Castle: A History of the Buildings That Shaped Medieval Britain

by Marc Morris

  All of this, however, is fairly obvious, and none of it gets us any closer to the heart of the question. Why France, and why the eleventh century? We can look at a motte and understand the motives that prompted a person to build it, but at the same time, the reasons seem to be universal and timeless – the desire to protect oneself and one’s family, while simultaneously lording it over everybody else. There’s no apparent reason why the Normans should have built mottes, but not the Romans, the Celts or the Vikings. Clearly someone somewhere in northern France must have had a brainwave one day around the turn of the first millennium, and the idea caught on fast.

  One reason for the sudden adoption of motte-building might have been the advances that the French aristocracy were making in mounted warfare at the time. The turn of the first millennium was the period when we see the emergence of a class of men who would dominate European society for the next five centuries – knights. If strong-armed men in mail shirts were starting to charge around the place on horseback, a big mound of earth could be interpreted as a counter-cavalry measure.

  Certainly, there is an important relationship between cavalry and castles. Castles, it has been observed, work a bit like aircraft carriers; they might be big and impressive, but without their moving parts – the aircraft, or the horses – they are not much use. Setting out at dawn, the cavalry garrison could ride out on daily patrols, making their presence felt and striking at their enemies, before returning to the safety of the castle in the evening. For the same reason, I tend to think of early castles as being like old-fashioned US cavalry forts. Surrounded by timber stockades, overlooked by watchtowers, and home to cavalry garrisons, such forts have much in common with motte-and-bailey castles.

  Their use of cavalry was one of the great differences between the way the French and the English made war in the eleventh century. The English, of course, had horses, but they did not ride them into battle, preferring to dismount and fight on foot. The French aristocracy, on the other hand, galloped into battle, armed with swords and javelins, and were perhaps starting to experiment with lances. The cross-Channel difference in opinion was made very clear to Ralph of Mantes, one of Edward the Confessor’s castle-building chums. When he tried to train Englishmen from his earldom in the French art of cavalry warfare, and led them against the Welsh at Hereford, the result was a military disaster.

  ‘Before a spear was thrown,’ sighed the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘the English fled, because they had been made to fight on horseback.’

  Castles and cavalry, then, were the two major differences between the English and French approaches to warfare in the middle of the eleventh century. The gulf, however, may have opened quite quickly and recently, especially in the case of the Normans and the English. The Normans, after all, had been Viking settlers at the start of the tenth century, and as such they were originally accustomed to travelling by longship and fighting on foot. Only in the course of the tenth century can they have adapted to fighting on horseback. In the case of castles, the gap between the two peoples had appeared even more recently. It used to be thought that every self-respecting Norman lord had a little castle of his own to call home, but recent research has shown this was far from the being the case. It is, in fact, very difficult to find rock-solid evidence that the Normans were building castles to a motte-and-bailey design before 1066. When it comes to establishing dates, archaeology relies on identifying disturbances in the soil; this becomes difficult when the thing you are excavating (in this case, a motte) is made up entirely of soil that has been disturbed. Fortunately, however, the reputation of the Normans as castle-builders appears to be safe. At several mottes that have been excavated, pottery and other small finds have suggested a construction date somewhere in the first half of the eleventh century.

  Archaeology, therefore, has emphasized the fact that the majority of Norman castles are likely to date from a period only a generation or so before 1066. This discovery tallies well with what we know of the history of Normandy around this time. From its creation in 911 down to the early years of the eleventh century, the story of Normandy had been one of unmitigated success. From 1026, however, the duchy experienced twenty years of almost perpetual crisis. In that year, the old Duke of Normandy, Richard II, died after a long and successful rule of thirty years, leaving behind two sons by his first wife. The elder of the two sons, Richard, succeeded his father as duke, but only one year elapsed before he also dropped dead – murdered, some would later claim, by his younger brother and successor, Robert. Whether or not Robert was indeed guilty of his brother’s death, his rule was an unsuccessful one, which saw the leading nobles of Normandy appropriating local offices and powers that properly belonged to the duke himself. In 1035, things went from bad to worse when Robert set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and never returned. When news reached Normandy that he had died on the way back home, many must have despaired – their new duke was Robert’s only son, a boy of eight years old, and a bastard. His name was William.

  Little William, as we all know well, would grow up to become the most famous of all Norman dukes. In 1035, however, few would have put money on him living past his ninth birthday. Normandy was soon plunged into a state of civil war, and all the evidence suggests that it was in this period, and during the rule of William’s father, that the number of motte-and-bailey castles in the duchy began to shoot up. Until this time, castles had only been built by the duke and his most powerful supporters. Now they were being built by anyone who could lay their hands on enough materials and manpower to do so.

  Tackling these new castles was the principal challenge for Duke William. His career as a young man reads as the story of one siege after another. Controlling the duchy became a matter of destroying the castles of his enemies, and building new ones of his own. After a successful battle against his greatest opponents in 1047, a Norman chronicler observed that the balance of power had been tipped in William’s favour.

