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word of cognate origin to our word hoarding.1 The word bretasche is also of Teutonic origin, akin to the German brett, a board.

The court at the base of the hillock is always called the ballium, bayle, or bailey, a word for which Skeat suggests the Latin baculus, a stick, as a possible though very doubtful ancestor. The wooden wall which surrounded this court was the palum, pelum, or palitium of the documents, a word which Mr Neilson has proved to be the origin of the peels so common in Lowland Scotland, though it has been mistakenly applied to the towers enclosed by these peels. The palitium was the stockade on the inner bank of the ditch which enclosed the bailey; but the outer or counterscarp bank had also its special defence, called the hericio, from its bristling nature (French hérisson, a hedgehog). There can be little doubt that it was sometimes an actual hedge of brambles, at other times of stakes intertwined with osiers or thorns.

Thus the words most commonly used in connection with these wooden castles are chiefly French in form, but a French that is tinctured with Teutonic blood. This is just what we might expect, since the first castles of feudalism arose on Gallic soil (France or Flanders), but on soil which was ruled by men of Teutonic descent. We may regard it as fairly certain that it was in the region anciently known as Neustria that the motte-castle first appeared; and as we have previously shown, there is some reason to think that the centre of that region

1 See Appendix H.

2 Peel, its Meaning and Derivation, by George Neilson.

3 See Appendix I. Cohausen has some useful remarks on the use of hedges in fortification. Befestigungen der Vorzeit, pp. 8-13. A quickset hedge had the advantage of resisting fire. The word sepes, which properly means a hedge, is often applied to the palitium.

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was the place where it originated. But this must for the present remain doubtful. What we regard as certain is that it was from France, and from Normandy in particular, that it was introduced into the British Isles; and to those islands we must now turn.

CHAPTER VII

THE CASTLES OF THE NORMANS IN ENGLAND

In this chapter we propose to give a list, in alphabetical order for convenience of reference, of the castles which are known to have existed in England in the 11th century, because they are mentioned either in Domesday Book, or in charters of the period, or in some contemporary chronicle. We do not for a moment suppose that this catalogue of eighty-four castles is a complete list of those which were built in England in the reigns of William I. and William II. We have little doubt that all the castles in the county towns, such as Leicester, Northampton, and Guildford, and those which we hear of first as the seats of important nobles in the reign of Henry II., such as Marlborough, Groby, Bungay, Ongar, were castles built shortly after the Conquest, nearly all of them being places which have (or had) mottes. Domesday Book only mentions fifty castles in England and Wales, but

1 This list or catalogue raisonné was originally published in the English Historical Review for 1904 (vol. xix.). It is now reproduced with such corrections as were necessary, and with the addition of five more castles, as well as of details about thirty-four castles for which there was not space in the Review. The Welsh castles are omitted from this list, as they will be given in a separate chapter.

2 The list is brought up to fifty by interpreting the regis domus of Winchester to be Winchester castle; the reasons for this will be given later. The number would be increased to fifty-two if we counted Ferle and Bourne in Sussex as castles, as Mr Freeman does in his Norman Conquest, v., 808.

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it is well known that the Survey is as capricious in its mention of castles as in its mention of churches. It is possible that further research in charters which the writer has been unable to examine may furnish additional castles, but the list now given may be regarded as complete as far as materials generally accessible will allow. One of the castles mentioned (Richard's Castle) and probably two others (Hereford and Ewias) existed before the Conquest; they were the work of those Norman friends of Edward the Confessor whom he endowed with lands in England.

Out of this list of eighty-four castles we shall find that no less than seventy-one have or had mottes. The exceptions are the Tower of London, Colchester, Pevensey, and Chepstow, where a stone keep was part of the original design, and a and a motte was therefore unnecessary: Bamborough, Peak, and Tynemouth, where the site was sufficiently defended by precipices: Carlisle and Richmond, whose original design is unknown to us: Belvoir, Dover, Exeter, and Monmouth, which might on many grounds be counted as mottecastles, but as the evidence is not conclusive, we do not mark them as such; but even if we leave them out, with the other exceptions, we shall find that nearly 86 per cent. of our list of castles of the 11th century are of the motte-and-bailey type.

About forty-three of these castles are attached to

But the language of Domesday seems only to mean that the lands of these manors were held of Hastings castle by the service of castle-guard. See D. B., i., pp. 21 and 206.

1 The total number would be eighty-six if Burton and Aldreth were included. Burton castle is mentioned in Domesday, but there is no further trace of its existence. The castle of Alrehede or Aldreth in the island of Ely is stated by the Liber Eliensis to have been built by the Conqueror, but no remains of any kind appear to exist now. Both these castles are therefore omitted from the list.

towns. Of these, less than a third are placed inside the Roman walls or the Saxon or Danish earthworks of the towns, while at least two-thirds are wholly or partly outside these enclosures.1 This circumstance is important, because the position outside the town indicates the mistrust of an invader, not the confidence of a native prince. In the only two cases where we know anything of the position of the residence of the Saxon kings we find it in the middle of the city. Even when the castle is inside the town walls it is almost invariably close to the walls, so that an escape into the country might always be possible.

8

Of the towns or manors in which these castles were situated, Domesday Book gives us the value in King Edward's and King William's time in sixty-two instances. In forty-five cases the value has risen; in twelve it has fallen; in five it is stationary. Evidently something has caused a great increase of prosperity in these cases, and it can hardly be anything else than the impetus given to trade through the security afforded by a Norman castle.

Our list shows that Mr Clark's confident statement, that the moated mounds were the centres of large and important estates in Saxon times, was a dream. Out of forty-one mottes in country districts, thirty-six are found in places which were quite insignificant in King Edward's day, and only five can be said to occupy the centres of important Saxon manors.*

1 Exact numbers cannot be given, because in some cases the bounds of the ancient borough are doubtful, as at Quatford.

2 At Winchester and Exeter. For Winchester, see Milner, History of Winchester, ii., 194; for Exeter, Shorrt's Sylva Antiqua Iscana, p. 7.

3 Colchester is the only exception to this rule, as the castle there is in the middle of the town; but even this is only an apparent exception, as the second bailey extended to the town wall on the north, and had been royal demesne land even before the Conquest. See Round's Colchester Castle, ch. vii. 4 ✦ These five are Berkeley, Berkhampstead, Bourn, Pontefract, Rayleigh.

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