An Englishman’s
home: the early castles of
Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 7 February 2013, Horncastle
(For
the PowerPoint presentation that accompanies this lecture, please contact David Roffe)
The last time I was here in Horncastle was, I
think, in 1978 or possibly 1979. I can’t recall the subject of the conference –
it was one of those excellent weekends organized by Geoff Bryant - but I suppose
it must have been something on medieval England. What does stick vividly in my
mind, though, is a lively lecture delivered by Allen Brown on English castles [slide 2]. This picture of Allen was
taken five or six years later at Pyke House in Battle. You see him dressed in
tunic, birnie, and helmet, and equipped with sword, lance, and shield. We were
on the site of the Battle of Hastings and I think the exercise was ostensibly
didactic. What was it like to experience a cavalry charge up that steep slope
to where the English army had been drawn up? Well, I can tell you it was
frightening, especially when Allen’s horse bolted, scattered the Battle
Conference delegates, and nearly threw Allen over a barbed wire fence. For
Allen, though, it was all delightful, a defining moment indeed: at heart he was
a romantic.
In
a cavalry regiment himself in the second world war, thereafter an archivist at
the PRO, and then an inspiring scholar and teacher at King’s College, London,
Allen had a deep sympathy for the Normans which permeated his understanding of
Anglo-Norman England. For him the mounted knight with couched lance, the knight
fee, and the castle were emblematic of a new aristocratic military society that
William brought to England in 1066. Before the Conquest, he argued, there were
few professional soldiers. Fighting on foot, the English warrior was lightly
armed and in consequence needed few resources to support him. By contrast, the
heavily armed knight was every bit a specialist and required extensive lands
for his maintenance. Military tactics, the knight fee, and the castle
presupposed a feudalism that was foreign to England. For Allen Brown, the
castle, along with the society that went with it, was an essentially Norman
institution.
Almost
40 years on, the ‘f’ word is no longer used in polite academic circles.
Discourse tends to be in terms of lordship. This was a phenomenon that was
common to both English and Norman societies and it is now recognized that the
hundred years before the Norman Conquest saw the emergence of an increasingly
super-rich elite every bit as specialized in function as after. English society
was already militarized in 1066. Castles are still seen as a Norman innovation,
but are now interpreted as a marker of lordship within a longer common
tradition. Castellogists no longer think in narrow military terms. The castle
was a residence, an estate centre, and above all a symbol. It was the Farrari
of the eleventh century [slide 3]
and it was as important to be seen to own one as to drive it fast.
We
now have a much more nuanced picture of the development of English society on
the one hand, and military organization on the other. Allen Brown’s
understanding was a flamboyant development of a nineteenth-century
historiography. John Horace Round [slide
4] first formulated the concept of the ‘introduction of knight service’
after the Conquest and Ella Armitage [slide
5] identified existing castle
earthworks as the physical counterpart of the phenomenon. By 1979, however,
cracks were beginning to appear in the edifice. ‘Events, dear boy, events’, as
Harold Macmillan said. A season is a long time in archaeology, as Harold Wilson
almost said: Allen had a hard time defending his thesis here at Horncastle. In
the early 1970s Guy Beresford had excavated a motte and bailey castle at the
site now known as ‘Goltho’ in Lincolnshire. I put Goltho in inverted commas
because Paul Everson subsequently identified the site as Bullington. To his
surprise, Beresford found a multiphase Anglo-Saxon defended site beneath the
Norman castle. With a ditch some 8 feet deep and a rampart 7 feet high, this
was a castle in everything but name [slide
6]. This is a rather fanciful reconstruction, but will give you some idea.
Subsequently defended sites of a similar type came to light elsewhere. The most
famous examples are Sulgrave, Castle Acre, and Earl’s Barton. Many other sites
have now been suggested.
It
was discoveries like these that added substance to a reinterpretation of the
structure of Anglo-Saxon society that was already underway. Forty odd years ago
when I first started studying Lincolnshire, the notion was still prevalent that
pre-Conquest England was largely untrammelled by the demands of lordship. The
typical freeman, it was thought, was subject only to the king and it was he who
was the mainstay of the fyrd, the army,
that defended the Anglo-Saxon realm. I think that it is this picture that makes
the noble Anglo-Saxon warrior so popular with re-enactors today [slide 7]. We now know, however, that it
is inaccurate. The Danish invasions, and the measures that were taken to
counter them, saw a rapid militarization of society from 850 onwards. Society
became highly stratified. The defence of the shire or, more usually, a group of
shires was entrusted to an earl. He was responsible for the levy of local
militias. All freemen were obliged to fight in defence of their locality. It is
from this duty that we get the idea of the peasant soldier of the Anglo-Saxon
period. However, the earl also had his own retainers. He was not alone. In
parallel there were king’s thegns who owed personal service directly to the
king. They too had their own men who, like the earl’s retainers, were commended
to their lord. Commendation involved an oath of allegiance and committed the
earl or the king’s thegn to protect the interests of his men. In Old English
terms it made the man law-worthy. In return, the median thegn, as he is called,
or freeman helped his lord to acquit the service due to the king. He fought
beside him in his retinue.
