Short History Of... - British Castles

Episode Date: April 9, 2023

For over 600 years, castles played a leading role in the story of Britain. From the Norman Conquest to the English Civil War, they are woven into the tapestry of British history. But when did they start to be built, and why? How did their architecture evolve? And why did they fall out of fashion, leaving a landscape littered with crumbling ruins?  This is A Short History Of… British Castles.  Written by Joe Viner. With thanks to Marc Morris, historian and author of Castles: A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval Britain. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the 3rd of June 1648, a bright summer's day in the north of England. A procession of horse-drawn carts rattles through the market town of Pontefract, West Yorkshire. At the front of the convoy is a local man in his 30s named John Morris. John glances up as he and his men step into the shadow of the hulking stone walls that loom over them, solid and grey against the blue summer sky. For most of the past century, the castle has served a domestic function, providing a luxurious residence for a succession of local lords. Recently, though, like castles all across the kingdom, Pontefract has been called upon to serve a very different purpose.

At the drawbridge, a guard calls out from the sentry post, musket poised, kingdom, Pontefract has been called upon to serve a very different purpose. At the drawbridge a guard calls out from the sentry post, musket poised, demanding the group state their business. He narrows his eyes, suspicious as to whether these strangers are fellow parliamentarians or enemy royalists. Because for the past six years these opposing factions have been locked in a bloody civil war. The Royalists support King Charles I, believing that the monarch's authority to rule unopposed is ordained by God. The Parliamentarians, loyal to Oliver Cromwell, want Charles' potentially tyrannical power to be curbed by Parliament.

be curbed by Parliament. Since the king's recent capture, most castles have fallen into Parliamentarian hands, serving as garrisons, like this one, for Cromwell's forces. Knowing that distrust and suspicion can often be deadly, John raises his hands to show that he is unarmed. They're just humble townsfolk, he says, simply bringing beds and bedding for the soldiers inside the castle as requested by its military governor. After a brief hesitation, the guard nods, gives the order to lower the drawbridge, and waves the group through the castle gates. John Morris leads his procession of carts across the narrow walkway. Soon they emerge into the middle bailey, the central courtyard at the heart of the castle. Everywhere is alive with activity. Soldiers in mustard yellow tunics are cataloguing mortar shells and gunpowder barrels.

Kitchen hands haul crates of grain across to the larder. Over in the smithy, swords are sharpened and armor repaired. John scans the battlements, counting the soldiers patrolling the ramparts, noting exits and entrances. But his companions stiffen, agitated, and some start reaching surreptitiously under their capes. Now the governor approaches, and he doesn't look friendly. John reaches beneath his own cloak, and his grip tightens around a pistol, knowing instinctively that he's been rumbled. It's now or never. John barks a command, and his men fan out across the bailey.

They reveal their pistols and open fire. John Morris did not come here to bring beds for the garrison. John Morris did not come here to bring beds for the garrison. He is Colonel John Morris, an officer in the Royalist Army, and he and his men have just infiltrated one of the most important parliamentarian strongholds, the apparently impenetrable Pontefract Castle, to seize it for their king. While the castle guards scramble to respond to this surprise attack, John and his men reach under the straw bedding on the carts and pull out powerful wooden matchlock muskets.

They release volleys of shots towards the parapets, and it's not long before the air is thick with gunpowder smoke. The screams of the wounded reverberate around the bailey, and bodies fall with sickening thuds from the ramparts. thuds from the ramparts. John Morris and his men seize control of the castle, but the parliamentarians don't give up that easily. As the months pass, other royalist strongholds across the country will fall to Cromwell's army, but Pontefract will hold firm under siege.

It will prove one of the final chapters in the story of castles, as they're made obsolete by modern warfare and its gunpowder, mortar, and cannon. For more than 600 years, castles played a leading role in the story of Britain. From the earliest days of the Norman Conquest through to the bloodshed of the English Civil War, the castle has woven itself into the tapestry of British history. But despite their prominence, castles defy straightforward definitions. Were these impressive constructions designed for warfare or as fortified luxurious homes for wealthy nobles. How did their architecture evolve from the humble Mott and Bailey of the 11th century into elaborate stone fortresses furnished with turrets, portcullises and drawbridges?

