Castles are the most impressive and distinctive monuments in the land. Within their walls lie some of the greatest stories of British history. The bitter siege of mighty Rochester. The conquest of Wales made permanent by Imperial Caernarfon.
The rags to riches knight who built fantastical fairy tale Bodium. The Lairds who ruled Scotland from romantic tower houses like Castle Urquhart. To understand castles, who built them and why, is to understand the whole of medieval Britain.
Dover Castle is without question the mightiest castle in the UK, and it's a place close to my heart. I grew up in Kent, and it was trips to castles like Dover that first got me interested in medieval history, and have kept me hooked ever since. Now Dover isn't just a fantastic castle, it's also a symbol of Britishness.
Perched high on the famous White Cliffs, Dover stares out to sea and looks would-be invaders right in the eye. And yet ironically, the first castle here was built by the most famous invader of all, William the Conqueror. And William didn't just build the first castle here, he was also responsible for introducing the very concept of castles to Britain. William's castles were first and foremost instruments of conquest, built to hold down his new kingdom by force. But there's much more to castles than just fighting.
A castle isn't simply a fortification, it's also a home. Before the Norman conquest, these two things were divided. The Romans had forts for their soldiers, but they lived in comfortable villas. The Scots had their brocks.
But these were places of refuge for wartime, not residences for peacetime. Only after William's invasion do we find defence and dwelling combined in the form of a castle. This is most obvious at William's most famous and important castle, the Tower of London. It is, of course, a mighty fortress.
but it's also a royal palace, a home fit for a king. The tower, though, was truly exceptional in its scale and grandeur. William's other castles, and the origins of these strongly fortified homes, were altogether more humble. This unassuming mound in Herefordshire is where the story of British castles began a thousand years ago.
Before it was built, there were no castles in England, Wales or Scotland. But then, in the year 1051, an English monk noticed some strangers building something very new and very unusual in his green and pleasant land. Something which he'd never seen before and which he had no words of his own to describe. In the end, the monk had to settle for the word the foreigners themselves used and called this new thing a castle. It's the first recorded use of the word in English.
These foreigners who built this castle were Frenchmen, friends of the English king, but building it made them unpopular and they soon fled back to France. So while the English thought that building castles was very strange, the French thought that castle building was quite the done thing. After all, they'd been building castles in France for generations. So what explains this difference?
How come the French had castles and how come the English didn't? Well, the answer to both questions is exactly the same. It was because of the Vikings.
In the 9th century, the Vikings swept down from Scandinavia into northern Europe. In England, the strong kings of Wessex resisted the Norsemen and eventually drove them back, establishing fortified towns, or burs, as they went. By the end of the century, the power of the Vikings had been broken.
But across the Channel, it was a completely different story. In France, there was no united response to the Viking menace. The kings of France proved unable to defend their subjects from attack. And so, their most powerful subjects took to defending themselves.
They started to build private fortifications to protect their lands, their families and their servants. And they called these private fortifications... Castella.
Whereas in England the Vikings had been driven out, in France they never left. Instead, large numbers of them settled a province on the north coast. The French left this area to the Norsemen, or Normans as they called them, and began to refer to the area as Normandy. These Normans soon began to adopt French ways of doing things, the French language, the Christian religion, and French ways of government.
And they also learned about castles, the very things that the French had put up to keep the invaders out in the first place. The Vikings turned Normans clearly liked the look of these castles. They were tough, impressive and easy to build.
And before long, the Normans started to build castles of their own. The vast majority of these early castles were made not of stone. but of earth and wood.
Although designs varied a great deal, by the time of the Norman conquest one dominant type had emerged, the Mott and Bailey. This is Plessey Castle in Essex and it's an absolutely classic or textbook example of a Mott and Bailey design. Over there is the Mott, this great mound of earth which has been produced by digging this ditch which goes around the bottom of the Mott and moving the soil to create this formidable defensive structure.
And moving this way, and ignoring that bridge, which is a late medieval brick-built bridge, you've got the other part of the Mott & Bailey design, the Bailey, which is a much bigger enclosure, surrounded by an earthen rampart. and which would have housed all the buildings necessary for the Lord's household the hall, the chapel, the kitchens, the stables. Sadly, they've all disappeared today because they were made of wood as has the wooden tower which was on top of the motte, the Lord's residence.
