The Repository Stone Record

Medieval Castles Were Not Grey. The King Paid for White

September 22, 2026 · Runtime 9:51 · Watch on YouTube

On 17 March 1240 a clerk at Westminster wrote out an order for the keepers of the works at the Tower of London: whitewash the Tower, entirely, inside and out. It is why the keep is called the White Tower. Every engraving you have seen of a castle shows grey stone — and this episode argues, from the king's own accounts, that grey is a ruin's colour, not a castle's.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Whitewash the Tower, 1240
  2. 0:54 The belief: a castle is grey
  3. 1:45 The Liberate Rolls — nine entries
  4. 2:33 Dover, Nottingham, Corfe
  5. 3:25 What dealbare sat on top of
  6. 3:46 A red castle called White
  7. 4:12 Conwy: the lime still on the walls
  8. 4:36 A name is a distinction
  9. 5:03 What the painters painted
  10. 5:35 December 1240: the gutters
  11. 6:30 When nobody pays for lime
  12. 7:24 The grey becomes a method, 1913–33
  13. 7:56 What it cost
  14. 8:47 A ruin's colour

Transcript

Whitewash the Tower, 1240 0:00

On the seventeenth of March, twelve forty, a clerk at Westminster wrote out an order for the keepers of the works at the Tower of London. Whitewash the Tower. Entirely. Inside and out. Not a chamber, not a chapel: the whole building. That order is why the keep is called the White Tower. More than two and a half centuries later a painter drew it for a French prince who had been held there, and he painted it white.

Every engraving you have ever seen of a castle shows grey stone. This episode is about why that is a ruin's colour, not a castle's. The case comes from the king's own accounts, from a red sandstone castle that has been called White since the thirteenth century, and from the lime still stuck to the walls at Conwy. Then the harder question. If castles were white, who took the white off?

The belief: a castle is grey 0:54

Here is the belief. A medieval castle is grey. Cut stone, bare mortar, weather on the face of it. The picture comes from somewhere specific. Between seventeen twenty-four and seventeen forty-two, Samuel and Nathaniel Buck travelled England and Wales engraving the antiquities, county by county. Every castle in their plates is bare stone. They are the castle pictures everyone has seen.

And the belief has a clean story behind it. Stone is honest. A builder who could afford cut stone wanted it seen. The grey is the material telling the truth about itself, and a coat of paint would have been a lie on top of it. The restorers of the last century agreed: strip the ivy, point the joints, leave the stone bare.

The Liberate Rolls — nine entries 1:45

The first problem is that the paper says the opposite, in the king's own accounts. The Liberate Rolls are the Exchequer's record of what Henry the Third ordered paid. In the printed calendar for twelve twenty-six to twelve forty, the index lists whitewash nine times. The Tower is one of the nine. Read the others.

February, twelve thirty-nine. Forty shillings to the constable of the Tower of London, to whitewash the queen's chamber. February, twelve forty. The queen's chamber to be wainscoted, whitewashed within, and painted with roses; the king's great chamber to be whitewashed and painted anew. The inside of a royal castle was white, and then it was colour on white.

Dover, Nottingham, Corfe 2:33

July, twelve forty. The constable of Dover Castle is to have the Tower whitewashed in the places that were not whitewashed before. Read that phrase twice. It means the great tower at Dover was already partly white, and the king wanted the job finished. Two royal keeps, whitened in the same year.

June, twelve forty-three. The sheriff of Nottingham is to whitewash the king's great tower of the castle of Nottingham. March, twelve forty-four. The sheriff of Dorset is to have the tower of Corfe Castle roughcast with mortar where there are defects, and whitened all over outside. Four great towers in four years: London, Dover, Nottingham, Corfe. This was not a taste. It was a maintenance programme.

What dealbare sat on top of 3:25

The Latin is dealbare, to make white. The calendar translates it as whitewash, and at Corfe it comes paired with the word that explains it: roughcast. First the mortar coat over the defects, then the lime over the mortar. The white was the top layer of a weatherproofing job. Which is the first hint of where it went.

A red castle called White 3:46

Now the second problem, and it is a name. In Monmouthshire there is a castle the Pipe Roll of eleven eighty-six calls Llantilio. It is built of red sandstone. From the thirteenth century the records call it White Castle, and White Castle it has stayed. Red stone does not turn white on its own. The name is the render, written down by people who saw it fresh.

Conwy: the lime still on the walls 4:12

And at Conwy, the render is still there. Cadw, which keeps the castle, tells visitors to look for it. Keep your eyes peeled, the guide says, for traces of lime render on the walls. This darkly forbidding fortress was originally white. Edward the First spent about fifteen thousand pounds on Conwy, and the outermost layer of all that money was lime.

A name is a distinction 4:36

Which brings us back to the Tower of London, and a point worth being careful about. The name White Tower is a distinction. Nobody calls one tower white if every tower is white. The orders show the king whitening his great towers. They do not show every baron doing the same to every wall. What the record supports is this: the royal keeps of the twelve forties were white, and white was worth naming.

