Ceremony and Dining – From Kitchen to Chamber.
Professor Richard Oram.
Ceremonial display formed a central part of royal culture in medieval Europe and Scotland’s kings were enthusiastic participants in the culture of conspicuous consumption that went hand-in-hand with display. James’s grand new banqueting hall at Linlithgow proclaimed that culture on a grand scale but it was embedded deep into Scotland’s elite society and is visible still in the planning of many of the kingdom’s late medieval royal and baronial castles. The finest of these castles is Doune in Menteith, built in the late fourteenth century for James’s uncle, Robert, duke of Albany, whose first powerbase was the earldom of Menteith. Here, in a building little altered since Duke Robert’s day, we can see how the kitchens, hall and chamber formed a core suite upon which the whole function of the castle was pinned.
As it survives, Doune comprises of two towers – the great tower and the kitchen tower – linked by the hall. These three elements were designed as an integrated whole, re-using components of an older building destroyed during the Wars of Independence. That recycling of an older ruin explains some of the oddities in the layout of the building, but the seemingly eccentric plan is actually a cleverly conceived arrangement designed for maximum convenience.
The kitchen tower lies at the westernmost side of the site. Its irregular plan arises from the incorporation of thirteenth-century remains into its lower levels. At ground floor, entered from the courtyard, are stone-vaulted cellars for the storage of dry goods. The ‘business’ floor is at first storey level, reached via two stairs from the courtyard. The main entrance, at the north, opens into a space that doubled as an entrance lobby for the hall and a service area from the kitchen. The service hatches to the left were where the food was delivered to the servants who would carry it through the screens passage into the hall. The kitchen is a grand space, with a massive fireplace in its west wall, provided with slop or grease drain in one corner and a window so that the cooks attending the food cooking over the multiple hearths within the fireplace could better see what they were doing. Corbels in the wall supported the timbers of a viewing platform, from which the master of the kitchen could oversee the preparation of the food and ensure that the servants weren’t stealing or wasting expensive sugar or spices. The ruined oven at the south-east corner of the kitchen is a later insertion. Originally, the bakehouse in which the massive quantities of bread consumed daily by the household were prepared, probably would have been in one of the other buildings, now demolished, that once lined the southern part of the courtyard. Without the oven, there is plenty of space in the kitchen for preparation tables and we must also imagine the spice-cupboard with its lock-secured wooden door, racks of utensils, water-barrels, and ceiling racks from which drying herbs would have hung. Outside the south door of the kitchen, now reached by a second stair from the courtyard, a stair leads up to the two-seater toilet for the use of the kitchen servants, but the vanished range of buildings that once adjoined the tower was otherwise probably mainly stores and bulk food preparation on two levels, with servants’ accommodation above.
Across the lobby/service area from the hatches, a door leads into the screens passage at the west or ‘low’ end of the hall. Here would have been a timber structure divided into compartments; bread store, ale store and access to the minstrels’ gallery overhead. A hatch at the north leads down into what was probably the ale cellar, from which the tables in the ‘low’ end of the hall would have been supplied. Through the screens was the hall proper, a wonderfully impressive space with large windows in its south wall. A central hearth provided heat, the fumes escaping through a louvre in the high, timber roof. At its east end is a dais, where the great table where Doune’s lords would have sat on the grand ceremonial occasions was placed. The window at its south side would have bathed the dais in light, reflected back from the once-limewashed walls and the jewelled colours of the wall-hangings. In its recess, one stair leads down to the wine cellar from which the high-status diners were supplied, while on the other side a door opens into a privy for the convenience of the top table occupants. A door at the north end of the dais leads through to the Duke’s private chambers in the great tower.
On great occasions, when Duke Robert or his son, Duke Murdac, were dining in state, the food for the top table would have been processed down through the hall past the eyes and noses of the waiting lower-status folk at the trestle tables to either side. Elaborately prepared savoury pastries, liked baked sculptures, broken open to spill richly spiced stews or oven-baked whole birds, or roasted fowl re-dressed in their plumage were part of the grand display of the Stewarts’ power and sophistication. Even when they were not seated at the top table, their food would have been carried ceremonially through the hall and delivered via the door behind the dais into their less public hall, or up the service stair to the ducal chamber on the second floor.
The duke’s hall, which was accessed directly from the courtyard as well as through the dais door from the great hall, had its own screens passage, minstrels’ gallery, dais fireplace with a double hearth, and hatch to bring up wine from the cellars below. Here, Robert and Murdac would have dined in greater privacy with their close family and special guests on the sumptuous food delivered from the kitchen tower. After dining, the dukes would have taken their own dais door to the stairs up to their private chambers in the upper levels of the great gate tower.
Their chamber on the second floor was the duke’s most personal space. It was a great, hall-like space, accessed via his private stair from the hall below or, for servants, via the service stair that rose in the north west angle of the tower. At the west end of the chamber would have been the bed, a magnificent piece of carved wood and rich cloth in which the duke would have sat to receive special servants and visitors. From there, he could have looked down to the opposite end of his chamber to a vast, hooded fireplace, now sadly mutilated, which provided warmth for the vast space of his chamber but on which food could also be re-heated. Beside it is a stone sink where food slops could be disposed of. There, at his own table, he could eat in privacy, served by his close personal attendants, untroubled by the noise of friends, supplicants or household members who thronged in the great hall or the demands of his political associates and foreign emissaries who approached him in his own fall.
Each space in this sequence from kitchen to chamber formed a continuous chain that bound together the most important, formal ceremonial activities of a great lord’s household. Food and drink, its supply to the table before the eyes of lesser men, processed through their midst in the hands of the richly-dressed young gentlemen of the household, and served to the glittering party on the dais, was one of the greatest statements of power in medieval society. What you ate and how you ate it were amongst the most potent symbols of status which set medieval rulers apart from their subjects.