The Repository Stone Record

Bolton Castle Was Begun Before the King Said Yes

September 27, 2026 · Runtime 9:48 · Watch on YouTube

On 14 September 1378 Richard le Scrope and the mason John Lewyn agreed in writing on a tower that did not exist: fifty feet to the battlements, ten yards by eight, walls two yards thick, a kitchen at the bottom. The king's licence to crenellate Bolton came ten months later — and the Patent Roll calls the man who received it 'chancellor'.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 A tower that did not exist, 1378
  2. 0:46 The belief: ask first, then build
  3. 1:31 Who asked: the Chancellor
  4. 1:55 Ten months, the wrong way round
  5. 2:38 The Patent Roll, July 1379
  6. 3:22 The contract: a tower for a kitchen
  7. 4:33 No total: 100s. a perch
  8. 4:58 Who pays for what
  9. 5:48 Where 18,000 marks comes from
  10. 6:54 John Lewyn, mason of Durham
  11. 7:15 The stone against the paper
  12. 8:00 1645, 1647, 1761
  13. 9:02 The date of a document

Transcript

A tower that did not exist, 1378 0:00

On the fourteenth of September, thirteen seventy-eight, a lord and a mason agreed in writing on a tower that did not exist. Fifty feet to the battlements. Ten yards by eight. Walls two yards thick. A kitchen at the bottom, and a vault over it. Ten months later, the king licensed the lord to build a castle at all.

Both papers survive. This episode reads the contract for Bolton Castle as an account roll: what it prices, who pays for what, and what it leaves out. Two things every guide to Bolton repeats come apart against it. And then the stone answers, because of everything at Bolton, the tower in that contract is the one you can no longer stand in.

The belief: ask first, then build 0:46

Here is the belief. A licence to crenellate is permission. A lord who wants walls and battlements petitions the king. The king grants a licence, it is enrolled, and the masons begin. Bolton Castle, in Wensleydale, is the textbook example: licensed in thirteen seventy-nine, finished before the end of the century.

And the belief has a clean story behind it. The Crown kept count of who could fortify. A licence was the control, and a castle without one was a challenge to the king. On that reading the licence comes first, and everything built after it is the licence carried out in stone. The guides add a price: eighteen thousand marks.

Who asked: the Chancellor 1:31

Now look at who asked. Richard le Scrope had been Treasurer of England from thirteen seventy-one to thirteen seventy-five. On the twenty-ninth of October, thirteen seventy-eight, he became Chancellor. The chancellor kept the Great Seal. Letters patent, which is what a licence to crenellate is, were issued by his office, and enrolled by his clerks.

Ten months, the wrong way round 1:55

The first problem is the order of the papers. The contract with the mason is dated the fourteenth of September, thirteen seventy-eight. The licence is dated July, thirteen seventy-nine. Ten months apart, the wrong way round. And the contract itself reads like the middle of a job, not the start of one.

The county history of nineteen fourteen says so plainly. The contract suggests by its terms that it is a continuation of other work, and the architecture agrees: the west and north ranges seem to have gone up first, shortly before thirteen seventy-eight. So part of Bolton was already rising before either paper was written.

The Patent Roll, July 1379 2:38

Here is the licence, as the Patent Roll calendar prints it. Licence for Richard Lescrope to crenellate his manor of Bolton, in Wensleydale, with a wall of stone and lime. And the entry directly above it, on the same membrane, the same month, is another grant to him. There, the roll calls him Richard Lescrope, chancellor.

So what was the licence, at Bolton? Not a door the builder waited at. It was a document issued, under the Great Seal, to the man who kept the Great Seal, for a building whose next range was already under contract. Whatever licences meant elsewhere, here the order of the paper leaves no room for ask first, then build.

The contract: a tower for a kitchen 3:22

Now the contract itself. It is in French, between Sir Richard le Scrope and John Lewyn, mason, and in nineteen fourteen it was still at Bolton, in the hands of the castle's owner. It opens with a tower for a kitchen: vaulted, embattled, fifty feet high below the battlements, ten yards long, eight wide, the outer walls two yards thick.

Then it walks along the east side. Between the kitchen tower and the gate tower, a range forty feet high, with three rooms one above another, each twelve yards by five and a half. A gate tower of fifty feet, with a vaulted gateway and three rooms above it. South of the gateway, a vaulted room, and three more on top.

Every room is to have entrances, fireplaces, doors, windows, privies, and all other necessaries. Three spiral stairs: one inside the kitchen, two for the gate tower. Inner partition walls three or four feet thick. It is not a description of a castle. It is a specification, the building written out as a list of dimensions.

No total: 100s. a perch 4:33

And here is the part an account roll would recognise. There is no total. Lewyn is paid one hundred shillings for every perch of masonry. A perch is twenty square feet of wall face, one yard thick, and the arches and vaults count as wall. Every height is measured from one point: the sill of the gateway. On top of that, fifty marks in all.

