Castle (7 page)

All this means that the Domesday Book is very useful for historians, since it provides rock-solid documentary proof for lots of things – including the early existence of castles. If a castle is mentioned in Domesday, we know that it must have been built before the survey was carried out in 1086. For example, if we turn to the county of Shropshire in Domesday, the first major landowner we find is (surprise, surprise) Roger of Montgomery. At the bottom his entry, we find the Latin sentence
Ipse comes construxit castrum Muntgumeri vocatum
(The earl himself [Roger] built the castle called Montgomery). Hen Domen, in other words, was built between 1070, when Roger was made earl, and 1086, when the Domesday scribe wrote that sentence.

When it comes to working out exactly how many castles the Normans had built, however, Domesday is a bit of let-down. Although it mentions castles from time to time, the book is a long way from being comprehensive. The king’s surveyors were much more interested in recording the number of manors, plough teams and peasants than they were in noting down where all the castles were. Certain castles, which we know from other evidence had been built before 1086 (such as Dover), are not mentioned in Domesday. Altogether, William’s great survey only provides us with evidence of fifty castles.

How, then, can we go about coming up with a total number? One option is to go looking for mentions of castles in all the other written evidence that survives from the eleventh century. Doing this pushes the total number up to just under one hundred. It is quite clear, however, from surviving numbers of earthworks, that there must have been considerably more than this. For castle scholars,
therefore
, the only solution has been to go out and count the sites on the ground – not as easy as it sounds, as some have been concealed or destroyed by later rebuilding. In recent decades, however, historians and archaeologists have between them come up with a total figure of around a thousand sites in England and Wales. Probably at least half of these castles were built before the year 1100, with the majority of them being built in the years immediately after the Conquest. This means that, even if we err strongly on the side of caution in our calculations, we have to conclude that around five hundred castles were built by the Normans in England during the reign of William the Conqueror.

When you arrive at a figure as big as this, it really makes you think about the scale of William’s achievement, and the invaluable role that castles played in the Norman Conquest. By 1086, the king’s policy of building castles himself and entrusting his great men with castle-building had proved spectacularly successful. Using five hundred castles, a force of seven thousand men had conquered and held down a country of almost two million people. Not since the days of Julius Caesar, a thousand years before, had such a feat been achieved; never again in the history of the British Isles would it be repeated.

Of course, William’s success was not due entirely to the fact that he and his followers built castles. We could also point to the king’s outstanding ability as a general, and remind ourselves that men like Roger of Montgomery were also zealous and experienced military leaders. Similarly, we should not forget that William and the Normans had more than their fair share of luck. The Battle of Hastings, after all, was almost too close to call – things would have been very different had it been William and not Harold who died that day. Perhaps most importantly, the country that William invaded, for all that it had been buffeted by misfortunes in the eleventh century, was still the strong centralized kingdom of England created by Alfred and his heirs.
Taking
over such a well-organized state was far easier than conquering a land where government was weak – as later generations of Normans in Wales and Ireland found to their cost.

Bearing all these qualifications in mind, have we been exaggerating the importance of castles? Recently, historians have begun to suggest as much, even to the extent of denying that castles were important at all. The technological differences between the Normans and the English, we are now informed, actually counted for very little in practice: knocking out the Anglo-Saxons in battle was the most important thing. Building huge mounds of earth was all very well but, when it came down to it, they were really symbols of lordship and not weapons of conquest. Personally, however, I wonder if we can really push castles out of the picture to this extent, or redefine them in such terms. Historians have, of course, the enviable advantage of hindsight. From a safe distance across the centuries, and using every available source, we imagine we can see the general picture better than contemporary chroniclers. Men who lived through such traumas are not only likely to be biased; their opinions are also fatally compromised by their provincial perspectives. I have already questioned the credentials of the Worcestershire monk who reported the events of 1067 earlier in this chapter.