But we can get a very good idea of what all these vanished wooden buildings looked like thanks to the most famous piece of artistic evidence from the 11th century the Bayeux Tapestry. The famous tapestry not only tells the story of the Norman conquest, it also deals with events in France leading up to the invasion. And on it, we find depictions of some early French castles. You've got one, two...
Three, and then one a little bit further down. Four. So let's just look at this first one here, Doll in Brittany.
Here, you've got a flying bridge, something that's now vanished that we can only guess at what was there. The Bayeux Tapestry's suggesting a very definite type of structure. And here, at Rennes, you've got steps going up to the mark. Maybe this is a palisade.
Look in particular at Dinant. Now, here you've got loads of activity at this one. Again, a flying bridge. Here, these stripes in the embroidery are very significant. suggestive of a timber structure and two guys underneath setting fire to it so clearly this is intending wood this is artistic evidence this is someone making this embroidery someone directing it perhaps in the 1070s it's one person's artistic representation of what a castle look like but it is really good evidence the best evidence we've got I think for what early castles look like But even with this artist's impression, it's still hard to imagine exactly what a Norman castle looked like.
But we don't have to imagine it. Combining the illustrations from the tapestry with archaeological evidence, at Saint-Sylvain-d'Anjou in northern France, they've recreated an astonishing full-scale motton bailey. Inside the Bailey Wall are all the buildings necessary for the self-contained community of an aristocratic household, which would have included soldiers as well as domestic servants.
And at the heart of the castle is the Mott, crowned with its wooden tower. It was a building with more than one use. A tower like this could provide additional accommodation, very high-grade accommodation, and you do get chronicle descriptions of towers in the 12th century, which have fantastic ranges of chambers and halls. But this tower, the one we've got here at Saint-Sylvan, is much more basic.
much more like a watchtower. And that is the primary purpose of the tower on top of a motte. It's to give you a last refuge when the going gets tough, when the castle's under attack. It's to keep you protected and to give you somewhere to get a good shot at your enemies. Mottes first appeared in France at the start of the 11th century.
So why did the French suddenly start building these huge mounds of earth? To understand that, you have to understand how the French made war in the 11th century. Castles were the defensive response to their preferred weapon of attack. Cavalry, the other half of the castle equation. So what kind of horse is Polly?
Polly's a cob, really quite typical of the sort of size and stature that the Normans would have had for their horses. What's the advantage of having a slightly smaller horse? Well, one advantage is manoeuvrability.
When you're on the battlefield and you're fighting, then obviously you need to be able to jink out of the way. I need to be able to come behind you. If you just stay where you are, I can get around you, and I've got great manoeuvrability.
good tight turning circle which you, obviously the bigger the horse you have a less tight turning circle so that's one advantage with a sword if it's a small horse you can stay there and be perfectly safe but with a small horse I can reach out and get you if I'm up on a small horse I'm losing balance as I reach out so presumably all this takes a lot of training how long have you trained for? man and boy you need a lot of accustoming to take the horse on into people a horse wouldn't naturally do that it needs accustoming to do that. You've got to take it into battle where missiles are coming at it because the horse is used in two ways. First way really is a mobile missile platform so what's going to happen is the horse is going to come out and when it's there then you throw your weapons then you get away go back recharge and come in again.
So what's the connection between castles and cavalry? People think of castles as static defensive structures. inert.
If you think of them perhaps like an aircraft carrier and the horses are the planes. Now if you're more an aircraft carrier off the coast and haven't got any planes on it, it is inert and doesn't do anything. So a castle is nothing without its cavalry garrison. But with its cavalry garrison, then it's got its moving parts and they can control the land a day's ride away, which depending on the terrain is probably going to average around a 30 mile circumference.
So in that way, they're keeping an authority. controlling the land by daily patrols, by hunting daily, having a presence in the landscape saying, we are here, and the mot high in the landscape proclaiming that presence. So the mot and bailey, as well as being a place from which to launch a cavalry attack, was also a very tough defensive site.
