CHAPTER III
THE ENGLISH CASTLE AFTER THE CONQUEST
A Castle is a private fortress, built by an individual lord as a military stronghold, and also as an occasional residence. In England at the time of the Norman conquest, this type of military work was known as castel, a word which is obviously the same as the Latin castellum. Castrum, munitio, and municipium are names which are frequently given to it by chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its existence was the direct result of the consolidation of the feudal system. The lord separated his dwelling from those of his vassals: he defended it against the attacks of other individual lords who naturally would seek to aggrandise themselves at his expense: he also needed a stronghold which might be impregnable on occasion against those vassals themselves, and might be a perpetual reminder to them of their subject position. The castle rose within or as an addition to the burh, the independent stronghold of one person within the walled or stockaded town of the many. Thus, at one and the same time, it protected and overawed the burh. Or it rose by itself, like the Peak castle in Derbyshire, on a spot where no burh existed, and so in many cases drew a small community to seek its protection.
An unlimited number of castles implies an unlimited number of independent magnates, uncontrolled by a supreme authority, and each ready to fly at the other’s throat. The feudal lord, however, was the king’s man, and his castle was therefore theoretically the king’s. We have already noticed the edict of Pistes (864), which ordered the destruction of all castles built without royal licence; and, save in periods of total anarchy, legislation of this type, safeguarding feudal order, was in operation during the middle ages wherever the feudal system was at the base of the constitution. The king was de jure, if not de facto, the owner of the castles of his realm.
The castle or private fortress was a feature in French social life and warfare from at any rate the middle of the ninth century. But in England it was certainly an unfamiliar and almost as certainly an unknown feature, until the middle of the eleventh century. Danish pirates who up to this time had visited England, had come from the north and east, and passed on to France. There, in contact with the feudal system as it existed under the later Carolingian monarchs, they may have learned the use of the private fortress. At any rate when the Northmen came back upon England from their continental duchy, they brought with them the fully organised social system of the Continent, and its most powerful symbol, the castle.
Harold’s aula, from Bayeux Tapestry
We have seen that, throughout the Saxon and Danish period, the burh, the home of the community, formed the unit, if the expression may be used, of military defence by fortification. The English or Danish nobleman lived, it may safely be assumed, in houses like the two-storied house in the Bayeux tapestry, where Harold and his friends are feasting on the upper floor, while the ground floor apparently forms a cellar or store-room ([36]).[38] It is possible that such a house, the prototype of the larger medieval dwelling-house, may sometimes have been protected by its encircling thorn hedge or palisade; but it was not a castle. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a castle meant to an Englishman a special type of fortress, of a construction and plan of a character more or less fixed. The loose phraseology which, in later times, applied the title of castle indiscriminately to prehistoric camps and medieval manor-houses, was not yet customary.
The first castles on English soil appear to have been raised by Norman favourites of Edward the Confessor before the Conquest, and to have excited alarm among the English population. In 1048 some foreigners or “Welshmen,” as the English called them, encroached on the territory of Sweyn Godwinsson in Herefordshire, constructed a castel—the first mention of such a thing in the Chronicle—and wrought harm to all the country round. That they were Frenchmen appears from the events of 1052: one of Godwin’s demands to the king at Gloucester was that “the Frenchmen of the castle” should be given up, and in the same year “the Frenchmen of the castle” helped to defend the borders against a Welsh inroad. The very fact that the Frenchmen’s stronghold was known as “the castle” proves that it was at any rate an unfamiliar type of fortress. But, if it was the first, others were soon constructed. When Godwin returned from his outlawry in 1052, and forced himself back into Edward’s good graces, the Frenchmen in London left the city. The archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, made his way to the east coast: some fled westward to Pentecost’s castle, which is probably identical with the Herefordshire fortress, others northward to Robert’s castle, which is now identified with Clavering in Essex. The Herefordshire castle is supposed to have been at Ewias Harold, some twelve miles south of Hereford, where there is still the great mount of a Norman stronghold on the north-west side of the village.[39]
