Castles: Instruments of Conquest and Control
A Kingdom Held Down by Earthworks
In 1066 there were only a handful of castles in the whole of England. By 1100 there were close to five hundred. The Normans were a tiny ruling minority — perhaps 8,000 fighting men sitting on top of two million Anglo-Saxons — and the castle was the technology that made that imbalance work. To understand Norman control, you have to understand the castle as an instrument of conquest first and a defensive structure second.
Why England Had So Few Castles Before 1066
Anglo-Saxon England did not build castles in the Norman sense. Local defence rested on burhs — communal fortified towns first developed under King Alfred against Viking raids. Burhs protected whole communities. Castles, by contrast, were private fortresses owned by individual lords. The few pre-conquest castles in England (such as those built by Edward the Confessor’s Norman favourites in Herefordshire) were resented by the English precisely because they looked foreign and threatening — they pointed inward at the local population, not outward at invaders.
The number of castles in England rose from a handful in 1066 to roughly five hundred by 1100. This explosion of building was the physical infrastructure of the Norman Conquest.
Motte-and-Bailey: Speed Over Strength
The most common Norman castle was the motte-and-bailey. The motte was a steep earth mound, sometimes natural and shaped, sometimes built up from scratch using forced English labour. On top sat a wooden tower — the lord’s residence and final stronghold. Beside the motte lay the bailey, a flat enclosed courtyard surrounded by a ditch and a palisade of sharpened timbers, holding stables, kitchens, a chapel, a hall and quarters for the garrison.
The point of the motte-and-bailey was speed. A wooden castle could be thrown up in a fortnight using local labour. William ordered one built at Hastings within days of landing at Pevensey, using prefabricated timbers brought from Normandy. After his coronation he marched through southern England building motte-and-baileys at strategic points; after the rebellions of 1067–71 he flooded the disturbed areas with new ones.
Motte-and-bailey design had developed in northern France in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, where rival lords needed cheap, defensible bases during the long break-up of Carolingian authority. By 1066 it was the standard Norman tool of lordship. William’s army arrived already trained in throwing them up. The Bayeux Tapestry shows English labourers being driven by Norman overseers to dig the motte at Hastings — one of the few visual records of a castle being built.
Stone Keeps: Permanence and Statement
Wood rotted, burned and could be chopped down. Where William wanted permanence — especially in major cities and royal centres — he replaced timber with stone. The greatest example is the White Tower, begun in the 1070s on the eastern edge of London. Its walls are over four metres thick at the base. Its scale was meant to be visible from the river: any merchant or rebel arriving at the capital saw a Norman fortress before they saw the city.
Other stone building followed at Colchester (raised directly over the ruins of the Roman temple of Claudius, deliberately reusing imperial stonework) and at Rochester, where Bishop Gundulf built a stone castle for William II between 1087 and 1089. Rochester’s famous keep came later, in the 1120s. Stone construction was slow and expensive — only the king and the wealthiest tenants-in-chief could afford it. By 1100, stone keeps remained the exception; most of the c.500 castles in England were still timber on earth.
Siting: Roads, Rivers and Rebels
Where you put a castle decided what it could do. Norman lords sited castles to control river crossings (Wallingford on the Thames, Cambridge on the Cam), road junctions (Berkhamsted on the route from London to the Midlands), the entrances to towns (York, Lincoln, Nottingham — sometimes two castles per town, on opposite banks), and rebellious regions (the lordships of the Welsh Marches, where Hereford, Shrewsbury and Chester anchored a frontier line).
Norman castles were sited to control three things: movement (rivers, roads, town gates), people (rebellious regions, urban populations) and patronage networks (the centre of a tenant-in-chief’s landholdings). Defence against invasion was rarely the first reason.
Castles as Instruments of Power
It is tempting to see castles as defensive shells — places to retreat into when attacked. They were, but only secondarily. Their primary function was projection: a permanent garrison of armed Norman knights stationed in the middle of an English town or shire, riding out to enforce lordship, collect rents, hold courts and intimidate the locals. Building one often meant demolishing English houses; castle-work meant forcing English peasants to dig the ditches and raise the motte without pay.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written by English monks, captures this resentment with bitter clarity. The Chronicler complained that the Normans built castles far and wide across the country, and that the poor people were oppressed with taxes and forced labour. The very visibility of a motte rising over a market square was the message: this land has new owners, and they live on a hill watching you.
Berkhamsted — a motte-and-bailey on the road from London to the Midlands, built shortly after Hastings; the Witan submitted to William here in December 1066. York — two motte-and-baileys on opposite banks of the Ouse, built after the 1069 northern revolt to anchor the Harrying. Lincoln — built on the highest point in the city after 166 English houses were demolished to make room. Tower of London — the White Tower in stone, dominating the river approach to the capital.