And it's possible that it was the very effectiveness of cavalry that caused the mot to be developed. in the first place. The steep bank of earth topped with a strong tower full of well-armed men hurling down projectiles would have been a highly effective means of defense and more than a match for most mounted attackers. Whatever the origins of Mott and Bailey castles, one thing is absolutely certain.
By the middle of the 11th century, the Normans were experts at building them. They were also highly motivated warriors and highly skilled cavalrymen. And now, to cap it all, they were led by one of the greatest generals in the history of warfare. His name was Duke William the Bastard, and he's better known to history as William the Conqueror.
In September 1066, Duke William of Normandy was amassing an invasion fleet off the coast of northern France, preparing to take England by force. He hadn't wanted it to be this way. Fifteen years beforehand, William had been promised the throne by the childless English king, Edward the Confessor. But on Edward's death, the crown was seized by his brother-in-law, the English nobleman Harold.
William was left with little choice. If he wanted to be king, he was going to have to fight Harold for the crown and the country. On the evening of the 27th of September 1066, William set sail from Normandy. He arrived here, Pevensey, on the south coast of England the next morning. He had with him a force of 7,000 men.
Now William was a very good general. that 7,000 men were going to give him a fighting chance in battle against Harold. But would 7,000 be enough to hold down a country of one to two million people? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But William was bringing with him a secret weapon that the Anglo-Saxons didn't have. The castle. William landed at Pevensey unopposed and established his first castle in England as a beachhead.
Ten miles along the coast, he built another castle at Hastings, clearly shown on the Bayeux Tapestry as a motte design. William knew that his only chance of success was to draw Harold on to a pitched battle as quickly as he could. William sent his troops out to terrorise Harold's tents, trying to provoke the king to come and fight him. Harold rises to the bait, comes down here to Hastings, lines his men up on Senlac Ridge, and the rest is history. After a long day's fighting, Harold looks up, arrow in the eye, end of story.
William had won the battle, but this didn't make him king. When the English nobles in London heard the news of Harold's death, they simply elected another man as their king. William was left to assert his claim to the throne with fire and sword. From Hastings, he marched along the south coast, taking towns by force.
In each case, his main first strike weapon was a castle. When William got to Dover, he burnt the town and started building castle number three. Now, there's nothing of William's castle left today because Dover has been massively redeveloped over the last nine centuries. But we do know how long it took William to build his castle because his chaplain, William of Poitras... tells us that it took just eight days.
But could William have built a Mottam Bailey castle in eight days? There are clues from the geophysics work done at the Norman Mott at Hampstead Marshall in Berkshire. Well, we've come here to survey the mot to find out how big it is.
And then from that, we want to calculate the volume so we know how much earth there is inside. So you can then work out how much material had to be moved to the site to build it up. This is the model that we've made of the surface.
And then what we've done to calculate the volume, we've projected through underneath the mot what the surface of the hill would have been before they built it. What we can do is we can now lift the mot off, pop it over there. That's fantastic. And you can see the shape of the hill. Well, we worked out the volume of the mott by calculating the difference between the two surfaces.
And that comes out at around 10,000 cubic metres of soil gone into building the mott. Do you know what that is in weight? There's probably something in the order of 22,000 tonnes of earth.
It's a lot of work for somebody. It's an awful lot of soil that they shifted. So just how quickly could you shift 22,000 tonnes of earth in 1066? Archaeologist Stuart Pryor helped me put it to the test. test.
You know when you have an ice cream at the cinema and it's rock hard and they give you a tiny little wooden spatula? That's what it's like. It's a bit large isn't it? You just cannot get the thing into the ground. Yeah.
These are authentic are they? Uh yeah well we've got depictions of these on the Bay of Tapestry. Half well single shoulder digging tool.