But not all chroniclers were so confused and befuddled, or wrote with such enormous axes to grind. Our principal authority for the Norman Conquest is a monk called Orderic Vitalis. He too wrote with hindsight, composing his chronicle fifty years after the invasion, from the safety of his monastery at St Évroul in Normandy. Orderic himself, however, was only half-Norman. His father was a servant in the household of Roger of Montgomery, who travelled to England after 1066, and married an English girl. Originally, this Continental monk was a Shropshire lad; as he tells us in his history, he arrived in Normandy unable to speak French. Unlike his other contemporaries, therefore, Orderic was able to see things from both sides. He still,
like
all of us, had his prejudices and his bugbears, but his is the least biased contemporary opinion we have on the Norman Conquest. And for him there was absolutely no doubt as to why the Conquest was successful:

The fortifications which the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English, in spite of their courage and love of fighting, could only put up a weak show of resistance
.

For Orderic at least, the castle was the instrument with which the Normans had riveted their power into place.

When the Domesday Book was compiled, William the Conqueror was aged sixty or thereabouts. He had lived to grow old, and he had grown to be fat. Neither age nor girth, however, could persuade him to slacken the pace of his lifestyle, or to desist from the brutal kind of warfare that he had made his speciality. In 1087, he was at war with the King of France, and had recently captured and burned the French town of Mantes. As he rode through its smoking ruins, however, his victory was suddenly undone. His horse started and reared up in fright, driving the pommel of its saddle into the king’s ample stomach. It was a fatal injury. In great pain, William returned to his ducal capital of Rouen, to the priory of Saint-Gervais. It was there, at dawn on 9 September, that he died.

The news of William’s death sent shock waves throughout Normandy and England. When it reached Canterbury – where our story began – the author of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
interrupted his record of the year’s events to record a detailed and impassioned obituary.

‘What can I say?’ he began. ‘If anyone desires to know what kind of man he was, or in what honour he was held… then shall we write
of
him as we have known him, who have ourselves seen him, and at one time dwelt in his court.’

The chronicler went on to describe the king in a balanced way, setting down both his good and evil deeds. William, he wrote, ‘was a man of great wisdom and power. Though stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will, he was kind to good men who loved God. We must not forget the good order he kept in the land, so that a man of substance could travel unmolested throughout the country with his bosom full of gold. No man dared slay another, no matter what evil the other might have done him.’

Among his blacker deeds, however, castle-building topped the list.

‘Assuredly in his time men suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries,’ wrote the chronicler. ‘He caused castles to be built, which were a sore burden to the poor.’

So ends William’s story. But the story of earth-and-timber castles, which started well before William’s day, had a long way to go once the king was gone. Some motte and baileys, particularly those built along the Welsh border, continued to be inhabited and improved right down to the end of the thirteenth century. Hen Domen, for example, was not abandoned until the 1280s. When civil war erupted in the middle of the twelfth century, many new earth-and-timber castles were built from scratch, and hundreds of older ones were quickly repaired and refortified. Likewise, when the Normans later carried war into Ireland and Scotland, motte and baileys were still the weapon of choice.

However, in England after the Conquest, the trend was towards peace rather than war. Men who had built castles to secure their acquisitions in the years immediately after 1066 soon found there was no need to keep all of them in constant readiness and good repair. In many cases, they followed the example of Orderic Vitalis’s father, and settled down to marry a nice English girl. Later generations of Norman
knights
found there was little point in investing time, energy and money in repairing and renovating all the castles that their fathers and grandfathers had built. From the start of the twelfth century, the number of occupied sites began to fall. Abandoned and left to decay, in time their baileys grassed over, and their timbers rotted away.

