Gone Medieval - The Rise of British Castles

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Castles. For centuries they have held fast across the landscape of the British Isles. Like beacons on a hill they project power in stone and wood. But where did these quintessentially medieval strongholds come from? And how were they put to use?All this month on Gone Medieval, Dr Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis are embarking on a new six-part series exploring the story of Britain's great castles: how they were built, how they survived assault and what they represented to the peoples that lived nearby.In this episode Eleanor is joined by medieval historian and all-round castles expert Marc Morris to discover the origins of castles in the British Isles, unpack the anatomy of a typical medieval castle and encounter perhaps the greatest castle England has ever seen: Dover.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

Castles. For centuries, they have held fast across the landscape of the British Isles. Like beacons on a hill, they project power in stone and wood. Any mention of castles often conjures up images of hulking masonry and arrow slits, battering rams, trebushes, and red-hot barrels of tar. And yet, whilst certainly means, military and character, castles didn't just serve a military purpose. They became central to the life of society, functioning as both fort and home to barons and lords that needed protection. They encouraged commerce, witnessed huge displays of courtly largesse, and hosted great

tournaments and markets. Their kitchens were alive with the hubbub of lavish hospitality. Huge fires, billows of steam from bubbling pot. the cooking of sumptuous feasts. Quite simply, castles were an essential part of medieval life in these lands. But now, over a thousand years later, the islands of Britain have become littered with the ruins of so many time-worn hill forts and colossal stone fortresses. Where did these quintessentially medieval strongholds come from? And how were they put to good use? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga.

and throughout October, myself and Matt Lewis are taking Gone Medieval on a journey across Britain and Ireland to tell you the story of castles. How they were built? How they survived assault. And what they represented to the medieval peoples that lived within and outside their vast walls. Today we start at the beginning, with the rise of British castles. Let's unpack the anatomy of a typical medieval castle. Discover how the design of these huge structures arrived in Britain from across the channel.

And along the way, we will encounter perhaps the greatest castle England has ever seen. But let's not rush ahead. This medieval tale begins, as it often does, with the Normans. The year is 1066, but it is later than you think. The great battle waged by William the Conqueror and Harold Godwinson for control of the kingdom is two weeks passed. The rolling hills of Sussex and the green shires of Kent now play host to an army of Norman invaders who ravage the countryside as they march towards London. But the route that they take is rather roundabout. Instead of marching directly north, they advanced up the coast towards

Dover. William, intent on tightening his grip on his newly won domains, wants to capture the port and stamp his mark on a region that was crucial to England's trade with the continent. As his entourage draws up to the gates of the town's wooden fort, its English custodians are stricken with fear. They have caught wind of the slaughter at Hastings, and the subsequent damage William's army have done to their country. Yet while the fort's inhabitants prepare to surrender unconditionally, the Normans set it aflame,

eager to wet their growing appetite for ransack and plunder. By daybreak, just cinder and ash remain of the fort that William had hoped to inherit. Out of the embers, he seeks to raise a new stronghold, a castle, which he can use to remind the local population of his power and prestige. According to William Poitier, he spends the next eight days rebuilding and adding new fortifications, hoping to leave an impression on the town of Dover that might stand the test of time. Over the next 10 years, this story is replicated throughout England. From the northern hinterlands of Durham to the White Cliffs of Dover.

From the western marches of Ludlow to the Fens of East Anglia, castles, inspired by the designs of the stone masons and builders in Normandy, were erected in their hundreds. Great mounds of earth, soaring timber palisades, and imposing stone towers became a familiar sight for William's new English subjects, an unmistakable expression of who now ruled the kingdom. The story of castles in Britain is one inextricably linked with the Normans, who came to these shores in 1066.

Indeed, castles are arguably the Norman's greatest export, and perhaps the most indelible marker they have left with us today. So to explore the castle they built and the masterpieces that their descendants built upon William's initial fortress at Dover, I'm joined by historian, best-selling author, and all-around castle expert Mark Morris. First of all, Mark, thank you so much for making time for us today on Gone Medieval. No, it's always a pleasure.

I'm very excited to have you here today because, in my opinion, you are the guy to talk to about castles. And as a result of that, I am going to start you off with the classic nerdy historian question. How do you define a castle? It's really difficult. It's a difficulty I found way back when I wrote a book on castles and they wanted a subtitle. And there is kind of no decent synonym because if you start to sort of say, it's a fortress. It's like, well, a castle is more than a fortress because people live in it in a luxurious way. And so you end up with something very bland, like buildings or something I think

we ended up with. So it's tricky. If you look it up in the dictionary, I think they just, the OED, do go with a fortress, a stronghold. And going back about 60 or 70 years, there was a famous English historian of castle called R. Allen Brown. And he said, no, no, no, no. A castle is much more than just a fortress. It also has to be a palace, a residence. And that was his kind of one size of it's all definition. And that sort of, when I read that book at university, I thought, oh yeah, that makes sense because you get taken to a lot of fortresses that might present as castles, but then you kind of think, well, there's nowhere here for the king to go to bed, or there's nowhere here for banqueting, or there's no sense of luxury here. It's just canon and sort of rooms for

squaddies. And equally, you can get taken to basically sort of modern stately homes that kind of have self-designated as castles. And you think, well, this is a bit of a sham castle, isn't it? Because really, there's no sense of this building taking the fight to anybody. It's just got kind of crenellations added on top for decoration. So Brown's definition that you have to have, in order to be a castle, it has to be a fortress and a stronghold. Seems to work very well. It's certainly in the last couple of generations that academics blast them come along and said, if that's your definition, then lots of medieval castles don't meet that requirement in that they're not always built with defence in mind.

