Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  But then, at the last minute, Godwin and his sons sensed it was a struggle that they could not win, and fled the country. Edward, finally, was free – master in his own kingdom after years of ruling in the earl’s shadow. He set the seal on his victory by confiscating the lands of the Godwin family and giving them to his French allies. Tellingly, he banished his queen to a nunnery, and later that autumn William of Normandy paid a visit to the English court.

  Edward’s victory, however, was short-lived. The following year, the Godwins returned, invading the country and demanding the restitution of their lands. Confronted with superior numbers, the king had no choice but to give in. His French friends, realizing that this time their defeat was inevitable, chose to run. Some of them went west, to the castle at Ewyas Harold. The archbishop headed east, and set sail for the Continent. Our Canterbury monk, who clearly despised the Frenchmen, reported their departure with undisguised glee, and laid all the blame for the dispute at their door.

  ‘Archbishop Robert was declared an outlaw unconditionally, together with all Frenchmen,’ he wrote, ‘for they had been mainly responsible for the discord which had arisen between Earl Godwin and the king.’

  So by 1052, everything was back to normal. The Godwins had been restored to power. Edward had taken back his queen. No one, if they were wise, was saying anything more about Duke William of Normandy. It was as if the events of 1051 had never happened. There were no more arguments, no more Frenchmen, and no more of their new-fangled fortifications – these so-called ‘castles’. Everything in England was back as it should be.

  And so it might have remained, had not Edward made his famous promise in 1051. It was a promise that meant that when the king died fifteen years later, the French would be back. No one could have guessed it at the time, but that castle in Herefordshire was the first drop of rain before the deluge. Within a generation of its construction, England would be filled with hundreds and hundreds of castles, from sea to sea.

  But let’s not race too far ahead. Instead, let’s dwell for a moment on the events of 1051, and what they tell us about castles. One thing emerges very clearly: the French definitely had them, and the English definitely didn’t. The Canterbury monk was quite outraged to discover that there were people building a castle in his backyard. Castles were a French invention and, as far as people in England were concerned, the French could keep them. By the same token, Edward the Confessor’s Continental friends had shown themselves to be enthusiastic and experienced castle-builders. At the first sign of trouble, they had quickly constructed a castle, and they must have built the other early castles in England at around the same time. Had this been France, where people had been building castles for generations, no one would have blinked an eyelid. Constructing a huge mound of earth was simply what you did in such circumstances. In France, when the going got tough, the tough built castles.

  This difference in attitudes might seem, on the face of it, quite strange. After all, here were two societies, both governed by warrior aristocracies, both at roughly the same level of economic development, and separated from each other by only a narrow strip of water. Yet their feelings and opinions about fortification were apparently quite divergent. So how had this divide come about?

  The simple answer is: because of the Vikings. The Vikings, we used to believe, were the bad boys of medieval Europe, looting and pillaging with fire and sword long after everyone else on the Continent had calmed down a bit and taken up farming. Nowadays, of course, we are taught to see them differently. Economic migrants rather than shameless pirates, traders as much as raiders: the Vikings, it turns out, were not such a bad bunch after all. But whether the indigenous peoples who lived in northern England at the close of the eighth century saw the Vikings in such a rosy light remains open to question. The monks on the island of Lindisfarne, who in 793 encountered the first batch of new arrivals, might well have disagreed. In the century that followed, the Norsemen swept all before them. One by one, the several kingdoms that made up ninth-century England collapsed in the face of the Viking onslaught. The ancient kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia, and even the mighty Midland kingdom of Mercia, all eventually succumbed. By the 870s, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the kingdom of Wessex, remained.

  Wessex, however, fought back. The resistance was led by King Alfred (871–99), who for this reason, as well as for his legendary lack of culinary skills, became an English national hero. The king and his descendants protected their people by instituting a sophisticated programme of defences, which they called burhs, or boroughs. These were nothing less than planned towns, strongly fortified so as to protect large communities within their walls. In many towns in southern England, the outline of a burh can be still be identified, and in each case the total area enclosed is very similar, suggesting that burhs were built to something approaching a standard model. By building them, Alfred and his successors were able to push forward their frontier with astonishing speed and success. By 927, they had all but reversed the effect of the invasions; that year the Viking capital of York fell, and the power of the Viking leaders was broken. Many Scandinavian settlers, of course, remained in the northern and eastern parts of the country, but they were now ruled by the kings of Wessex – or, as they had begun to style themselves, the kings of England.