In
this rigid stratification of society England followed developments on the
Continent. But there was a crucial difference between the experience on either
side of the Channel. In Europe public authority lost control and royal and
imperial powers passed into seigneurial hands. They became privatized. Lords assumed
proprietorial rights over both lands and jurisdictions. England, however, was
different. Liberties there were here and
there. The closest to us was the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire to
the south and Holderness in Yorkshire to the north. However, by and large
successive kings managed to retain control of local government even in the
worst times of crisis. How that came about is a fascinating story. Briefly, it
is related to the way in which the kings of Wessex incorporated Mercia and the
Danelaw into the kingdom of England. They did so through the network of
hundreds - wapentakes in our part of the world - and shires that made up the
distinctive machinery of local government in England. The system depended for
its workings on the free communities of the localities. Freemen dominated its
courts and by forging an alliance with them, the king was able to resist
divisive forces, be they over mighty subjects or marauding Danes. If you want a
parallel you might think about the way in which administration worked in
British imperial India.
But
that’s another tale. If you are interested you can pursue the subject on my
website. The important point today is that land, real estate if you like,
remained in the hands of freemen, whether they be thegns or peasants. Lords
merely had rights over land and the families that held it. This is where the
confusion has come from in the past. The fact that freemen had full rights in
their land had convinced historians that they could not be subject to lords
other than the king. That reasoning, if you ask me, merely indicates lack of
imagination. It’s the curse of the concept of feudalism. Put pre-conceived
notions on one side, it really is simple. We all have property rights of one
kind or another today, but that does not stop the government or government
agencies from demanding taxes from us and being able to levy charges on our
houses, or even confiscating them, if we do not pay. Anglo-Saxon freemen were
in precisely the same position but with some dues going to the king and others
to their lords. The threat of the loss of land, and with it status, was an
excellent incentive to perform the services demanded of them and thereby became
the main motor of loyalty to the king.
Domesday
Book allows us to see how this skein of relationships worked on the eve of the
Conquest. Equally importantly for our present purposes, it also shows how they
influenced the Norman settlement that followed. The Domesday survey was
commissioned in late 1085 to audit the lands and income of the king and to
reassess the services of the king’s barons, the tenants-in-chief. In the
process much detail was recorded about the holders of land in ‘on the day on
which King Edward the Confessor was alive and dead’, that is in 4 January 1066.
The Lincolnshire folios of Domesday Book, the great epitome of the survey, are
amongst the most eloquent on the nature of tenure and lordship in 1066. There
we find that all the great lords of the county held their land with sake and
soke. A list is conveniently provided at the head of the account of the county
[slide 8]. Now, if you read the
Phillimore edition of the Lincolnshire Domesday – the red covered paperbacks
that you probably know - you will find sake and soke translated as ‘full
jurisdiction’. That is misleading. Sake, ‘cause’ in the legal sense, certainly
contains the idea of jurisdiction, but soke had a much wider meaning. In this
context it refers to ‘the king’s two pennies’, that is dues that were owed to
the crown in place of what had originally been a food rent. It was these rights
that the king granted to the king’s thegns – hence their name – by charter or
what was known as a book. Thus, it was that they, the king’s thegns, or their
lessees, came to have what the king might normally expect to have from his free
subjects. At all times, it must however be emphasized, royal rights in
taxation, the geld, and public dues were retained and rendered in the hundred
or wapentake.
Exercised
over lands of freemen, sake and soke, then, was the glue, if you like, of
lordship before the Conquest. If the concept begins to sound familiar, then you
will not be surprised to learn that sake and soke continued to inform lordship
after 1066. I am, of course, not talking in terms of continuity of tenure, that
is the people on the ground. In the aftermath of the revolts against the
Normans from 1068 to 1070, almost all of the Old English aristocracy was
dispossessed. Lincolnshire was only exceptional in this regard in that two
Englishmen of substance remained in 1086 out of a total of 67 major
landholders. Kolsveinn was probably the son or nephew of a local staller, that
is a military commander, and was almost certainly constable of Lincoln castle.
Kolgrimr was the queen’s reeve in Grantham and probably continued in that office
after 1066. Both survived precisely because they were expert in the running of
the machinery of local government and estate management. Both retained
something of their pre-Conquest estates or those of their family.
