In the middle of the 11th century, Britain was a land without castles.
Then, in 1051, a group of foreigners started building a large and forbidding
mound in Herefordshire. Their action surprised, shocked and scandalised
the natives. The English monk who recorded the incident had no difficulty
expressing his disapproval, but found he had no English word to describe
the thing that the foreigners had built. So he used their word, and called
it a castle.
This is the first recorded use of the word in English. The castle being
described was probably Richard's Castle in Herefordshire. The foreigners
who built it were Frenchmen. They were friends of the English king, Edward
the Confessor, who had grown up in exile in France and made many friends
there. He invited them to England and gave them lands, which they governed
in the French fashion by building castles.
French resistance
The French had been building castles for more than a hundred years. In
the 9th century, both England and France had been attacked by the Vikings.
Both countries resisted invasion and drove the Vikings back, but in different
ways. In England the fight-back was led by the king, who established fortified
towns or burhs to protect his people. In France, royal resistance to the
Vikings proved ineffective, and local lords took the responsibility for
defence into their own hands. They built smaller, private fortifications,
and they called them castles.
One group of Vikings, however, never left France, and settled a large area
in the north-west of the country. The French called them Norsemen, or Normans,
and their province Normandy. The Normans quickly adopted French habits in
language, government and religion. They also adopted French means of defence,
and built castles – the very things that had been invented to keep
them out in the first place.
Motte and bailey
In the vast majority of cases, these early castles were built not from
stone but from earth and timber. Because they were private, design varied
quite a lot, but the commonest model adopted was a large mound of earth,
called a motte, and a larger enclosure surrounded by rampart and ditch,
called a bailey. The earthworks were covered in elaborate timber buildings,
as shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. Motte-and-bailey castles were an 11th-century
phenomenon, perhaps an answer to the increasingly sophisticated cavalry
techniques being developed in northern France.
In 1066,
castles were introduced to England on a grand scale by William
the Conqueror. William established castles at Pevensey and Hastings
immediately after landing in England, and after his coronation continued
to build castles in major towns and cities in order to overawe the English.
Berkhamsted is a good example. He also gave his Norman followers the freedom
to build castles of their own, in order to hold down the reluctant English.
By the end of William's life in 1087, it is estimated that about 500-600
castles had already been built.
Fortified and strong
One of the most fortified regions in the country was Shropshire. William
I had given this land to one of his most trusted lords, Roger of Montgomery.
He built a couple of castles. He named one of them after his home town
in France, Montgomery. Now it is known as the Old Mound, or in Welsh,
Hen Domen.
Hen Domen is the most exhaustively excavated timber motte-and-bailey castle
in Britain. Drawings and a model have since been made to give us a real
feel for Roger's castle. It had a double palisade, the inner being two
storeys high, with a fighting and lookout platform. In the bailey, low-grade
accommodation, a grain store and a great hall were uncovered, and running
from the bailey to the motte, a 4m (12ft) wide flying bridge. This ran
up to a two-storey tower. Guards on watch here would have stood 24m (80ft)
off the valley floor.
A diminishing role
Motte and baileys were first and foremost weapons of conquest, and as
the English grew to accept Norman rule, the need for hundreds of castles
diminished. With peace, many fell into disrepair; their timbers rotted
and their baileys grassed over. Some, at key sites such as Warwick, York
or Lincoln, were rebuilt in stone, but the timber motte and bailey had
had its day.
Those which survived did so because they were used as centres of government
by the king's sheriffs, or because they were the favourite residences
of their builders. Many of these castles were rebuilt in stone in the
12th and 13th centuries.
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