So it's very, very difficult. I think the best thing to do is just kind of, you know, it becomes sort of self-referential. And I just say, if there's people in the middle age is called it a castle, then let's call it a castle. Let's go with that. I think that that's absolutely fair. I mean, who am I to tell them what a castle is or is not? But, okay, let's create a kind of hierarchy of these different meanings. So a fortress is just kind of bare bones.

This is a building that exists for military and defensive purposes. Yeah, I mean, the fort part, and as in French, just means it's strong. It's a stronghold. It's a strong place. It's somewhere where you hole up when the going gets tough. So Fortress is very straightforward, as is, you know, palace or stately home or whatever you choose to call it. Castle, though, has that sort of like unique blend of the two. It's kind of like we are creating here a spectrum. And then on one hand,

you've got the fortress down the end that is just doing military things. On the other hand, you have a palace or a stately home that is being a site for pleasure. And then a castle is somewhere in the middle. Is that fair as a rough and ready estimate? Well, yeah, I think that illustrates, well, one of the problems that Castle Designers faced is that you're on the one hand building a residence for one of the most powerful people in whichever polity you're in. So whether it's the king or the archbishop or a great earl or, you know, someone who expects the finer things in life, someone who's traveling with a household of 50 or 100 or more people. So it's got to be well lit, well heated. It's got to be sumptuous. It's got to be luxurious. On the other hand,

security says these people need to be kept safe in the event of foreign invasion or, you know, the civil war or whatever. So it has to be strong and it has to be warlike. And they're two quite contradictory briefs to an architect, you know. If you say I want it to be well lit, for example, to take an obvious example, you need big windows. If you want it to be secure, you need tiny little narrow slits. So the way that castle designers reconcile these contradictory imperatives, I think, is what makes those buildings so very fascinating to study. Absolutely, because they're doing so much. I think especially when we have buildings that survive from the Middle Ages, oftentimes

they are doing one thing. You know, a cathedral is a cathedral, even if, you know, occasionally you get a Lincoln that is fortified. A church is a church. But castles are doing military duty. They are doing pomp and presentation. and then they're also sometimes having a little church in there as well. You always have your chapel, don't you? So they're quite interesting because they contain multitudes. Yeah. I think there are a good lens through which to view the Middle Ages as a whole. And you kind of get all walks of life there.

I mean, yes, they are primarily aristocratic residences, but the aristocratic households or their next networks draw in other people as well. So, yeah, I think they're fascinating buildings. Well, I suppose moving on, what would you say the main features of a castle are? If you are going to describe one to someone who's never seen or heard of a castle before, what would you say that they exhibit? This is actually a question I put sometimes to schoolchildren. It's a good way of illustrating the way we think about castles. Because if you say, okay, draw a castle or name five things you expect to see at a castle.

And I think this probably works as well with adult audience as well. They say, oh, okay, I get it. So you start them off and you say a drawbridge. Oh, right. Okay. So drawbridge will be one, towers, crenellations, or. battlements or ramparts, whatever you call them, a moat, perhaps, arrow loops, crossbow loops, a portcullis, you know, the great grill that comes down across the entrance to stop people

getting in. So they rattle off all these things that you see on castles in film, castles in reality and castles when they're made as models for you as children, play castles, toy castles. Almost never does any audience say, as you already have, a chapel, chambers, bedrooms, a great hall, a forge, a smithy, a kitchen. So they always go for the military accoutrements, almost never the domestic ones. And yet, not only are castles both of those things, but 99.9% of the time,

you're only using those domestic features. You're very, very seldom using the arrow loops or using the dropping the port colors. So I'd go with those list of attributes to describe a castle to someone visiting. visiting from a distant planet. What different types of castles were there? Because, again, I think that when we say castle,

especially here in the British context, we're thinking of these grand Norman things, but there's a lot of different kinds of castle that could be a lot less, I suppose, imposing? Yeah, I think to some extent, I think the main thing to emphasize is that they evolve across time. I'm going to end up sort of eating these words, I'm sure, in a minute, but by and large, I think, from one era to the next, there is a kind of common or

garden type of castle, and that evolves as the centuries progress. You specifically mentioned Britain, so I'm going to run with that limitation. And in Britain, you have almost nothing that can be described as a castle before the Norman conquest of 1066. There are three or four castles built to generation immediately prior to the conquest in England. But really, It's a Norman phenomenon or a French phenomenon that arrives with the Normans. And the earliest kind of common type of castle, or the most common type of castle by a very long chalk that the Normans introduced is described by historians today as a Mott and Bailey. A Mott being a very large artificial mound of earth, which gives you the advantage of height, on top of which you build a tower. The bailey is a much larger but shallower enclosure, so just slightly raised with a sort of ditch and rampart around it, and that is the place where you put everything else.

