1897), and remains extremely strong across popular culture today. The myth of medieval dungeons and crypts is common fare in the cinema or on telly, in video games, in best-selling children’s books (like the Harry Potter series), and of course in tourist attractions like Chillingham Castle.

That brings us full circle. The myth of medieval dungeons survives and thrives because we find it entertaining to shiver at the thought of the horrors of the distant (as opposed to recent) past; we also find it comforting to consider our own progress towards greater civilisation and to scoff at the primitive nature of our medieval ancestors; and we associate many of our most famous urban citadels (the Tower, the Conciergerie, the

Bastille, Milan Castle) with imprisonment, since they all became major prisons after the Middle Ages. I’ve argued above that such views are misleading, and that dank dungeons might be said to characterise almost any other period more correctly than they do the medieval.

But we should understand this in the wider context of a long general historiography and educational culture which has regularly and repeatedly denigrated the medieval period for its primitive barbarism, stupidity, and idiotic violence both mindless and ideological. If the Middle Ages were not entirely innocent of these negative charges, well, nor has any other historical period been. However, this was also the time of Abelard and Aquinas, Dante and Giotto, the great cathedrals and castle-palaces, of the creation of parliaments and statecraft, legal systems, polyphonic music, modern literary languages, chivalry and romance, as well as so many more of the main ingredients of our culture. It’s odd that so many bright thinkers, especially during the Enlightenment, appear to have missed all this in their rush to trash the entire period.

Never mind. Ultimately, we should celebrate and enjoy the myth of medieval dungeons, since – thanks to skilful writers, artists and filmmakers – the myth itself has become an interesting and entertaining, if occasionally disturbing, part of our past.

J.M.W.Turner’s painting of Dolbadarn Castle (1800) reflects a widespread romantic fascination with wild and gloomy tales of castle-based misery: a Welsh prince, Owen, was imprisoned there for twenty-two years in the 13th century, and Turner, recalling the scene and enhancing the scenery, has inscribed the painting with a few lines (probably written by the artist himself): ‘How awful is the silence of the waste, Where nature lifts her mountains to the sky.Majestic solitude, behold the towerWhere hopeless OWEN, long imprison’d, pined, And wrung his hands for liberty, in vain.