Anoca.org

Castle

(castle)

This article describes the fortified buildings. "Castle" is also an alternative name for the Rook and the move of castling in chess .

The Castle (from the Latin castellum, diminutive ofcastra, a military camp, in turn the plural of castrum or watchpost), is a fort , a camp and the logical development of a Fortified enclosure .However a number of large château -like mansions are also calledcastles.

A castle is a small self-contained fortress , usually of the middle ages , though the term is sometimes used of prehistoric earthworks (e.g. Hollingbury Castle , Maiden Castle ), andsometimes of citadels (like the castles of Badajoz and Burgos ) or small detached forts d'arrêt in modern times. It is also often applied to the principal mansionof a prince or nobleman, and in France (as château ) to any country seat, this use being a relic of the feudal age.

Castles also figure prominently into Japanese history , where thefeudal Daimyo inhabited them.

Contents

1 Medieval European castles

1.1 Influence of Castles in British History
1.2 Bibliography

2 Castle building

3 See also

Medieval European castles

Under its twofold aspect of a fortress and a residence, the medieval castle is inseparably connected with the subjects offortification (see Fortification and siegecraft ) and architecture .

As the size of local communities grew, it became necessary to provide both a larger and stronger fortification, which wouldprovide for a very strong perimeter defence Castle walls together with lodgings ( Keep ) suitable for a Baron and lower grade housing within the walls to accommodate some of the key population of thelocal area.

Castles were also developed to defend key part of the countryside such as a mountain pass or river estuary and often exploitedthe natural geography to support the defensive walls through exploitation of cliffs, rivers, hills and the like.

By their very nature they were very permanent structures and many survive through to the modern day; they are now mostlyconsidered monuments or however notable architectural examples.

Some well known examples include:

For a more complete list see List of castles .

In addition to the castle walls, other defensive features include towers at the angular direction changes of walls, moats , drawbridges , battlements , portcullis etc.

The traditional mechanism used to defeat a castle would normally be to lay siege whereby a surrounding army would camp out of range of attack and wait for the internees torun out of either food or water. Offensive techniques would include the use of catapults , siege engines , battering rams and later mortar and cannon .

The word "castle" (castel) was introduced into English shortly before the Norman Conquest to denote a type of fortress, then new to the country, brought in by the Norman knights whom Edward the Confessor had sent forto defend Herefordshire against the inroads of the Welsh .

Richard's castle, of which the earthworks remain and which has given its name to a parish , was erected at this period on the border of Herefordshire and Shropshire by Richard Fitz Scrob . Theessential feature of this type was a circular mound of earth surrounded by a dry ditch and flattened at the top. Around the crestof its summit was placed a timber palisade . This moated mound was styled in French motte (in latin, mota), a word still common in Frenchplace-names. It is clearly depicted at the time of the Conquest in the Bayeux Tapestry , and was then familiar on the mainland of western Europe .

A description of this earlier castle is given in the life of John, bishop ofTerouanne (Ada Sanctorum, quoted by GT Clark, Medieval Mil. Architecture): "The rich and the noble of thatregion being much given to feuds and bloodshed, fortify themselves ... and by these strongholds subdue their equals and oppresstheir inferiors. They heap up a mound as high as they are able, and dig round it as broad a ditch as they can ... Round thesummit of the mound they construct a palisade of timber to act as a wall. Inside the palisade they erect a house, or rather acitadel, which looks down on the whole neighbourhood". St John, bishop of Terouanne, died in 1130 , and this castle of Merchem, built by a lord of the town many years before, may be taken as typical of thepractice of the 11th century. But in addition to the mound, the citadel of the fortress, there was usually appended to it a bailey or basecourt (and sometimes two) of semilunar or horseshoe shape, so that the mound stood on the line of the enceinte.

The rapidity and ease with which it was possible to construct castles of this type made them characteristic of the Conquestperiod in England and of the Anglo-Norman settlements in Wales , Ireland and the Scottish lowlands. In later days a stone wall replaced the timber palisade and produced what is known as theshell-keep, the type met with in the extant castles of Berkeley, Alnwick and Windsor .

