Dan Jones turns his attention to the wonderful world of castles
What exactly is a castle? Your thoughts might run automatically to a brick fortress with round watch towers and regular crenellations, situated on high ground. Something like the Tower of London, perhaps.
But, explains historian Dan Jones, castles come in a range of shapes and sizes, from Bronze Age hilltop fortresses to the 20th century make-believe of Disneyland’s fairytale palace.
Along the way you’ll find everything from the vast crusader castles of the Middle Ages to the gothic fantasias of Bavaria’s mad King Ludwig which resemble giant white wedding cakes. All human life and imagination, from King Arthur to Count Dracula is here.
Norman castle building at best, The Tower of London
In this brilliant book, Jones reveals how castles are built into Great Britain’s earliest sense of itself.
In the late Bronze Age the climate in Scotland took a turn for the worse, so that farming on the scrubby soil became hugely competitive. Building a hill fort from which to keep a lookout for marauding neighbours intent on stealing your livestock made perfect sense.
By the time the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43, these northernmost parts had acquired a reputation for utter lawlessness. Hadrian’s Wall, built on the Roman emperor’s command in 122 AD, was designed to stop pesky Caledonians from charging into England and wreaking havoc.
Seventy-three miles long, it took 20,000 men ten years to build using 1 million cubic metres of locally quarried stone.
More than just a crude blockade, the wall incorporated regular fortified gatehouses which housed soldiers who functioned as border guards. Part of their duties involved collecting taxes from those tradesmen and herders who were passing peacefully through.
This dual function of the castle as administrative hub and military HQ is nowhere better illustrated than in the building that followed the Norman conquest.
When Duke William (William the Conqueror) arrived in 1066 he quickly discovered that this was ‘a process, not an event’. The best way to send a message to the Anglo-Saxons that their new overlords were here to stay was to build a series of castles across the newly conquered land: Durham, Pevensey and Launceston are all Norman constructions.
Not only did these impressive buildings, visible for miles around, function as reminders of who was in charge, they also housed important civic functions.
It was now that the castle developed into a counting house, a law court and even a royal mint. It was the place you went to pay your taxes or plead your case. If you were a person of some status – a baron, say, or even a high-ranking Anglo-Saxon farmer – you might be invited to a slap-up feast in the magnificent main hall as a way of keeping you loyal to the new regime.
The piece de resistance of Norman castle building, though, has to be the Tower of London.
One of the first things William did was to order its construction on the edge of the capital city. From rudimentary wooden beginnings, the site was added to gradually until it reached its finished layout in the late 1300s.
Jones is very good at ferreting out some lesser-known stories. Like the fact that in 1101, Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, managed to escape from the infamous White Tower by getting his guards drunk, shimmying down a rope and then, quite sensibly, fleeing England.
The bishop was the first of only 40 people ever to escape from the Tower over the nine centuries that followed, a fact which led to its terrifying reputation as a place of no return.
Jones is also excellent on the ways the idea of the castle has found its way into culture.
One of the most famous examples is Elsinore in Denmark, where Hamlet is set. Shakespeare never visited in person, but his fertile mind was able to conjure what it would feel like to wander this stupendously grand Renaissance palace-fortress, built to ensure complete naval control of the gateway between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.
T he result is that famously atmospheric scene in which the young Prince Hamlet is walking the chilly ramparts when he encounters the ghost of his murdered father in full armour.
On occasion, these acts of historical imagination shaped the actual castle-building process. In the 19th century, eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria announced to the composer Richard Wagner that he intended to create a series of extravagant buildings ‘in the genuine style of the old German knights’ castles’.
Yet the results bore only a glancing relation to the medieval buildings His Majesty purported to admire so much. Instead, his three fairytale palaces, including Neuschwanstein, resembled the stage sets from one of Wagner’s bombastic operas, all fancy turrets and pointy spires.
Even worse, this obsession with castle building had bankrupted the king, and on June 10, 1886, he was deposed. A few days later the 40-year-old former monarch was found drowned in a nearby lake. Sometimes, it seemed, you could love castles just a bit too much.