There is no clear evidence of its importance before the Conquest, and in the Domesday Book Windsor is neither a parish nor a manor. But halfway between the chalk hill and Staines the Saxon kings had a palace at Old Windsor. It may have been close to the river, west of Old Windsor Church, where there used to be a farmstead having a river-fed moat; but not a sign of this palace remains. Edward the Confessor held his court there, we know, and the most vivid memory of it is connected with the year before the landing of the Conqueror. The king was at Old Windsor, and with him Earl Godwin's two strong sons, Harold and Tostig. Harold was drinking with Edward, when Tostig seized him by the hair and shamefully handled him, to the dismay of the household. Harold in return caught his younger brother up in his arms and dashed him to the floor. The guards then leapt forward from all sides and forcibly separated the fighters, while the mild king foretold God's anger and a fatal end to their violent ways.
Only five years after this, in 1070, the Conqueror held his court on the hill of what was then New Windsor. In the Domesday survey of 1086 a castle there is mentioned, but what it was we cannot be sure, and there are no visible remains of it. The position had struck and pleased the Conqueror as soldier and hunter, for he not only fortified the hill but recovered, to form part of a forest, some neighbouring lands which the Confessor had given to his Abbey of Westminster. The early Norman castles in England and Normandy were of timber, and consisted of a ditched and palisaded mound and a court, or several courts, also ditched and if possible moated with water. Under William the castle tended to become a high stone keep of rectangular form, with towers at the corners, depending for its strength upon the thickness of its own walls, not on a series of outer fortifications. In 1095 Windsor was used as a prison for Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, by the second William, but Old Windsor was still at times a royal residence while the new castle was being built. Henry I added "many fair buildings", including a chapel, and held his court there for the first time at Whitsuntide in 1110. At Windsor Henry married his second queen, Alice the Fair, and there also he kept Whitsuntide when David of Scotland and the English barons swore fealty to his daughter, the Empress Maud. At the time of the peace between Henry and Stephen the Castle was the second fortress in the kingdom, and its castellan, like those of London, Oxford, Lincoln, and Southampton, gave hostages for its surrender to Henry in the event of Stephen's death.
Henry II held his court at Windsor at Easter, 1170, accompanied by William the Lion of Scotland and his brother David; there he held a parliament in 1175, and often resided; he knighted his son, Prince John, within its walls; and it is said that one of the apartments was decorated with a picture of a dying eagle attacked by four eaglets, to represent himself and his rebel sons. When Richard I lay in prison, on his way home from the Crusade, John seized Windsor, but was forced by the barons to give it up. When John succeeded to the kingdom he frequently kept Christmas at the Castle, and there in 1210 he confined William de Braose of Bramber's wife and son, and the son's wife, in chains until they died of hunger and misery. A contemporary says that the captives were shut in a room with a sheaf of wheat and a piece of raw bacon, and that in eleven days the mother was found sitting upright between her son's knees, her head thrown back on his breast, and that she had gnawed his cheek, probably after his death, as he sat with his face bowed. From Windsor John rode out to Runnymede in June, 1215, to sign Magna Charta. When he broke his faith soon after, Louis of France and the English barons subdued all the south of England save Dover and Windsor. Windsor they besieged with a great force under the Count de Nevers; but John corrupted him to treachery, and was then free to gather an army from his garrisons and lay waste the eastern counties, in that furious and hasty course which led to his death in 1216.
THE HUNDRED STEPS
John's son, Henry III, was a great builder at Windsor. He raised the Bell, the Clewer, the Berners, and the Almoners' Towers on the north side, and on the south-west the Garter and Salisbury Towers, completed the ditch on the west and added a barbican, and in the upper ward made two great chambers for himself and his queen, and a chapel with painted windows. The King's Hall, in the Clewer Tower, is now the Library of the Dean and Chapter. In 1248 Henry received the Papal nuncios at the Castle. In 1261 he kept Christmas there with his queen and his daughter, the Queen of Scotland. It was a fine season, more like summer than winter, and Margaret of Scotland had come that she might bear her first child in her native place. She had been born at Windsor in 1240, and spent her childhood in the Castle with her brother, afterwards Edward I, who was a year older. Married as a child to Alexander III, she spent an unhappy girl-wifehood in Scotland, and was not allowed to visit England. But in 1261 she concealed the nearness of her time from the Scots and her husband and came to Windsor where, after a long waiting with her mother, the child was born. There was then no more splendid castle in Europe, says Matthew of Westminster. As a fortress it was of first importance, as a palace it was unrivalled. On the outbreak of the war with the barons Henry's son Edward occupied the Castle, placed his wife Eleanor there, and strengthened it with foreign troops, who devastated the surrounding country. It was used as a prison for London citizens. Two years later, in 1265, it surrendered to de Montfort. After his death, followed by the Ban of Kenilworth and the conclusion of peace, Henry came to Windsor again in 1268.