But the Normans introduced also two other types of castle. The one was adopted where they found a natural rock strongholdwhich only needed adaptation, as at Clifford, Ludlow, the Peak and Exeter, to produce a citadel; the other was a type whollydistinct, the high rectangular tower of masonry , of which the Tower of London is the best-known example, though that of Colchester wasprobably constructed in the 11th century also. But the latter type belongs rather to the more settled conditions of the 12th century when haste was not a necessity, and in the first half of which thefine extant keeps of Hedingham and Rochester were erected. These towers were originally surrounded by palisades, usually onearthen ramparts, which were replaced later by stone walls. The whole fortress thus formed was styled a castle, but sometimesmore precisely "tower and castle," the former being the citadel, and the latter the walled enclosure, which preserved morestrictly the meaning of the Roman castellum.

Reliance was placed by the engineers of that time simply and solely on the inherent strength of the structure, the walls ofwhich defied the battering ram , and could only be undermined at the costof much time and labour, while the narrow apertures were constructed to exclude arrows orflaming brands.

At this stage the crusades , and the consequent opportunities afforded to westernengineers of studying the solid fortresses of the Byzantine empire ,revolutionized the art of castlebuilding, which henceforward follows recognized principles. Many castles were built in the HolyLand by the crusaders of the 12th century, and it has been shown (Oman, Art of War: the Middle Ages, p. c20) that thedesigners realized, first, that a second line of defences should be built within the main enceinte, and a third line orkeep inside the second line; and secondly, that a wall must be flanked by projecting towers. From the Byzantine engineers,through the crusaders, we derive, therefore, the cardinal principle of the mutual defence of all the parts of a fortress.

The donjon of western Europe was regarded as the fortress, the outer walls as accessory defences; in the East each envelopewas a fortress in itself, and the keep became merely the last refuge of the garrison, used only when all else had been captured.Indeed the keep, in several crusader castles, is no more than a tower, larger than the rest, built into the enceinte and servingwith the rest for its flanking defence, while the fortress was made strongest on the most exposed front. The idea of the flankingtowers (which were of a type very different from the slight projections of the shell-keep and rectangular tower) soon penetratedto Europe, and Alnwick Castle (1140-1150) shows the influence of the new system.

But the finest of all castles of the middle ages was Richardde Lion 's fortress of Château Gaillard Les Andelys. Here the innermost ward was protected by an elaborate system of strongappended defences, which included a strong fte-de-pont covering the Seine bridge (seeClark, i. 384, and Oman, p. 533). The castle stood upon high ground and consisted of three distinct enceintes or wards besidesthe keep, which was in this case merely a strong tower forming part of the innermost ward, The donion was rarely defended cioutrance and it gradually sank in importance as the outer "wards" grew stronger. Round instead of rectangular towers were nowbecoming usual, the finest examples of their employment as keeps being at Conisborough in England and at Coucy in France. Against the relatively feeble siegeartillery of the 13th century a well built fortress was almost proof, butthe mines and the battering ram of the attack were more formidable, and it was realized that corners in the stonework of thefortress were more vulnerable than a uniform curved surface. Château Gaillard fell to Philip Augustus in 1204 after a strenuous defence, and the success ofthe assailants was largely due to the wise and skilful employment of mines. An angle of the noble keep of Rochester wasundermined and brought down by John in 1215 .

The next development was the extension of the principle of successive lines of defence to form what is called the "concentric"castle, in which each ward was placed wholly within another which enveloped it; places thus built on a flat side (e.g. Caerphilly Castle ) became for the first time more formidable thanstrongholds perched upon rocks and hills such as Château Gaillard, where the more exposed parts indeed possessed many successivelines of defence, but at other points, for want of room, it was impossible to build more than one or, at most, two walls. Inthese cases, the fall of the inner ward by surprise, escalade , vive force, or evenby ordinary siege (as was sometimes feasible), entailed the fall of the whole castle. The adoption of the concentric systemprecluded any such mischance, and thus, even though siege engines improved during the 13th and 14th centuries, the defence, bythe massive strength of the concentric castle in some cases, by natural inaccessibility of position in others, maintained itselfsuperior to the attack during the latter middle ages. Its final fall was due to the introduction of gunpowder as a propellant. In the 14th century thechange begins, in the 15th it is fully developed, in the 16th the feudal fastness has become an anachronism.