So your great hall, your stables, your smithy, your chapel, etc. And I said a tower on top of the mott, the crucial thing to remember with all these early castles is they are almost exclusively made from earth and timber. So you begin with wooden castles. I remember really kind of struggling to get my brain around that when I read that first when I was an undergraduate, because you're so used to thinking castles being made of stone. It almost beggars belief the notion that they could have once been not just kind of occasionally made of wood, but in almost every circumstance made of wood. And a helpful way to think of this is, well, all castles actually start being made of wood. So even somewhere like Canavan Castle in the first instance, especially if you're, as of the most of the time is true,

you're building them in hostile territory, territory you've just conquered, and you're sort of imposing your will on that area. You don't start off by saying, well, go and get Master Roger the Mason and get, you know, 50 guys to start chipping away at blocks, because it's too dangerous. You're in the first instance, creating a military base, digging ditches and putting up palisades. So it looks like a modern building site.

The first thing you do is you put up a wooden fence to keep people out. In this case, in modern day, for your own safety, you know, don't go beyond this area without a hard hat. In the Middle Ages, to keep people out for your safety. So you start off with walls made of wood, towers made of wood and buildings made of wood. If that castle then proves a favorite, if it proves successful or necessary, or just somewhere that you really want to invest in for generations to come, then you can start to think about tearing down those wooden walls and replacing them with stone ones. But that's going to cost you maybe 50 to 100 times as much in terms of money and labour.

So even as say somewhere like Windsor Castle, which you think today is like the biggest and most palatial, one of the East and most palatial castles in Britain, that began life as a wooden motte and bailey during the reign of William the Conqueror. And almost any other castle you care to mention, they all begin life made of earth and timber. as time rolls on and you get into later centuries, they will start replacing those wooden walls with stone ones. It's good to hear that because I think that that's generally what I think of when I think of castles, you know, as the making of one, because they are such huge buildings. They're on such a monumental scale and it takes so long. That's sort of what I throw out as an explanation to people.

And one worries that it's a bit of a myth and, you know, a little too easy to say, oh, yeah, you start with the wood and then eventually you end up with. you know, something is stone and magnificent. But I suppose there has got to be a lot of Mott and Bailey wooden things that we've lost along the way when, you know, your sortie doesn't exactly work out and you are repelled. So we kind of tend to see successful examples of that, no? Yeah, I mean, there are no surviving wooden ones.

What you get, what do survive are the MOTs, because it's very hard to make, and also pointless, to try and make, say, 20,000 tonnes of soil and chalk and stone disappear. So the mott survive in the landscape, often covered with a blanket of trees or completely denuded of any wood or indeed stone. Often the stone is robbed out if there were stone buildings. So lots and lots of moths survive where there are no buildings or anything really beyond the earthworks. It's a sort of an arresting thought to think that once upon a time wooden ones were absolutely the norm. One thing that I should, it occurred to me while you were asking your question to emphasize, though, is there's absolutely no truth in the idea or no mileage in the idea that you start off initially with wooden castles and then at some point some architect has a eureka moment and goes, do you know what would make these things stronger and less vulnerable to attack with fire?

Stone, you know, so it's not like stone is an evolution. There had always been stone castles. My point is that their rarities, they initially are the things that cost an absolute fortune. And you only invest in them when you're really trying to make an impression or you're absolutely convinced this needs to be your main residence. It's just nowadays, the only buildings we see surviving are the stone ones. I suppose this gives me another question for you, which is you've mentioned briefly that castles come out, especially in England. They come out from a Norman context and a French context. Why is it that in the French lands we have a lot more castles at this point than we do up here on the British Isles?

Good question. And for me, all these things are slightly mysterious. It's kind of like, you know, why all of a sudden did you get a decline in slavery or why did you get sort of the coming of feudalism, whatever? These kind of big questions about why I always find very daunting. I've mentioned the F word feudalism. I mean, that's the sort of traditional explanation is that society in the, 8th, 9th centuries on the continent was sort of a range differently. And there wasn't such a, or the aristocracy wasn't so heavily militarized and privatized. What starts to happen as that

breaks down in the course of the 10th century is powerful people. And indeed, people quite low down the hierarchy. People who are really just kind of, you know, want to be powerful, but have strong right arms and can attract gangs of followers. They start investing heavily in their own fortification. And so as power starts to sort of disintegrate and become invested in in smaller landowners, then they start to dig in and build castles. So you see that happening towards the end of the 10th century. The easiest way to think of it in terms of time is around the turn of the first millennium, around the year at 1,000. And then you see castles all over what is modern France, Francia, being built in vast numbers.

