Castles are an exceedingly mixed bunch. They can apparently be anything from giant fortress-palaces to underwhelming mounds of earth; they can date from thousands of years ago or from well into the modern age. Even for those who know their history, the diversity of what constitutes a castle can seem more than a little baffling.
So what is a castle? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word itself derives from the Latin castellum, and suggests that a castle is ‘a fortified building... a stronghold’. Most castle experts would go further. A true castle, they would say, was also a private residence – a home – and this important qualification helps narrow the field considerably. Take, for example, Maiden Castle in Dorset, or Uffington Castle in Oxfordshire – both majestic fortifications, but, crucially, communal ones, erected to protect entire prehistoric communities; rightly speaking, we should (and generally do) refer to them as Iron Age hill forts. Similarly, we can disqualify Richborough ‘Castle’ in Kent, which was in reality a camp for Roman soldiers. And, while we’re kicking impostors out of the castle club, we should exclude all those little ‘castles’ that Henry VIII built along the south coast to foil a French invasion. Deal, Walmer, Pendennis, St Mawes, Camber, Calshot, Hurst, Portland – sturdy little troopers all, but artillery forts for Henry’s gunners, not homes for the king himself.
The true castle was not prehistoric, Roman or Tudor, but medieval. It is in the Middle Ages (from 1066 to, say, 1500) that we see fortification and domesticity fusing to create a new and distinctive category of building. In a castle, defensive elements (the drawbridge, the portcullis, arrowloops and battlements) are elegantly combined with the residential ones (the hall, the chapel, chambers and kitchens). Of course, not all castles possess all these features – like modern private homes, no two are exactly alike. As you might expect, in a period spanning more than four centuries, there was an awful lot of variety in castle design.
As the date 1066 suggests, the story of castles in England begins with the Normans. These earliest castles were first and foremost weapons of conquest, used by the Normans to hold down a reluctant English population, and as such the vast majority of them were built at great speed – out of wood. For the most part they were also built to a common design – the famous ‘motte and bailey’. The motte, a giant artificial mound of earth surmounted by a wooden tower, was the castle’s look-out and ultimate place of defence; the adjacent bailey, an enclosure formed by steep banks and ditches, housed the rest of the castle’s buildings. Pickering in Yorkshire provides an excellent example. Of course, the original wooden walls at such castles are now long gone but, if you spot a motte, you can be sure it was erected early: certainly within a century (and most likely within a generation) of the Conquest itself.
While most early castles were hastily erected from earth and wood, a tiny handful were being built out of stone, and to a far grander design. In place of a motte, the richest castle-builders – the king and his greatest barons – erected giant stone towers (or keeps, as they are sometimes called today). The earliest belong to the eleventh century, but in general ‘the great tower’ is a twelfth-century phenomenon. And phenomenon, as the recreated interior of Henry II’s Great Tower at Dover makes clear, is an entirely appropriate word, for these buildings were palaces, nothing less. Identifying them is fairly straightforward, because of their sheer size and bulk (Rochester in Kent, soaring to 113 feet, is the tallest such tower in Europe). The period in which they were built means that they exhibit ‘Romanesque’ features – look out for semi-circular arches, chevron decoration and blind arcading (as at Castle Rising in Norfolk). Perhaps surprisingly, great towers often display no obvious military hardware – few of them, for example, have arrowloops – because in each case they were surrounded by defensible walls which have often (as at Orford in Suffolk) entirely vanished.
Those walls, however, are the key to the next big development in castle design. Around the year 1200, great towers fell out of favour – probably because they were viewed as vulnerable to new more advanced forms of attack (the giant catapults known as trebuchets). Attention shifted to the perimeter walls, which were now interrupted by towers. Early examples (such as Framlingham in Suffolk) favoured square towers, but soon the preference was for round ones (again, probably because they were believed to be stronger). At the same time, extra care was taken to defend the castle’s entrance by positioning a tower either side of it, creating a ‘twin-towered’ gatehouse. Such gatehouses, and round mural towers – these are the tell-tale signs that you are confronting a thirteenth-century castle. Goodrich, near the Welsh border in Herefordshire, provides a splendid example.
As we move into the late Middle Ages, identifying a common type of castle becomes virtually impossible. Contrary to popular belief, England at this time was relatively peaceful; there was little need to build for defence and, consequently, castles tended to become more architecturally exuberant. Certain defensive features help with dating: sure signs of a late medieval build are gunloops (as opposed to arrowloops) and machicolation (masonry standing proud around the top of a tower). At the same time, these features are often so mannered that modern experts wonder whether they were merely stuck on for reasons of status. In general, if a castle seems to be almost too picturesque (like Nunney in Somerset), or its design too clever by half (Old Wardour in Wiltshire, or Warkworthin Northumbria), a late medieval date is likely. The same is true if a castle is built of brick, like Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, built from 1480. Or rather half-built, for construction there came to an abrupt halt in 1483 when its unfortunate owner had his head chopped off – about as good an end for the story of the medieval castle as one could wish for.