Castles through the Ages

Castles, as I've noted in previous posts, really only first appeared around the year 1000, as a combination of palace and fortress.  There had of course been palaces and fortresses going back to prehistoric times, but their combination in a single defensible structure was new in the eleventh century.

We have very few eleventh-century castles.  The occasional grim eleventh-century square tower is about all that we have, or perhaps an outer wall such as the eleventh-century shell-keep of Gisors in Normandy, seen below.

The reason we have such few remains of eleventh-century castles is because castles were rebuilt a lot.  Siege technology was constantly improving (think trebuchets), and castles had to stay one step ahead.  Besides, castles had to make a Statement, and the bigger, the stronger, and more elegant they were, the better statement they made.  Any castle lord who could afford it would renovate and rebuild his castle every generation or so.

In some ways gunpowder did in castles.  In France, where under Louis XIV his war minister, Vauban, systematically went around the countryside with cannons destroying castles (or at least knocking big holes in them), castles were pretty much given up in the early modern period.

But the castles were still there.  They were built of literally millions of stones and were not going anywhere.  And all that stonework could be made defensible again with some effort.  In some places, like Scotland, where it was harder to get cannons across the lochs and highland hills, new castles were being built in the early modern period, designed pretty much the same as medieval castles.  After all, that's what a castle was supposed to be like.

The image below is of Blackness Castle in Scotland, on the Firth of Forth.  It was used for its original military purpose up through the nineteenth century, when soldiers were quartered there.

For the most part, however, most medieval (and early modern) castles had become ruins by the nineteenth century, with a lot of the best stone carried off by enterprising locals to use in their own building projects.  With the development of the Romantic movement (think Ivanhoe) as a reaction against the industrial age, people decided they liked ruined castles.  Castles were romantic.

Some castles were renovated once again in the twentieth century, becoming elegant homes (by twentieth-century standards) as they had once been elegant homes (by twelfth-century standards) in the Middle Ages.  These aren't ruined anymore, but they sure are romantic.

The image above is the Scottish castle Eilean Donan, on an arm of the Irish Sea.  It's now a house as well as a castle that has been voted "most romantic" by various entities.  It really is a romantic site.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook sellers.  Also available in paperback!

Motte-and-bailey castles

Earlier I discussed the development of castles.  Here I want to discuss one of the earliest versions from the eleventh century, the motte-and-bailey castle.  (They were not called this in the eleventh century when they were invented.  They were just called castles.  But modern historians of architecture like the term because it's descriptive and because it distinguishes this type of castle from other, later types.)

Let's start with the motte.  The term means a mound.  (It does not mean a moat, and in fact most real castles did not have the circle of water with swans swimming in it that one sees in modern fairy-tale books--not even a moat without the swans.)

A castle was of course most defensible if built on a high place, and an artificial mound increased the height.  There is some discussion whether a mound was built first and the keep that was the heart of a castle built on top of that, or, as seems more likely, the keep (tower) was built first, grounded on bedrock, and then a mound was built up around it.  A wall was often built all the way around the base of the motte, providing additional protection for the tower.

In any event, the lower, underground levels of the tower were used for storage, the ground level had no windows or doors, and the first door was one level up.  This required a wooden staircase on the outside, which could easily be taken in or fired in case of attack.  Only the upper levels had decent windows.

In the above image, the tower dates from the twelfth century, not the eleventh, but you can see the typical position of the one door, well above ground level.

The bailey was an open area, inside a wall, where buildings were run up to serve the needs of the castle:  barracks, kitchens, more storerooms, weapons shops, mews (for the hawks), stables, and the like.  Originally the wall encircling the bailey would have been built of wooden posts, more like a stockade than anything, but soon the wood was replaced with stone.

What architectural historians consider the "normal" motte-and-bailey arrangement consisted of two sets of circular walls, essentially looking from above like a figure-8, with the motte in one and the bailey in the other, the two joined in the center.  But as already noted, every castle was different, and the typical arrangement was soon to have a wide, open area at the base of the motte, where all the incidental buildings were built, and a high stone wall encircling it all.

The castle of Gisors seen above, built at the end of the eleventh century, has its central keep on top of a very large mound, a wall around it, and more walls at the base of the mound and beyond it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval castles, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Dukes and Counts

The most important medieval nobles were the dukes and counts, that is regional authorities.  Let's start with the counts (and no, in spite of what Sesame Street may have told you, a "count" is not someone who can count from 1 to 10).

A count is the head of a county (there, wasn't that easy?).  In the US we still have counties as the basic geographic and governing units; we got them from Europe.  The word "count" comes originally from comes, meaning "companion," because the first counts, back in the sixth century, were the companions of the kings who appointed them.  Originally kings were careful to move these officers around, to keep them from building up too much local power, but counts became hereditary during the ninth century, well before the monarchs did.

Counts did not "own" their counties anymore than the modern county commissioner owns an American county, but they were the chief administrative officers, especially responsible for giving justice in their courts.  They also collected revenue and taxes for the kings and raised armies if armies needed raising.

For those of you following Downton Abbey, in England a count is generally called an earl (from the Anglo-Saxon eorl).  He's still a count the whole time, and his wife is called a countess, not an earless (you can see why).

A duke was a sort of high-level version of a count.  He was head of a duchy, which generally meant a group of several counties.  Eleanor of Aquitaine, who married successively Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, was duchess of Aquitaine, basically the southwest quarter of France, which contained multiple counties.

An especially large and important county might also be called a duchy.  Normandy was sometimes called a county, sometimes a duchy, but the dukes, who became kings of England as well in 1066, preferred the title of duke to that of count.  (The image is the castle of Gisors, in Normandy, built by the dukes shortly after they became kings of England.  It is now a municipal park.  Schoolchildren are brought there to learn about their patrimony.)

Although dukes and counts were fairly independent of the kings in the ninth through eleventh centuries, in the twelfth century all western kings all persuaded these great lords that they held from them in fief.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on dukes and counts and so much more about life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.