The proof of that the other way is that in England, in the course of the 10th century, public power is very strong. So the kings of Wessex, who ultimately become the kings of England in the course of the 10th century, they have a complete monopoly of fortification. They are building large kind of communal fortifications called Burrs or Burroughs.

And there is really no scope for people, however powerful, below the level of the king, to build their own private fortifications. And right down to 1066, you can see that's the way power operates in England when, for example, Edward the Confess, falls out with the Godwin family, who are incredibly powerful. They do not run to their main estates and hole up in castles because they don't have them. They flee abroad and they raise

fleets and that is the way their power is measured. It's their ability to attract men and ships to their banner. By contrast, if you look at what's going on the other side of the channel in Normandy, whenever politics breaks down, which is very frequently, you can see men instantly rushing to their castle that they have built and holding it against it. the Duke for months running into years. So the proof of the pudding is kind of in the politics. Normally prior to the conquest is all about one damn siege after another. England, although politics does occasionally lead to standoffs, it never results in sieges because there are no buildings to besiege. Let's then place ourselves firmly in England. When do we see the first

castle appear? Because to my recollection, we have a reference to a reference to a a castle existing prior to the Norman conquest according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where there is a description of a fortification of some type built by foreigners? Yeah, the first reference, as far as I'm still aware, this was true 20 years ago when I wrote a book on this, as far as I'm still aware, the earliest written use of the word castle in English that has survived is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1051, and it says, the foreigners built a castle in Earl Swain's territory. And the significant fact is they don't say a burr or some other English word.

They use the foreign word, Castel, you see, written in English. And there is a sense of this was, you know, this is a horrible foreign invention because it's associated from the very first with it. I think the next part of that sentence is something like, and they did all the damage they could to the king's men in that region. So there's a sense from the first that they are intrusive kind of weapons of domination. and you start to see the course, once you've got after the Norman Conquest, those references multiply by a huge factor, and you get constant references to castles in the sources. And again, they are associated with Norman oppression. So, you know, they caused castles to be built far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, that sort of thing. So it's very hard to pinpoint exactly the first. We could tell you, you know, the first written reference, and we can point to, you know, I say three or four early examples. But it's after the conquest. Conquest is really the the inception point or something or the point where it all kicks off. That is the point

where you go from having a number small enough to count on the fingers of one hand to a deluge, hundreds being built, up to maybe five or six hundred between 1066 and the end of the 11th century. So castles going up everywhere all across the country as the Normans rivet their power into place. So where, just to take us back, where was England's first castle built then? You mentioned the reference in 1051, that it says they built a castle in Elth Wayne's territory, which is in Herrifonship. It's possibly Richards Castle, I think that's the lightliest contender, which is somewhere, I think, on those of herifaxia, Welsh border. I've been there once a long time ago, and it was covered in trees. I mean, there are two or three built simultaneously in the Welsh marches by the French followers of Edward the Confessor,

because that's the way they were used to doing things on the continent. So there's another one at Iwas Harold, which is also in Herefordshire. There's one just to the north of London, or clavering castle in Essex. I think that's the one. So there are two or three, let's say, competing for the honour of the first castle in England. But nowadays they are very nondescript. They haven't grown into big, you know, big famous modern fortresses in the way the ones built after the conquest. So you've mentioned now already that the Normans essentially start building

castles as though they're mushrooms. They're popping up all over across England. What is the reason for such an incredible amount of building? Obviously, there's something in there where this is the way that they rule, and so they're coming from a culture where castles are the norm. But it's more than that, no? Yeah, I mean, I think it's two things. One is this is just the typical way that the French do lordship, you're lord of this parcel of land. You build a castle to enforce that lordship. It's just second nature to the Normans. And two, even more so than in Normandy, the people that you are seeking to dominate don't want you there. So you have to build castles in great numbers because your lordship is being resisted. So, I mean, you can see it in the case of William the Conqueray

himself. I mean, he starts off planting castles. I mean, as soon as they're off the boat on the biotapestry, it says, you know, here they are at Hastings, building a castle. They're digging in from the moment they are disembarked. But wherever William goes in the year, after 1066. Well, as I've said already, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1067, talks about Williams of Regents, William Fitzhospon and Odo of Bayeur, building castles across the country wherever they went. William in 1068, he leads the first of his kind of armed marches into the Midlands and the North, and he plants castles at places like Warwick, Lincoln, York, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Nottingham. This is the sort of the origins of all these castles. I think I said

early, you know, probably 600 by the time you get to the end of the 11th century. But the majority of them planted it during the reign of William the Conqueror, because that's the time when resistance to the conquest is at its thickest. That's the time when you need these castles of the most. So it's fairly kind of clear cut, at least in my mind, this military domination, it's enforcement of a new regime against the people that don't want it there. And when the Normans are planting all of these castles, are they doing it in areas? that wouldn't have seen any kind of fortifications or fortresses at all? Or are they explicitly going into areas where there had been English seats of power

or places that I don't know you would expect to see military garrisons? I think it's a bit of both. I think it's just pure pragmatism. I mean, in some cases, I mean, the royal ones I mentioned earlier, you noticed the places I mentioned were towns or cities. So where there are large concentrations of people, you know, I mean, not large as we would think of them now. London's probably about 20,000 people.