If we were to fight over it look this would argue in that way. way, wouldn't we? Bay of Tapestry joke there for Bay of Tapestry fans. This may seem frivolous, but there is a serious point behind all this, and that's we're trying to discover how much earth you could shift in a day, because it's one of the great debates, isn't it, about Mott & Bailey's, is how quick...
you could throw up a mop there's 19th century military manuals yeah that basically talk about how much soil one man should be able to shift with a shovel one squaddy if you like is supposed to be able to move 15 cubic feet of soil in one hour or 80 cubic feet of soil in a day because obviously you get tired as the day goes on yeah that seems like a lot of soil but so if you were to sort of extrapolate from that and take a guess at how long it would take you to build a moth say the size of the one here at Hampstead Marshall. Take a guess. Then it's going to be somewhere in the region of 50 men.
Yeah. And it's going to take about 80 days. That's a lot of time.
It is a lot of time. And it's a huge investment of effort. Chronicles imply that William turned up, a week later he moves on and there's a castle, gleaming new Motten Bailey Castle. I think maybe the idea or the notion of where it was going to be might have been established in those eight days. Established.
Yeah, the site would have been established and possibly the ring. work would have been started. But in actual fact, to construct the motte on the real earthworks, it would have taken an awful lot longer.
You've got to keep those Anglo-Saxons digging. You've got to keep those Anglo-Saxons digging. Yeah.
By Stuart's calculations, if William had built a motte, he would have needed 500 men to do it in just eight days. That's a very large number of men on a single site. And it wasn't just a question of shifting the earth. Building a motte was a surprisingly complicated business. A band of soil and a a band of stone and a band of soil and a band of stones the stone was obviously put in to consolidate the mott and make it strong so that all the soil didn't simply wash away so in other words if you do what we're supposed to be doing now uh and we were just digging and putting up a pile of earth then by the time as soon as the first shower of rain came down if you built a mott it'll simply wash away it'll be gone i mean one of the things i think of when you talk about layering uh is the representation of the bay of tapestry where you've got that the mott and they're made up of layers you look at it and you think oh that's just someone's as an artistic interpretation to suggest height or depth.
In fact, it's someone who knows the way a mott is constructed. That's it. I think our time is almost up, Stuart. We've been going nearly half an hour. I don't know what the Norman overseer would have made of us two.
I think we'd have been sacked or hung. One of the two. You know what they say about bad workmen. It's the tools. Blame the tools.
It's the tools. Yeah. Having established his castle at Dover, William turned towards his main objective, the city of London. He marched through Kent to Canterbury and from there headed up to the Thames until the capital was within sight.
London Bridge was guarded against him, so instead of trying to force his way across, he chose to march west along the south bank of the river. The army laid waste to the land as it went, trying to terrify the waiting Londoners into submission. When William crossed the Thames at Wallingford, the first of the leading Anglo-Saxons gave themselves up.
Eventually, William camped his army at Berkhamstead. And it's here that one of the greatest of all Motten Bailey castles was built. We don't know for certain that it was built by William, but the sheer scale of the site suggests that it was a royal foundation. It was here at Berkhamstead, just a few weeks after his victory at Hastings, that William accepted the defeat of the Anglo-Saxon nobility. Their submission opened his way to London, and it was in London, in Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day 1066, that William was crowned King of England.
Once William had been crowned king and established his control over London, he clearly hoped that would be the end of the matter. He assumed that the rest of the country would accept him as their king and that both Anglo-Saxons and Normans could put aside their differences and live peacefully side by side. William was so keen to make a good impression, he not only issued orders in English, he even tried to learn the language himself, so he could rule as a good English king.
William was deceiving himself if he thought that 1066 was the end of the matter. The majority of the Anglo-Saxon nobility may have submitted to him, but the people in the country as a whole were having none of it. In the two years after his coronation, William faced major rebellions the length and breadth of his new kingdom.
So he was forced to leave the country. to impose his authority in a more direct way. William's conquest of England had castle building at its very heart.
From London, he marched west to Exeter. After a three-week siege, he took the town and built the first castle there. He then marched north and founded further castles. at Warwick, Nottingham and York, before looping back south and building more at Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge.
But if William hoped he'd finally brought the English to their knees with these new castles, he was once again mistaken. The year 1069. saw the biggest and most concerted effort to end William's rule. The new castles the king had established the year before had exactly the opposite effect to the one he'd intended. They were a provocation to the English, who started to mass in huge numbers in Yorkshire and Northumbria. Their target was the lightly defended castle at York.