And why did the castle fall out of fashion in the 1600s, leaving a landscape littered with crumbling ruins? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of British castles. Think of a castle, and a clear picture comes to mind. A moat surrounding a large stone fortress with high walls punctuated by turrets and arrow slits. But the word castle is actually rather hard to define. Mark Morris is a historian and the author of Castles, a history of the buildings that shaped medieval Britain.

It is quite difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all definition of a castle. I mean, if you look up castle in the Oxford English Dictionary, it says a castle is a stronghold or a fortress. But most people, after a minute's reflection, would say, well, hang on a minute, there must be more to it than that, because fortress can cover any number of things. The definition that was kind of offered up in the mid-20th century was a strongly fortified residence or a domestic fortress. And I think that covers most of the bases. But the story of these iconic structures begins with the Anglo-Saxons,

on the eve of an invasion that changes the landscape of Britain forever. It is the 6th of January 1066. A funeral is taking place inside Westminster Abbey. 1066. A funeral is taking place inside Westminster Abbey. England's late king, Edward the Confessor, is being laid to rest before a solemn congregation. The death of a monarch is always a time of uncertainty, but Edward's demise has brought particular unease. Much to the concern of the Anglo-Saxon royal council, the Witton, Edward almost left it too late to name an heir. His reluctance could have left a dangerous power vacuum. But with his final breath, the ailing king chose Harold Godwinson, the wealthiest nobleman in England, to succeed him.

Now, Harold stands inside the gloomy, candlelit abbey, watching Edward's coffin as it is lowered into the tomb. Soon Harold will receive the crown he has coveted his entire adult life. But worries plague the future king's mind. A powerful French nobleman, Duke William of Normandy, has also staked his claim to the English crown. And, as a distant cousin of Edward, William's entitlement is strengthened by blood. Harold knows that once he becomes King Harold, William won't hesitate to fight for the kingdom that he believes is rightfully his. It's a daunting prospect, but as Harold prepares for his coronation, he tries not to think about it.

Later that afternoon, Harold kneels, bows, and accepts the crown. It sets in motion a series of events that will lead to the loss of a kingdom, the end of a dynasty, and the dawn of a new type of building in England. On September 28, mere months after Harrell's coronation, a fleet of 700 longships lands at Pevensey on the Sussex coast. There, shrouded in the pre-dawn mist, the 7,000-strong army of William, Duke of Normandy, disembarks on the Shingle beaches. The Norman invasion has begun. The Norman invasion has begun. Upon landing at Pevensey, William's first task is to establish a beachhead, a defensible stronghold from which to launch further incursions into southern England. To achieve this, William constructs something that has long been a fixture of life in medieval France,

but until now has hardly featured at all in Britain. A castle. Castles originate in Western Europe around the turn of the first millennium. They differ from what had gone before by virtue of being private. So if you look at earlier fortifications in the first millennium AD that were built in Western Europe, or indeed earlier, sort of Iron Age hill forts, they are designed to protect hundreds, if not thousands of people. And what you get around the turn of the first millennium is lords in Western Europe, Francia, seeking out places to build fortifications for themselves, which are designed, they're smaller because they're designed only to protect

the lord and his immediate following, retinue or household, whatever you call it. So they're designed to protect a relatively small number of soldiers and horsemen and dependents of that lord. And you see them springing up everywhere, particularly places like Anjou, Normandy, Flanders in the years around the turn of the millennium. You don't see them in England really until after the Norman conquest. Obviously, that's a moment when French culture or Frankish culture, if you like, is suddenly introduced like a tidal wave. There are a tiny handful, a cluster of castles, three or four, built in England before 1066 by some of the French friends of the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. But the deluge begins with the Norman conquest. The Normans already have a reliable blueprint for construction. The process begins by erecting a wooden keep on top of a mound of earth known as a motte. The motte is accompanied by a courtyard, or bailey,

surrounded by a steep ditch and a palisade fence made of wooden stakes. It won't be long before Mott and Bailey castles are as ubiquitous in England as parish churches are today, but it all begins with this one at Pevensey. William and his troops now march further up the coast to Hastings, where they construct a second fortress within days of the first. But they aren't just convenient staging posts for storing equipment, troops, and horses. Their construction is all part of William's wider campaign of psychological warfare. Southern England, known now as Wessex, is King Harold's own personal earldom.