Maybe not as much as that in 1066, but there's nowhere apart from London, really, that's into five figures. But even so, even if you've got three or four thousand people in one particular area, then that's a good place to plant a castle if you want to control those people. So royal castles tend to be in towns and cities, major power centres. But Norman Lords, who are left of their own devices, are going to pick places where they can control important. route ways, whether they are river routes or land routes, they're not planted at sort of random.

They are planted with the eye always to the main advantage of how can we best dominate this area. That's why they're sort of on cliffs above rivers or crossroads. They're all about control. So you find some of them in established areas of lordship. You find other new lordships carved out where there hadn't been lordships before, you know, greenfield sites essentially. So huge variety in the places that they're sighted. Is there a corresponding variety in what these castles look like, or do we see a form of archetype that is coming in along with the Normans? I thought it was about time we got onto this. So we talked about Motten Baileys.

That's the dominant type to begin with. But what you get in parallel with Motten Bayleys, so your motte is your giant mound of earth, which is not exactly a doddle to build because you can't just build it like a sand castle, it will wash away. It has to be consolidated. It's a piece of civil engineering, if you like, but comparatively inexpensive compared to the trouble of building a stone tower. And the stone tower is the other main type of building you get, the great stone tower from the very first. Most famous example being William the Conqueror's Great Tower of London, the Tower of London. Other examples going up in the Conqueror's reign places like Colchester in Essex or Chepstow right on the Welsh border. Richmond goes up a little bit

later. The Tower of London is probably the best one to conjure with because it doesn't require anything in the way of introduction. Very, very big square or rectangular look by stone boxes that just scream kind of power and domination. I mean, something like the Tower of London. There had been churches of that height in pre-conquest England, but no secular buildings on that scale. You know, the Anglo-Saxons had built halls. It's an exaggeration or oversimplification. to say, think of Tolkien, because Tolkien was a, you know, a 20th century romantic take on pre-conquest England. But if you think of the way that King of Rohan is presented in Tolkien, in a big wooden hall, that's kind of the way that the pre-conquest English had done royal

residences, nothing on the scale, certainly, of the Tower of London. And then, of course, once that ball has been set rolling by the royals, anyone who's powerful wants a building like that. So what you see, to move us forward a bit, what you see throughout the 12th century is the most powerful people in the country, the earls are the most powerful barons, they're saying, I want a great tower as well. So you have the second generation of castles like, and this is where we get into numbers, 20s, 30s, 40s,

Rochester, Portchester, we'll come on to Dover, but lots and lots of castles going up across the country, heading them in Essex is another one, with sort of the Tower of London as the father or the grandfather, the prototype, if you like, that way of expressing your power becomes very, very desirable and mainstream by the middle of the 12th century. And anyone who's of any consequence will want a tower of their own. You notice I'm not using the word keep, which is something I've trained myself to do over the years, because typically until recently, and a lot of the time still today,

people talk about keeps, which is a Tudor term. It wasn't one used by medieval people at the time. They just talked about great towers, or if they're writing in French, don't jens. But the reason they called them keeps, by the way, the tud is because by that stage, they didn't live in them and they just used them as kind of giant closets. So it's where you kept stuff, you know, put it in the keep. No one was saying that at the time. They were great towers. But that's the dominant architectural form.

If you're building in stone, if you have the enormous wherewithal to do that, from 1066 right the way down to the end of the 12th century in England, you will be wanting to build a great tower to express your power. And let's not avoid the kind of obvious Freudian thing here. Your virility. I mean, you know, there's a reason that bishops want the longest names. There's a reason that people, men, into the modern age as well, want a big tower with their name on top.

And it has to be the tallest in town. So that's what they're doing in the 12th century. Look, you said it not me, so it's fine. If I say it, it's problematic. You're allowed to say it. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Okay, well, I've lured you here, of course, not just to talk about castles more generally, but specifically to make you speak about Dover Castle.

Because this is one of those big Norman monumental castles. You know, I often say that if a child closes their eyes and thinks about a castle, Dover is sort of what would come into their head. So what would you say is so interesting about Dover? because I think for me, one of the things I love about it is it's very emblematic of the wider story of English castles, I would say. Yeah, I mean, Dover requires a lot of unpacking. Perhaps just let's just start with the very basic. So there was a castle of some kind at Dover from the normal conquest onwards,

because we know William the Conqueror stopped at Dover on his route march between Hastings and London, and we're told that he spent seven days adding the fortifications that it lacked, which is kind of like, well, we don't know. So it's one of those very frustratingly obscure allusions to early fortifications at Dover. They have dug at Dover many times done archaeological digs over the decades, and they haven't found any trace of an early cast with it.

