THE STORY BEGINS
nine hundred and sixty years ago. A monk was sitting in Canterbury, writing his chronicle of the year’s events. It was the year 1051 – and what a year it had been! A great struggle had taken place in the kingdom between two powerful factions. On the one side stood the king, Edward the Confessor, with his friends and allies. On the other stood Earl Godwin and his sons, the most powerful noble family in England. The question they were debating, with armies and swords at the ready, was of the highest importance. Who was going to be king after Edward died?
The monk set down these events in detail. At one point, however, he departed from his main account to report an incident that had taken place in distant Herefordshire. Some members of the king’s party – Frenchmen, if you don’t mind – had been given lands in that county, and had been getting up to some outrageous things.
‘The foreigners,’ wrote the monk, ‘committed all kinds of insults and oppressions on the men in that region.’ But that wasn’t the worst
of
it. What really surprised the monk was the thing that these foreigners had built.
It was a great mound of earth, topped with a large wooden tower, surrounded by an enclosure of wooden palisades. It was so new and so different that the monk didn’t even have a word of his own to describe it. In the end he had to settle for the word the foreigners themselves used, and called it a castle.
We know all this, of course, because the monk’s chronicle has survived. It’s one version of the famous
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, now kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Sadly, this manuscript doesn’t tell us anything else about the monk – not even his name – other than the fact that he lived in Canterbury. But is is the first surviving document, written in English, to use the word ‘castle’, and the earth-and-timber structure that the monk was describing was the first castle to be built in England.
No one is exactly sure where this castle was. Most historians think that the monk was talking about the mound of earth at Ewyas Harold on Herefordshire’s border with Wales. Two other castles were built in the county at the same time, in Hereford itself and at Richard’s Castle, while a third was constructed at Clavering in Essex. None of them is much to look at today. They are overgrown with trees and bushes, and their wooden towers and walls have long since vanished. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d probably never guess they were there at all. Yet these few mounds of earth are the earliest castles in England. None of them were built by Englishmen – they were all built by the French friends of Edward the Confessor.
Although he came from a long line of English kings, Edward had grown up a stranger to England. When he was about ten, in the year 1013, the country was invaded and conquered by the King of Denmark. Edward’s father, King Ethelred the Unready, gathered up his family and fled across the English Channel to France, where
he
sought refuge at the court of his brother-in-law, the duke of Normandy. It was in Normandy, living the life of an exile, that Edward grew to manhood.
For a long time, it looked as though he would remain in France forever. His father and older brothers made several attempts to win back the kingdom they had lost, but to no avail: one by one, they all died trying. But disaster overtook the Danish royal house just as quickly as it had engulfed Edward’s family. In 1035, the Danish king, Cnut, died. By 1042, his two sons had followed him to the grave. The way was suddenly clear for Edward to reclaim his inheritance. In 1043, with the consent and support of the English aristocracy, Edward found himself back in England, being crowned king.
His fortunes had improved no end, but after his accession Edward still had one major problem. In his bid for the throne he had been supported by Earl Godwin, an Englishman who had collaborated with the Danes and was now the greatest aristocrat in England. After Edward’s coronation, the two men cemented their alliance when the king married Godwin’s daughter Edith. But Edward had grave doubts about his new father-in-law, and one very good reason to dislike him – the earl, it was rumoured, had been involved in the murder of the king’s brother. After a few years, therefore, of ruling with Godwin by his side, Edward decided it was time to take action. He invited to England some of his old friends from France, and began appointing them to positions of power. In 1050, he made his nephew, Ralph of Mantes, Earl of the East Midlands; shortly afterwards, he appointed his Norman friend Robert of Jumièges as Archbishop of Canterbury. The king’s intention, it seems, was to create a counterweight to Godwin. By 1051, surrounded by his Continental supporters, Edward seems to have felt that he was powerful enough to take on the earl and his family.
That year, a major row erupted between the two men. The official cause of the dispute was petty – some local trouble in Godwin’s
town
of Dover. The more likely cause for disagreement, however, was the question of the succession. Despite seven years of marriage, Edward and Edith had produced no children. Godwin couldn’t be certain – and neither, of course, can we – but it seemed that his son-in-law was deliberately resisting his daughter’s charms, and spitefully frustrating any chance that there would one day be a little Godwin sitting on the English throne.
In 1051, Godwin’s worst suspicions were confirmed. In the summer of that year – or so it was later claimed – Edward promised the throne of England to his cousin, an energetic young man called Duke William of Normandy. This, it seems, was the real trigger for Godwin’s defiance. It was now absolutely clear to the earl that he and his family were being cheated of their inheritance. In September, the row boiled over and threatened to come to blows. Robert of Jumièges, the archbishop, accused Godwin of plotting Edward’s death. The king’s other French friends started building their castle at Ewyas Harold in anticipation of the coming storm. Both sides were squaring up ready for a fight, amassing hundreds of troops in their own territories. It looked, to everyone’s despair, as though England was about to be plunged into a civil war.
But then, at the last minute, Godwin and his sons sensed it was a struggle that they could not win, and fled the country. Edward, finally, was free – master in his own kingdom after years of ruling in the earl’s shadow. He set the seal on his victory by confiscating the lands of the Godwin family and giving them to his French allies. Tellingly, he banished his queen to a nunnery, and later that autumn William of Normandy paid a visit to the English court.
Edward’s victory, however, was short-lived. The following year, the Godwins returned, invading the country and demanding the restitution of their lands. Confronted with superior numbers, the king had no choice but to give in. His French friends, realizing that this time
their
defeat was inevitable, chose to run. Some of them went west, to the castle at Ewyas Harold. The archbishop headed east, and set sail for the Continent. Our Canterbury monk, who clearly despised the Frenchmen, reported their departure with undisguised glee, and laid all the blame for the dispute at their door.