By building castles in Harold's backyard, William is laying down the gauntlet, deliberately undermining the king's authority in order to provoke a retaliation. His plan works. Fresh from a battle with the last great Viking ruler, Harold Hardrada, King Harold rushes his army down to Wessex. There, Norman invaders are encamped close to the castle they have just built at Hastings. At nine o'clock in the morning on October the 14th, the Battle of Hastings begins. It's bloody and dogged, but Norman archers slowly gain the advantage, chipping away at the English vanguard. Late in the afternoon, Harold himself is killed in the Melly. Following his death, the English defenses collapse entirely.

The Battle of Hastings ends with a decisive victory for the Normans and a seismic defeat for the English. Now there is little standing in William's way. His invading legions march towards London, brushing aside whatever resistance they encounter and building more Mott and Bailey castles as they go. Two months later, on Christmas Day 1066, William is crowned king in Westminster Abbey, bringing the 600-year Anglo-Saxon age to an end. William, Duke of Normandy, has become William the Conqueror. But the natives do not simply accept his victory lying down. Across the country, rebellions break out against him, and William understands he will have to enforce his new royal status. He orders the construction of a mighty fortress in London to serve as his primary base, and to remind his unruly subjects of his absolute authority. Unlike the timber constructions of Pevensey and Hastings, William stipulates that his royal castle in London should be far stronger and more durable.

It shall be built from stone. He orders the finest limestone to be shipped over from Caen in northern France, where the material is renowned for its fine texture and distinctive pale colouring. and distinctive pale coloring. The fortress that will become known as the White Tower will measure over 100 square feet at its base and stand more than 90 feet high. It is the largest building project undertaken in Britain since the time of the Romans and takes so long to complete

that William won't live to see it finished. Later, monarchs will add to it, building outer walls and enhancing the fortifications until William's Castle becomes the central keep within the sprawling Tower of London complex. While it stands alone in terms of size, it is one of many hundreds of castles erected by the Normans following the invasion. Because though the Norman conquest brings major social change to England, it also radically transforms its architectural landscape. There's all kinds of reasons why you see a huge amount of castle building after the Norman conquest. I mean, you might suspect it's to do with the politics after

the conquest, which is that the English don't take the Battle of Hastings lying down. We know 1066 is going to be an irreversible date, nearly a millennium on. People at the time didn't know that. They'd been conquered lots of times, and they saw no reason why this shouldn't be reversible. So there are rebellions and insurrections after the conquest, lasting years, four or five years after 1066. They start in the Welsh marches in Kent, and then you get a whole load of them in 1068 in the West Country, in the Midlands, in the North, and the North continues to rebel down to 1070. And so with that warfare and that insurrection, what William does is march royal armies into those regions. And wherever he goes, wherever there's a population center, a town, he plants a new royal castle.

Exeter, Cambridge, Lincoln, York. Wherever there is a rebellion against William's rule, a castle soon appears. After suppressing the insurrection, William appoints one of his lords to stay in the castle and maintain law and order over the surrounding area with a retinue of knights. Approximately 500 castles are built during his reign alone, mostly simple mott and bailey structures constructed of timber and soil. They are effectively military garrisons from which Norman aristocrats prevent further uprisings and enforce civil obedience among the peasantry. prevent further uprisings and enforce civil obedience among the peasantry. As the years pass, once the Normans have successfully extinguished any simmering fires of dissent among the English, the purpose of castles changes. No longer required as tools

of conquest, smaller wooden Mott and Bailey fortresses are abandoned and left to rot. conquest, smaller wooden Mott and Bailey fortresses are abandoned and left to rot. The castles that survive during peacetime are the ones that their owners enjoy spending time in, the favorite domestic residences of the wealthiest Norman Lords. And these rich nobles, who have the time, money, and inclination to renovate and strengthen their homes, unsurprisingly opt for a material more permanent than wood. Like William and his White Tower, they now build their castles out of stone. There's no sense in which stone was the successor to wood

in a sense of like you don't have a wood age followed by a stone age. You have from the start of castles, going back to the late 10th century, you have castles being made of stone. The point is that stone costs 100 times more and it's so labour-intensive and it requires a degree of architectural ingenuity that, with all due respect to the carpenters who were working on the wooden ones, a greater level of ingenuity and engineering experience to build in stone.

