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Early Castles
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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