Frome in Wessex
Nunney and Nunney Castle
Abstract
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
Nunney and Nunney Castle
Only three miles from Frome is the pretty village of Nunney which boasts an astonishing ruined castle. In 1373 AD Sir John De La Mare returned to his manor at Nunney from the wars with France impressed by the fairy-tale castles he had seen there. The war had benefitted the feudal lord because he had held prisoner several wealthy French knights who he had successfully ransomed for considerable sums. He appealed to king Edward III for permission to fortify and crenellate his manor and his petition was granted.
Such substantial structures as castles can hardly be put up overnight and by the time work was proceeding apace on the castle Sir John had died and been laid to rest (about 1390 AD) in the Chapel of St Katherine in the north transept of the nearby All Saints Church, the chancel of which pre-dates the castle. The castle was only completed in the next century. Some of the stones used were huge like the very large one by the entrance and they plainly took some effort to get into position. They came from a quarry at Doulting near Shepton Mallet. The architect might have been Henry of Wynford who, as chief master of the King’s Works, worked on the royal castle of Windsor in 1372 and before that in 1364 AD on Wells Cathedral, just 15 miles down the road from Nunney. It had its own well, a chapel in one of the towers as well as a chantry house in the grounds and an orchard.
As a fortified manor house, the building must have impressed the locals which was doubtless its real purpose, it being quite useless as a fortress. It had a moat with a bridge over it but no sign of a drawbridge or portcullis. Its towers do not have battlements and it seems that originally they were topped with conical roofs in typical French (and fairy-tale) style. A Royalist officer came to Nunney in 1644 presumably to consider the defensive potential of the castle and sketched it with its conical roofs. It was not a serious castle though but simply a fortified manor—a folly really. It did not have a commanding position as a castle should have but was set on low terrain compared with nearby ground and therefore cannot be seen except from its immediate surroundings.
The following year it was indeed defended by a Royalists force under the leadership of Colonel Prater of the family who owned the castle against General Fairfax. Fairfax, known as Black Tom because of his dark skin, was a Yorkshireman, the 33 year old commander of the Parliamentary army, a stern disciplinarian who routed the Royalists under the feckless Goring at Isle Moor and Langport on 8the and 10th July that year. Fairfax had marched from Naseby, where in June the Royalists had been drubbed, the 160 miles to Somerset to relieve the siege of Taunton.
After the battles, Goring fled to Devon and thence to Spain where he became a general in the Spanish army and never returned to Britain. Meanwhile Fairfax, an energetic soldier, stormed Bridgewater, Bath, Sherborne Catle, Nunney Catle, Bristol and Basing House. Nunney castle was easily cannonaded into submission by batteries set on the higher ground to the north from which the castle stands out from the surrounding cottage roofs like a sore thumb. The wall betwixt the towers on the north side was quite thin because a stairwell—still visible—had been built into its thickness. A dissident defender was said to have given the Roundheads this knowledge. On its surrender on 8th September 1645, the garrison agreeing to return home, it turned out to consist of only eight Irish soldiers with their captain, some civilian Catholic refugees and Colonel Prater.
Since the building had been used militarily, Cromwell’s orders were followed and its roof was stripped and the internal floors chopped out to prevent its future use but it was not torched as some think. When Charles II was restored to the throne George Prater had his home returned to him but it was never re-occupied. When the Reverend John Collinson described Nunney in 1791 as a dry and healthy spot, part hilly and part plain, he must have had the dampness and unhealthiness of much of the rest of Somerset in mind. Orator Hunt, the radical, who spent a Christmas in Ilchester Jail a few decades later said he was warned by his physicians against the deadly effects of the flat country of Somerset wherein agues and fevers were prevelant and fatal. Collinson tells us that the castle of Nunney had been dismantled and by his day was fast going to decay. By 1828 it was used only as a pen for hounds and local villagers had used the stone to build their cottages—several of them have unusually grand fireplaces! By 1889 its value had been appreciated and a small charge was made for visitors to inspect the ruins but no effort was made to preserve them and on Christmas morning 1910 the weakened north wall collapsed altogether.
Now the castle is under the care of English Heritage as a pretty ruin with the four towers still intact. The castle was always really just the four towers with very little wall between especially on the eastern and western sides but adding to its charm is the moat which is fed and freshened by Nunney Brook and is bright enough to harbour fish. A portioned off area is also a bird sanctuary. It was not always thus, Collinson reporting that the moat was choked with weeds and rubbish in 1791. He thought the source of the brook was a spring arising in the neighbouring village of Cloford called the Holy Well, a source of excellent trout and eels, Collinson says. The place is still called Holwell but is now the site of a limestone quarry. The brook flows on to the Mells river at Great Elm, a village on the outskirts of Frome, which each year has its springtime daffodil festival.
In the church which is on a site adjacent to the castle are several old tombs decorated with figures, the oldest one considered to be that of Sir John De La Mare who commissioned the castle and was also Sheriff of Somerset. One couple are thought to be members of the Poulet family of the 1400s. An Elizabethan couple have been squashed in among the others having been moved from the main body of the church to create more seating space at a time when churchgoing must have been more fashionable and people more superstitious.
The history of Nunney is long, though not so long as Frome’s. Its name is thought to have come from a Saxon nunnery which stood on the brook. St Katherine to whom the chapel in the church is dedicated was Catherine of Alexandria who tried to persuade the Emperor Maximinus to give up his pagan worship. In Christian martyrology she converted Maximinus’s wife and family as well as half the Roman army sent to torture her but not Maximinus himself. He tried to break her on the wheel but the wheel broke! Finally he decided to chop her head off and succeeded. Because she was a virgin who had refused many offers of marriage she was taken up into heaven and betrothed to Christ by his mother, the Virgin Mary.
St Catherine was thought of as a suitable saint for nuns and especially suitable where the church faced up to paganism. It suggests that, when these monasteries and chapels in Nunney and Frome were first dedicated the region was largely pagan and the best saint to protect the nuns was Catherine. Her remembrance day is 25th November which could tie in with the date of the fair at Nunney and the church being dedicated as All Saints. Nunney was granted a royal charter in 1259 to hold a fair on 11th November—Martinmas, a popular day for fairs, but possibly legitimising the older practice of a fair on the later day—for the sale among others of cattle, sheep and pigs. The fair was held for over 600 years until 1875 when records of it cease. In 1959 the people of Nunney decided to exercise their charter once more and a fair was held but in June. Now it is customarily held in the first Saturday in August as a street festival.
The dedications to St Catherine, All Saints and the preponderance of churches dedicated to John the Baptist (who was originally associated with the water festivals of November) suggest that water was an important element of pagan worship in the region. The aforementioned Holy Well might have been a holy place for the Pagan Celts. November was the first month of the Celtic year, the festival being Samhain (Sowain). Somerset was the border of the Saxon lands, the country further west being still Celtic, but St John the Baptist is traditionally given a feast day which coincides with the midsummer solstice too. So it seems that the Saxon bishops were relying on John the Baptist and St Catherine to save the world from the pagan Celts.