But for those lords that could afford it, stone was absolutely the place they wanted to be. By erecting stone towers, the Norman lords send out a clear message to the English that they are here to stay. And of all those constructed during this period, few possess more staying power than Rochester Castle. few possess more staying power than Rochester Castle. Built by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 1120s, the Great Keep at Rochester is strategically located at the mouth of the River Medway in Kent, an important river crossing on the main road to London.

Soaring four storeys as opposed to the White Tower's three, Rochester Castle is colossal. It's about 125 feet, Rochester, from top to bottom. So, you know, a huge great stone tower and palatial. I mean, really, really, although it's burnt out today and hasn't been roofed for almost half a millennium. It would have been spectacular inside. A very well-appointed place to live. It has a well that runs right through the centre. It has window seats at higher levels, you know, so you could sort of sit and read or embroider in light. It has toilets on every level. So it's very luxurious living, as you would expect

for an Archbishop of Canterbury or the other great people that came to sit at his feet or commune with him. Now, a castle is, first and foremost, a home. By the early 12th century, their owners spent far more time enjoying leisure activities, like hunting and feasting, than they do fending off assaults. In their heyday, castles offer their inhabitants lives of unparalleled luxury. Their interiors are replete with creature comforts, including drinking wells, cellars stockpiled with meat, cheese, and wine, private bedchambers for the nobles and their household. There may even be toilets, amenities that represent the height of extravagance in the 1100s.

At the heart of the medieval castle life is the Great Hall, where the Lord and Lady host guests at candlelit banquets, while entertained by musicians, troubadour poets, jesters, and more. gestures and more. But it's the delicate balance between luxury and security that leads to the remarkable diversity of castle design. No two towers are exactly alike because their designers are trying to solve that riddle all the time because luxury says, well, you need more light, you need bigger windows, you need thinner walls.

Luxury says, you need chimneys and you need toilets, all of which have to be incorporated in the thickness of the walls. Whereas security says, no, no, you want thicker walls. You want fewer windows. You want fewer openings. You want less weak spots. So trying to balance those two very contradictory imperatives, I want to enjoy myself in this building. I want to be safe in this building." That's the balance that castle designers have to strike. The ingenious ways in which they solve that problem is what I think makes them so fascinating. Should the need arise, these more comfortable medieval castles can quickly revert to the other purpose for which they were built, as defensible strongholds in times of war. And in the early 13th century, Rochester Castle

finds itself at the heart of one of the longest, bloodiest sieges of the Middle Ages. In 1215, 150 years after the Norman conquest, King John sits on the English throne. Famous for being the central villain in the Robin Hood legends, John's actual role in history is no less nefarious. A cruel, conniving, and callous man, John is also an incompetent ruler. For ten years, he has been waging a series of ill-advised wars in France, trying to claw back lands he lost in earlier campaigns. To pay for these disastrous and costly military exploits, John has levied extortionate taxes on his nobility and imposed crippling fines for trivial offenses. Outraged by these abuses,

a group of English barons rebel. They draft a document that will limit the king's power to indiscriminately tax his subjects. Then, to force the issue, they raise an army and seize control of London. In the face of this mounting opposition, John reluctantly agrees to sign their document, known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter. But he has no intention of keeping his word. Soon he reneges on his promises, rendering Magna Carta null and void. Realizing that John will never change his ways, the barons write to Prince Louis, the son of the King of France, and offer him the throne of England. Prince Louis, the son of the King of France, and offer him the throne of England. This treasonous act enrages John, who now amasses his own army. He declares war on the rebellious barons, whose

only hope now is that Prince Louis will soon arrive from France and take the crown by force. With war on its way, controlling the kingdom's most important castles becomes a vital military objective. And no castle offers a better strategic advantage than Rochester. Wasting no time, John writes to Rochester's owner, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hoping to requisition the castle for his war effort. But the archbishop is one of John's fiercest critics. He ignores the king's petition and instead leaves the castle to the barons. It's now mid-October 1215, and inside the great hall of Rochester Castle, the barons are finishing a meal. The hearth blazes behind them, casting distorted shadows on the walls. They're still sucking the last of the meat from the bones when the conversation dies away suddenly.