What the painters painted 5:03

The painters agree, for what a painter's word is worth. Around fifteen hundred a miniature was made for the poems of Charles, Duke of Orleans, who had been a prisoner at the Tower after Agincourt. The keep behind him is white, and the curtain walls around it are not: the painter kept the distinction. Nearly a century earlier the Limbourg brothers painted the Duke of Berry's castles into his book of hours. Saumur, Lusignan, Vincennes. Every one of them pale, and not one of them grey.

December 1240: the gutters 5:35

So where did the white go? The answer is in the same rolls, nine months after the order to whiten. December, twelve forty. The keepers of the works are to lengthen all the leaden gutters from the top of the great tower and bring them down to the ground. So that the wall of the tower, which has just been whitened, may be in no danger of perishing or falling outwards through the trickling of the rain.

The king's clerk knew the thing everyone later forgot. Lime is a sacrificial coat. It goes on wet, hardens in the air, and the weather eats it from the top down. Rain off a roof takes it in streaks. That is why the orders repeat: the places not whitewashed before, the old wall round the tower, the defects roughcast again. White was not a finish. It was a subscription, and somebody had to keep paying.

When nobody pays for lime 6:30

A castle stays white for exactly as long as somebody pays for lime. Take away the household, the constable, the yearly order from Westminster, and the coat has a few decades left in it. Most of the castles in the engravings were slighted in the sixteen forties, or abandoned long before. By the time an engraver arrived, the render had been gone for generations. He drew what was left, and what was left was the stone underneath.

Which is what the Bucks did. They drew the Tower of London in seventeen thirty-seven, Dover in seventeen thirty-five, Conwy in seventeen forty-two. They were careful men. They drew grey because grey was what stood there, five hundred years after the last order for lime. Their plates became the picture of a castle for everyone who came after, including the people who restored them.

The grey becomes a method, 1913–33 7:24

And in the twentieth century the grey became a method. From nineteen thirteen the state's first Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Charles Peers, took ruins into public care by the hundred. His rule was to remove ivy, undergrowth and what he called accretions, to hide the repairs, and to set the bare masonry in mown lawn. Four hundred sites by his death in nineteen fifty-two. The castle you picture is a ruin of the sixteen forties, presented in the style of the nineteen twenties.

What it cost 7:56

The prices answer the question of why anyone bothered. Forty shillings whitewashed the queen's chamber in twelve thirty-nine. In December twelve forty the same keepers of the Tower works were handed a hundred and twenty pounds in a single payment. Two pounds for a white room is the cheapest line in the roll. At Nottingham the clerk did not even price the job in advance: the cost was to be credited by the view and testimony of lawful men.

What survives of the white is what the rain could not reach, or could not erase. Patches of render on the walls at Conwy. A name on a red castle in Monmouthshire. A name on the keep in London that outlived its colour by seven centuries. A miniature, a book of hours. And a handful of lines in the Exchequer's rolls, with prices attached.

A ruin's colour 8:47

So the correction is this. The bare stone castle is a ruin's colour, not a castle's. Grey is what a building looks like after the last person stops paying for lime, and after two centuries of deciding that the bare stone is the honest version. The honest version is in the roll. Whitened, inside and out.

Next time you stand under a curtain wall, look up, not out. Render survives where rain does not run: under a string course, in the lee of a tower, high under the wall-walk. If there is a pale crust on the stone that is not the stone, you are looking at the last coat somebody paid for.

Next time, a document that describes a castle before it existed. In September thirteen seventy-eight, Richard Scrope signed a contract with the mason John Lewyn for Bolton Castle, ten months before the king licensed him to build it. The paper says what the rooms were to be, and what they were to cost. That is the account roll episode.

Description and sources

The Liberate Rolls — the Exchequer's record of what Henry III ordered paid — index 'whitewash' nine times between 1226 and 1240. Forty shillings whitewashed the queen's chamber in the Tower in 1239; the next year it was 'whitewashed within and painted with roses'. Then the great towers: London in March 1240, 'entirely both inside and outside'; Dover in July, 'in the places that were not whitewashed before'; Nottingham in 1243; Corfe in 1244, 'roughcast where there are defects, and whitened all over outside'. A red sandstone castle in Monmouthshire has been called White Castle since the thirteenth century because of its render; at Conwy, Cadw tells visitors to look for the lime still on the walls.

Where did the white go? The same rolls answer: in December 1240 the lead gutters of the great tower were to be brought down to the ground 'so that the wall, which has just been whitened, may be in no danger of perishing through the trickling of the rain'. Limewash is a sacrificial coat; it lasts as long as somebody pays for lime. The Buck brothers drew the Tower, Dover and Conwy in 1735–42, five centuries after the last writ, and drew what stood there. Charles Peers, first Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, then made bare stone a method: ivy and 'accretions' removed, masonry set in mown lawn, four hundred sites by 1952.

One caution: the name White Tower is a distinction. The record shows the king whitening his great towers, not every baron whitening every wall.

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.

... and 26 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

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

Every image is public-domain, CC0 or CC BY material from Wikimedia Commons, credited on screen — nothing is AI-generated. Three frames are cropped details of the 1737 Buck engraving and the c. 1500 Orléans miniature, from the originals. The diagrams and set-type quotations are code: drawings of the argument, not measured surveys.

#castles #medievalhistory #architecture