Castle (5 page)

The figure of eight days can be tested, to some extent, by measuring the size of an ‘average’ motte, and the amount of soil one man could shift in a day. A recent geophysical survey of the motte at Hamstead Marshal in Berkshire has revealed its volume to be 10,000 cubic metres – a weight of 22,000 tonnes. How much earth a man could move in a day is more speculative, but some idea can be gleaned from nineteenth-century military manuals. The regulations of the Victorian Army suggest that one soldier could dig fifteen cubic feet in an hour, or eighty cubic feet in a day (they evidently allowed for tiredness as the day wore on). By using these figures, therefore, we can say that to build an average-sized motte in eight days, we would need about five hundred men.

While this might at first seem a feasible recruitment target – especially if you had Normans with swords and whips to round up the
diggers
– it is doubtful whether such a large workforce could be effectively deployed on such a small site without the whole operation descending into chaos. Building a motte was not simply a matter of making a big pile of soil. If that were the case, the Normans’ earthworks would have been washed away by the first shower of rain, and would certainly not have made suitable foundations for the buildings that we know went on top. Where mottes have been excavated, archaeologists have found that they were constructed by using alternating layers of different material: a band of soil would be followed by a band of stone or shingle, followed by another band of soil, and so on. This is also reflected by the picture of the motte being built at Hastings on the Bayeux Tapestry, which shows several men raising a mound with different coloured bands. What we might first imagine to be an artist’s impression of height or depth turns out to be another very literal rendering of reality by the tapestry artist, who clearly understood the fundamentals of motte construction

The Bayeux Tapestry – men building a motte at Hastings
.

To build a motte in eight days, therefore, would seem to be pushing it. It would take several weeks, probably running into months, if you didn’t want the whole thing to subside under the weight of the
tower
. A week might be enough to lay out and establish the site, but a full-scale motte-and-bailey castle would take a lot longer.

It seems, then, that Duke William probably only had time to carry out a few improvements to the existing defences of the
burh
at Dover, before heading off with his army eight days later. They marched through Kent, and set about laying waste to the land south of London in an effort to induce the remaining English leaders to submit. William crossed the Thames at Wallingford, where several leading Englishmen surrendered, and eventually stopped his army at Berkhamsted, where the final capitulation of the Londoners took place. If he stayed in Berkhamsted for any length of time (and it seems quite likely that he did), then the very large motte-and-bailey castle standing in the town today might have been begun by his men

The next significant date in William’s diary was, as far as we know, Christmas. On Christmas Day, 1066, in the new abbey church which Edward the Confessor had built at Westminster, the Duke of Normandy was crowned King of England.

After his coronation, William was faced with the dilemma common to many conquerors: how to rule his new subjects with fairness, and at the same time reward his victorious comrades-in-arms. Having claimed to be the legitimate successor of King Edward, he wanted to prove to the English that he would be a good king, willing and able to uphold the laws and customs of his predecessor. At the same time, however, he had an army of seven thousand men at his back, all recruited by the promise of rich pickings, and all now hungry for payment. In the early days of his reign, we see William trying to balance these contradictory expectations and demands. Certainly, many Normans grew rich at the expense of Englishmen. Plunder and booty – which the Continental chroniclers called ‘gifts’ – were shipped back to Normandy in large quantities.

Yet even as churches and monasteries were being pillaged, William was being lenient and generous in his dealings with the governing class of England. Of course, a lot of aristocrats, including Harold and his brothers, had perished at Hastings, but there was little anyone could do about that. To those who survived, however, William was quite charitable, allowing them (once they had sworn allegiance, naturally) to remain in possession of their existing lands and titles. When it came to governing his new subjects, the king exhibited the same sensitive streak. Letters drafted by his ministers continued to be written in English, and William was so keen to make a good impression that he even started learning the language himself. He seems to have believed that, given enough time, the English and the Normans could settle down and live happily side by side.

But William’s lenient approach did not endear him to the English. On the contrary, treating them with kid gloves actually provoked the opposite reaction. In the first five years of his reign, William faced a series of rebellions up and down the country. His response was to deal with them in much the same way as he had dealt with his opponents in Normandy. At the first sign of trouble, he marched his army into the affected region, put down the insurrection, and began to build a major new castle. These new royal foundations were, almost without exception, constructed in the larger towns and cities of England, where the population and the resistance were most concentrated. The king had already enforced his authority in London in the weeks immediately after his coronation, building a castle in the south-east corner of the city. When, early in 1068, the first rebellion broke out in the West Country, William wasted no time marching his troops down to Exeter and repeating the exercise. Likewise, when in the summer the two English earls who controlled the Midlands and the North cast off their allegiance, William pushed his way northwards, establishing castles at Warwick and Nottingham. When he reached York, he began the construction of the giant motte that still stands in the city centre
(Clifford
’s Tower). Returning south, the king planted three more new castles at Lincoln, Cambridge and Huntingdon, mopping up pockets of resistance as he went.

None of this, of course, was especially good for Anglo-Norman relations. When building these new castles, the king and his engineers showed little concern for the English inhabitants of the town or city in question. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way once the optimum site had been selected. At Cambridge, twenty-seven houses were razed to the ground to clear a space for the works to begin. In Lincoln, the number of dwellings destroyed was 166. But while William showed few or no scruples about building castles over people’s homes, he could at least claim to be acting out of strategic necessity. Outside the towns and cities, the king was still reluctant to indulge in any wide-scale disinheritance of Anglo-Saxon landowners.