Their leader, a knight named Sir William Dalbini, pushes back his chair. He stands motionless, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, listening. Gradually, the other barons hear it. Distant at first, but growing ever louder and more distinct, drifting in through an open window, the sound of hundreds of men on the march. When Dalbini strides over to the window, his fears are confirmed. The advancing army is a vast, dark swathe,

sweeping across the countryside like the shadow of a storm cloud. Leaving the others to get to their feet and draw their own weapons, Dalbini races up a flight of stairs, emerging on the uppermost parapet. His archers pour out, lining up along the walls, ready for the signal. Soon, King John's army is ranged outside the castle gates it is a formidable force of a thousand men comprising several legions of archers longbowmen and infantry soldiers amid the fighters teams of their strongest all five enormous wooden catapults on wheels or trebuchets, designed to break the castle walls with repeated bombardments. Dalbini grips the stone battlements as one of these mighty siege engines is wheeled forward into position. The knight stares, wide-eyed with horror, as the catapult's colossal arm is slowly winched back and a boulder is placed in its sling. In a hoarse voice, Dalbini

orders his archers to loose their arrows, but the shower cannot delay the inevitable. Dalbini drops to his knees to take cover as the trebuchet arm is released, and a moment later, the boulder slams into the side of the keep, sending shockwaves shuddering through the great stone walls. Dalbini clambers to his feet and peers from behind the parapet. He and his hundred-odd fellow rebels are hopelessly outnumbered. His blood runs cold at the prospect of enduring a sustained assault from John's catapults. of the prospect of enduring a sustained assault from John's catapults. The rebels' only hope is that the twelve-foot-thick walls of Rochester Castle can withstand the brunt of the king's assault.

Just as he feared, what started as an attack soon develops into a full-blown siege. John's army surrounds the castle, mounting offences day and night. Despite their best efforts, however, the siege engines cannot bring down Rochester's defences. Two months of constant bombardment fails to breach the battlements. Now John's army changes tack. Rather than hurling projectiles at the walls, they dig underneath them, the medieval technique of undermining. His men excavate tunnels beneath the keep, supporting them with wooden props, and when these supports are deliberately burned, the tunnels cave in, bringing the castle's foundations

down with them. Their method of burning these braces, by setting fire to rendered pork fat will fuel outlandish rumours for centuries to come. Just days before the fall of Rochester, there's a famous writ or letter that John sends to one of his leading henchmen and says, we want all the... The word is bacons, bacones in the Latin Ritz. It's kind of slaughtered pigs, pig carcasses. We want all the bacons that you can get to bring to Rochester

to make fire beneath the tower. So I think older generations of historians imagined that the pigs were sort of driven in with kind of firebrands attached to their curly tails. But in fact, if they were baconids, then it was pigs that were being brought pre-slaughtered. The fat of those pigs was to paint on the pit props and to bring fire beneath the tower. So that was the fate of the pigs. That's how the pigs brought Rochester Castle down. The fall of Rochester demonstrates that even the mightiest stone tower is vulnerable. It's the strength of castle architecture that drives the development of siege weaponry in the first place. The rise of increasingly accurate trebuchets and more sophisticated undermining

practices mean that castles are no longer seen as impenetrable fortresses. In the wake of the siege at Rochester, it becomes apparent that the architecture of castles is going longer seen as impenetrable fortresses. In the wake of the siege at Rochester, it becomes apparent that the architecture of castles is going to have to change with the times. From that point on, you see great towers fall out of fashion, you see castles being constructed to a sort of fairly different design, and you see castles being broken more readily. I mean, there's a

chronicler that comments on the fall of Rochester Castle in 1215 when John broke it. And the chronicler afterwards said that few afterwards would put their trust in castles. So there's a sense now that the technology has caught up, the technology of attack has caught up with the technology of defence. It's no longer sufficient for those inside castles to defend themselves with just thick walls and lofty watchtowers. By the late 13th century, new defensive trends emerge in British castle building, designed to repel even the most well-equipped of attackers. Outer walls are expanded and gatehouses strengthened to provide formidable first lines of defense. Openings, known as murder holes, are drilled above doors, through which boiling oil can be poured on the heads of enemy soldiers.

