Page 28 - John Barber's Oakham Castle and its archaeology

Fig. 34. The horseshoe over the doorway to the Magistrates’ Court
belonged to a horse called ‘Clinker’ (see Rudkin 1905-06).

At one time it was stolen from the Castle by an Oakham School boy and
hidden under the floor of his study in School House. The boy who stole it would
seem, without much doubt, to have been R N Jackson (at Oakham School 1845-
47). After graduating at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he became a
Chaplain in the Royal Navy. From 1871-78 he was Vicar of Winchcombe in
Gloucestershire. He was also godfather to Cecil Rhodes. Messing Rudkin in the
Rutland Magazine Vol II March 1906 tries to give us a clue without openly
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breaking confidence. He writes: ‘Suffice it to say, that the one who took the shoe bore for a Christian name
the surname of the other, and from my knowledge of the history of Leicestershire, I believe them both to have
been descended from a very old Leicestershire family of NOBLE character, if not of lineage’. The two men
referred to were: Robert Noble and Robert Noble Jackson. The shoe was stolen in 1846 and returned in 1858
(the year that the great Dr Doncaster died and the year in which the old Hospital of Christ was pulled down and
the new School House erected). When he left school he became a clergyman in the Church of England and had
a parish down in the West Country. Eventually his conscience got the better of him and he returned the shoe,
along with some doggerel verse to the Castle, where it has hung ever since.
Thirdly, a good deal of doubt seems to
shroud the origin of what has now become
something of a sentimental and picturesque
custom. To my mind the most likely
explanation is that the surrender of a horseshoe
was not so much a due in itself as a pledge.
Peers of the realm, who had occasion to visit
Oakham, were probably accommodated by the
Lord of the Manor, and a shoe was removed
from their horse or horses overnight as a
guarantee of payment before they left, and then
restored to the horse by way of a receipt, as it
were. Throughout all my years in Oakham the
vast majority of the horseshoes have been made
by local farriers.

Fig. 35. Part of the horseshoe collection
in the Great Hall.

Para 6: ‘FOUR CHAMBERS’
These would undoubtedly have been located at the west end of the hall,
i.e. at the end furthest removed from the kitchen and service quarters,
which we know to have been on the east end, both by general usage and
by my own excavations in this area (see Para 7). Mr Ralegh Radford
writes about this part of the Castle: ‘Patching and fragmentary remains at
the west end show that there was a two-storied solar block of the same
width as the nave. It was entered by a door in the end of the north aisle
and seems to have been flanked by a pent-roofed passage on this side’.
This doorway is still visible, leading as it now does to two modern cells,
whilst on the exterior of the west wall there are clear indications of the
slope of the roof of this passage. It is just possible that there was a similar
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arrangement leading from the south aisle into the solar.

Fig. 36. The doorway which JLB and others thought may have led to a former
solar, and which now leads to two relatively modern prison cells.

30 See Rudkin 1905-06; for clarification, there were two schoolboy thieves, R N Jackson and his brother, but when Rudkin says ‘them both’, he is
referring to R N Jackson and another cleric, Robert Noble, in the context of a much later visit to the Castle; it is JLB who emphasises ‘NOBLE’.
31 Although JLB, C A R Radford and others believed that there was a two-storey solar block at the west end of the Great Hall, Nick Hill has recently
shown that this is not likely to have been the case, postulating instead a substantial lean-to structure at each end as the original design (Hill 2013).

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