Across Europe stand castles and the ruins of castles, enduring monuments to the place of war in medieval society and to the importance of the proprietorial imperative.
Castles were many things at different times, but at heart they were the homes of the great and centres of their estate administration and government. The European elite had estates which, because they were acquired by death, inheritance, marriage, gift and conquest, were scattered. Rents were largely in kind and transport poor, so it was simpler for kings and lords to store renders in kind where they were collected, and to travel around eating them. In an age of insecurity, such residences needed to be fortified. It was these domestic needs that determined the location, and to a very large extent the form, of the castle: it was the stately home of its age.1
Kings always recognized the threat to their authority implicit in private fortifications.
Charles the Bald prohibited them by the Edict of Pîtres. But in 868 Egfrid was killed by Count Gerald, when his “strongly fortified house” was besieged and burned despite the efforts of Charles the Bald. Such things happened when Carolingian government was a going concern; as the Carolingian line failed in the late ninth century the conflicts of competing “princes” made the fortified house even more of a necessity for those with something to lose and offered possibilities for the ambitious with something to gain. The castle was necessary because of the limited competence of medieval government. It was effective because of the technical limitations of the means of war, which meant that men had to come face-to-face before they could fight. The defender of a modest earth and timber ringwork enjoyed a considerable advantage, especially if it was a wet day and his attacker had to struggle up a slippery surface burdened by the weight of his equipment. Moreover, a fortification was a secure base for attack and a
garrison, especially if mounted, could threaten the country round about. In fact, it is a mistake to see the castle as simply a defensive structure, because it could menace enemies as well as protect friends.2
Castles were built where proprietors had land. Modern visitors often wonder why a castle is built in a particular location which does not dominate routes, passes or river-crossings: the answer is that it was built where the owner had land important enough to defend in this elaborate way, and it was sometimes influenced by claims that he was pursuing against others, or enmities that he had incurred. Kerak and Showbak were called the “Lions of the Desert”, but they were built in fertile enclaves which maintained them. Fulk of Anjou built Langeais to counter the raids of Gelduin of Saumur, but his great stone tower at Loudun enabled him to extort tribute from his neighbours. When Albert of Namur wished to challenge Godfrey’s hold on Bouillon in 1082, he first built a castle on his own adjacent property at Mirwart. In England, the castles of Tonbridge in Kent and Clare in Suffolk formed centres for clutches of estates that belonged to the family of Clare. In France, the relationship between landholding and castles is very clear in the case of the counts of Champagne. At the start of the eleventh century, their holdings along the upper Seine were guarded by Montereau, Provins and Troyes, while those along the length of the Marne were protected by no less than six castles:
Meaux, Château Thierry, Châtillon, Mareuil, Châtillonsur-Marne and Vitry. Outlying holdings were guarded by their vassals at St Florentin and Vaucouleurs. Along the Aube, between these two valleys, lay a series of castles held by independent lords, amongst them Brienne, which was annexed only by negotiation in 1121. Since a castle could be a threat, this kind of interpenetration could lead to savage warfare, and it was to the end of averting raiding that the earls of Leicester and Chester demilitarized a whole section of Midland England during Stephen’s reign. In 1176, Baldwin V of Hainaut and his brother-in-law Philip, Count of Flanders, tried to prevent friction by promising not to build castles in the lands of their common march.3
Everywhere, the stability of power depended on controlling castles. To remain dominant, a king or lord needed castles to protect his demesnes, to keep the loyalty of followers and to overawe enemies. Sometimes the need was passing: most of the castles built after the Norman conquest of England were allowed to decay. But castles often survived the demise of the initial impulse to build them: Beaujeu, built by Audouin, Bishop of Limoges (992–1012) with the support of the Duke of Aquitaine, against Jourdan of Chananais’s efforts to encroach on the abbey of St-Junien, is a case in point. To remain strong, princes had to control castle-building: the counts of Champagne ensured that no vassal held more than two castles and the counts of Anjou controlled their castellans tightly. William Tallifer, Count of Angoulême, viewed
Aimeri of Rancogne’s construction of the castle of Bouteville in 1024 as a breach of his oath of vassalage. Robert of Normandy and his brother William forbade castle-building in their joint effort to pacify Normandy in 1091. When, at Easter 1185, the Count of Vermandois declared that he held Bray of Philip Augustus of France rather than Philip of Flanders, it ended the truce between the two. The building of Dolforwyn castle by Llewellyn, Prince of Wales, contributed to the tensions that led to the Anglo-Welsh war of 1277. Failure to exercise control had disastrous consequences. In the early eleventh century, five great castellan families at Berzé, Beaujeu, Bâgé, Brancion, Uxelles and la Bussière rivalled the power of the counts of Mâcon. The multiplicity of such lordships and the common situation of multiple homage enabled castellans to bargain for independence, but the balance of advantage could be fine: the lords of Parthenay, first attested in 1012, established their position in the Gâtine of Poitou by playing off the counts of Anjou and Poitiers, but an open challenge to the latter led to their destruction, while their more politick neighbours at Lusignan went on to a great future.4 Even the strongest medieval sovereigns found it impossible to prevent castles emerging. Despite the prestige of Ottonian power, tenth-century Germany was turbulent and large numbers of earthwork fortifications appeared, many in the control of magnates.