The problem being that Dover has been overwritten so many times built over from that day, well, not just that day, right back to the Roman lighthouse, which still stands there, from the Romans right through to the modern age, there has been some form of habitation at Dover. And particularly in the modern age, say, from, say, the late 18th century onwards,

the military had been there of just digging things up and throwing things away. So the archaeology of the early castle is long since gone. But we do have written references to the castle being there from 1066 down to the late 12th century. But it clearly wasn't much cop, one, because there's no trace of it. And two, because the amounts of money being spent on it in royal records, are futileingly small sums, you know, £10, £20, on patching up something which was almost certainly made of timber. So that's the backstory of Dover for its first 120, 130 years.

Then along comes Henry V. Second, who's most famous sort of today for his ill-timed rhetorical, apparently question, who will rid me of this turbulent priest? So he's the guy who does for Thomas Beckett. And he decides he is going to build a massive. monumental castle at Dover in the year 1180. And it is a castle on a scale to rival the Tower of London. It's also really the last of its kind, because I said earlier that after the Tower of London is built, then a great tower becomes the way you do things. And Dover really is the last of those great towers.

Very often, I say it's sort of similar in scale to the Tower of London, very often nowadays, It's the Tower of London's body double, because you can't shut down the Tower of London, no matter how much money, how many Hollywood dollars you waive, it's too lucrative and important. But you can shut down Dover Castle for a morning or so. So very often you kind of go, you know, here's Ambellim being executed at the Tower of London. And I'm going, wait a minute, that's Dover. You know, I'm the 0.001% of the audience that is tutting and saying, that's not the Tower of London. Anyway, I digress, but that's the point is they are the same species of building.

And I say Dover begins in 1180. The thing that's really interesting, and I expect we'll drill down into this now, is why Henry the second wanted to make a statement of that scale up there on the top of the white cliffs at Dover. Look, Mark, don't do my job for me. But yes, that is my next question. Why here? Why Dover? What's the significance?

Well, I'm glad you asked me that. I think traditionally, and this is something that was said at Dover itself until very recently, the explanation would be obvious because, as everybody knows, Dover is the closest point in Britain to the continental mainland of Europe. So that's the place the fairies go across now. That's the shortest route, as was demonstrated by the Romans. It's a place you need to defend at all costs. And that's the place you need to defend at all costs. And that's the shortest. the way Dover has behaved into the early modern period and into the modern period. That's why it was so rebuilt in the 17th, 18th, the 19th centuries, because it was always standing sentinel against any continental threat. The problem with that is if you go back to the time Henry the second built it, there isn't a continental threat at the time. Henry got on very well with the people on the other side of the channel, who weren't the King of France. The King of France, he didn't get on well with at all. But the King of France didn't own the North French coastline. It was owned by various people who were notionally vassals, but not really. People like the Count of Boulogne, the Count of

Flanders, a Duke of Brabant, all of whom were sort of Team Henry. So he didn't have to worry about a threat from across the channel. Much more, obviously, Henry II was Duke of Normandy. He was the direct descendant of William the Conqueror. So not only does he not have to defend Dover, He never has to go there and never bothers going there because if he were crossing the channel that way, he would end up in someone else's territory. He wants to cross the channel and end up in Normandy. So when he goes to Normandy and he wants to end up somewhere like Ruhr or Kohl or Diep or whatever, he will cross typically from somewhere like Portsmouth or Shoreham in Sussex or even occasionally go further west somewhere like Plymouth. So there's no point of him going to Dover. And although it's, you know, We can't recover his itinerary in any great detail. It's very hard to locate Henry at Dover until the building of Dover Castle. So to go back to your treachered question of 10 minutes ago, why? Why build this castle?

The answer seems to be Thomas Beckett. Again, that requires some unpacking. Beckett was famously, an archbishop, murdered in his cathedral in 1170, December 1170, with some degree of royal involvement, whatever it was, whatever Henry did or didn't say, he's done him by royal knights, probably acting on Henry's orders. So this scandalises all of Europe. I mean, it's one of the great sort of things that rocked society,

the fact that an archbishop could be done to debt in his own cathedral, Henry thinks that he's going to be deposed, and somehow or other he scrapes through. The point is that Beckett is very quickly canonised, so he's a saint from 1173. and the place of his martyrdom, his cathedral, Canterbury, is in East Kent, about 15 miles from Dover. So people start coming to pray at Beckett's shrine in considerable numbers. He becomes the most famous martyr in Europe.

And very powerful people start coming across the channel. And very often, because if they're praying for someone's recovery from some disease, they will turn up at a moment's notice. So it won't be kind of a visit that they've planned for weeks or months in advance. The king will be told, oh, the Duke of Brabant or the Count of Flanders is coming to Canterbury. We've just said, and he's ready to sail. He's at Wissant, waiting for a favourable win. He's going to be there in 48 hours.

