This article is part of a series. Find the previous article here, and overview here. Photo by Vlad Ardeleanu on Unsplash.
Do any of you remember the story of Hastings Castle… ? The prototype was made of wood when William the Bastard came over from Normandy in 1066 to do his part in creating England. Some mason-looking types turned it into stone a couple of years later, but apparently none of the architects had heard that story (a parable perhaps) about building your house on the sand.
Different times back then, not so many biblical scholars, and their word for sandstone might not have been so blindingly obvious as what we have now. I mean, the Old English mealm sounds nothing like mealmstán, does it? And how about those Normans. Apparently you’ve got greve and gret. No excuses, really – they were all just playing silly buggers. That or the castle was a very slow-burn kind of Saxon terrorism.
The Castle and its surroundings became the foundation for a noble house, Eu (don’t mind the smell). It was even directly owned at one point by the future King Edward I (the one who hated Scotland and, according to the wee Australian, had a gay son) but he was short on cash and sold it. In the Winter of 1287, disaster struck, putting an end to the castle’s noble lineage: a storm blew half of it down – because it was built on sandstone that had been steadily eroding all those years. The nobles gave up on it after that.
Well, the land passed through a knight (or a sir to be precise) who apparently set the tradition of farming it, which was kept as standard until an Earl of Chichester took charge of it in 1824, beginning an archaeological dig. You know those pre-Victorians and their growing obsession with the ‘gothic’. It’s less archaeology and more “look pals, a real gothic ruin, what fun!” He tried to rebuild bits of it, and then it goes quiet again until 1951 when the Hastings Corporation thought it’d make a good tourist attraction. And that’s more or less the situation we find it in now.
Bit like the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire – looked so grand until it dramatically collapsed into a dark age that ran for about a thousand years, with rich chieftains’ children gawking at its remains, and now what? (The very slow demise of) industrialised capitalism under an essentially Roman Catholic social culture? It might as well be Hastings.
What a peculiar tale. I wonder why it comes to mind…
Try part two: What’s a council in crisis to do?