  Indeed, by driving the Vikings back, the kings of Wessex created a country that, in territorial terms, was recognizably similar to modern England. Where formerly there had been a handful of competing English tribes, there was now a single, united English state. As states went in the Middle Ages, it was a mighty one. The kings of England enjoyed powers on a scale unrivalled by any other European rulers at the time. They issued one type of coin throughout their realm, and manipulated the currency for their own profit. Their laws and their government likewise extended to all parts of their kingdom. Most importantly, they restricted the building of fortifications. Burhs were public defences, maintained and owned by the king. Building a private fortification – like a castle – was not permitted. When Alfred’s descendant Athelstan took the city of York in 927, his first action was to destroy the stronghold that the Viking leader had built there. If you were a reasonably prosperous landowner in tenth- or early eleventh-century England, the most you could get away with was a small fortified homestead, confusingly also known as a burh, but sometimes called a burhgeat. Archaeological excavation suggests that these amounted to a collection of domestic buildings surrounded by an earthwork and a wooden stockade. In England, serious fortification was the business of the king, and the king alone.

  On the other side of the Channel, however, it was a different story. Here, too, the Vikings attacked in the ninth century, sailing their longboats up the Seine in 854 and burning Paris. But whereas in England the Viking attacks ultimately brought unity, in France the end result was political fragmentation. The formerly strong kingdom created in the late eighth century by the famous Charlemagne crumbled away during the rule of his heirs. In France there was no national epic in the making, no hero in the mould of Alfred to lead resistance against the invaders. Instead of building communal fortifications under the direction of the king, powerful men began to take the matter of defence into their own hands – to protect themselves, their families and their households. In 864, the then King of France, Charles the Bald, watching his kingdom disintegrate before his very eyes, attempted to reverse the process with a royal proclamation.

  ‘We will and expressly command,’ he said, ‘that whoever at this time has made castles and fortifications and enclosures without our permission shall have them demolished.’

  This is the first recorded use of the word ‘castle’ in French – almost two hundred years before it occurs in English. It is also an indication that the spread of private fortification in France had reached the extent where it was irreversible; the French king might as well have ordered back the sea.

  Of course, the Vikings weren’t the only cause for castle-building. Castles might be necessary for defence, b
ut they were also very useful for enforcing one’s right to rule over others. As royal authority began to disintegrate in France, all aspects of government – law-making and law-enforcement, tax-collecting and control of the coinage – began to fall into private hands. French society, in a word, was becoming feudalized, and the symbol of a lord’s feudal authority was his castle.

  Next comes an elegant twist in the tale. The Vikings who raided France, like the ones who raided England, decided to stay for good. However, whereas in England the power of Norsemen was eventually broken, in France they just kept getting stronger. In 911, the French king recognized the authority of the Viking ruler Rollo, who had colonized a large chunk of territory in the North-West of his kingdom. The region became known as the land of the Norsemen, or Normans. The province of Normandy had been born.

  The remarkable thing about the Normans was how quickly they shook off their Viking past, and how readily they adopted the ways of their more sophisticated French neighbours. Within a couple of generations they had started speaking French, and had embraced the Christian religion. Their leaders started experimenting with French titles, like ‘count’, and later, ‘duke’. They also adopted French ideas about fortification and defence – the very ideas that their not-too-distant Viking ancestors had inspired as a result of their initial raids. By the eleventh century at the very latest, the Normans were following the fashion of French lords, and building castles.

  What did these early French and Norman castles look like? Unfortunately, in the case of the very early ones – the kind against which Charles the Bald tried to legislate in the ninth century – we have no idea. The earliest surviving castles date from over a hundred years later, and are to be found along the River Loire. In the small town of Langeais, for example, not far from the city of Tours, are the remains of a stone tower, built around the year 1000. Stone castles, however, were highly exceptional at such an early date. It was far, far more common in the tenth and eleventh centuries for castles to be built from earth and timber. Like the stone castles of later periods, these castles came in all shapes and sizes, depending on the needs and resources of the owner. At the simplest end of the spectrum, they might consist of timber buildings encircled by a ditch and an earthen rampart. However, while there was no single design, by the eleventh century something approaching a standard procedure had evolved. Looking back from the early twelfth century, a French clergyman remembered:

  The richest and noblest men… have a practice, in order to protect themselves from their enemies, and… to subdue those weaker, of raising… an earthen mound of the greatest possible height, cutting a wide ditch around it, fortifying its upper edge with square timbers tied together as in a wall, creating towers around it and building inside a house or citadel that dominates the whole structure.

  It was these huge mounds of earth that ultimately distinguished the strongly fortified, private defences of French lords from the comparatively weakly defended homes of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Contemporary authors, writing in Latin, described these great mounds as aggeres, but the popular thing to call them was ‘mottes’ – which is curious, because the word ‘motte’ itself seems to be Celtic in origin. Mottes were almost always accompanied by a much larger enclosure, known as a bailey, created by digging a ditch and making an earthen rampart. The two elements, taken together, produce the common-or-garden early castle – the classic ‘motte and bailey’ design.

  The earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle (Tomen y Rhodwydd in Wales).