The general adoption of cannon placed in the hands of the central power a forcewhich ruined the baronial fortifications in a few days of firing. The possessors of cannon were usually private individuals ofthe middle classes, from whom the prince hired the matériel and the technical workmen. A typical case will be found in thehistory of Brandenburg and Kingdom of Prussia (Carlyle, Frederick the Great, bk. iii. ch. i.), the impregnable castle of Friesack,held by an intractable feudal noble, Dietrich von Quitzow, being reduced in two days by the elector Frederick I with "Heavy Peg" (Faule Grete) and other guns hired and borrowed (February 1414 ). The beginnings of orderly government in Brandenburg thus depended upon the guns, and thetaking of Friesack is, in Carlyle's phrase, "a fact memorable to every Prussian man." In England, the earl of Warwick in 1464 reduced the strong fortress of Bamburgh in a week, and in Germany, Franzvon Sickingen 's stronghold of Landstuhl, formerly impregnable on its heights, was ruined in one day by the artillery ofPhilip of Hesse ( 1523 ). Very heavy artillery was used for such work, of course, and against lighter natures, some castles and even fortifiedcountry-houses or castellated mansions managed to make a stout stand even as late as the great castles erected by Henry VIII , especially those at Deal, Sandown and Walmer (c. 1540 ), which played some part in the events of the 17th century, and of which Walmer Castleis still the official residence of the lord warden of the Cinque Ports .

Viollet-le-Duc, in his Annals of a Fortress (English trans.), gives a full and interesting account of the repeated renovationsof the fortress on his imaginary site in the valley of the Doubs, the construction by Charles the Bold of artillery towers at theangles of the castle, the protection of the masonry by earthen outworks, boulevards and demi-boulevards, and, in the 17thcentury, the final service of the medieval walls and towers as a pure enceinte de sfireti. Here and there we find old castlesserving as forts d'arret or block-houses in mountain passes and defiles,and in some few cases, as at Dover , they formed the nucleus of purelymilitary places of arms, but normally the castle falls into ruins, becomes a peaceful mansion, or is merged in the fortificationsof the town which has grown up around it. In the Annals of a Fortress the site of the feudal castle is occupied by the citadel ofthe walled town, for once again, with the development of the middle class and of cammerce and industry, the art of the engineercame to be disolayed chiefly in the fortification of cities. The baronial "castle" assumes pan passu the form of a mansion,retaining indeed for long some capacity for defence, but in the end losing all military characteristics save a few which survivedas ornaments. Examples of such castellated mansions are seen in Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire, and Hurstmonceaux, Sussex , erected in the 15th century, and nearly all older castles which survived werecontinually improved and altered to serve as residences.

Influence of Castles in British History

Such strongholds as existed in England at the time of the Norman Conquest seem to have offered but little resistance toWilliam the Norman, who, in order effectually to guard against invasions from without as well as to awe his newly-acquiredsubjects, immediately began to erect castles all over the kingdom, and likewise to repair and augment the old ones. Besides, ashe had parcelled out the lands of the English amongst his followers, they, to protect themselves from the resentment of thedespoiled natives, built strongholds and castles on their estates, and these were multiplied so rapidly during the troubled reignof King Stephen that the "adulterine" (i.e. unauthorized) castles are said by one writer to have amounted to 1115.

In the first instance, when the interest of the king and of barons was identical, the former had only retained in his handsthe castles in the chief towns of the shires, which were entrusted to his sheriffs or constables. But the great feudal revoltsunder the Conqueror and his sons showed how formidable an obstacle to the rule of the king was the existence of such fortressesin private hands, while the people hated them from the first for the oppressions connected with their erection and maintenance.It was, therefore, the settled policy of the crown to strengthen the royal castles and increase their number, while jealouslykeeping in check those of the barons. But in the struggle between Stephen and the, empress Maud for the crown, which becamelargely a war of sieges, the royal power was relaxed and there was an outburst of castle-building, without permission, by thebarons. These in many cases acted as petty sovereigns, and such was their tyranny that the native chronicler describes thecastles as "filled with devils and evil men." These excesses paved the way for the pacification at the close of the reign, whenit was provided that all unauthorized castles constructed during its course should be destroyed. Henry II , in spite of his power, was warned by the great revoltagainst him that he must still rely on castles, and the massive keeps of Newcastle and of Dover date from this period.