Edward I and his queen often lived at Windsor; three of their children were born there; and in 1278 he held a tournament in the Park with thirty-eight of his knights. His son, Edward II, kept Christmas at the Castle in 1308 and afterwards, and in 1312 his first son, Edward III "of Windsor", was born there. When the Despensers returned in 1321 and the opposition barons were put to death, Francis de Aldenham suffered at Windsor.
Edward III made Windsor his chief residence, and began a remodelling and rebuilding of the castle which lasted twenty years, though some of it was done in such haste that assuredly the oak timber did not lie long enough by the roadside for its ends to bourgeon into gophered fungi of the colour of gold. It was worth the haste, beyond doubt, for a boy to see it begun, then in his prime to ride back again and to see suddenly the whole range of it, beautiful in its pale new stone under the dawn, the trees of home whispering above him and the night of absence behind. The Castle of Edward III, in its outline, mass, extent, and arrangement, has dominated all succeeding changes until the present day, though little of the actual structure is to be seen except in the Dean's Cloister, the "Norman" gate at the Round Tower, the vaulted basement of the Devil's Tower, and the groined vaulting under the north side of the Castle between the kitchen and King John's Tower. He built the Round Tower on the mound, the great Hall of St. George, lodgings on the south and east of the upper ward, a Chapel of St. George (to supplant Henry I's chapel, dedicated to the Confessor), and the whole circumference of the walls with their towers and gates. Of those works it is possible to give some account. "The Tower, though usually called round," says the historian of the Life and Times of Edward III, "is not really so; the east side next the upper Castle is flattened to accommodate the building to the form of the mound—a clear proof that the mound was not made for the tower.... The tower was built entirely in ten months, in the eighteenth year of Edward III. It was built in great haste by the special command of the King, to receive the Round Table for the new order of Knights of the Garter, then just established.... A large number of hands were employed for a few weeks to collect materials, dig out stone, fell trees in the forest, prepare lime-pits and sand-pits, and all things necessary for a great work to be done in a short time. Many were employed in the royal quarry at Bisham, near Marlow, on the Thames, a few miles above Windsor, in digging out the chalk or soft stone there, of which the bulk of the wall consists; but it is faced with better stone, a large proportion of it having been brought from Wheatley in Oxfordshire, and a smaller part from Caen. Some of this was bought in London by the Dean of St. Paul's, who had prepared it for some other purpose, but as that was not enough, three ships' loads were brought direct from Caen. The timber must have been used quite green, as the carpenters were sent out to cut it in the forest. Messengers were despatched to every part of England to impress the most skilful workmen. For a short time as many as 600 men were employed in the Castle, and 122 in the quarry in addition. But the number was soon reduced rapidly, the chroniclers say, on account of the wars, and the consequent want of money, but more probably because, when the materials were all prepared, only a small number of hands were required, or could work at the same time. The drawbridges were strengthened for the purpose of carrying the materials across them, and in various ways it is evident that the circular wall which makes the Round Tower was built to receive the Round Table for the knights to dine at. The table was placed in a wooden gallery within the tower wall, with a passage under it for the servants, and an open space in the centre. The building was covered by a roof of tiles; part of the wooden arcade of the gallery remains, and nearly the whole of the cornice of the roof with the fine mouldings of the fourteenth century. There are entries in the accounts for the purchase of tiles for covering the wall of the building over the Round Table, and the carting of them from Penn in Buckinghamshire, where they were made. The kitchen for the table was on the top of the square tower on the slope of the mound, called the Kitchen Tower, which also served for the tower of a drawbridge over the moat.... The knights sat on one side only with their backs to the wall. The King and his sons dined with them all on the same level, without any high table. The whole cost of the Round Table, with the tower to contain it, was rather more than £500 of the money of that day, equal to about £10,000 of modern money."
THE NORMAN GATE