19–20) as well as reflecting the highly militarised nature of early Norman society.
William and his immediate successors built on an imperial scale. The cathedral at Winchester (p. 47), the great towers at London and Colchester, and their own palace at Westminster (p. 79) were expressions of a parvenu dynasty at the helm of one of Europe’s richest monarchies. William and his contemporaries expressed their power in the architectural language of ancient Rome. The blind arcading on the White Tower was a deliberate quotation from antiquity; the tower at Colchester was constructed on the podium of the Roman temple of Claudius, while the bishop’s residence at Lincoln was framed as a triumphal arch (fig. 38). These buildings were not the busy, accretive structures of the Saxons; they set out to imitate the monumentality and spatial clarity of ancient Rome. The Normans had not built in this style or to this scale in Normandy; it was the Conquest that created a giddy mixture of excess, power and imperial triumphalism that was expressed in an outburst of architectural megalomania. Yet we should be clear, Anglo-French architecture was not a homogeneous style; it was one that varied significantly from region to region. Buildings in the west of England and in Yorkshire, for instance, looked very different. This account cannot describe the subtleties of these variations, nor does it attempt to do so.7
The Norman Military Occupation
Anglo-Saxon England was no stranger to invasion or fortification; both Offa and Alfred had commissioned well-engineered and effective defences (pp 40 and 51). These royal enterprises, offering communal security, were matched by the individual fortification of aristocratic residences with ramparts, walls, towers and gatehouses (p. 55). The situation in Normandy was broadly similar. Few nobles lived in strongly defended residences, but in the years after 1000 a large number of fortified residences – or castles – were being developed. In England the word ‘castle’ is used for the first time in the reign of Edward the Confessor to describe fortified places on the Welsh border, but on the eve of the Norman Conquest castles were neither common nor well developed on either side of the Channel.8
This was soon to change. The military requirements of conquest caused a rapid development in military engineering and a proliferation of castles across the English countryside. The first ones were simple structures: either ringworks, that is to say an area enclosed by earth ramparts topped with a palisade, or mottes, which are mounds upon which a fortified structure was built. Ringworks were the most common form of castle in Normandy and similar to Anglo-Saxon fortified sites such as Goltho, Lincolnshire (p. 55). Mottes were less common, though it seems that prehistoric mounds in Wiltshire had been converted into forts from the 1010s (p. 55). The earthworks of both types of fort could be raised with unskilled forced labour, while timber structures could easily be built by expert native carpenters. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the motte of the Conqueror’s castle at Hastings being built, under instruction, by Saxon slaves. Soon these mottes had a lower outer enclosure known as the bailey, which was used for stabling and accommodating any garrison.9
The most important of this first generation of castles were royal, a product of the systematic imposition of Norman sovereignty on England. They were erected in strategic locations to support field tactics and, crucially, in county towns (fig. 38). Many were built on the sites of former Saxon royal or aristocratic residences, most usually in a corner of the town walls (fig. 39). The novelty of these buildings was that they were not merely defensive residences; they were centres of administration, a symbol of new overlordship and a warning to the native inhabitants to submit.
As the Conqueror criss-crossed England he granted out land to his followers. The first grants were military commands intended to consolidate Norman power. A quarter of England was granted to the king’s tenants-in-chief, some 170 or so of William’s companions. Most of these men built castles, first as safe and secure places to live, but in due course as places from which to administer their lands and to enforce peace. While the tenants-in-chief kept about half of the land themselves, the rest they granted to some 6,200 vassals, knights and men-at-arms. Of these, the majority held lands valued at less than £1 a year, but a large elite, some 940, owned lands worth between £5 and £45 a year. A good number of these built small castles, too. Ultimately, this meant that in the period to 1130 there might have been as many as 500 castles in use, half of which were in private hands. This was a big change from the situation before the Conquest either in England or Normandy, where very few had had a fortified house.10 Every one of this first generation of timber castles has been rebuilt, but there is no doubt that they were functional structures, primarily military buildings – a necessary and mechanistic part of the conquest and colonisation of England. In the autumn of 1066 just such a castle was built at Canterbury. A tower was raised up on a motte surrounded by a ditch, beyond which was a palisaded outer bailey, covering in all perhaps 5 per cent of the city. It overwhelmed the town and must have accommodated mounted knights as well as foot soldiers (fig. 39). At Abinger, Surrey, there was a castle belonging to an under-tenant at the other end of the social scale. The 35ft-diameter top of its motte has been excavated, revealing the plan of the original timber stockade and small tower. It is possible to visualise what these towers looked like by visiting the freestanding bell tower at St Mary’s, Pembridge, Herefordshire, built between 1115 and 1150. Here, in the middle of this sleepy village, is a massive timber-built pylon with a weighty scissor-braced internal structure – about as close as we can come to envisaging the Conqueror’s timber towers (fig. 40). They cannot have been comfortable or elegant places to live.11
Fig. 38 Cathedrals and castles built 1050–1100. It is very noticeable that at this date there were few churches and abbeys in the west or north, and that the number of castles north of York is markedly less dense.
Fig. 39 Canterbury, Kent, in the early Middle Ages. The cathedral lay in the north-eastern corner of the city – English cathedrals and abbeys are rarely placed in the middle. In the south, in its own enclosure, was the castle.
Fig. 40 Freestanding bell tower at St Mary’s, Pembridge, Herefordshire. This late 14th-century tower is supported internally by eight mighty oak posts forming a square. They are braced diagonally and horizontally up to the pyramidal roof. Though this is a much later example, the footprints of such massive timber constructions have been excavated and dated to the 11th and 12th centuries.
Two buildings started by William, however, were – the White Tower, London, and its sister in Colchester. These colossal structures were palaces for the duke-made-king. They contained a suite of reception rooms and a large chapel in an overwhelming stone-built tower. Such towers had been built for rulers before in the Loire valley and, indeed, in Normandy itself, but not quite on this scale or to this level of sophistication. In fact, scale was integral to their purpose; the parapets of the White Tower were raised far above its roof line to create a more domineering silhouette (fig. 37). The population of London, as the largest and most important city, and that of Colchester, guarding the east flank of England from troublesome Scandinavia, would be in no doubt that their new king was a mighty and determined master. Yet these were sophisticated residences, too. They had fireplaces with chimneys, garderobes (latrines) and simple, bold architectural settings for thrones, tables and chairs. Furnished with rich textiles, brightly painted wooden furniture and sparkling with candlelit gold plate, these palatial towers
19–20) as well as reflecting the highly militarised nature of early Norman society.