A handful of his leading men had been rewarded with grants of land at this time, and they were busy asserting their own authority in similar fashion. In Sussex, for example, a number of Continental-style lordships, each organized around a castle, were created immediately after 1066. But how far castle-building extended in general is not known. Writing just one year after the Norman invasion, a monk at Worcester said that, when the king was away in Normandy, his regents ‘built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people’. How much this statement reflects the general situation, however, is open to question. One of the regents, William Fitz Osbern, had been made Earl of Hereford, and constructed several castles in the Severn valley region before 1070; our Worcester monk may have heard more horror stories about castles going up than most people. We should also perhaps allow for the fact he was clearly very depressed about the Conquest in general.

‘Things went ever from bad to worse,’ he said in his next sentence. ‘When God wills, may the end be good.’

*

What did transform the situation, however, was the great rebellion of 1069. It was a response, in part, to William’s castle-building programme of the previous year. The king’s new foundations were seen as a provocation – an invitation, even, for the English to rise up and smash them. When the men of Northumbria and Yorkshire rose early in the year, the lightly defended motte and bailey at York was an obvious and tempting target. William soon retook the castle and ordered the construction of another, but the city still fell for a second time in the summer. On this occasion the northerners came in greater numbers, aided in their rebellion by the arrival of a Danish army.

‘Forming an immense host, riding and marching in high spirits, they all resolutely advanced on York and stormed and destroyed the castle, seizing innumerable treasures therein, and slaying many hundreds of Frenchmen.’

For the third time in eighteen months, William was obliged to move his army into Yorkshire and retake its principal city. On this, his final attempt, defeating the rebels took considerable effort, and the Danes had to be paid to withdraw. By the time he rode triumphant through the smouldering ruins of York, the king himself was fuming.

Dealing with the rebellion of 1069 appears to have caused something inside William to snap. He had, after all, tried to be nice to the English, letting many of them keep their lands and promising to uphold their ancient laws and customs. Yet all they had done in return was repay his generosity with contempt, and force him to spend time, money and energy in putting down their insolence. What’s more, even now, after three years, they showed no signs whatsoever of giving up. So, since the softly-softly approach had evidently failed, William now allowed the more brutal side of his character to take over. After a sombre Christmas in York, he divided his army into small contingents and sent them out into the countryside of Yorkshire and Northumbria. Their mission was to burn crops, homes and livestock, in order to render the entire region incapable of supporting human
life
. Modern historians have dubbed this the ‘Harrying of the North’, but only a contemporary author can fully capture the horrific consequences of the king’s decision. One northern chronicler described it thus:

So great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, [and also] that of horses, dogs, and cats… [some] sold themselves to perpetual slavery, so that they might in that way preserve their wretched existence; others, while about to go into exile from their country, fell down in the middle of their journey and gave up the ghost. It was horrific to behold human corpses decaying in the houses, the streets, and on the roads, swarming with worms while they were consuming in corruption with an abominable stench… There was no village inhabited between York and Durham; they became lurking places to wild beasts and robbers, and were a great dread to travellers
.

In retrospect, the Harrying was seen as the most savage and merciless act of William’s whole career. At the time, however, the king regarded it as just the beginning of a new direction in royal policy. If the English did not want him as their king, and were never going to give him their love or loyalty, why should he worry about respecting their laws or customs? This cold logic soon translated itself into action. Not only did William abandon his English lessons, and start spending much less time in England; he also decided there was no point in upholding the rights of Englishmen when there were loyal Normans who needed rewarding. In the year 1070, therefore, he deposed many native bishops and abbots, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and replaced them with Continental newcomers. In the same year, the king permitted English monasteries to be plundered for cash.

The biggest change, however, was not felt in church cloisters, but in the countryside at large. In the wake of the English rebellions,
William
created huge new blocks of power for his most trusted followers, and charged them with holding down their new territories by whatever means they chose. Above all else, this meant building many hundreds of castles.

One of the main beneficiaries of William’s change of heart in 1070 was Roger of Montgomery. Roger was one of William’s oldest and closest friends: we first spot the pair of them together when William was in his late teens, and their friendship may have stretched back even earlier. Two major things underline the degree of trust between the two men. First, when William set sail for England in 1066, Roger was the man he left in charge of Normandy during his absence. Second, when Roger joined William in England shortly after the invasion, the king rewarded him with large grants of land. Roger was one of the individuals who profited from the early redistribution of property in Sussex, and in 1070 he received an even bigger prize. In the carve-up that followed the Harrying of the North, William made Roger Earl of Shrewsbury (or Shropshire).

This was a very large gift, and it catapulted Roger right to the top of English society. In the list of the top ten Normans in England after 1066, Roger ranks number three – below William himself and his brother, Odo, but above the king’s other brother, Robert. With great power, however, came great responsibility. As earl, Roger was expected to keep order in the region, and also to defend the English border with Wales. Shropshire, like Yorkshire, was one of the remotest and wildest parts of William’s new kingdom. In order to carry out the task appointed to him, Roger built several new castles. One of the most important of these, to judge from its name, was the one he called ‘Montgomery’, after his own home town of Montgommeri in Normandy. This castle, a perfect little motte and bailey, still survives, but for centuries it has been known by its Welsh name, simply meaning ‘the Old Mound’. It is called Hen Domen.