The rest of the Lincolnshire
landholders were newcomers. Nevertheless, we see continuity of tenurial forms when we look at
their estates. A common view is that William the Conqueror distributed the land
anew. He gave blocks of estates to support strategic castles, but otherwise
ensured that no lord had any great concentration in any one area. We can
certainly see the first process in one part of Lincolnshire. The Isle of
Axholme was granted in its entirety to Geoffrey de la Guerche. Astride the
rivers Trent, Don, and Idle, the Isle commanded access to Nottinghamshire and
south Yorkshire and therefore had to be entrusted to a safe pair of hands. It
stands alone in the county. Otherwise, however, there is no sign of random
distribution of estates. Domesday Book shows that Norman lords derived their
title from one or a number of pre-Conquest antecessores,
that is predecessors, who had held their lands with sake and soke. Gilbert de
Ghent, for example, succeeded to the lands of Ulf Fenisc and Tonne; Walter de
Aincurt to those of Thorir, Hemming, and Healfdene; the earl of Chester to
those of Earl Harold, that is King Harold II. In all cases these barons held
the lands that were in the soke of their predecessors and held by their men. It
was English rights and English law that determined the shape of honours in
1086. If you should want further confirmation of this fact, then you only have
to go to twelfth-century law codes. There you will find that tenure in barony
was defined by the right of sake and soke.
Notions
of the feudal revolution and the like are, then, a misapprehension. That is, of
course, not to say that there were no changes after 1066. Far from it. There
were many in the hundred years following, not the least being a further
territorialization of lordship. The point here, however, is that we are dealing
with an evolution of English tenure rather than the wholesale introduction of
foreign forms. The idea of the creation of the knight and the introduction of
knight service is a misconception. We must, then, question the received wisdom
that castles were also a Norman innovation. There can be no doubt, I think,
that the motte was a continental import and it was seen as such. In the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle there was outrage at the construction of the new type of
earthwork - called by the French word castel
- sometime before 1051 at Richard’s Castle in Herefordshire [slide 9]. This is what remains of the
offending structure. Significantly, though, the scandal was not the fact of
fortification itself, but the usurpation of royal and comital power that
accompanied it by its Norman lord Richard fitzScrope. This could only bode ill.
By contrast, fortification in itself was the norm. The earthwork and the tower
had probably long symbolized lordship in England. An early eleventh-century
text known as the Geþyncðo, ‘the
promotion law’, states that:
if a ceorl prospered so that he
had fully five hides of his own land (agenes
landes), church and kitchen, bell house and burh-geat, and seat and special office in the king's hall, then was
he thenceforth entitled to the rank of a thegn.
Burh-geat is the telling term here. Burh has the root meaning of
fortification and geat is ‘gate‘,
suggesting together a gatehouse or defended tower. The thegn in question is
clearly a king’s thegn – he serves the king after all - and it is possession of
the burh-geat that most immediately
distinguishes him from those of lesser rank.
So,
a house, and presumably the estate centre that it presupposes, was at one and
the same time a symbol of lordship. Goltho is put into context. After the
Conquest Norman castles performed exactly the same function. Those of
Lincolnshire nicely illustrate the point. The castles of Stamford and Lincoln
were probably the first to be built, dating from the start of the Norman
campaign in the North in 1068 against English rebels. Royal castles are usually
seen as intrusions into towns. Domesday Book shows that many houses were often
destroyed and there can be no doubt that there was frequently considerable
disruption in their construction. But as a phenomenon, defended enclosures in
towns were not an innovation. It was usual for both the king and earl to have burhs within or immediately without
boroughs. The most famous is perhaps Aldermanbury in London, but examples are
known from many other urban centres. In York and Shrewsbury the king’s
enclosure was within the borough, as was the earl’s in Exeter. By contrast, at
Gloucester and Northampton, it was outside. In many cases Conquest castles were
merely modifications of these centres of power. Thus, it is clear from Domesday
Book [slide 10] that
It
seems likely that the Bail in
Context
was evidently a major consideration in the construction of royal castles in
towns. So it apparently was with the siting of baronial castles, that is
castles built by tenants-in-chief. We probably have as many as fourteen in
Table 1: Baronial
castles
|
Castle |
Type |
Lord 1066 |
Lord 1086 |
Sake and soke |
|
Barrow |
motte |
Earl Morcar |
Drew de
Beuvriere |
√ |
|
Bolingbroke |
enclosure |
Stori |
Ivo Taillebois |
√ |
|
Bourne |
motte |
Earl Morcar |
Oger the Breton |
√ |
|
Bytham,
Castle |
motte |
Earl Morcar |
Drew de
Beuvriere |
√ |
|
|
motte |
Godric |
Ansgot of Burwell |
|
|
Folkingham |
motte |
Ulf Fenisc |
Gilbert de Ghent |
√ |
|
Frampton |
? |
Adestan |
Walter de Aincurt |
√ |
|
Gainsborough |
enclosure |
? |
? |
|
|
Owston |
motte |
Guerde |
Geoffrey de la Guerche |
|
|
Redbourne |
enclosure |
Agemund |
Jocelin son of Lambert |
√ |
|
Sleaford |
enclosure |
Bardi |
Bishop of |
√ |
|
Stainby |
motte |
Siward |
Alfred of |
? |
|
Tattershall |
enclosure |
Godwin |
Eudo son of Spirewic |
√ |
|
Welbourn |
enclosure |
Godwin |
Robert Malet |
|
This
pattern strongly suggests that the sites of major castles were chosen as much
with an eye for existing centres of power as for strategic considerations. It was
important to appropriate such sites in order to harness the authority that went
with them and thereby legitimate the new lord. It is the same imperative that
prompted some newcomers to seek the hand of native heiresses. Geoffrey de la
Guerche is a notable local example. He acquired much of his lands through
marriage to Aelfgifu, the daughter of his antecessor
Leofwine. Nevertheless, it was also important to demonstrate that power had
changed hands. Raised within an existing centre of power, the motte was a
potent symbol of conquest. It was a message that was hard to miss.
