Castle Characters - Maurice the Engineer

For our latest blog post, one of our Castle team, Corey, has been looking into the life of the man who gave Newcastle its castle, and in doing so, its name. In doing so he’s researched loads of information on medieval masons and their craft.

King Henry II, Maurice’s patron. NLI ref. Ms. 700

One of the more mysterious personalities amongst our Castle Characters is Maurice the Engineer, also known as Mauricius ‘Caementarius’. Maurice was, unsurprisingly, an engineer, but when it comes to Newcastle Castle, he was THE engineer and the man responsible for our swanky castle! Unfortunately, we know very little of his life, not even where he was from. Maurice served as the master mason and builder in this vast construction project and even though much of his life is a mystery – he did leave one of the biggest marks in Newcastle upon Tyne!

Maurice was very fortunate because he had one of the most beneficial and powerful patrons around – the young and energetic king, Henry II. Henry ascended to the throne in the aftermath of civil war known as ‘The Anarchy’ between his mother, Matilda, and her cousin, King Stephen I, for the crown of England.

Henry arrived in England aged just 21 and immediately set about asserting his dominance over the barons who had gained immense power during ‘The Anarchy’. After asserting his power over the barons, Henry came up to the North East and nicked the title of Earl of Northumbria from King William ‘the lion’ of Scotland! To show his control, Henry started building castles.

In 1168, Henry commissioned our mysterious master engineer Maurice to build him his very own royal castle at Newcastle, paying him twenty shillings for his work! This huge construction project took ten years (1168-1178) to complete and cost Henry a hefty sum of £1,144 – which when you take into account that there was only around £125,000 in circulation by 1180, that is a massive sum (National Archives)! All of that spending was worthwhile because Henry – technically Maurice – created a lavish and powerful image of royal splendour and authority in the northernmost county.

Henry must have been a big fan of Maurice’s work because between 1179-1189 he had Maurice build one of the most important castles in the country – Dover. Together, both Dover and Newcastle created royal centres of power and control in the north and south of Henry’s new domain and enabled him to control access to the country from both north and south!

Laying Foundations! How to build a castle?

Castle building spread like wildfire throughout Europe in the 12th century, as kings and lords began to upgrade the older Motte and Bailey (wood and earth) castles into more permanent stone ones and to build new castles.

These immense projects required master craftsmen and engineers like Maurice and an army of artisans such as blacksmiths, masons and carpenters to get the job done. Many of these were ‘professional’ castle builders moving from place to place to work on new building projects. A great number of settlements around castles and near to them owe their existence to these massive projects because the labourers and craftsmen established villages to live in whilst they worked.

Surprisingly, we have an amazing modern example of castle building at Guedelon Castle (Guédelon Castle) in Northern Burgundy, France. This is a 25-year experimental archaeology project to build a castle from scratch using all the tools and skills of the 13th century. These skills would not be too different from the ones that Maurice the Engineer employed in his construction of Newcastle Castle in the latter years of the 12th century and in some ways they have not changed much from how we build today!

In order to become a master mason and engineer, Maurice would have required a vast array of skills such as a deep understanding of geometry and mathematics, construction, warfare and resource acquisition. Maurice would have learned many of these skills through a long career most likely starting with a 7-year apprenticeship as a mason. Whichever path Maurice took to become a master engineer, we know with certainty that he must have been exceptionally skilled to design and oversee the construction of two immense and important castles at Newcastle and Dover.

A medieval crane in action, from the Morgan Bible, Pierpont Morgan Library. MS M.638.

Newcastle Castle has a whole host of wonderfully preserved mason’s marks scattered throughout the building. The mason who prepared and laid the stone made these marks and each mark is individual to a particular mason – a mason’s signature if you like. They are common on medieval buildings, and there are a number of theories surrounding their purpose - the most common is that it marked a mason’s work so that they could be properly paid for the amount of work done.

Many of the tools used in medieval construction had been around for centuries and were certainly used at Newcastle. The most common of all tools used in castle building was the humble chisel and this tool would need nigh daily blacksmith care to ensure it remained pointed and hardened enough to shape stone.

There were many other tools used in castle building and these range from the lead plummets, which have been in use since the days of Ancient Egypt, and treadwheel cranes, which have been in use since before the Roman Empire.

The lead plummet is a very basic tool, and early form of spirit level when attached to a wooden frame, that is simply a lead weight attached to a length of string. This was used to ensure that walls were straight by dangling it down through a special gap between the wall and scaffold and this would tell the builder that the wall is vertical. I would say this is one of the most important tools in Maurice and his team’s arsenal because if the walls were not vertical they could collapse!