The garrison at York was small and no match for the thousands of men who now marched on the city. In overwhelming numbers, the English attackers breached first the Bailey walls and then the inner defences, capturing or killing the Norman defenders inside. The castle itself, a hated symbol of foreign oppression, was razed to the ground. For the first time, it seems, the English had finally proved that the Norman Motombele was not invincible. With their forces now concentrated in York, the Anglo-Saxons waited for William's response.
It wasn't long coming. Enraged by the English revolt at York, William now changed tactics. He took a much more ruthless approach. The king marched his army into Yorkshire and with considerable effort retook the city.
His enemies fled into the hills and the castle was rebuilt. But dealing with the rebellion of 1069 seems to have caused something inside William to snap. He now gave vent to the most brutal side of his character.
After a sombre Christmas in York, he divided his army into small contingents and sent them out into the Yorkshire countryside. Their mission was to lay waste to the entire country. to render it incapable of supporting human life. William's action is remembered as the harrying of the North.
In his anger, he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind, should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance. In consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible was the situation in the West. terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless populace, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.
The harrying of the North, brutal as it was, was just the beginning. William had equally radical plans for controlling the rest of England. Up to this point, although he'd had to reward some of his Norman followers with grants of land in England, on the whole he'd tried to respect the existing land-owning rights of the Anglo-Saxons.
Well now, he didn't care. He carved up the country into great chunks of land and gave them to his Norman followers to hold down in any way they chose. The most powerful of all these men was one Roger of Montgomery.
Roger of Montgomery was one of William the Conqueror's closest and oldest friends. They'd known each other since they were teenagers. And William trusted Roger a great deal.
In fact, when William had come over to invade England, he'd left Roger back in Normandy to sort of look after the shop. And when Roger came over to England, William rewarded him by making him one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. In the carve-up that followed the harrying of the North, William made Roger Earl of Shropshire. Shropshire lies on England's frontier with Wales, and in the 11th century, it was bandit country.
Now, to secure his hold on his new territory, Roger did exactly what you might expect and built castles. And one of the most important of those castles, to judge from its name, was the one he called Montgomery, after his hometown in Normandy. Today it goes by another name, it's simply known as the Old Mound, or in Welsh, Hendomath.
In its day, Hendommen was a hugely important castle, controlling a major crossing point on the River Severn. But today it's important for another reason. It's been the setting for a major archaeological investigation, the biggest investigation into the origins of early castles anywhere in Europe, a dig that lasted over 30 years. Thanks to the work done here at Hendommen, we've got a much better idea of what these early castles looked like.
Of all the Norman Motten Bailey's, Hendommen was one of a tiny handful that were... continuously occupied for over 200 years. It's a measure of just what a vital role it played in holding down England's wild frontier with Wales. Roger of Montgomery's Castle was well-equipped for the job, heavily fortified with two sets of rampart walls and an additional ring of tough inner defences. Archaeologist Bob Hyam worked on the 30-year dig man and boy, starting when he was still doing his A-levels.
The occupants of this place were surrounded by a heavily built up environment with very tall defences all the way along the edge of the bailey in front of us and behind us and with a whole pile of buildings around us. On the crest of the rampart, a massive timber palisade about 12 or 14 feet high and behind us, behind it rather... about six feet behind where we're standing now, another timber palisade, less high, which supported a fighting platform. It must have been 12 or 14 foot high because you'd need to have space beneath for a man's height to walk under, and then there needs to be about another six foot of timber to protect. a man who was standing on it.
From the outside in the landscape, you'd have looked at this very formidable wall on top of the crest. And in fact, further along the rampart, we can see the outer rampart below. It's got a very steep ditch, which separates this inner rampart from the outer rampart.
That's got to be about 12 feet down there? Yes. The other rampart is less massive than this, but it's still quite formidable. And on that stretch of space between those two trees out there, we did an excavation many years ago, which showed that that too had a palisade.
on it. So that there are double, and beyond that there's another ditch. It's not common for moats and bales of this size to have double lines of defences, and it's an indication of how seriously Roger of Montgomery took the defence of his new castle.