  ‘All those magnates who had renounced their fealty to the duke,’ wrote the chronicler, ‘now bent their stiff necks to him as their lord. And so, with castles everywhere destroyed, none afterwards dared to show a rebellious heart against him.’

  From that point on, William went from strength to strength. By the time he was in his late thirties, he could reflect with a great deal of satisfaction on his success. The dark days of his boyhood were far behind him; he was now respected and feared not just in Normandy, but throughout all of northern France. At the same time, however, he had not taken his eyes off a far bigger prize – the one that had been held out to him in 1051, only to be immediately snatched away. In 1065, the throne of England was once again uppermost in William’s thoughts.

  On the other side of the Channel, things had been reasonably quiet since the dramatic events of 1051–52. After their triumphant return to England, the Godwin family had manoeuvred themselves into positions of power. Old Earl Godwin himself had died in 1053, but he left several healthy sons to succeed him. The eldest, Harold, had inherited his father’s position as Earl of Wessex, and his younger brothers had become Earls of Northumbria, East Anglia and Kent. By 1065, the Godwin boys were easily the most powerful force in English politics.

  However, the sad contrast between the Godwin clan and the royal family was plain for all to see. King Edward the Confessor, now in his sixties, was clearly not going to produce a son to succeed him, and his brothers, of course, had died decades ago. Attempts to find a suitable candidate for the English throne were becoming increasingly desperate. A few years beforehand, the great men of England had sent messengers to find the king’s long-lost nephew, Edward the Exile, who for half a century had lived in Hungary. They managed to find him and ship him home; but he died the moment he set foot on English soil, leaving only a young son, Edgar, in his place.

  With a lack of obvious strong candidates, the wolves were beginning to growl and snarl around England, sensing easy prey. The King of Denmark was known to be interested. So, too, was the King
of Norway. Most worryingly, the Duke of Normandy had apparently not forgotten King Edward’s rash promise of 1051. Back then, no one had been very concerned about this. Duke William was a young man, with a few easy victories behind him, but a ruler barely able to control his own territories, never mind seriously threaten England. Now, though, in 1065, the duke looked considerably more menacing. He was undisputed master of northern France, and an experienced general with a reputation for brutality and success.

  In the event, however, when Edward finally gave up the ghost in January 1066, it was Harold Godwinson, the man on the spot, who unexpectedly seized the moment. How long he had been plotting this move we don’t know. Certainly, his nomination by the dying Edward the Confessor can’t have come as a surprise – it was simply a useful piece of last-minute propaganda. For many years now Harold had been the power behind the throne, and he seems to have decided he might as well just sit on it himself and deal with the consequences. Of course, this meant that he had to push young Edgar out of the way first, but no one of any importance seemed particularly bothered about that. The choice was between a strong, powerful and experienced man with a weak claim, and an inexperienced child with a better one. With England threatened by other, much less appealing overseas contenders, ready to wage war in pursuit of their ambitions, most people probably thought that backing Harold was the wise choice.

  And so it proved, for most of 1066. Throughout the summer, Harold showed what a capable leader he was, summoning and holding together a great army in readiness for the invasions that everybody now expected. When the King of Norway landed in September, Harold marched straight up to Yorkshire and won a famous victory. The Norwegians had arrived in three hundred ships, but they sailed home in just twenty-four. The more poetical English soldiers were probably already composing songs to their new king’s greatness when messengers arrived from the south, bringing the news that William of Normandy had landed with an army of seven thousand men.

  Landing his ships at Pevensey on the morning of 29 September, William’s first concern was to establish a beachhead, and he did this by building a castle. Pevensey was the site of an old Roman fort, and William and the Normans proved adept at customizing such ancient sites. There is also the intriguing possibility, suggested by a twelfth-century chronicler, that the Normans brought this castle with them. The fact that this is only mentioned in a later source casts some doubt upon its veracity, but there is nothing inherently implausible in the idea of a flat-pack fortress. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the elaborate lengths to which the Normans went in preparing their invasion fleet – transporting barrels of wine, armour, weapons, and the like. Landing in hostile territory, they didn’t necessarily want to go scurrying around looking for suitable timber, and waste time cutting it to shape. We have at least one example in later centuries of an invading army taking a wooden castle with them ready to assemble when they landed. It seems quite possible, therefore, that the first castle built in England by William the Conqueror was a prefab.

  The castle at Pevensey, and the second castle that the duke began further along the coast at Hastings, can be used to explain in part why Harold rushed headlong into battle with William. The new English king, as recent events had shown, was by no means a bad general, yet he plunged his exhausted army straight into battle at Hastings without pausing for breath. Why was he so hasty and intemperate? Historians have tended to conclude that Harold was responding to William’s provocation. For his part, William knew that his only hope of success was to draw his opponent into battle as quickly as possible; above all, he needed a decisive victory. Landing in Sussex made this somewhat easier – the county was part of Harold’s own earldom. William was deploying a tried-and-tested technique of medieval warfare: attack your enemy in his own back yard. Terrorize his tenants, burn his crops, slaughter his sheep and cattle. To act in this brutal way exposes the weakness of your opponent’s lordship, and underlines his inability to protect his own people. Castle-building, of course, fits perfectly into this catalogue of terror. One need only recall the words of the Canterbury monk, for whom the construction of a castle was associated with ‘insults, injuries and oppressions’. Forcing Harold’s tenants to build castles and burning them alive in their houses (activities which are shown side by side on the Bayeux Tapestry) were all part of the same process of humiliating the king and provoking him to fight. And it was a tactic that proved highly effective.