With castles no longer needed as instruments of conquest and oppression, those which survived this process of thinning down were the ones that could adapt to play new peace-time roles. Many royal castles, for example, survived because they were necessary as prisons, as residences for sheriffs, and as treasuries for the king’s gold and silver. In most cases, however, the castles that survived were simply the ones their owners liked best, either because they were conveniently situated at the heart of their estates, or because they were well-placed for hunting, trade and travel. As they let some of their earlier castles fade into the landscape, and began to invest more and more of their resources in one or two favourite residences, later generations of Normans found they were able to invest in something a little more spectacular than earth and wood.

It was William the Conqueror, once again, who had led the way. In the weeks and months after his coronation, he had built a timber castle in the south-east corner of London. By the middle of the 1070s, however, the king had decided that his new capital required a more permanent and more grandiose royal residence – a building made of stone. It was a castle that took almost thirty years to build, and which William never lived to see completed. Its importance to future generations of castle-builders was correspondingly colossal. As the great stone building slowly inched its way skywards, it became known simply as the Tower. This, without question, was the shape of things to come.

THE CITY OF
Rochester lies on the north coast of Kent, at the mouth of the river Medway. Like most modern cities, it has its fair share of tall buildings, from elegant Victorian mansion blocks to ugly sixties high-rises. The building that dominates this city’s skyline, however, was built not in the modern age, but almost nine centuries ago. The great tower of Rochester Castle still dwarfs everything for miles around, including the Norman cathedral that stands in its shadow. Even a modern visitor who is used to tall buildings, and familiar with stone castles, cannot help but be impressed; in terms of sheer size alone, Rochester bowls you over.

It becomes almost impossible, therefore, to imagine the impact this building must have had on people when it first appeared. Back in the early twelfth century, when construction work began, what emerged was not just a brand new castle, but a brand new type of building. By this time, the citizens of Rochester must have thought
they
knew all about castles. An earth-and-timber affair had been foisted upon them shortly after the Conquest, and a few years later some of its wooden walls had been replaced with stone ones. But these earlier structures, whether wood or stone, paled into insignificance in comparison with the monster that now began to rise against the city’s skyline. No one in Rochester, or anywhere else for that matter, had ever seen anything like it.

To begin with, Rochester’s size is truly superlative. Measuring 125 feet from its base to the top of its turrets, it takes the prize for being the tallest great tower in the country. Built from 1127, it is also one of the earliest examples of its type, and was the property of the Archbishop of Canterbury – then one of the most powerful lords in the kingdom.

The castle’s greatest claim to fame, however, is not its early origins or its distinguished ownership, but the sequence of events that later engulfed it. In 1215, Rochester had the misfortune to be visited by one of England’s worst kings, and subjected to the biggest and most spectacular siege that the country had ever seen. For two months in the autumn of that year, the struggle for Rochester Castle decided the fate of King John – and whether his kingdom would stand or fall.

This chapter focuses on great towers like Rochester, and attempts to ask all kinds of questions about them; how they were built, what they were for, how they were attacked, and how they were defended. But it is important to remember that such towers, or ‘keeps’ as they are often called, were not intended to stand alone. Like the wooden tower on a motte, a great tower needed to be supported by a whole range of other buildings, grouped together in a bailey. Even though many keeps seem isolated today, we should not forget that they were once surrounded by (and to some extent dependent on) a host of smaller buildings that were huddled around their feet.

It is also important to stress that there is no sense in which the great tower ‘evolved’ from the wooden tower on top of a motte. Stone castles were, of course, bigger, stronger and taller, nicer to live in and much more expensive to build. But, as we saw in the previous chapter, they originated in France at exactly the same time as wooden ones. Likewise, timber castles continued to be built in England and France well into the thirteenth century. It is not a case of a ‘Wood Age’ being followed by a ‘Stone Age’. The switch to the building of keeps cannot be represented as a technological advance; one type of castle did not ‘develop’ out of the other. Nevertheless, stone castles themselves did develop, and by the time Rochester was constructed, building a keep was the norm – for the tiny minority of castle-owners rich enough to afford one. The twelfth century was the golden age of the great tower.