Modern writers have seized upon Ordericus Vitalis’s comments about the absence of castles in Anglo-Saxon England as the reason for the speedy conquest of that land by William the Bastard. However, there were fortifications in Anglo-Saxon England, as the excavations at Goltho in Lincolnshire and Eynsford in Kent, amongst others, indicate.
These earth enclosures around halls probably did not strike Ordericus, writing in the mid-twelfth century, as much resembling the castles of his age, but they were not so very different from the simple earth and ditch enclosures that the Normans built in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest and used long after, as the twelfth-century example at Deddington shows. Moreover, there is evidence that many burhs were fortified centres of lordships that functioned in much the same way as the later castles, and some may have been taken over unchanged in Norman times. All of this makes comprehensible Harold’s promise in 1064 to garrison castles in England for William, amongst them perhaps the royal fort at Dover.5
Great crises such as succession conflicts weakened medieval authorities. The dukes of Normandy were powerful princes of France, but castles multiplied in the troubled minority of William the Bastard. In Anjou, the outbreak of a long succession struggle after 1060 enabled the count’s castle-holders to annex public powers and found lordships; similar circumstances produced similar consequences in contemporary Champagne. The English succession struggle under Stephen led to the multiplication
of castles, while that in Norman Italy after 1196 produced a rash of them, which was curbed only with difficulty by Frederick II. In France, the minority of St Louis produced large-scale warfare. In Germany, the Investiture Contest and subsequent dynastic conflicts fostered castle-building which is associated with the rise of great families such as the Hohenstaufen.6
In Italy, the tenth and eleventh centuries were the age of Incastellamento, a word that encompasses the planting of new villages, the fortification of new and old ones and their endowment with jurisdiction. However, it is significant that a word with such heavy military overtones is used, for in Italy the destruction of the native monarchy and the failure of the German monarchs to stabilize their control opened the way to political fragmentation and the multiplication of fortifications, especially in the later eleventh century when the Investiture Contest rented the land. These took various forms: villages might be surrounded by walls or dominated by the fortified curtis of a noble family. In Lombardy, the power of the Empire had prevented the rise of princely families, so the nobility were drawn into the politics of the fortified cities. The house of Tuscany were an exception but, significantly, their lordship, based on rural castles, lay on the fringe of the urbanized area of the Po plain. Fragmentation was even more marked in South Italy, where the Byzantine power jostled uneasily with the Lombard states such as Benevento and Capua, independent merchant-republics such as Gaeta and the influence of the papacy. Central Italy and the Roman principality after the mid-tenth century underwent the same process, with the creation of fortified hilltop villages, often embodying a rocca castri.7
History offered casde-builders many models, for fortifications are almost as old as man. Prehistoric fortifications, great “ring-works”, studded the countryside. The inheritance of Rome to the medieval world was in stone and some of it survives to this day: the Porta Negra at Triers, the walls of Le Mans and Rome, the superb fortifications of Constantinople. Frontier defences such as Hadrian’s Wall, permanent legionary camps such as Caerleon and way-forts provided further models of fortification for later ages. However, most Roman fortifications were ruinous, and stone was difficult and expensive to work, so earth and timber fortifications predominated. The Carolingians used them to stabilize their conquest of Saxony. The Vikings constructed them as bases for raiding. The Edict of Pîtres began the construction of earthwork forts along rivers to deny free movement to Danish raiders, and this may have influenced Alfred’s decision to build a network of burhs, earth and wood fortifications, of which Cricklade and Wallingford are fine examples, which protected Wessex and its population. In the tenth century, royal burhs were a vital component in the re-conquest of England from
the Danes and in the defence of Saxony against Hungarian attack.8 But royal initiatives of this kind were becoming increasingly rare, as power slipped into the hands of lesser men.
Contemporaries used a vast variety of words to describe fortifications, so that it is often difficult to understand what kind of structure is referred to. In the tenth century most were of earth and wood, and they continued to be useful throughout the period:
in the plain of the Po in the thirteenth century, earth and timber camps were a standard tactic of war. Earthwork remains are difficult to differentiate from the myriad mounds that dot the European countryside: one part of Normandy, 12 × 20 km, has yielded four stone castles and 28 earth mounds, not all of ascertainable date. But there was no simple transition from timber to stone. Forest was scarce in Spain and parts of Italy, where stone predominated.9 In the Loire valley the counts of Anjou seem to have built in stone from a very early date, perhaps because of the availability of lime and stone.
