In 1066, as everybody knows, the Normans invaded England. That most engaging of all medieval sources, the Bayeux Tapestry, shows them landing their horses at Pevensey in Sussex and racing to occupy nearby Hastings, from where they will shortly set out to fight the most famous battle in English history. Before that, however, they pause to have an elaborate sit-down meal – barbecued chicken is on the menu – and attend to their own protection. ‘This man’, says the caption above an important-looking Norman holding a banner, ‘orders a castle to be dug at Hastings’, and to his right we see nine other men, armed with picks and shovels, setting to do just that.
The Normans’ decision to erect a castle at the very moment of their arrival might not strike us as particularly remarkable: after all, medieval warfare revolved around the building and besieging of fortresses, and the English landscape of today is liberally studded with their remains. But at the time of the invasion in late September 1066 the Normans’ action was startlingly novel, for prior to that point castles had been virtually unknown in England. The only exception was a tiny handful constructed a few years earlier by the French friends of King Edward the Confessor. ‘The foreigners had built a castle in Herefordshire’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1051, ‘and had inflicted every possible injury and insult upon the king’s men in those parts’. The fact that he was reporting a new phenomenon is conveyed not only by the chronicler’s palpable outrage at the Frenchmen’s behaviour, but also by his need to borrow their word for the offending object: this is the first recorded use of ‘castle’ in English.
The Conquest that followed fifteen years later ensured it would not be the last: the castle was the primary instrument by which the Normans stamped their authority on England. From having almost none in the period before 1066, the country was quickly crowded with them. According to one conservative modern estimate, based on the number of surviving earthworks, at least 500, and possibly closer to 1,000, had been constructed by the end of the eleventh century, barely two generations since the time of the Normans’ initial landing.
Of course, England had not been without defences before 1066: the pre-Conquest landscape contained, among other things, Iron-Age hill forts, Roman legionary forts, and the fortified towns built by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, known as boroughs or burhs. But all of these differed from what followed by being large enclosures designed to protect large communities, including, in some cases, non-military personnel. Castles, by contrast, were comparatively small affairs, designed to be defended by a limited number of fighting men. They had originated in France around the turn of the first millennium as a result of the collapse of royal and provincial authority, when power ultimately devolved to those who had the means to build their own private fortifications and fill them with mounted warriors.
As well as being smaller, castles were also taller. Some of the earliest French examples were great stone towers, such as the soaring donjon at Loches on the River Loire, built by the buccaneering Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, around 1000 AD, and still impressive a thousand years on. But the crucial thing about castles was that they could be created without the need for such colossal investment. It was quite possible to obtain the same advantage of height quickly and on a fraction of the budget by throwing up a great mound of earth and topping it with a tower of wood. As every schoolchild knows, such mounds were known from the first as ‘mottes’.
The point about size and speed is reinforced by the Normans’ behaviour in England immediately after their arrival. At Pevensey they created a castle by adapting a Roman fort, and at Hastings by customizing an Iron-Age hill fort, in each case hiving off a smaller section of the much larger original. After their victory at Hastings, as they set about crushing the remaining English resistance, they continued to act in exactly the same manner, adding new fortifications to the ancient defences at Dover, and almost certainly creating the castle at Wallingford by destroying a corner of the Anglo-Saxon borough. When, towards the end of 1066, the citizens of London at last submitted to William the Conqueror, his first thought was to plant a castle in the south-eastern angle of the city – the site which would soon become home to the Tower.
In the months and years that followed, the castle-building campaign intensified. The Normans, wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1067, ‘built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse’. Part of the reason for this intensification was the repeated attempts by the English to throw off the rule of their conquerors. The southwest of England rose in revolt at the start of 1068, apparently led by the surviving remnants of the Godwine family, while in the summer of the same year there were similar risings in the Midlands and northern England. William methodically crushed them all, marching in with his army and planting castles in major towns and cities. Exeter, Warwick, Nottingham, York, Lincoln, Cambridge and Huntingdon all received new royal fortresses at this time, and further examples were added in the years that followed: Chester and Stafford in 1069–70, Ely in 1071 and Durham in 1072. The northernmost outpost of Norman power was established in 1080 by the Conqueror’s son, Robert, who planted a ‘new castle’ upon the River Tyne, while William himself marked the western limit of his authority during an expedition to Wales the following year, founding a new fortress in an old Roman fort called Cardiff.
The foundation of castles, however, was far from being an exclusively royal affair. William may have raised armies to quell major rebellions, but the rest of the time he relied on other Normans to keep order in his newly conquered kingdom. In the two decades after 1066, the new king rewarded his closest followers with extensive grants of land in England, and the first act of any sensible incoming lord was invariably to construct a castle. In some instances it appears that these were planted on top of existing Englishseigneurial residences, so as to emphasize a continuity of lordship. But in the majority of cases such continuity was lacking because the process of conquest had caused the country’s existing tenurial map to be torn up. Sussex, for example, was sliced up into half-a-dozen new lordships, known locally as rapes, which paid no heed whatsoever to earlier patterns of ownership. New lordships required new castles, and the rapes were named in each case after the fortresses that sprung up at Chichester, Hastings, Bramber, Arundel, Lewes and Pevensey.