  Today, of course, all the timber parts of such castles have long since rotted away, leaving only the earthworks, and even these have been considerably diminished by erosion over the centuries. Working out what these buildings looked like when they were first constructed therefore requires considerable detective work. In the absence of surviving timbers, we have to look for other evidence. Of course, we have some descriptions of castles, like the one above. We also have one or two bits of pictorial evidence, of which the Bayeux Tapestry is by far the best. The famous Tapestry, commissioned shortly after 1066, not only describes the Norman Conquest of England; it also deals with events in France leading up to the invasion. In the first section of the story, we find some of the earliest and most detailed images of wooden castles.

  The Bayeux Tapestry – castles at Dol, Rennes and Dinan.

  Altogether, there are four French castles on the Bayeux Tapestry – three in Brittany (at Dol, Rennes, and Dinan) and one in Normandy (Bayeux itself). As you can see, when the artist who directed the work thought of a castle, he clearly pictured a motte in his head. Castle experts have poured over these images for many long hours, trying to work out what the artist’s highly stylized depictions actually represent. All the mottes are clearly covered in buildings, and the appearance of two crafty Norman knights at Dinan, attempting to set fire to the castle with burning torches, strongly suggests that these buildings are made of wood. In the case of three of the castles (Dol, Dinan and Bayeux), access to the top of the motte from the ground is made possible by a ‘flying bridge’, which has a shallower angle than the steep side of the motte itself. At Rennes, visitors seem to have made their way to the top of the motte using steps cut into the side – taking care, of course, to avoid the animals grazing on the slope. It also appears that we might be looking at gatehouses, both at the top of a flying bridge (Dol) and also at the bottom (Dinan).

  The Bayeux Tapestry – the castle at Bayeux.

  It is, however, the towers on top of the mottes that have generated the most interest and speculation. Are they one, two, or more storeys tall? All of them certainly look very different. The one at Dol is particularly difficult to interpret – what are the curvy things hanging off the left-hand side of the tower? Are they shields belonging to the defenders, or flames licking the side of the building? Nobody can say for sure. The picture of Dinan, which has the most activity, shows a garrison of half a dozen knights defending the castle during a siege. It seems clear enough that the top of the motte is protected by a wooden fence or palisade around its edge, but what about the tower at the centre? Is it a solid building, or is it raised up on stilts to make it even higher? One of the knights on the motte, readying himself to throw his javelin, seems to pass his arm behind a post supporting the building above. Is that the main entrance to the tower, shrunk out of all proportion, squeezed in against the top border of the tapestry? And what are we to make of the fancy tower on top of the motte at Bayeux, complete with what appears to be a domed roof, stepped gables and round-arched windows, as well as an elaborate entrance, decorated with a carved animal head? Are these depictions realistic, or just something the tapestry artist invented? Had he actually visited the castle at Bayeux, or had he just heard second-hand that it was a very impressive building? As you can see, the Bayeux Tapestry, wonderfully rich source that it is, raises as many questions as it answers.

  Another problem with the Tapestry is that it offers us no information about the baileys of the castles it depicts. A bailey was a large area that housed all the buildings necessary for a medieval household – not just the lord and his immediate family, but also their domestic servants and a number of soldiers. There had to be accommodation enough for all these people, as well as a chapel to cater for their religious needs, and buildings for the storage of grain and tools. Most importantly, the bailey had to have a hall, so that the lord could sit down with his whole household and dine in public, and so that he could receive and entertain guests in style.

  So the bailey is quite straightforward – it is simply an enclosure for all the buildings needed by a small private community. But what was the purpose of the motte, with its wooden tower on top? From some contemporary descriptions of mottes, it is clear that their towers could provide additional accommodation for the lord. A famous description exists of the twelfth-century wooden tower at the now vanished castle of Ardres in northern France. The chronicler, one Lambert of Ardres, describes at great length a magnificent three-storey building, with stor
erooms and chambers piled on top of one another. It contained just about everything the lord of Ardres could wish for – not just a great chamber for him and his lady, but private rooms for their servants, as well as a chapel, a kitchen, and numerous cellars, larders and smaller rooms. In many cases, however, the surviving earthworks are too small to have accommodated such a huge structure, and must have supported something rather more humble.

  Part of the reason for building a motte, of course, was defence. By raising a tower well above the ground, the castle-owner gained an obvious advantage over any attacker. There is also, however, an element of showing off. According to that twelfth-century description, French lords built mottes not just to protect themselves, but also ‘to subdue those weaker’. By building a great earthen mound, and topping it with a big wooden tower, you were making a statement. It was not so much, ‘I’m a bit concerned about my own safety,’ as ‘I’m in charge here, and don’t you forget it.’

  We can also begin to understand why mottes were a popular option. Most obviously, they were cheap to build, and the building materials – earth and clay – were at hand and plentiful. It took some time of course, and you needed to persuade a lot of peasants with strong backs to do the digging, but it wasn’t nearly as demanding or expensive as building in stone. When stone is hard to come by and peasants are ten a penny, building a motte makes good sense.