And Henry is ripped from his normal itinerary and has to race down to Kent in order to receive these powerful people who are coming to pray at Beckett Shrine. that happens once in 1178. In 1179, the king of France himself, Louis the seventh, his son falls ill, the future Philip Augustus. Louis the seventh says, I know, I will go to Canterbury and pray at the shrine of my old friend, St Thomas. Henry has once again told this when he's somewhere in the South Midlands and has to race down to Dover. where, lest we forget, he doesn't have a castle, or at least a castle of any consequence. He's got some tattie old, you know, decades-old wooden buildings. So he cannot put anybody up in style.

This is the first time when Louis I comes in 1179. It's the first time a European king has come to England, as far as we can tell. So it is, if you like, and has been well done, the first state visit in English history. And what can Henry say, good that you brought your tents, Louis, because I don't have anywhere for you to stay in Dover. So he's repeatedly embarrassed. He's repeatedly embarrassed by the lack of royal accommodation where people get off the boat. Six months after that embarrassment, he starts building Dover Castle. So Dover Castle in the first instance is not, although it is a tremendously strong building,

It is not built to keep people out. It's actually built to welcome them in. And when you go there now and you walk up in that great tower, one of the striking things about the stairs that lead you into the interior are they are very grand and processional, extremely wide route of entry into the castle. And the rooms themselves are big, spacious, well-appointed rooms because they are being built for visiting dignitaries,

potentially foreign rulers. But that to me seems to be absolutely nail the explanation of why Dover is built on that palatial scale and why it's built in that particular political context. It's so interesting. I mean, one of the most important works of architecture in England as a flex. You just don't want to be embarrassed when the King of France shows up when you're already embarrassed by the fact that you accidentally got your Archbishop murdered on purpose. You know, image is everything. You know, the way you project power is everything. And so you cannot have people repeatedly turning up. And Henry's saying, I know you've had a long journey, but if you're able to ride 15 miles, I've got a sort of halfway decent, pretty old, but it'll do. I've got a castle in Canterbury you can stay in. Because by that stage, he's already within the orbit of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's going to be put up in style by the monks of Canterbury. So by that stage, it's too late. Henry needs to kind of welcome people off the boat. And on the one hand, he's offering a kind of mere maxima culpah because the chapel at Dover is dedicated to St. Thomas Beckett. So on the one hand, he's going to say, yeah, I see why you're here.

And totally, you know, I'm on board with that. I can't emphasize how much I regret that now. But yeah, by all means go to Canterbury. And yet, the thing he receives you in is this colossal statement of royal power right on top of the white cliffs. Everybody who's coming from the continent by boat nowadays still sees that building and generally tends to say in my experience, I'll visit that one day, but in the meantime, I've got to get on with my itinerary. But at the time, you know, then that castle was built, you're getting off the boat there and you are being overawed by the site of that magnificent stone town.

So this is one of Henry II's more impressive bits of building, but, But the story of Dover doesn't exactly stop there. And you have work going on pretty much continuously throughout the 13th century. And, you know, people want new things, tastes change. It's hundreds and hundreds of years in the medieval period that we're talking about. So does Dover kind of show us an interesting evolution of how English castles as a whole respond? Or is it because it is so monumental a special case? Yeah.

Well, there's a very important change that happens at Dover. in the generation after Henry II. So Henry II famously had numerous sons, the two who survive him, are Richard the Lionheart, who succeeds him in the first instance, and then a decade later, the youngest son, Bad King John. And it's in John's reign from 1199 that you see big changes of Dover, because there is by this stage an invasion threat from the King of France. The King of France has expanded his power.

He's taken over that north coastline, along the French coast, and is poised to invade at various points in John's reign, and indeed does invade in the final year of John's reign. And what you see John doing at Dover is increasing the defences. So Henry starts off with the Great Tower and a set of walls around it. What John does is he builds a second set of walls around it. So it's often said that Dover was the first concentric castle in English history. Concentricity, obviously from, you know this from your geometry,

just means you have shapes within shapes, walls within walls, or ditches within ditches and are all surrounded by a moat or something else. So any attacker has multiple barriers to overcome in order to get to the heart of the castle. So because it has two sets of walls, Dover is often touted as the first concentric castle in English history. What's, I think, really interesting that happens at Dover is when the French do show up in the last few months of John's reign and attack Dover Castle, they do not succeed in taking it, which means that really that Dover saves John's dynasty

for the rest of forever. But they do do very significant damage, and they almost get in the main gate. What happens at Dover is that gate is blocked off, and they create a new gatehouse on the south side of the castle, where the slope up to the castle is at its same. steepest. And that gatehouse is indicative of the way castles are going once you enter the 13th century. So you have, in the first place, round towns, which had until that point been extremely rare, after that point become the new norm. And the gatehouse at Dover is formed by two round towers being pushed together. So you have what's called a twin tower of gatehouse. The gatehouse in question, the constable's gate, it's called, is just this most magnificent brooding gatehouse, well worth