The reorganization of Sussex into continental-style, castle-centred lordships seems to have been a decision determined by cold military logic. The county was the Normans’ initial beach-head, and also the former Godwine heartland. The rapes run north-south, and their castles are all located near the coast, as if to keep the route between London and Normandy secure.
In recent decades, however, the scholarly trend has been to emphasize that castles had other roles beyond the military. The fact that they were often sited so as to command road and river routes, for example, meant that their owners were also well placed to control trade, and could both protect and exploit mercantile traffic. We are also reminded that part of the reason for building a castle could be symbolic. A great fortress, towering above everything else for miles around, provided a constant physical reminder of its owner’s power, a permanent assertion of his right to rule.
During the Conqueror’s reign, this was most obviously true in the case of the three great stone towers the king himself is known to have created at Chepstow, Colchester and (most famously) London. In each case these giant buildings, the like of which England had not seen since the time of the Romans, have strong Roman resonances, and were partially constructed using the stone from nearby Roman ruins (not for nothing did twentieth-century scholars christen the style ‘Romanesque’). Indeed, in the case of Colchester, it is difficult to suggest a reason for the construction of so massive a building beyond a desire to be associated with the town’s imperial past. There are no reports of rebellions or military action in Essex at any point during William’s reign; but the great tower he created in Colchester was erected on the ruins of the town’s ruined Roman temple. The Conqueror’s sycophantic biographer, William of Poitiers, draws frequent comparisons between his royal master and Julius Caesar. To judge from buildings like Chepstow, Colchester and the Tower of London, it was a comparison that the king himself was keen to cultivate.
At the same time, we need to guard against hyper-correction. In recent years, it seems to me, the revisionist arguments about Norman castles have been pushed too far, to the extent that some historians now come close to arguing that they had almost no military function at all. Take, for example, the castle that William the Conqueror caused to be built at Exeter in 1068. Its original gatehouse still survives, and has been judged defensively weak because it was originally entered at ground level. This may be so, but it takes a considerable leap to conclude from this, as one historian has done, that the whole castle was ‘militarily ineffectual’. Much of the site has now vanished, but it occupied an area of around 600 feet by 600 feet; Domesday suggests that 48 houses were destroyed in order to make room for it. It was built on the highest point in the town, and separated by a deep ditch and rampart. Exeter fell to William in 1068 after a bitter three-week siege which saw heavy casualties on both sides (and during which, if we believe the later chronicler William of Malmesbury, one of the English defenders signalled his defiance by dropping his trousers and farting in the king’s general direction). It beggars belief to suppose that the Conqueror, having taken the city at such cost, would have commissioned a building that had no military capability, and was concerned only with the projection of what has been called ‘peaceable power’.
The notion that castles had little military purpose also requires us to ignore the testimony of contemporary chroniclers. The Conqueror’s biographer, William of Poitiers, repeatedly describes the castles his master besieged on the Continent before 1066 using terms such as ‘very strong’ or ‘virtually impregnable’, and such descriptions are borne out by the fact that it took the duke months and in some cases years to take them. Yet some scholars are curiously reluctant to allow that castles built in England after the Conquest served a similar military purpose. The Conqueror’s great stone tower at Chepstow, for instance, has been plausibly reinterpreted in recent years as an audience chamber where the king or his representatives could receive and overawe the native rulers of Wales. But the fact remains that it was still a formidably tough building, situated high on a cliff above the River Wye, and defended at each end by ditches cut deep into the rock. True, it does not bristle with arrowloops, turrets and machicolations, but then no castles did in this early period, because the technology of attack was also primitive in comparison to what came later. Without the great stone-throwing machines known as trebuchets, there was not much an enemy at the gates could do, beyond mounting a blockade and trying to starve a garrison into submission. In these circumstances, a well-situated and well-stocked castle could be militarily decisive. In 1069 the people of Northumbria succeeded in taking Durham, massacring its newly arrived Norman garrison who tried and failed to hold out in the hall of the local bishop. But when the Northumbrians attempted to take the town for a second time in 1080, they failed, because they were unable to take its new castle.
One of the remarkable things about the Norman Conquest was how quickly the rift between the English and the Normans was healed. Within a generation or two, it is possible to point to castles that did owe more to ideas of peaceful living than military deterrence. But in the years immediately after 1066, filled as they were with bloody rebellion and even bloodier repression; when a few thousand Normans lived among a population of two million English in the daily fear of violent death: in these circumstances castles have to be regarded first and foremost as military installations, introduced to subdue an unwilling population. Unfashionable though it may be among castle scholars, there is every reason to listen to the testimony of the half-English, half-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis, born in Shropshire within a decade of 1066, who attributed the success of Conquest to one factor above all others. ‘The fortifications that the Normans called castles’, he explains, ‘were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.