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in the second century AD

      What, then, is a castle? And how did this type of building come to exist and to play such an important role for centuries? To some extent, of course, castles speak of a universal human desire for security. Like other animals, humans have always sought to protect themselves. Even today we use bricks and mortar, wood, metal and stone to give ourselves some measure of protection from both the elements and other people. The earliest humans used the natural defences of the landscape: caves, mountain passes, rivers and swamps. Nearly 12,000 years ago Neolithic man built a massive stone wall to protect Jericho. Iron Age defensive structures – ramparts and ditches – remain clearly visible, particularly from the air. The Romans built walls, forts and camps right across their vast domain: an attempt to secure themselves against the incursions of barbarian tribes like the Saxons and the Franks.

      In Britain it was the Anglo-Saxons who were the principal successors to the Romans, but they in turn came under pressure from without. Their response to the seafaring, warlike Vikings was to put their faith in fortifications. They built walls round important towns, creating defended settlements called ‘Burhs’ (Wareham and Wallingford are well-preserved examples). In France, meanwhile, the Viking onslaught prompted people to build subtly different defences. It was here that a new kind of fortress appeared on the scene: the castle.

      The word ‘castle’ came from the Latin castellum, a term which simply meant any kind of fortified building or town. In English the word has come to describe the grand fortified residences of kings and lords. Most people agree that a castle was a combination of a fort, the residence of a lord and a centre of authority. However, in his excellent recent history book, The English Castle, John Goodall remarks that, ‘a castle is the residence of a lord made imposing through the architectural trappings of fortifications’. This gets round the tricky problem that many buildings that look like massive castles are actually lavish palaces; they look imposing, but are in fact militarily indefensible and not really forts at all.

      Castles spread fast through a fragmented, violent Europe. In the 840s, Charles the Bald had just succeeded as King of the West Franks (a kingdom that was to morph roughly into modern France). He and his brothers were at each other’s throats as they wrestled with the problem of governing their grandfather Charlemagne’s vast legacy, which stretched from the north of modern Spain through France, Germany and Northern Italy. They faced external threats: the spread of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula; the Vikings who raided deep inland, as far as Paris several times in the ninth century. Within, they faced the perpetual aggravation of a restless and independent-minded aristocracy, eager to bolster their position by building. It was in the midst of all this, in 846, that King Charles issued a historic order: ‘We will and expressly command that whoever at this time has made castles and fortifications and enclosures without our permission shall have them demolished.’

      Neuschwanstein is a nineteenth-century palace in southern Germany with a castle-like appearance, built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria

      Ingmar Wesemann / Getty Images

      Charles was referring to strongly-fortified residences of the aristocracy. Initially they were simply strong houses, such as Doue-la-Fontaine in Anjou which was given much thicker walls and an easily defensible entrance on the first floor. In the region which would become the kingdom of England, homes of lords were not designed to withstand a determined onslaught – the main fortifications were the burhs, communal defensive structures built by royal command. In France, by contrast, the local magnates responded to collapsing central authority by taking matters into their own hands. Government came to be exorcized by the local lords. They issued coins, collected the taxes, defined and enforced the law. Every local warlord became a king, and kings needed grand fortified residences. Political authority was becoming fragmented and the architecture of the castle was the physical manifestation. The Italian word describing this breakdown of authority is incastellamento, explicitly linking the rise of castles with the decline of central control. Castles conferred autonomy, which is exactly why rulers like Charles the Bald, desperate to re-establish royal control, wanted them destroyed.

      Ultimately the attempt to destroy them was, of course, in vain. (Often, in the course of my travels round Europe, I mused on the futility of Charles the Bald’s command.) Castles were here to stay. Once Charles’ vassals had seen the strength of castle walls and felt the independence they gave them, they were loath to give them up. Too many of them had developed a taste for power. To the south-west of Paris, near Tours, the Count of Anjou Fulk III, for instance, built one of the earliest stone towers in Europe: the Château de Langeais. The tower was called a donjon, from the Latin dominium or lordship. In Spain they would become known as torre del homenaje, meaning place of homage. Both terms emphasize that these buildings were the physical demonstration of power.

      In one region of modern France, meanwhile, a further change took place which saw these fortified houses evolve into what we would now recognize as castles. In the north-west corner of the country, a particular group had taken local autonomy to the point of outright independence. The Normans were the descendants of Vikings – Norsemen who had arrived as raiders and stayed as settlers. They were tolerated by the French kings as long as the Normans paid lip service to their royal authority. But while the Normans swore fealty to the Crown, they also built castles.

      By the mid-tenth century strange mounds were appearing across France, and particularly in Normandy. Known as ‘mottes’, meaning turf in Norman French, they were artificial hillocks to bolster defensive structures. They would often be surrounded by a wooden stockade or ‘bailey’ with animal hides hung on them to combat the effects of fire. On the motte it was customary to find a wooden or even a stone donjon. In the first half of the eleventh century, Normandy became thick with castles. The Duke’s palace at Rouen had a mighty donjon, and another twenty-six castles – mostly built in the first half of the century – sprang up between the towns of Falaise and Caen alone. The process was described by a French chronicler:

      The richest and noblest men … have a practice, in order to protect themselves from their enemies and … to subdue those weaker, of raising … an earthen mound of the greatest possible height, cutting a wide ditch around it, fortifying its upper edge with square timbers tied together as in a wall, creating towers around it and building inside a house or citadel that dominates the whole structure.

      A drawing of a wooden motte-and-bailey castle. This design became commonplace in England with the arrival of the Normans

      Dorling Kindersley / Getty Images

      In Normandy, when Duke Robert the Magnificent died on the way to the Holy Land, his seven-year-old son, William, succeeded him. Chaos ensued. As always when political authority fragmented, castles appeared. Normandy was deeply unstable. Three of William’s guardians were killed by usurpers, one in William’s bedchamber. A Norman chronicler, William of Jumièges, wrote that at this time, ‘many of the Normans, renouncing their fealty to him, raised earthworks in many places and constructed the safest castles’. In his late teens, however, William crushed the rebels at the battle of Val-ès-Dunes in 1047. Another biographer wrote that this was ‘a happy battle indeed which in a single day brought about the collapse of so many castles’. William exploited his new power. He issued the so-called Consuetudines et Justicie in which he banned the building of castles in his domain without his consent. Importantly, he defined a castle as any building which had a motte and bailey, plus ditching, earth ramparts and palisading.

      A penny struck during the reign of William the Conqueror, King of England (1066–87)

      Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge / The Bridgeman Art Library

      The Bayeux Tapestry – a 70-metre-long embroidered cloth record of Anglo-Norman relations in the eleventh century, culminating with the Battle of Hastings and the crowning of William the Conqueror in Westminster Abbey – gives

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