If an enemy broke through the outer palisade, he still had the ditch, and then a good 30 feet of rampart wall to negotiate before getting inside the bailey to the mot, the defensive heart of the castle. The motte was well protected by a mighty tower on top, and the only access to it was via a flying bridge, which would have been strongly defended by the Norman garrison. So if an attacker couldn't get in that way, the only means left to him was to fight his way up the steep banks of the 50-foot-high motte itself.
This was a castle that was clearly not designed for comfortable living. It was a tough military fortress in hostile territory. This was a spring point for conquest.
It was a military presence. It was a political statement. This is a place of simple but strong intent. With William the Conqueror and his powerful friends like Roger of Montgomery putting up castles round the country, it wasn't just a large local labour force that was required, but also huge supplies of England's timber. With only fairly basic tools at their disposal, it's astonishing how much they achieved.
All the timber has to be split up and then hewn with axes. Just using wooden wedges we can actually finish this split off. It's starting to go.
It will take a while. Do we know that they definitely use wood or they definitely use metal? They use both. Occasionally you find wooden wedges surviving in pieces of wood. So we do know that they were used.
Right. I'm tempted to ask you if I can have a go Richard. Yes you can. Because it looks tremendous fun.
I'm sure it's hard work. Any particular end of this I've got to use? Either.
And you want to try and hit it so it hits it straight. Hit it square. Right. A bit of a jaunty angle at the moment. I'm always doing these slightly grueling things.
It's hard work for a historian who spends most of his time in the library. I think we'll start with another wedge. That one's getting a bit too pounded. We've started to open up a crack.
Put another one in there. Can I put in a bit of the wedge? Yeah, I think you should. It might start to break if you tap it wrong at the beginning. This split is going to go through the end.
On your feet. There you go. There it goes. It's gone all the way down.
It's just held by the rope at the other end. Yeah. Oh!
Yep. There it is. So once you've got a split bit of wood like this, once you've split your oak tree in half, what's the next stage, Richard?
The next stage is flattening it off. It's quite likely in a lot of places that there'd be the Saxons doing the woodwork that was actually done for the Normans. Clipboards and saxons definitely work. I think Normans with swords and whips. Swords, yes.
OK. Having produced what is essentially a very flat surface, a reasonably flat surface over there, you then use a T-axe and dress it again. The T-axe is the refining tool.
You do it with a six-inch one. It's almost equivalent to a plane. Of course, yeah. It's very similar, isn't it?
It's quite possible to produce planks without any dressing at all. This one here, which is... As split.
Oh, right. And you just put these up on edge and put another piece at its side here, and another one and another one. So if you're in a hurry, this will do.
I mean, this is a sort of fairly crude type of wall or defence. Yes. Let's just pop that down.
I mean, when you think about felling of the trees, you can only have three or four men felling a tree. And if you cut a five-metre length, you can split it into quarters, eighths and sixteenths and thirty-seconds within a day. And this is all working. Based on one man? Well, there's a couple of men working on it.
If you're talking about a big tree, this is a radial plank, and if you end up with planks which are as wide as this and as thick as this, you can produce something of the order of 1,000 square feet of planking from a single tree. With both timber and Anglo-Saxon labour in plentiful supply, putting up a Mott & Bailey castle like Hendommen was fairly straightforward. But William had given Roger of Montgomery the whole of Shropshire to control, and that couldn't be achieved with just one castle. So Roger built several castles, and he didn't stop at that. He parceled out large sections of his New Earlham to his own supporters.
for them to control as they chose, and that meant that in turn they built more castles of their own. Before long, Rogers' earldom of Shropshire was peppered with Mott & Bailey's, all built with the sweat and the blood of the oppressed Anglo-Saxon population. Shropshire soon had over 70 new castles, more than any other English county.
And it wasn't just Shropshire. This pattern was repeated right across the country. Between them, William's great men filled the kingdom with castles.
The king's policy of delegating power had worked. By building castles, his followers managed to subdue an entire country of some two million inhabitants. But a policy of giving power to other people is a double-edged sword.
