LITMIR.BIZ

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William on campaign in Brittany. Three castles are shown: Dol, Rennes and Dinan. All have mottes, and they are strengthened with towers and walls. These defences seem to be made out of wood, since the soldiers are trying to set fire to them. It is clear that by the second half of the eleventh century, castles were becoming a common sight across the French landscape; and in fact they were beginning to spread abroad.

      The eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman Conquest. In this section, the process of layering soil to build a motte is depicted by the different colours in the embroidery

      Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France / With special authorisation of the city of Bayeux / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

      Even before the Norman Conquest, kings of England like Edward the Confessor spent time in Normandy, had a Norman family and Norman advisers. In 1051 an English chronicler wrote that these Norman supporters, granted land by the King, were making themselves unpopular – and one way they did this was by building castles. In Herefordshire, he recorded, these ‘foreigners’ had built a castle, from which they ‘inflicted every possible injury and insult upon the King’s men in those parts’. The site of this castle was probably Ewyas Harold, halfway between Hereford and Abergavenny. I have stood here on a spur looking west towards the higher hills of the Welsh border. You would not think it had much significance now. No walls or battlements survive to inspire daydreams of medieval knights; there is only a tell-tale mound or ‘motte’, and the age-old tussle between goats and undergrowth. But here at Ewyas Harold the story of the English castle began: for this was probably the site of the first French-style castle built in England. Others quickly followed, and a century later there would be few corners of England without one.

      Even at this early stage their purpose and impact was clear. A castle was what you built if the locals really didn’t want you there. The snippet of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is illuminating despite its brevity. Castles allowed lords to behave with impunity. From a secure base they could inflict ‘every possible injury and insult’, without fear of retaliation. They might look like defensive structures, but castles were not for cowering. They were springboards from which owners were able to dominate the surroundings, and they made the most striking claim possible about lordship in the domain.

      When Edward the Confessor died childless in 1066, three men claimed to be his rightful heir. The English magnate and warlord Harold Godwinson seized the throne, and near York he annihilated the army of King Harald Sigurdsson of Norway (‘Hardrada’, as he was known: ‘hard ruler’). Then William, Duke of Normandy, landed on the south coast, and his first act, tellingly, was to build a castle.

      He appears to have brought the necessary materials with him from Normandy. In the ruins of the Roman fort at Pevensey, William’s first castle quickly took shape. Days later, he marched along the coast to Hastings where he immediately set to work on a second, whose motte still stands: part of a stunning castle site which man, weather and sea have left a beautiful ruin. Standing in the ruins it is easy to imagine the trepidation that William’s men must have felt, looking down at the thin strip of ground beneath the walls: their only toehold in a hostile and warlike land.

      The Bayeux Tapestry shows the building of Hastings, and gives us a vital piece of evidence for the construction process. Mottes were built in layers – a band of soil, then a band of stone or shingle, followed by another layer of soil. Baileys would have been built around the motte, while on top would have been a timber tower probably with a fighting platform or walkway. Although, unsurprisingly, none of these wooden structures survive, at Abinger in Surrey archaeologists have discovered post-holes in a motte built within a few decades of 1066. Labour would almost certainly have been provided by the unfortunate natives, forced to build buildings that were both the means and symbol of Norman imperialism. It all became too much for two workers, depicted in the tapestry having a fight with their shovels behind the supervisor’s back.

      William’s two new castles were not to be tested during that late summer. King Harold of England marched south to meet this new invader, hoping that the same lightning tactics that had surprised and defeated Hardrada would also beat William. It was a mistake, but only just. In one of the longest and hardest-fought battles of medieval history, William won an attritional, bloody contest. The best guess is that the English army broke just before sunset after Harold was terribly wounded or killed by an arrow in the eye. The corpses of Harold, his brothers and the cream of the Anglo-Saxon warrior class lay mutilated on the battlefield. The throne was William’s, but he harboured few illusions that he would be widely welcomed. From Sussex he marched to Kent and took possession of the strategic fortress at Dover, the important site which guarded the narrows between Britain and mainland Europe. Its defences would be improved by William and his successors until it stood as one of the mightiest castles in the world (see Chapter 1). From here, William moved slowly towards London and briefly visited Westminster for his coronation, before heading east into Essex while a suitable castle could be built ‘against’, writes his biographer, ‘the inconstancy of the huge and savage population’.

      The White Tower is the keep at the heart of the Tower of London. Built by William the Conqueror, its basic design provided a model for Henry II’s keep at Dover

      photo © Neil Holmes / The Bridgeman Art Library

      Faced with inhospitable locals, the invaders built castles. To control London the Normans built two, one in the west and one in the east. Soon there were three: Montfichet, near the present-day Ludgate Circus, Baynard’s Tower on the site of the modern Blackfriars, and a castle that would be forever synonymous with English kingship and royal authority, referred to simply as The Tower.

      William ordered his engineers to build a castle which reflected his new-found status as king, in the south-eastern corner of the old Roman wall that surrounded the city. They started constructing a vast stone tower, one of the largest in Christendom. Nothing like it had been seen in Britain since the Romans left, over 600 years before. At the same time he began a castle in the old Roman capital at Colchester; this had a donjon which sadly has not survived as completely as the tower. The ground plan of Colchester was the largest of any great tower in Europe. Not for the last time, a king of England would build castles to claim the mantel of the Romans.

      The Tower of London was a rectangle. It had extremely thick walls and turrets at the four corners. There were four storeys with the entrance on the first floor, accessed by a wooden walkway that could be removed in war. It was divided in two by a spine so that even if half of the donjon fell, the other half could still act as a final stronghold. The rooms inside were palatial. It appears to have been heavily influenced by castles on the continent. Ivry-la-Bataille in Normandy took the same general form, and it is tempting to think that the blueprint for all these eleventh-century great towers might have been the massive ducal palace in Rouen, demolished in the thirteenth century. Much of the facing stone for The Tower comes from quarries in Normandy, the rubble fill is ultra-hard Kentish ragstone. It was a huge project and William would not live to see it completed.

      William’s attitude to his new subjects only hardened as he grew to know them. Initially he seems to have hoped he could rule through the existing elite. But this uncharacteristic compassion was not rewarded by loyalty. Rebellions broke out with infuriating regularity in the years after the Conquest. From the south-west to the north-eastern tip of his new kingdom he was forced to fight vicious campaigns to secure his new domain. In addition, opportunist neighbours – Irish, Welsh, Scots and Vikings – could be relied upon to raid and harry frontier lands.

      Clifford’s Tower, York. The remains we see today are thirteenth century, but the site was once topped by an earlier fortification built by William the Conqueror

      © incamerastock / Alamy

      Typically, William would crush the rebellion

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