  The Battle of Hastings, contemporaries recognized, was a strange affair. One side – the English – just stood stock still, trusting to the ancient tactic of presenting a solid wall of shields to the enemy. The Normans, for their part, had little option but to try and break this wall, using archers to rain down arrows on to their enemies’ heads, and charging up the hill on horseback, throwing their spears at the English line. It went on all day, which shows that it was a very close-run thing, with both sides equally matched. Two mistakes, however, eventually cost Harold the battle, the crown and his life. First, the English line failed when some of the less-experienced recruits, seeing the Normans retreating, and thinking the day was theirs, broke ranks and charged down the hill in pursuit. It was, it turned out, a cunning Norman ruse. No sooner had the line broken than the Normans wheeled round and attacked their pursuers. The second mistake, as everyone knows, was Harold’s own. Late in the day, at precisely the wrong moment, he looked up.

  Few battles ended as decisively as Hastings. Not only was Harold killed; all his brothers and a large number of major English landowners also perished. And yet, in spite of this catastrophic defeat, the remaining English leaders in London showed themselves in no rush to submit to William. Instead, they persuaded young Prince Edgar to wear the crown. William was obliged to continue pressing his candidacy with violence. After a short rest at Hastings, he headed east along the coast, burning and sacking the towns of Romney and Dover. The town of Dover was protected by an ancient fort on the top of the cliffs, which quickly submitted. At this point, one of our main sources for the duke’s career, his chaplain, William of Poitiers, says that, having taken possession of this fortress, William ‘spent eight days adding the fortifications that it lacked’. This has long been taken by some historians as an indication that, when the chips were down, it was possible to build a motte-and-bailey castle really quickly. You will notice, however, that the chaplain’s words are not very specific, and it takes a considerable leap of imagination to believe that what Dover ‘lacked’ was a motte – especially since there is no trace of one at the castle today. Nevertheless, the figure of eight days has in the past been eagerly seized upon, and seems to be supported by the comments of another chronicler on the building of a castle at York, which did have a motte.

  The figure of eight days can be tested, to some extent, by measuring the size of an ‘average’ motte, and the amount of soil one man could shift in a day. A recent geophysical survey of the motte at Hamstead Marshal in Berkshire has revealed its volume to be 10,000 cubic metres – a weight of 22,000 tonnes. How much earth a man could move in a day is more speculative, but some idea can be gleaned from nineteenth-century military manuals. The regulations of the Victorian Army suggest that one soldier could dig fifteen cubic feet in an hour, or eighty cubic feet in a day (they evidently allowed for tiredness as the day wore on). By using these figures, therefore, we can say that to build an average-sized motte in eight days, we would need about five hundred men.

  While this might at first seem a feasible recruitment target – especially if you had Normans with swords and whips to round up the diggers – it is doubtful whether such a large workforce could be effectively deployed on such a small site without the whole operation descending into chaos. Building a motte was not simply a matter of making a big pile of soil. If that were the case, the Normans’ earthworks would have been washed away by the first shower of rain, and would certainly not have made suitable foundations for the buildings that we know went on top. Where mottes have been excavated, archaeologists have found that they were co
nstructed by using alternating layers of different material: a band of soil would be followed by a band of stone or shingle, followed by another band of soil, and so on. This is also reflected by the picture of the motte being built at Hastings on the Bayeux Tapestry, which shows several men raising a mound with different coloured bands. What we might first imagine to be an artist’s impression of height or depth turns out to be another very literal rendering of reality by the tapestry artist, who clearly understood the fundamentals of motte construction

  The Bayeux Tapestry – men building a motte at Hastings.

  To build a motte in eight days, therefore, would seem to be pushing it. It would take several weeks, probably running into months, if you didn’t want the whole thing to subside under the weight of the tower. A week might be enough to lay out and establish the site, but a full-scale motte-and-bailey castle would take a lot longer.

  It seems, then, that Duke William probably only had time to carry out a few improvements to the existing defences of the burh at Dover, before heading off with his army eight days later. They marched through Kent, and set about laying waste to the land south of London in an effort to induce the remaining English leaders to submit. William crossed the Thames at Wallingford, where several leading Englishmen surrendered, and eventually stopped his army at Berkhamsted, where the final capitulation of the Londoners took place. If he stayed in Berkhamsted for any length of time (and it seems quite likely that he did), then the very large motte-and-bailey castle standing in the town today might have been begun by his men

  The next significant date in William’s diary was, as far as we know, Christmas. On Christmas Day, 1066, in the new abbey church which Edward the Confessor had built at Westminster, the Duke of Normandy was crowned King of England.