Kings and Castles Read Online Free

biographer, William of Poitiers, draws frequent comparisons between
his royal master and Julius Caesar. To judge from buildings like Chepstow,
Colchester and the Tower
of London, it was a comparison
that the king himself was keen to cultivate.
    At the same time, we need to guard against hyper-correction.
In recent years, it seems to me, the revisionist arguments about Norman castles
have been pushed too far, to the extent that some historians now come close to
arguing that they had almost no military function at all. Take, for example,
the castle that William the Conqueror caused to be built at Exeter in 1068. Its original gatehouse still
survives, and has been judged defensively weak because it was originally
entered at ground level. This may be so, but it takes a considerable leap to
conclude from this, as one historian has done, that the whole castle was
‘militarily ineffectual’. Much of the site has now vanished, but it occupied an
area of around 600 feet by 600 feet; Domesday suggests that 48 houses were destroyed in order to make room for it. It was
built on the highest point in the town, and separated by a deep ditch and
rampart. Exeter fell to William in 1068 after a bitter three-week siege which
saw heavy casualties on both sides (and during which, if we believe the later
chronicler William of Malmesbury , one of the English
defenders signalled his defiance by dropping his trousers and farting in the
king’s general direction). It beggars belief to suppose that the Conqueror,
having taken the city at such cost, would have commissioned a building that had
no military capability, and was concerned only with the projection of what has
been called ‘peaceable power’.
    The notion that castles had little military purpose also
requires us to ignore the testimony of contemporary chroniclers. The
Conqueror’s biographer, William of Poitiers, repeatedly describes the castles
his master besieged on the Continent before 1066 using terms such as ‘very
strong’ or ‘virtually impregnable’, and such descriptions are borne out by the
fact that it took the duke months and in some cases years to take them. Yet
some scholars are curiously reluctant to allow that castles built in England after
the Conquest served a similar military purpose. The Conqueror’s great stone
tower at Chepstow, for instance, has been plausibly reinterpreted in recent
years as an audience chamber where the king or his representatives could
receive and overawe the native rulers of Wales. But the fact remains that it
was still a formidably tough building, situated high on a cliff above the River
Wye, and defended at each end by ditches cut deep into the rock. True, it does
not bristle with arrowloops , turrets and
machicolations, but then no castles did in this early period, because the
technology of attack was also primitive in comparison to what came later.
Without the great stone-throwing machines known as trebuchets, there was not
much an enemy at the gates could do, beyond mounting a blockade and trying to
starve a garrison into submission. In these circumstances, a well-situated and
well-stocked castle could be militarily decisive. In 1069 the people of Northumbria succeeded in taking Durham, massacring its newly arrived Norman
garrison who tried and failed to hold out in the hall of the local bishop. But
when the Northumbrians attempted to take the town for a second time in 1080,
they failed, because they were unable to take its new castle.
    One of the remarkable things about the Norman Conquest was
how quickly the rift between the English and the Normans was healed. Within a
generation or two, it is possible to point to castles that did owe more to
ideas of peaceful living than military deterrence. But in the years immediately
after 1066, filled as they were with bloody rebellion and even bloodier
repression; when a few thousand Normans
lived among a population of two million English in the daily fear of violent
death: in these