Google. And that is kind of the way castles for the next century or more evolve. So I'd said already that the Great Tower at Dover, Henry II's Great Tower, is really kind of the last hurrah for that age of Great Towers that's ushered in with the Norman Conquest. What you find after that is that you really don't find Great Towers being built. Instead, you have these great loops of walls. And a lot of the power and prestige that had been projected by the Great Towers, is now vested in the gatehouse itself. And so you're looking at places like, I'm not sure off the top of my head,

someone like Chepstone Castle, which is a very early one, or Tumbridge Castle has a magnificent mid-13th century gatehouse, or indeed the castle was built where'd with the first in Wales, places like Harlech, really big impressive gatehouse, Canarvan, although the towers aren't round there, polygonal, really, really big impressive gatehouses. So that's the shift in castle design, if you like,

into the 13th century is great towers fallout of fashion, great twin-towered gatehouses come on stream. I love that. Dover is this tastemaker. I mean, that's for me. There are lots of other things that happen to Dover across the centuries, but you're getting beyond the medieval period, which is my forte. I mean, one of the things, for example, with Dover that happens, which is, again, part of the course, if castles survive as fortresses this long, is once you get into an age of real proper, I'm not just talking about the invention of gunpowder, because gunpowder to begin with is largely not exactly kind of whiz-bang fireworks, but it's sort of anti-personnel as a weapon. You're not using guns in the first instances to try and blow holes in masonry. By the time you get to the late 15th century and you've got guns that are the size of kind of Monsmeg, which is now kept to Edinburgh Castle, really big long bombards.

they are, as their name suggests, used to blast their way through stone walls. Once you've got that, there is no point in having really tall towers, which to us might seem thick, if you've got 10, 15 feet of stonework, if that can be just taken down in one shot. So when you get into the early modern period,

you'll find that the towers of medieval castors are leveled, and their walls have massive amenities, ounce of backfill. They have banks built up behind them, so they don't collapse if they are bombarded. And that also gives you a platform behind the wall, a great earth and embankment, on which you put your own cannon. So that radically transforms the appearance of medieval castles, which had been all about tall towers with flags and pennants flying. All of a sudden, they look squat and dumpy. And so two really good examples of that in the UK are Carlisle Castle, which is transformed that way against the hostile Scots immediately to the north,

and Dover Castle, which is transformed in that way in the 18th century. So every time I'm down at Dover, I'm having to remind people to say, it didn't always look this squat and dumpy. These towers once rose another 20 feet or so, and it looked more Camelotti. So that's another way in which the architecture has been modified across the centuries in line with the kind of ever-changing conversation between sort of attack and defense. Mark, I could talk to you about this all day, more specifically, about the degradation of the early modern period and the terrible things that it's done to medieval things in general.

But I'm going to ask you one final, very silly question that you're probably not going to be able to answer. What's your favorite castle? You see, like a kind of any sort of bad stand-up comedian, I always try and please the audience in front of me. So I sort of anybody in from Canarvan. But I do have my favour. So I don't have one favourite. I do actually really like Canarvan Castle, not just because I wrote a book about the man who built it, but because it's just astonishing in its scale and grandeur.

And it's kind of like you travel to the sort of the outer limits of the British Isles. You travel all the way up to the North Welsh coast, northwest Welsh. coast, northwest Welsh coast, and there it is. And I feel like Samuel Johnson wrote about Carnarvon, Samuel Johnson in the famous 18th century, a lexicographer. He sort of said in his diary, I

didn't think such things were possible. You know, he had this sense of, in the 18th century where they weren't really building much on that kind of scale, to suddenly realize that people you'd stigmatized as kind of almost barbarians, you know, medieval kings, could build something so

grand and strong. So, Carnarvon is a favourite. Dover is a favourite. I don't live a million miles from Dover, so I'm always there a lot. There are little bijou castles I like as well. Bodium down in Sussex I'm very fond of, precisely because it reflects a different type of castle builder. It reflects a man who's a knight who desperately, desperately wants to be in the top echelon of power players, but can only afford something which is really, you know, not quite a wendy house, but it's really, really, really, really. really dinky. And yet he takes great trouble to make sure it gets called a castle. He takes great trouble to get it licensed by the king. And it has every single accoutrement you could wish. It has the full panoply of moat, drawbridge, portcullis, towers, etc. Because he wants it to look as castle as possible. So, you know, I've got many, many, many, many favorite castles. I couldn't

possibly choose one. Well, you know, I'd love to end you on a Sophie's choice with that. But Mark, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your insights so much. As safe, Paul, it was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit, and thank you so much to Mark once again for joining me. If you are interested in learning a bit more about Henry II and Thomas Beckett, which we talked about in the show, you can check out our past episodes on Beckett from July this year, where Matt and I cover everything from the bishop's rise to his murder and his legacy. As always, Matt Lewis will be back on the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday.

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