Arrow loops, vertical slits in the walls through which archers can fire, become popular, as do portcullises and drawbridges. These modern castles raise the game, becoming not just instruments of defence, but deadly weapons in their own right. And nowhere in the kingdom are castles being built at a greater rate than in Wales. One of the places that you see being sort of intensely fortified during this period is Wales and the English border with Wales, because the antagonism between the English and the Welsh goes right back to the 5th century when the English first arrived. By the time you get to the late 13th century, English claims to overlordship of Britain and Ireland have become so intense that they're utterly

incompatible with the claims of Welsh rulers. It comes to a crunch when you have a king like Edward I on the throne, who's convinced that he is not just an overlord in a loose sense, but he has total jurisdictional supervision over everything, certainly within the island of Britain. Prideful, belligerent King Edward refuses to tolerate the slightest threat to his sovereignty. And by the time of his coronation in 1272, the most potent opposition to his dominion over Britain comes from the hills and valleys of Wales. Made up of several autonomous kingdoms, Wales has been riven by internal discord for centuries. Bitter territorial disputes between regional leaders

had left the country militarily weak. But in recent years, one man has emerged as the de facto leader of a united Wales. Llywelyn ap Griffith is from a noble family of Welsh rulers. After succeeding his uncle as King of Gwynedd in North Wales in 1246, he set about conquering the country's various rival kingdoms. His aim remains the same, to unify the Welsh against their real enemy, the English. Llywelyn's rise to supremacy in Wales so alarmed Edward's predecessor that he sued for peace. The Welshman accepted the treaty offered on the condition that he be allowed to rule over his domains without being bothered by the English. He also demanded to be recognized by a new official title, the Prince of Wales. Now it's 1275. Edward I is on the throne, and he is determined to bring Wales

back under his authority. In an audacious publicity stunt, he requests that Llywelyn pays him homage, an oath of allegiance made by a subject to their monarch. Edward demands the Welsh prince's presence at a public ceremony at Chester Castle, near the northern tip of the border with England. It's an opportunity for Edward to finally cut Llywelyn down to size, and to reaffirm his sovereignty over Wales. But while Edward sits, waiting in the castle courtyard, enrobed in his ceremonial vestments, it becomes clear that Llywelyn has stood him up.

Simmering with fury, shortly after this humiliating snub, Edward declares Llywelyn a rebel. Then he prepares his army. Edward invades Wales in 1277 and tears Llywelyn down to size, what he feels is an appropriate size, which is just Lord of Snowdonia. Edward forces Llywelyn to acknowledge English sovereignty before stripping the Welsh prince of all but a small portion of his lands. During this swift but effective campaign, Edward also constructs a string of castles. The first is built at Flint in North Wales, strategically located downriver from Chester, from where supplies and reinforcements can be shipped. The next is built along the coast at Rudland, followed by one at Aberystwyth and another

further inland at Bilth. These fortresses are notable for their strength and architectural sophistication. Flint Castle is designed with one enlarged turret, separated from the middle bailey by its own moat and drawbridge, a final place of refuge in the unlikely event of the fortifications being breached. At Rudland, Edward's stonemasons follow a concentric design, encircling the keep with two outer walls built to repel wave after wave of Welsh raiders. The presence of these fortresses is a humbling reminder to Llywelyn of his defeat. But Edward doesn't stop there. Installing royal officers in these castles to act as feudal

overlords, he introduces English governmental structure to Wales and enforces English laws. Edward doesn't just want to humiliate Llywelyn, he wants to eradicate all traces of Welsh independence. But the Welsh remain defiant, and rebel yet again a few years later. Even harsher repercussions are handed down from Edward, and the construction of even mightier castles. After the second campaign, he builds these majestic fortresses like Ponwy, Carnarvon, Harlech. And then after a final rebellion in 1294-5, he builds one last great castle on the island of Anglesey, which is Beaumaris. So these are sort of like perhaps the high point of castle building in the British Isles in the Middle Ages. The castles built during Edward's second Welsh campaign are even greater than those of his

earlier exploits. From the mighty fortress at Caernarfon to the soaring turrets overlooking the sea at Conwy, these are some of the most magnificent fortresses ever constructed in Britain. Building such monstrously large and complex structures inevitably takes a great deal of time, sweat, and ingenuity. When work begins on Harlech Castle in northeast Wales in 1282, the construction is immense. 546 general labourers, 115 quarriers, 30 blacksmiths, 22 carpenters, and 227 stonemasons are contracted, not to mention plumbers, glaziers, and other skilled artisans who fit the castle with all the mod cons expected by its royal inhabitants. And none of this comes cheap. Harlech Castle comes with the hefty price tag of £10,000, nearly £7 million in today's money, while the even larger Caernarfon

