The Repository Stone Record

Kirby Muxloe's Builders Came Back After the Beheading

September 8, 2026 · Runtime 11:02 · Watch on YouTube

On Friday 13 June 1483, Lord Hastings walked into a council meeting at the Tower of London and did not walk out. The story everyone tells is that his half-built castle in Leicestershire stopped dead when the news arrived. It is a good story, and the last part of it is wrong. The building accounts survive week by week, and they show the masons back at work in September and still working fifteen months later — the final year paid for by his widow. They also show something nobody put in the story: the roll does not add up with itself.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 The story everyone tells
  2. 1:30 The accounts that survive
  3. 2:14 Three languages in one line
  4. 2:37 Built around the house he lived in
  5. 3:21 A hundred thousand bricks a week
  6. 4:05 The trip to Tattershall
  7. 5:17 Friday the thirteenth of June
  8. 5:36 What the roll does not record
  9. 5:58 The interval tripled
  10. 6:44 Fifteen more months of work
  11. 7:05 The widow's year
  12. 7:50 The totals disagree
  13. 9:21 Toothing is a promise in brick
  14. 10:08 The last thing anyone did

Transcript

The story everyone tells 0:00

Here is how the story gets told. On a Friday in June, fourteen eighty-three, Lord Hastings walked into a council meeting at the Tower of London. He did not walk out. When the news reached his building site in Leicestershire, the bricklayers, the masons and the carpenters stopped work at once. And the castle was never finished.

Every part of that is in the written record, including the day the tools went down. The last part is wrong. They came back in September and worked for another fifteen months. The final year was paid for by his widow. And the account roll that tells us all of this does not agree with itself. It is out by ninety-five pounds.

Kirby Muxloe sits just west of Leicester. It is not a castle in the sense the word usually means. It is a fortified manor house, built of brick, on a rectangular island inside a wide moat. Today two pieces of it stand. Everything else is a foundation in mown grass.

The building has a legal starting point. On the seventeenth of April, fourteen seventy-four, Lord Hastings was licensed to fortify three of his houses. Ashby de la Zouch, Bagworth, and Kirby. He was allowed a park of three thousand acres at the first, and two thousand at each of the others. Then nothing happened at Kirby for six years.

The accounts that survive 1:30

Then, in October fourteen eighty, the digging starts. And here is why this site matters more than its ruins suggest. The building accounts survive. All of them. From the twenty-second of October, fourteen eighty, to the sixth of December, fourteen eighty-four. They were found among the family papers at Ashby.

A building account is not a chronicle. Nobody wrote it to be read later. It is a list of payments, made week by week, by a man who had to account for the money. That man was Roger Bowlett, Hastings' steward, working as clerk of the works. And he wrote it in three languages at once.

Three languages in one line 2:14

Here is one line of it, from fourteen eighty-one. It records buying four pieces of timber. The frame of the sentence is Latin. The article, le, is French. The words for poles, levelling and earth are English. Nobody was writing for posterity. They were writing fast enough to keep up with the work.

Built around the house he lived in 2:37

The accounts also tell you something the ruins cannot. Hastings did not clear the site and start again. The old moated house was still standing, and he kept the hall and the north wing. He was building his new castle around the house he was living in. On the survey plan you can still see it, inside the courtyard.

By May fourteen eighty-one the site is busy. A master mason appears in the accounts at eightpence a day. Six weeks later he gets a name: John Cowper. Under him, Robert Steynforth, the leading freemason. A good number of the men are Welsh. At the peak, more than forty were working here at once.

A hundred thousand bricks a week 3:21

The brick was made on site, at a place the accounts call the Breke house. The burning was run by a Fleming, listed first as Antony Docheman and later as Antony Yzebrond. In one week he burned a hundred thousand bricks, using seventy-eight loads of wood. By the end, one point three million bricks had been laid.

The smallest entries are the ones that carry the site. Through the summer of fourteen eighty-one, men are paid to watch the moat at night. The moat was being dug, and a brook had been diverted to fill it. If the brook rose before the banks were finished, it would flood the work. So somebody sat out there in the dark, watching the water.

The trip to Tattershall 4:05

In October fourteen eighty-one, Cowper is sent to Tattershall and back, by order of Lord Hastings. Steynforth had made the same trip in June. Tattershall is Ralph Cromwell's brick tower in Lincolnshire, finished about thirty-five years earlier. They went to take notes on how the brick and stone were handled there. Kirby Muxloe is, in part, a copy.

One more thing about the roll, and then the year turns. The accounts are rendered weekly. Every week, a page: wages paid, materials bought, days worked. That rhythm is not a detail. It is the instrument this episode is going to read.

Fourteen eighty-three opens well. In February the vault over the gatehouse is finished and bricks are laid over it. In March the kitchen foundations go in. In April, worked stone arrives from Swarkestone Bridge in Derbyshire, for the machicolation corbels. In May, lead pipes and gutters are being fixed and soldered. Edward the Fourth had died on the ninth of April, and none of this had stopped.

Friday the thirteenth of June 5:17

Then, on Friday the thirteenth of June, Lord Hastings went to a council meeting at the Tower of London. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, accused him of treason. He was taken out and beheaded, without a trial. Two weeks later Richard deposed Edward the Fifth and took the crown himself.