Left unchecked, William's plan might quickly run out of control. So 20 years after he had landed at Pevensey Beach, William decided it was time to draw a line under the process of conquest and to remind everyone, Norman and Anglo-Saxon alike, exactly who was boss. At Christmas 1085, the king launched a great survey, so expansive in its scope and so intrusive in its nature, that men compared it to the last reckoning of God himself.
They called it Doomsday. Now, almost everybody, I think, has heard of the Doomsday Book, and they're aware of the fact that it was some kind of massive investigation into landholding. But what was the Doomsday Book really about?
Well, unsurprisingly, there's quite a lot of controversy about that. I think the best explanation is that it... It was intended to set the seal on 20 years of fairly chaotic land acquisition. And it was also to act as a directory for William's ministers in London, so they could quickly find out who owned what. This is obviously not the original from 1086. but it is an absolutely perfect modern facsimile.
Now, let's find the county of Tropshire. If you work through the bishops, then the first big layman you come to is Roger of Montgomery, the lands of Earl Roger. There's the manors there, and they're in capital letters crossed through in red, so you can find Roger's individual manors very, very easily.
And there at the bottom, it says, Ipse Comes constructs it Castrum Montgomery Vocatum. constructed or built the castle called Montgomery. Now, Doomsday Book is very, very useful in this regard, because it's absolutely rock-solid proof for the early existence of castles like Montgomery. And if you go all the way through Doomsday Book, and you pick out all the references to castles, you can identify 50 castles.
There's a slight problem, however. Doomsday Book isn't really interested in castles as such. It's much more interested in economic assets, things like cows, pigs, goats, and sheep. than it is in things like defences.
For example, we know that Dover Castle was definitely built in the early years of the conquest, and it's not in Doomsday Book. So how can you go about finding the other ones? Well, one thing you can do is go through all the other written evidence for the 11th century and find out if they mention castles.
And if you do that, you end up with a total of about 100, which still doesn't seem enough. So there's a third thing you can do if you're really interested in early castles. You can get on your bike or in your car, you can go around the country and you can start counting the mounds of earth.
If you go out castle counting, you'll find literally hundreds of them. There are moths in many of our major cities, in Canterbury, Lincoln, York and Warwick, and also in smaller towns and villages like Clecheton, Stanworth, Blackpool, Camberley, Furnham. Wallingford, Brill, Otley, Rayleigh, Skipton, Chesham, Kettlewell, Westmian, Ilkley, Whitchurch, Hawes, South Newtons, Keefley, Pleshy, Hampstead Marshall, Abinger.
In fact, you can find the remains of Mott & Bailey's right across the country. But unless you know what you're looking for, you probably wouldn't even guess that they were castles at all. By counting all the old Mott & Bailey's, Historians now agree that about 500 castles were built in the first 20 years after the conquest. That's an astonishing average of a new castle every two weeks.
It was a policy that was spectacularly successful. I think once you realise how many castles the Normans built so quickly, you really start to appreciate the scale of William the Conqueror's achievement. He'd come over to England... with just 7,000 men, and they managed to hold down a reluctant population of between one and two million Anglo-Saxons. Not since the days of Julius Caesar, and never again in British history, would such a feat be repeated.
Now, you can put William's success down to lots of things. He was a fantastic general, and his mates, like Roger of Montgomery, were very good warriors. And they'd had a fair dollop of luck.
I mean, Hastings, after all, was a close-run thing. But more than anything else, the Normans' success was due to their technological advantage. They had cavalry and most importantly they had castes. William was quite content to build Mott & Bailey castles in places like Warwick, Lincoln and York.
And he was also perfectly happy for his great men like Roger of Montgomery to build castles pretty much wherever they wanted. But when it came to his new capital city, William wanted something totally different. There he wanted a build in stone. And as his new stone castle began to inch its way skywards, it became known simply as the Tower. Quite simply, there'd never been anything like the Tower of London before.