With
one possible exception, the remaining castles are broadly honourial [slide 21], that is they were built by the principal tenants of the barons
(Table 2). Many are extremely obscure, meriting only a single reference in the
medieval period and are often without physical trace on the ground today. The
chronology of construction is thus vague. Swineshead [slide 22] was almost certainly in existence by the 1130s when
Robert de Gresley founded Swineshead abbey. The Goltho motte and bailey appears
to dates from much the same time, the excavator’s date of c.1080 being
unsustainable. Caistor, Grimsby, Newhouse, and Partney were short-lived
structures thrown up in the crises of the Anarchy and the reign of John.
Moulton is first mentioned in 1216 [slide
23] and Somerton is apparently no earlier than the mid thirteenth century.
If true to type, the remainder will be later in the twelfth century or later
rather than earlier.
Table 2: Honourial
castles
|
Castle |
Type |
Lord 1066 |
lord 1086 |
Sake and soke |
|
Barton |
|
|
|
|
|
Benniworth |
|
|
|
|
|
Caistor |
|
|
|
|
|
Goltho |
motte |
Lambecarle |
Earl of |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Heydour |
enclosure |
soke |
soke |
|
|
Kingerby |
enclosure |
|
|
|
|
Moulton |
enclosure |
soke |
soke |
|
|
Newhouse |
|
|
|
|
|
Partney |
|
|
|
|
|
Somerton |
enclosure |
Aldene |
Alfred of |
|
|
Swineshead |
motte |
soke? |
soke? |
|
|
Thorngate |
|
|
|
|
|
Wrangle |
motte |
soke |
soke |
|
In
contrast to the baronial castles [slide
24], there is no obvious correlation with pre-Conquest liberties and as
such the class represents a second stage in the Norman settlement. The business
of the Domesday inquest was brought to a conclusion with the swearing of an
oath of fealty by ‘all those who held land in England’ at Salisbury in August
1086. The oath not only confirmed the barons in their lands but also the men
who held from them in theirs. From the early twelfth century onwards the
honourial barony, as the principal tenants were known, enjoyed hereditary right
and sought to mark their status in an appropriate way. The new lord of
Swineshead was typical. He built his own castle in imitation of his lord and
founded a religious house as a family mausoleum. His peers did likewise in the
course of the twelfth century as resources allowed.
A
fortification, a residence, an estate centre, a symbol of lordship:
pre-Conquest burhs and post-Conquest
castles alike were all of these things. It has been claimed that what does
distinguished the castle from what went before was the aggregation of public
jurisdiction to it as it had on the Continent. But as a rule this was simply
not the case. Castles assumed royal rights in the Welsh Marches, the northern
borders, and, after a fashion, in the Rapes of Sussex. But they were not
typical. Elsewhere castles generally enjoyed no extraordinary privileges that
took them and their lands outside the shrieval system. As you can readily see
from the map of
What
can we conclude from all this? What I am not saying is that there was no
difference at all between aristocratic Anglo-Saxon residences and post-Conquest
castles. New circumstances required new solutions. The dispossession of the Old
English aristocracy and its replacement by foreigners acutely raised questions
of legitimacy. New lords had to assert their authority and ensure that it was
seen to be asserted. The castles with its motte and then keep was a very
visible symbol of that authority. But this was no revolution. Anglo-Saxon lords
faced similar problems and they reached essentially similar solutions. The
construction of the
©David Roffe 2013