‘Archbishop Robert was declared an outlaw unconditionally, together with all Frenchmen,’ he wrote, ‘for they had been mainly responsible for the discord which had arisen between Earl Godwin and the king.’
So by 1052, everything was back to normal. The Godwins had been restored to power. Edward had taken back his queen. No one, if they were wise, was saying anything more about Duke William of Normandy. It was as if the events of 1051 had never happened. There were no more arguments, no more Frenchmen, and no more of their new-fangled fortifications – these so-called ‘castles’. Everything in England was back as it should be.
And so it might have remained, had not Edward made his famous promise in 1051. It was a promise that meant that when the king died fifteen years later, the French would be back. No one could have guessed it at the time, but that castle in Herefordshire was the first drop of rain before the deluge. Within a generation of its construction, England would be filled with hundreds and hundreds of castles, from sea to sea.
But let’s not race too far ahead. Instead, let’s dwell for a moment on the events of 1051, and what they tell us about castles. One thing emerges very clearly: the French definitely had them, and the English definitely didn’t. The Canterbury monk was quite outraged to discover that there were people building a castle in his backyard. Castles were a French invention and, as far as people in England were concerned, the French could keep them. By the same token, Edward the Confessor’s Continental friends had shown themselves to be
enthusiastic
and experienced castle-builders. At the first sign of trouble, they had quickly constructed a castle, and they must have built the other early castles in England at around the same time. Had this been France, where people had been building castles for generations, no one would have blinked an eyelid. Constructing a huge mound of earth was simply what you did in such circumstances. In France, when the going got tough, the tough built castles.
This difference in attitudes might seem, on the face of it, quite strange. After all, here were two societies, both governed by warrior aristocracies, both at roughly the same level of economic development, and separated from each other by only a narrow strip of water. Yet their feelings and opinions about fortification were apparently quite divergent. So how had this divide come about?
The simple answer is: because of the Vikings. The Vikings, we used to believe, were the bad boys of medieval Europe, looting and pillaging with fire and sword long after everyone else on the Continent had calmed down a bit and taken up farming. Nowadays, of course, we are taught to see them differently. Economic migrants rather than shameless pirates, traders as much as raiders: the Vikings, it turns out, were not such a bad bunch after all. But whether the indigenous peoples who lived in northern England at the close of the eighth century saw the Vikings in such a rosy light remains open to question. The monks on the island of Lindisfarne, who in 793 encountered the first batch of new arrivals, might well have disagreed. In the century that followed, the Norsemen swept all before them. One by one, the several kingdoms that made up ninth-century England collapsed in the face of the Viking onslaught. The ancient kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia, and even the mighty Midland kingdom of Mercia, all eventually succumbed. By the 870s, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the kingdom of Wessex, remained.
Wessex, however, fought back. The resistance was led by King Alfred (871–99), who for this reason, as well as for his legendary
lack
of culinary skills, became an English national hero. The king and his descendants protected their people by instituting a sophisticated programme of defences, which they called
burhs
, or boroughs. These were nothing less than planned towns, strongly fortified so as to protect large communities within their walls. In many towns in southern England, the outline of a
burh
can be still be identified, and in each case the total area enclosed is very similar, suggesting that
burhs
were built to something approaching a standard model. By building them, Alfred and his successors were able to push forward their frontier with astonishing speed and success. By 927, they had all but reversed the effect of the invasions; that year the Viking capital of York fell, and the power of the Viking leaders was broken. Many Scandinavian settlers, of course, remained in the northern and eastern parts of the country, but they were now ruled by the kings of Wessex – or, as they had begun to style themselves, the kings of England.
Indeed, by driving the Vikings back, the kings of Wessex created a country that, in territorial terms, was recognizably similar to modern England. Where formerly there had been a handful of competing English tribes, there was now a single, united English state. As states went in the Middle Ages, it was a mighty one. The kings of England enjoyed powers on a scale unrivalled by any other European rulers at the time. They issued one type of coin throughout their realm, and manipulated the currency for their own profit. Their laws and their government likewise extended to all parts of their kingdom. Most importantly, they restricted the building of fortifications.
Burhs
were public defences, maintained and owned by the king. Building a private fortification – like a castle – was not permitted. When Alfred’s descendant Athelstan took the city of York in 927, his first action was to destroy the stronghold that the Viking leader had built there. If you were a reasonably prosperous landowner in tenth-or early eleventh-century England, the most you could get away with was a
small
fortified homestead, confusingly also known as a
burh
, but sometimes called a
burhgeat
. Archaeological excavation suggests that these amounted to a collection of domestic buildings surrounded by an earthwork and a wooden stockade. In England, serious fortification was the business of the king, and the king alone.
On the other side of the Channel, however, it was a different story. Here, too, the Vikings attacked in the ninth century, sailing their longboats up the Seine in 854 and burning Paris. But whereas in England the Viking attacks ultimately brought unity, in France the end result was political fragmentation. The formerly strong kingdom created in the late eighth century by the famous Charlemagne crumbled away during the rule of his heirs. In France there was no national epic in the making, no hero in the mould of Alfred to lead resistance against the invaders. Instead of building communal fortifications under the direction of the king, powerful men began to take the matter of defence into their own hands – to protect themselves, their families and their households. In 864, the then King of France, Charles the Bald, watching his kingdom disintegrate before his very eyes, attempted to reverse the process with a royal proclamation.
‘We will and expressly command,’ he said, ‘that whoever at this time has made castles and fortifications and enclosures without our permission shall have them demolished.’