At Hastings the English army fought on foot and could not withstand the charges of mounted Norman knights, who wore long chainmail hauberks and carried spears. Wooden saddles, stirrups and lances held under the armpit gave the knight a firmer seat and impressive striking force. The Norman Conquest was achieved largely thanks to two instruments of war new to England, the mounted, armoured knight and the castle. The knight was a key factor in the victory at Hastings, and the castle dramatically militarised the English landscape. A knight's armour and heavy horse were expensive to buy and keep, so the king, in return for knight service, gave land as an incentive. As armour grew into full plate by the 15th century, knights seemed unstoppable, until powerful firearms capable of puncturing plate armour arrived.
The chronicler Orderic Vitalis explained that the fortifications the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, so the English, in spite of their courage and love of fighting, could put up only a weak resistance. Over about 150 years the Normans built around 1,000 castles in England and Wales. A motte and bailey castle had a mound of earth, the motte, with a wooden tower on it, and next to it a courtyard called the bailey. Earthwork motte and bailey castles were quickly and easily constructed, with the help of local forced labour. Well over 500 were raised in the 20 years after 1066.
To build a motte, a perimeter rampart was dug within a few days, and then a team of 100 men took around forty days to finish the mound, which was lightning-fast compared with the time needed for a stone castle. The timber tower on a motte, the donjon, was often prefabricated offsite and then erected like flat-pack furniture. It was uncomfortable to live in and was used mainly as a watchtower, firing post and last-stand refuge if there was an attack. Sometimes really hastily constructed mottes started to slump and did not survive later attempts to rebuild with heavy stone. From the 1100s some owners rebuilt wooden castles in stone, with a stone keep.
Castles were often sited within a pre-existing Saxon settlement, and locals' homes were destroyed to make way for the conquerors. A ringwork castle had an outer bailey but, instead of a motte, another circuit of banks, ditches and a timber palisade. The earliest ringworks predate the Conquest of 1066 and were built by the Anglo-Saxons and Viking settlers. Today there are more than 700 early castle sites in England that are harder to spot than famous stone castles, because most are earthwork castles built from timber in the decades after 1066, and the timber has long since rotted away.
The Welsh princes built castles of their own: the earliest were like the Normans' in design and of earth and timber, but in the thirteenth century they began to build in stone, generally on sites with strong natural defences such as a hill-top or a spot next to a river. When the country became more peaceful, castles were no longer needed for defence. Some were used as centres of administration where rents and taxes were collected, some held courts of law, and others fell into ruins.
Words to know
- donjon: timber tower
- palisade: wooden fence
- hauberks: chainmail coats
- prefabricated: built elsewhere first