castle costs Edward three times that and takes almost a decade to build. During the rebellion of 1282 Llywelyn leads a small band of followers towards Mid Wales, where he intends to raise support for the uprising. But on the journey south, they're ambushed by a group of English knights and Llywelyn is slain in the skirmish. When they realize who they've killed, the knights hack off the Welsh prince's head and send it north to Edward, who is encamped at Rudland Castle. After looking his old enemy in the eye one final time, Edward has the head transported back to England, where the grisly trophy is displayed on a spike outside the Tower of London. By the time Harlech, Caernarfon, and Conwy castles are completed, Llywelyn ap Griffith is dead. No

British monarch after Edward I will build castles on such a scale ever again. As the 14th century dawns, English castles enter a new phase in their history, characterized not by sieges and rebellions, but by domesticity. England in the late Middle Ages is not as war-torn as it once was. Though battles are fought overseas in France and a series of bitter dynastic disputes erupt in England in the mid-1500s, at home the 14th and 15th centuries are, by and large, uneventful. Consequently, the castles that appear in England and Wales during this period tend to be constructed without any defense considerations at all.

One prosperous knight, named Sir Edward Dallingridge, wants to be surrounded by the trappings of nobility and to enjoy the prestige that comes with castle ownership. But he has no need for any actual defensive precautions. Like other late medieval castles, the one he builds, Bodium Castle, is all style, no substance. Bodium Castle in Sussex, as a fortress, it doesn't work at all. Any army of any size would overrun it very quickly. It's not even built in a position which was defensible. It's halfway down a hillside. But as a status symbol, it just ticks every box because it looks really castle-y. I mean, that's one of the reasons it appears in so many calendars

and on the front of so many books. It's because it's got a drawbridge and a moat. Moats have become much more popular into the later Middle Ages. It's got towers, it's got turrets, it's got portcullises, it's got all the trappings you would expect to see on almost a fairy tale castle. It's a deliberately romantic building, but not very tough at all. Bodium can stand for almost any late medieval castle in England because their owners are not more interested in luxurious living, but their defense isn't at the top of their priorities. Looking very castle-y is. So that's why they look so architecturally exuberant and almost more castle-like in a way

than some of the less florid buildings of an earlier age. It is very important for knights like Sir Edward to own a castle. But what actually makes a castle a castle? Anyone with the resources can erect a massive stone building with turrets and a moat. But to officially designate such a building a castle, you will need written permission from the king. If granted, this license authorizes you to surround your dwelling with fortified walls

topped with the distinctive tooth-like crenlations from which archers can loose arrows. Historians used to believe that such licenses were principally an attempt by the crown to regulate castle ownership, in much the same way that guns or dangerous pets are regulated today. But recent research shows that in fact they were more likely medieval status symbols. The reason you get licenses to crenellate being issued is because their owners wanted the license to say, no, it's not just a manor house, it is a castle. Because when the king issues a license to crenellate, it's not just a manor house. It is a castle. Because when the king

issues a license to crenellate, it's not issued to the individual. It is issued to the county court. It's read out in the county court amongst all the well-to-do people in the county. And it says, I, insert the name of the king here, have granted to this up-and-coming local lord here permission to crenellate and build a new castle. So it's a great advertisement for this person's newly exaggerated status. Throughout the 15th and 16th century, highly ranked people in society continue to live in castles. But there is a general trend towards less militaristic, more comfortable residences. This period sees a rise in popularity of courtyard houses, as England's wealthy elite opt for luxury and elegance over defensibility.