Who pays for what 4:58

Then the contract splits the risk. Lewyn does all the masonry at his own cost, and finds all the stone and lime. Scrope finds the wood: wood to burn the lime, wood for the centres the vaults are turned on, wood for the scaffolds. And Scrope pays the carriage of all the stone, sand and lime. The mason carries the quarry. The lord carries the roads.

A hundred and sixty years later the antiquary John Leland rode through Wensleydale and heard how the timber came. Most of it, he wrote, was fetched out of a forest he calls Engleby, in Cumberland. Scrope laid teams of oxen along the road, to carry it from place to place until it came to Bolton. The contract said the lord pays the carriage. The story remembers the oxen.

Where 18,000 marks comes from 5:48

The second problem is the price. Every guide gives Bolton's cost as eighteen thousand marks, and the national heritage list gives it as twelve thousand pounds, which is the same number. It is not in the contract. The contract cannot produce a total: it pays by the perch. The number comes from Leland.

What Leland wrote, around fifteen forty, is two round figures. It was eighteen years in building, and the expenses of every year came to a thousand marks. Somebody later multiplied them. Leland names no roll and no witness, and he was writing a century and a half after the last stone was set.

Check his eighteen years against the dated papers. Work under way before the contract of thirteen seventy-eight. The licence in thirteen seventy-nine. The castle's chapel dedicated in thirteen ninety-nine, which is the nearest thing to a completion date. That is more than twenty years. Leland's figure is a tradition, not an account.

John Lewyn, mason of Durham 6:54

And the man who signed for the masonry was no local builder. John Lewyn was the mason of Durham Priory, where he had built the great kitchen a few years before. In the same year as the Bolton contract he was working for the Crown at Carlisle and Roxburgh. The first thing Scrope's contract asks him for is a kitchen.

The stone against the paper 7:15

Now the stone. Bolton stands high on the north side of the dale, about fifty-five metres by forty, with a tower at each corner and a courtyard in the middle. The entrance is through the east range, the side the contract describes. The county history compared the north-east tower with the contract, and found the measurements closely approximate. That is the kitchen tower.

In fifteen sixty-eight, Mary, Queen of Scots, was held here, and her keeper Sir Francis Knollys wrote a description of the building. The highest walled house that I have seen, he says, and hath but one entrance thereinto. Two hundred years after the contract, the gate on the east side still decided who came in.

1645, 1647, 1761 8:00

Then the part the paper could not know. In sixteen forty-five Bolton was held for the king, and surrendered after six months, starved out. In sixteen forty-seven Parliament slighted it. And in a storm in seventeen sixty-one, the north-east tower fell, probably from the damage of the century before.

Look at what is ruined at Bolton. The west and south ranges stand almost complete. The north-east tower, the kitchen tower, and part of the east range are the seriously ruined corner. It is the corner the contract describes. The best-documented part of the castle is the part that is not there.

Which means the paper is now the only complete record of it. We know how high the kitchen tower was meant to stand, how thick its walls were, how many stairs it had, and what each perch of it cost. Not from a reconstruction. From an agreement written ten months before the king said yes.

The date of a document 9:02

So read a licence to crenellate as the date of a document, not the date of a building. At Bolton the contract came first, the licence came to the chancellor's own manor, and the famous price is a tradition, two round numbers multiplied. Where the stone still stands, it agrees with the contract. Where it fell, only the contract is left.

One clause is worth carrying into the next episode. Scrope had to find the wood for the scaffolds. A scaffold leaves holes in a wall. At Harlech those holes are placed the way they are in castles in Savoy, and they have been used to name the man who designed Edward the First's castles. Next time: why the holes do not quite prove it.

Description and sources

The belief: a licence to crenellate is permission, asked first and carried out in stone afterwards. At Bolton the papers run the other way. The contract reads as the continuation of work already under way (VCH 1914), Scrope became Chancellor — keeper of the Great Seal — on 29 October 1378, and the licence of July 1379 sits directly under an entry naming 'Richard Lescrope, chancellor'.

The contract has no total: 100 shillings a perch, arches and vaults counted as wall, plus 50 marks. The mason finds stone and lime; the lord finds the wood and pays the carriage. The famous 18,000 marks is John Leland, c. 1540 — '18. yeres in buildynge' at '1000. marks' a year, multiplied later.

The contract's kitchen tower is the north-east tower, which fell in a storm in 1761. The part of Bolton the contract describes is the part that is not there.

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.

  • Barry Marsh — 2016 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Barry Marsh — 2016 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Immanuel Giel — 2006 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Godfrey Bingley — 1897 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Peter De Wint (1784-1849) — before 1849 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Immanuel Giel — 2006 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Paul Lakin — 2014 | Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 3.0
  • Cassell's Illustrated History of England — 1865 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 3 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 or CC BY material from Wikimedia Commons, credited on screen — nothing is AI-generated. The diagrams and set-type quotations are code: drawings of the argument, not measured surveys. The contract is quoted in the county history's 1914 English abstract; the French original is printed in Salzman (1952).

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