The age of castles
After William the Conquers success in winning the crown of England, besides changing the whole system of government, controlling rebellions and changing English culture, he also demanded the creation of castles. From here and on, many other Kings, continued the creation of castles.
Due to the numerous amounts of rebellions which had occurred William and his barons travelled all over England to establish castles. He built them on the outside of Saxon towns, which helped protect their new land and make is difficult for the English to fight back – to prevent them from building or raising an army.
At first these castles were built from wood. Although it is described by David Howarth in his book 1006: the Year of the Conquest he describes the castles as 'heavily guarded, with archers day and night as well as knights who kept ‘castle guard’, their weakness was attack by fire'. Rebellious Saxons would light bond fires against the wooden fences; touch the timber poles with blazing pine-brands (torches) and fire arrows with greasy rags to start the palisades smoldering.
When William built the first castles many Saxons were unaware of what they were. As said by Edward Arnold in his historical book In Search of History 1066-1485, that William 'forced the English to build over one hundred castles'. Firstly they were forced to burrow a large round ditch. The dirt was placed in the middle to make a mound, which was called a motte. On the motte they built the castle of wood (they used wood because they in a rush to build castles). After this, they would dig another ditch nearby to make a bailey. Once this was completed, they built wooden fences around the bailey and castle and added a wooden bridge to link the mote and castle. They would do this in a space of 7days if the worked quickly.
Another element besides the English people being used as slaves was that if houses were interfering with construction, the Normans would just pull them down. It was recorded by Edward Arnold, that “In Lincoln, 116 houses were destroyed… At Oxford, they made the motte by piling earth on top of the peoples homes”.
From this it is evident that William truly impacted the lived of many English people during his reign in the medieval era. The fact that he used English people as slaves to built his castles, as well as destroy or build on top of their houses would have destructed their way of life, let alone the establishment of castles themselves near their towns, explored how they will be continuously under the control of the King. This further displays their loss of freedom, if apart of the kings army was left to continuously monitor the towns activity.
When times in England has settled and become more peaceful, William recognised that his wooden castles were not durable, thus be replaced the fences with stone walls. Stone building were too heavy to be built on a motte, and were usually built on a bailey instead. Many stone castles were huge such as the one at Rochester which is over 34 meters high, with walls 3.5 meters thick. Through Williams construction of Castles, which are a monumental historical structure of the medieval period, many Kings following William, continued the construction of castles. This evidently shows his impact on new technology.