Further north, by now the Scottish nobles have, like their English counterparts, eschewed strength and defensibility for ostentation and style. eschewed strength and defensibility for ostentation and style. In contradiction of the common image of a wild, violent Scotland of the Middle Ages, the castles now built here have more in common with modern-day luxury hotels than with threatening fortresses. So actually, one of the things I often end up saying with Scottish castles is people will tell you, they'll spin you some kind of hand-me-down 18th or 19th century tale about how anarchic it was with all the fighting that was going on in the Middle Ages,

and that's why the castle was built. And then the castle itself today is a hotel, and it will work perfectly well as a hotel, able to accommodate 30 sets of people at a time across that many rooms and feed them expensive dinners. Because that's the purpose it was built for in the 15th century. It was built as, if you like, productively, an accommodation block, a hotel in all but name. So their present function actually gives the lie to the idea that they were built as fortresses when they are just stuffed with bedrooms and en suite toilets. By the dawn of the 1600s, castles across Britain have either ceased to serve any practical purpose

or fallen out of fashion entirely. And that might have been the end of the story. Except, by the middle of the century, the winds of discontent are blowing once again. A disagreement between King Charles I and his parliament over how the country should be governed is growing into an irreconcilable feud. By 1642, the unrest that has been simmering for years will finally erupt into civil war and British castles will be thrust back into the spotlight. The collapse of England into civil war in the 17th century meant that castles, which had been sort of crumbling into ruin for at least the last 100 or 200 years, are all of a sudden militarily essential. So people who've been kind of content to live in courtyard houses or to move out of their sort of moldy old castles were all of a sudden rushing back to these castles and re-fortifying them and getting engineers across from the continent where warfare had continued to be more endemic and saying, you know, how do we modernize this? How do we get this up to speed?

Tell me about bastions. Tell me about mortars. You know, they suddenly had to learn these newfangled military techniques. So it's horribly bloody and medieval castles are suddenly pressed back into service. Among many such fortresses is Pontefract Castle. By 1648, the Civil War had dragged on for six years already. King Charles has been captured and imprisoned, and the castle, like most in Britain, has fallen to the parliamentarians. Victory for Cromwell seems close at hand,

but now a contingent of royalist soldiers infiltrate the stronghold disguised as townsfolk bringing beds for the garrison. Led by Colonel John Morris, the soldiers pull off their audacious surprise attack and take control of the fortress. The parliamentarians lay siege to the castle, but to no avail. Pontefract refuses to fall. In November, Cromwell travels north to take command of the siege effort himself, but despite the relentless bombardment with mortar shells and cannonballs, he can't breach the castle's defenses. Eventually, Cromwell returns to London to cut off his royalist enemies at the source

by executing the man for whom they are fighting, King Charles I. Two months after the king's execution, Pontefract finally succumbs to Cromwell's forces. The Civil War will drag on for another two years, but with the fall of Pontefract, the age of castles as military instruments is over. The Civil War finally ends with a Parliamentarian victory in 1651. Cromwell has successfully defeated the British monarchy, but the question remains of what to do with those mighty buildings which, for centuries, have stood as symbols of royal power.

To prevent them ever falling into the wrong hands and providing a launching ground for another royalist rebellion, Cromwell orders their destruction. This process of controlled demolition is known as slighting. They are ripped down or reduced to ruins, if not totally destroyed, then made untenable by engineers after the Civil War on the instructions of Parliament. So lots of castles are either demolished at that point, places like Nottingham or Pontefract just leveled, razed to the ground, or have towers collapsed or walls collapsed, which means that they just are not livable anymore, or they're not defensible anymore. So there are far fewer aristocrats still living in castles

after the 17th century than there have been up to that point. So in a sense, the English Civil War is really the event that really does for castles on a major scale. It's not quite the death knell because some continue to be inhabited, but it's the end of the story for a great many of them. The slighting of castles after the Civil War has left a landscape strewn with their ruins. Castles as we know them today are mostly abandoned stacks of stone.

But even where just overgrown edifices, lopsided turrets, or empty windows remain, it's possible to imagine their former glory. These hollow shells were once full of life, holding great banquets, jousting tournaments and revelry, the sights of kings, knights and rebels. They saw bitter battles, but were also homes not just to nobility, but to untold numbers of ordinary people, staff, soldiers, families. They served as community spaces at the heart of the medieval town. In this sense, the legacy of castles can be felt in all aspects of civic life, from town halls to law enforcement. The age of the castle might be over, but their place in Britain's national story will last forever. In the next episode of Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the Wild West.

Separating the fact from the fiction and acknowledging the dark side of that era of American history has to be just as important as holding up the good things and the ideals. So I think you have to be able to do both. You can't simply ignore the tragedies that happened with the Native American society and everything else and the discrimination and the abject horrors that lots of people experienced in the West while mythologizing and romanticizing the idea of the cowboy or anything else, or even the outlaw.

That's next time on Short History Of.