Castles weren’t just military buildings – they were opulent residences for pleasure-loving noblemen. By John Goodall
An Englishman’s castle is his home Where sheep may safely graze: Lowther Castle (1814), near Penrith, Cumbria
A. C. COOPER / PAUL HIGHNAM / COUNTRY LIFE PICTURE LIBRARY
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n 21st-century Britain, we are deluged with imagined visions of castles – in historical novels, fantasy films and computer games. They don’t all aim at historical accuracy, but they underline the enormous popularity of these buildings and the idea that castles are somehow special buildings with a distinct character of their own. What were the realities of life in castles as they existed across Britain in the past, and what informs our popular understanding of them? The second question is easier to answer than the first. Castles have long been understood as being distinctive because they were houses designed for war. The conventional view is that they were introduced to England by the Normans in 1066 as a tool of conquest and offered a practical means by which William the Conqueror successfully imposed his rule on an unwilling kingdom.
In the aftermath of the Conquest – the same conventional view continues – these buildings created an unstable political environment because barons could resist royal authority from the safety of their homes. Over the next two centuries, then, an arms race began between architects and siege engineers, which brought about a flowering of castle architecture in about 1300. Thereafter, however, the growing power of the Crown and the development of gunpowder rendered castles obsolete and by the close of the Middle Ages they had gradually vanished into irrelevance. This purely military (and medieval) understanding of the castle is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. Castles were introduced to England by the Normans, and they have always been distinguished by the Funerary brass of Bishop Wyville of Salisbury (d 1375) of Sherborne Castle
architectural trappings of fortification, such as turrets, battlements and arrow loops. The historical record also offers boundless evidence of their use in warfare, not merely in the 11th and 12th centuries but much later as well. There were Tudor sieges, such as that of Cooling in 1554, and there were even attempts in some Georgian and Victorian residences to create defences that might at least resist an industrial mob. Yet castles were never merely military buildings. Almost from the first, they also enjoyed prestige as the residences of kings, nobles and knights. Indeed, castles were buildings that expressed their power, celebrated their vocation as a fighting class and reflected their wealth. The greatest of them also commanded estates including parks – reserved for the jealously guarded aristocratic pleasure of hunting – and were commonly associated in the Middle Ages with settlements and ecclesiastical foundations including monasteries or colleges. So while castles may have begun as fortifications, they almost The Oldie April 2022 23