The largest piece of equipment used on a medieval construction site was both integral for taking the heavy stones and materials to higher parts of the project and for getting a brilliant workout! This high tech piece of kit was the treadwheel crane – part crane, part hamster wheel! The crane works much like ours today, a rope is attached to what you need to lift and then the rope is gradually retracted to raise the object. In this instance, a person walking in a wheel allows the rope to be lowered and then raised – walking one way will raise the rope and walking the other will lower it.

Masons would need a sound understanding of geometry in order to make some of the key components of a medieval building, for example a spiral staircase. The go to tool for doing this was a compass, which allowed masons to draw perfect circles and create other shapes to be transferred onto stone via wooden templates. In order to draw lines, medieval masons employed string coated in ochre, a clay-earth pigment powder, that when plucked like a guitar string would leave a perfect line. This knowledge of geometry set masons apart from the vast majority of the population, and in some medieval imagery only God is depicted as a mason – no doubt a great source of pride for masons!

How did the finished castle look?

We have a very limited view into dialogue and planning between Henry and Maurice, but I think that it is safe to assume that the Great Tower or donjon, Keep to you and I, was deliberately built in a style that harked back to William the Conqueror’s Tower of London and, therefore, Henry’s Norman ancestry. By the time that Newcastle Castle was built, rounded towers were creeping in and becoming more common. So, why else would Henry and Maurice build in a style that was on the way out?

An artist’s impression of Maurice’s Keep as it would have appeared in 1178 after completion.

Like all castles, Newcastle’s keep came with all the comforts of home such as garderobes (toilets combined with wardrobes – because why not?), bedrooms with fireplaces and, contain your excitement, inbuilt plumbing for fast water transportation!

The project under Maurice at Newcastle resulted in a formidable castle atop a very steep hill overlooking the river Tyne. The castle had a curtain wall with multiple towers surrounded by a deep ditch that completely enclosed the peak of the hill. In the wall, there were four gates – two leading westwards onto flatter land (towards Westgate Road today) and two leading down the hill to the river. Some of these gates had drawbridges to cross the ditch.

The bailey (area within the castle walls) contained the Keep, a chapel and space for external buildings such as knight’s houses and stables. There is even talk of a large tower being located on a rounded section of the curtain wall called the Queen’s Mantle, though it is nigh impossible to attain firm, archaeological evidence owing to the fact that the Vermont Hotel and the Moot Hall are built on the site. If this were the case, it would propel Newcastle Castle further into the ranks of grand castles in England and would have vastly increased storage and accommodation space.

The castle had to be designed to fulfil a host of needs from being used as the royal centre of administration in Northumberland, to defending one of the few safe crossing points on the Tyne for miles around. In addition to this, the castle had to serve as a potential place of accommodation for the king and his entourage or anyone acting on the king’s behalf such as the Sheriff of Northumberland.

Newcastle Castle had many places to accommodate people and we have two certain bedrooms within the Keep. These rooms are known as the King’s Chamber and Queen’s Chamber today (a fine example of imaginative Victorian names!), but would have been known as a Solar back then. These rooms have windows to allow light in, garderobes and fireplaces - a true sign of high status lifestyle! Not only do they have all the comforts of home but also these rooms (and all others within the castle) would have been plastered and beautifully decorated – something we often overlook in castles!

Whilst those powerful and fortunate enough had their own private rooms and garderobes, common folk had a communal garderobe and a comfortable spot to sleep on the floor in the Great Hall – a prospect that makes crashing on a settee or ‘sleeping’ on an air mattress whilst camping seem like luxury!

Alongside serving as an uncomfortable place for sleeping, the Great Hall served many other purposes such as playing host to feasts, diplomatic events, and court cases to name but a few. This is a whacking great space and Maurice clearly designed it to impress!

Another part of the castle that shows off the skills of the masons is the Chapel, likely dedicated to the Archbishop Thomas Becket, former best friend of Henry II, turned victim to Henry’s temper tantrum. This beautiful space is where much of the skills of the masons came into play with beautiful rib vaulting with ball ornamentation and chevrons in the door archway of the chancel.

When you visit Newcastle Castle today, or any other medieval castle for that matter, it is clear for all to see that the masons and builders of the medieval period were masters of their craft. The medieval period should be viewed as a time of architectural mastery with vast building projects springing up all over the known world – from the great cathedrals like Durham or Canterbury to castles like Dover, Newcastle, and Rochester.

People like Maurice often vanish from history with kings or great lords getting all the credit for their work. The names of the masons tend to only be recorded in the financial records meaning that they often go forgotten with the only evidence of their work being the buildings left behind and the mason’s marks they had made. So, to put it right this is Newcastle Castle, built by Maurice and his team for King Henry II.