What the roll does not record 5:36

Now go to the roll and look for it. It is not there. There is no entry for the death of the man paying for the building. No line, no note, no gap with a name in it. The roll is a record of payments, not of politics. So if you want the execution in this document, you have to read it a different way.

The interval tripled 5:58

Here is what it does record. Until June, the accounts come every week. From the twenty-third of June until the first of September, they come every three weeks. The interval tripled. English Heritage says the news reached Kirby three days after the event, and that the men stopped at once. The roll shows the same shock from the other side. The clerk did not stop writing. He stopped writing as often.

And then, in the editor's own words, affairs settle down. By September the masons and the bricklayers begin again. Practically nothing had been done for ten weeks. But the site was not abandoned. It restarted.

Fifteen more months of work 6:44

What happens next is the part the story leaves out. Through the autumn the towers are roofed and floors are laid. In November thatch goes on the towers and the gatehouse, against the winter. The masons work through that winter. And they keep working, at a smaller scale, all the way through fourteen eighty-four.

The widow's year 7:05

Look at what the four years cost, and the shape of it tells the story on its own. First year, three hundred and thirty pounds. Second, three hundred and ninety-seven. Third, three hundred. Fourth year, sixty-one. And the editor of the accounts notes who ordered that last year's spending. It was Lady Katherine Hastings. The widow.

Now do the arithmetic, because this is where the document turns on itself. Add the four annual totals together. You get one thousand and eighty-eight pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence three farthings. That is what the roll says the work cost, year by year.

The totals disagree 7:50

Now turn to the end of the roll. The clerk wrote his own summary there. Receipts, nine hundred and ninety-four pounds, eighteen shillings and twopence. Expenses, nine hundred and ninety-three pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence three farthings. Look at that again. The same shillings. The same pence. Ninety-five pounds apart.

Ninety-five pounds, exactly. Not a rounding error, and not a small sum here. It is more than the whole of the fourth year. Charles Peers, editing the accounts in nineteen seventeen, records the gap and does not explain it. And neither will this. A lost membrane, a sum carried to another account, a slip: the roll does not say. And there is a third figure. Bowlett's own receipt acknowledges nine hundred and eighty-nine pounds, six shillings and eightpence. Three totals, and no two of them agree.

So what is actually standing out there? One tower, and one gatehouse. The west tower is complete, and the survey says so plainly. Twenty-five feet square, three storeys, projecting six feet into the moat. The gatehouse got as far as the vaulted ground floor and the great room above it. There was another storey above that. It was perhaps never built.

Toothing is a promise in brick 9:21

Everything else is foundations. But look at where the ranges should join the west tower. The brick is left projecting, in a stepped edge. That is called toothing, and it is not damage. It is a joint left open on purpose, so the next wall could be bonded into it later. Toothing is a promise in brick. It says: we are coming back to this.

There is one more empty thing, and it is over the front door. Above the entrance arch is a square-headed niche, with a panelled base and carved ornament in the head and jambs. It was cut to hold Lord Hastings' coat of arms. Nothing was ever put in it. The frame for the owner's name is the one piece the owner did not live to fill.

The last thing anyone did 10:08

And the last thing anyone did on this site was not building. In September fourteen eighty-four, they were thatching the gatehouse. Thatch on a brick gatehouse is not a roof. It is a temporary cover, put over work you intend to come back to. Before the year was out, the accounts stop. Nobody came back.

So here is the reading. The toothing and the three-week account are the same gesture, in two materials. Both are a record of an intention to continue. Kirby Muxloe is not a monument to a beheading. It is a monument to fifteen months of work that happened after one, and then stopped for a reason nobody wrote down. Next time, how to read a brick building. Cowper went to Tattershall to copy it. We will go and see what he copied.

Description and sources

Kirby Muxloe is a brick manor house on a moated island west of Leicester, begun by William, Lord Hastings in October 1480 under a licence to fortify granted in 1474. It matters far beyond its ruins because of a document: the complete building accounts, from 22 October 1480 to 6 December 1484, found among the family papers at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and edited by C. R. Peers for the Office of Works in 1917. They were kept by Roger Bowlett, Hastings' steward, in a working mixture of Latin, French and English — one entry buys four pieces of timber and needs all three languages to do it.

What they do not record is the execution. There is no entry for it. What changes is the interval: from 23 June to 1 September 1483 the clerk rendered account every three weeks instead of every week, and then went back to weekly. He did not stop writing. He stopped writing as often. And the roll does not close — the four annual totals add to £1,088 17s 6¾d, while the clerk's own summary gives expenses of £993 17s 6¾d. The same shillings, the same pence, ninety-five pounds apart. Peers records the gap and does not explain it. Neither does this episode.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

How to Read a Castle, Vol. 01 — the method, the measured drawings and the documents behind the first two episodes

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/read-a-castle

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • C. R. Peers (Office of Works) — the west tower — 1917 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • C. R. Peers (Office of Works) — site plan — 1917 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • C. R. Peers (Office of Works) — block plan — 1917 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • C. R. Peers (Office of Works) — gatehouse plan — 1917 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • C. R. Peers (Office of Works) — west tower plans — 1917 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

Stone Record reads castles as documents — what the surviving paperwork and the standing masonry actually say, against what gets repeated. Primary sources are linked above.

Every image here is public-domain material from Wikimedia Commons, credited on screen — nothing is AI-generated. All five plates come from one book, the 1917 Office of Works guide listed above; the diagrams and plans are drawn in code from the figures named on screen.

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