Langeais, built by Fulk Nerra in 993–4, is believed to be the earliest surviving stone tower, closely followed by Montbazon by 1006. Excavations at Doué-la-Fontaine reveal a process of adaptation: a splendid Carolingian stone hall was given a second storey in the mid-tenth century and strengthened in the eleventh with an earth motte heaped around the ground floor. At s’Gravensteen, the castle of the counts of Flanders at Ghent, the eleventh-century stone keep was built and later had earth piled around it to form a motte: there are indications that the timber buildings on the motte were contemporary with the stone structure. This all points to the difficulty of seeking simple models for the origins of castles and to the problems of definition. English and German fortifications may have been simpler than the stone casdes of the counts of Anjou, but Goltho has many parallels in France.10 The fact is that by about the eleventh century, fortifications were extremely variegated.
Our conception of a castle is dominated by existing ruins. But the reality was of much humbler structures which answered the need of proprietors for protection. Across this period almost any kind of fortification could, if well defended, become a major obstacle. In 1003, Robert II of France and his ally Richard II of Normandy were unable to capture the monastery of St Germain d’Auxerre, held against them by Landri of Nevers. In July 1128 William Clito, claimant to the county of Flanders, was repelled before a fortified house at Oostkamp, while in the thirteenth century Hen Domen was a wooden structure although in an exposed position on the Welsh March. In the early twelfth century, Ordericus distinguished between Robert of Bellême’s “strong houses”
and his castles. However, it would be impossible to define the point at which the one became the other. The Flemish example noted here suggests that all had military potential,
and Stokesay and Acton Burnell in thirteenth-century England, or Tortoir and Les Bourines in France, are essentially similar. As late as the English Civil War, Basing House, a late medieval castle developed into a residence in Tudor times, withstood a long hard siege against a Parliamentary army in 1645.11 What was actually built reflected the severity of conditions, the means of individual landowners and the pressures faced.
Of all these early castles, one type has been much discussed – the motteand-bailey castle which modern English historians have been in danger of making into a norm, partly at least because it did not exist in England before 1066 and so has seemed to be startling evidence of the novelties supposedly imposed by the Norman Conquest.
The motte is an artificial mound surrounded by a ditch, upon and around which defences were sited. Most commonly, a tower was set on it and a defended open area with buildings in it, the bailey, built to one side. Where the idea for this structure came from is uncertain, but the tradition of earthwork building is ancient. In the Rhineland, ring-works were sometimes raised because of the high water table. The terpen of the Netherlands were also built to raise houses above water level. The advantages of towers are obvious, and stabilizing them with heaped earth is a fairly natural process:
out of this may have been born the and-bailey. The great value of the motte-and-bailey was that it was a “go-anywhere” fortification. Lords located castles on their lands, but they did not always have some convenient eminence as a site. A motte could be raised in flat lands and it was effective. Moreover, it could be built with a minimum of expertise – the essential input was peasant labour, and proprietors disposed of that.
This structure exemplifies the social structure which created it. The bailey could serve as a protective enclosure for the people, livestock and goods of the area in time of war: this was the public function of the castle derived from the past. But in the end the really strong protection was afforded to the owner, the lord and his family and close dependants in the tower, which could usually be cut off from the rest. This was a compact fortification, economic of manpower for its defence, and capable of being built and supported by local resources. There are innumerable variations on this basic pattern: at Hedingham the huge motte was natural but improved by man, and the artificial plateau thus achieved was surrounded by a curtain wall around a central keep, while at Huntingdon there was only ever a modest mound with wooden fortifications and a ditch. This type of castle came to be built in virtually all the countries of the medieval West, except Spain, by the early twelfth century.12 However, it was in no sense a norm, because proprietors wanted different things, and sites and the
availability of materials varied. In the Holy Land, plentiful supplies of worked stone from classical sites led to the rapid building of stone enclosures.
Even the simplest castle cost a great deal, and sheer expense limited the number of lords who could build them. In England only about 35 per cent of the 200 baronies had what we now recognize as castles as their heads in the twelfth century, although others probably possessed fortified houses, of which little trace is left. A large motte such as that at Clare probably took about 8,000 man-days, while even a modest one such as Huntingdon took 3,000. When castles had to be built quickly after the Norman Conquest, it was simple ring-works that went up, not time-consuming mottes, which came later. Moreover, once built, a castle had to be manned and maintained, and this again tied it to the resources of its immediate locality; castleguard was a widespread obligation in medieval society. In 1199, a truce was agreed between Richard and Philip, under which the latter held a group of Norman castles while Richard held the lands.
William Marshal regarded this as a triumph, for it imposed an enormous burden on the French, especially as the English harassed the garrisons. At Richmond in northern England, 186 knights owed castleguard to the lord and discharged this in a rota of six groups, each serving for two months. Here there was a specific castlery, an area dependent on Richmond castle, and such institutions were also found on the Welsh March; but in the main parts of England, arrangements such as the “Lowy” of Tonbridge had short histories as England gained in stability. Castleries are much more common in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such costs explain why only the greatest princes could own more than one or two castles.13
Even the greatest tried to build as few castles as possible, commensurate with their
Even the greatest tried to build as few castles as possible, commensurate with their