It's the prototype, the original, the mother of all stone keeps in Britain. Building the tower involved not only ferrying hundreds of tonnes of Kentish ragstone up the River Medway, it also meant shipping huge quantities of pure white constone from Normandy. All told, the project took over 20 years to complete.
Clearly this was no temporary structure. It was the work of a man who was here to stay. At the heart of the tower, and unchanged since William's day, lies the exquisite royal chapel of St John the Baptist.
The architecture is plain and bold, the stone nearest the altar the whitest. When it came to building, the Normans were clearly capable of more than just wooden towers and mounds of earth. This is an artistic achievement of great serenity. Of course, there had been some stone castles in France well before the conquest, like the one at Langeais on the River Loire, but this was only a simple two-storey hall, not a massive fortress palace like the Tower. So what inspired William the Conqueror to come up with a brand new original design for the Tower of London?
Well, obviously, there's an aspect of showing off here. This is a hugely impressive building, even by today's standards. Back in the 1070s, when it was being built, it must have been utterly awe-inspiring. But there's also a crucial element of fear in this design.
What you've got here with the White Tower is all the essential parts of a palace complex, the hall, the storage space, the bedrooms, the chapel, all packed into one building. Now, if you were building in peaceful circumstances... you could afford to have those spread out all over the place. You could have the chapel down there, the bedrooms over there, perhaps a great hall down there. But in the special circumstances of the 1070s, just after the Norman conquest, when everyone's still feeling a little bit edgy, you want all those things packed into one space and wrapped up in thick stone walls.
And it's that fear that explains the design of the Tower of London. William didn't live to see his castle completed. In the year 1087, A year after he'd compiled the Doomsday Book, he died, aged about 60. It had been an extraordinary life. A brilliant general, a determined and sometimes brutal king, he'd risen from being the illegitimate son of a French duke to become the undisputed ruler of the most powerful kingdom in Europe. Contemporary opinion of him was mixed.
The Anglo-Saxon chronicler praised William as a man of great wisdom and power. but also condemned his more brutal policies. Assuredly in his time, men suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.
He caused castles to be built which were a sore burden to the poor. Whether we choose to admire or condemn him, there's no denying the enormous legacy that William left to castle builders of the future. The Mont and Bailey castles that William had introduced to England as weapons of conquest had a long life even once the conquest was over. Take Hendommen for example.
Because of its strategically important position on the Welsh border, Roger of Montgomery's castle was inhabited and kept in good repair right up to the end of the 13th century. For other earth and timber castles it was time for a conversion job. The sites used for the old Mott & Baileys were often the best locations for building a stone castle.
This is exactly what happened at places like spectacular Restomel Castle in Cornwall. In fact, at the heart of many later stone castles you can still find the original Norman Mott's. But after William the Conqueror's day, castles were no longer needed in such large numbers. Abandoned and left to decay, their baileys grassed over and their timbers rotted away. The decades that followed William's death were largely peaceful ones.
Although his sons had to fight for their lands in Normandy, there was little or no opposition to their rule in England. So the Normans who'd first come over as conquerors were by now settlers. In many cases, they'd married a local English girl, started to raise a family, and turned their swords into ploughshares. Those Mottenbailies that survived this process of slimming down in peacetime did so because, in one way or another, they were exceptional.
Many royal castles survived because they were necessary as prisons, as residences for sheriffs, or as treasuries for the king's gold and silver. As for the castles owned by the nobility, if one of those survived, it was because the owner had opted for quality rather than quantity. What later generations of Normans wanted was not lots of castles spread around their various manors, but one big impressive residence located right at the heart of their domains.
Now if you're going to start putting all your eggs into one basket like that, you can start to invest in something a little bit more permanent and a little bit more special than earth and timber. Over the next hundred years, dozens of stone keeps sprang up all around the country, in direct imitation of the Tower of London. So not only did William the Conqueror invade and hold down a country where castles were practically unknown and in the space of his own lifetime build hundreds and hundreds of castles made of earth and timber, he also, by building the Tower of London, built the original stone castle and provided the prototype and the blueprint for generations of castle builders in the future.
The stone keep was the shape of things to come. But as the piece that followed William's death began to fracture, it wouldn't be long before these stone towers would also be put to the test.