Under his sons the importance of the chief castles was recognized as so great that the struggle for their control was in theforefront of every contest. When Richard made vast grants at his accession to his brother John, he was careful to reserve thepossession of certain castles, and when John rose against the king's minister, Longchamp, in 1191 , the custody of castles was the chief point of dispute throughout their negotiations, and Lincoln was besieged onthe king's behalf, as were Tickhill, Windsor and Marlboroughsubsequently, while the siege of Nottingham had to be completed by Richard himself on his arrival. To John, in turn, as king, thefall of Château Gaillard meant the loss of Rouen and of Normandy with it, and when he endeavoured to repudiate the newly-grantedGreat Charter, his first step was to prepare the royal castles against attack and make them his centres of esistance The barons,who had begun their revolt by besieging that of Northampton, now assailed that of Oxford as well and seized that of Rochester.The king recovered Rochester after a severe struggle and captured Tonbridge, but thenceforth there was a war of sieges betweenJohn with his mercenaries and Louis of France with his Frenchmen and the barons, which was specially notable for the greatdefence of Dover Castle by Hubert de Burgh against Louis. On the finaltriumph of the royal cause, after John's death, at the battle of Lincoln, the general pacification was accompanied by a freshissue of the Great Charter in the autumn of 1217 , in which the precedent of Stephen's reignwas followed and a special clause inserted that all "adulterine" castles, namely those which had been constructed or rebuiltsince the breaking out of war between John and the barons, should be immediately destroyed. And special stress was laid on thisin the writs addressed to the sheriffs.

In 1223 Hubert de Burgh, as regent, demanded the surrender to the crown of all royalcastles not in official custody, and though he succeeded in this, Falkes de Breauté, John's mercenary, burst into revolt nextyear, and it cost a great national effort and a siege of nearly two months to reduce Bedford Castle, which he had held. Towards the close of Henry's reign castles again asserted, in the Baron's War,their importance. The Provisions of Oxford included a list of the chief royal castles and of their appointed castellans with theoath that they were to take; but the alien favourites refused to make way for them till they were forcibly ejected. When warbroke out it was Rochester Castle that successfully held Simon de Montfort at bay in 1264 ,and in Pevensey Castle that the fugitives from the rout of Lewes wereable to defy his power. Finally, after his fall at Evesham, it was in Kenilworth Castle that the remnant of his followers madetheir last stand, holding out nearly five months against all the forces of the crown, till their provisions failed them at theclose of 1266 .

Thus for two centuries after the Norman Conquest castles had proved of primary consequence in English political struggles,revolts and warfare. And, although, when the country was again torn by civil strife, their military importance was of smallaccount, the crown's historic jealousy of private fortification was still seen in the need to obtain the king's licence to crenellate (i.e. embattle) the country mansion.

Bibliography

GT Clark, Medieval Military Architecture in England (2 vols.), includes a few French castles and is the standard workon the subject, but inaccurate and superseded on some points by recent research; Professor Oman's Art of War in the MiddleAges is a wide survey of the subject, but follows Clark in some of his errors; Mackenzie, The Castles of England(1897), valuable for illustrations; Deville, Histoire du Château-Gaillard (1829) and Château d'Argues (1839);Viollet-le-Duc's Essay on the Military Architecture of the Middle Ages was translated by M Macdermott in 1860.

More recent studies will be found in JH Round's Geoffrey de Mandeville (1891); "English Castles" (Quarterly Review,July 1894); and "Castles of the Conquest" (Archeologia, lviii., 1902); St John Hope's "English Castles of the 10th and 11thCenturies" (Archaeol. Journal, lx., 1902); Mrs Armitage's "Early Norman Castles of England"; (Eng. Hist. Review, xix.1904), and her papers in Scot. Soc. Ant. Proc. xxxiv., and The Antiquary, July, August, 1906; G. Neilson's "TheMotes in Norman Scotland" (Scottish Review, lxiv., 1898); GH Orpen, "Motes and Norman Castles in Ireland" (Eng. Hist.Review, xxi., xxii., 1906-1907).

Castle building

Castle building was a task to be completed very often, as boundries increased greatly. The walls would most commonly go upfirst, so nothing could hurt the castle while it was being built. Then came the castle so the Town Lord could govern easily. Thena cathedral would be built. This would often be the longest job, due to the intricate artwork that went into it. Then thevillagers would be left to build their houses and shops, often with a separate kitchen building. Fields would be built and cropsharvested. A castle town is built.