Castles and forests

In England, the dispossessions and conquests of the late eleventh century have left an impact not just upon aristocratic DNA and naming patterns but upon the modern English landscape. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, still croaking away in its archaic English prose, reported the death of King William I in 1087 not in a spirit of vengeance or hatred but in something approaching wonder. This King, the chronicler wrote, built castles and sorely oppressed the poor. He also so loved the wild beasts of England, the hart, the hare and the boar, that he protected their habitat with new laws.

William was not the inventor either of the castle or the idea of the forest. Castles of one sort of another had been known in England as long ago as the ice-age, and the remains of Roman military encampments still litter the English, Welsh and Northumbrian countryside. In the 1050s, one of the consequences of Edward the Confessor’s encouragement of Normans at his court was the building of castles, by the Norman Oswin Pentecost in Herefordshire and by Ralph the Staller in Essex, with Eustace of Boulogne probably planning one at Dover, all of them powerful symbols of foreign authority within regions theoretically controlled by the Godwin family. As for forests, hunting was the great joy of the young Edward the Confessor, and large parts of England, including the Mendip Hills, were probably already regarded as special royal hunting reserves even before 1066.

The Normans after 1066 nonetheless vastly extended the reach of both castles and forests. Even before the Battle of Hastings, with the construction of a castle on the Sussex coast, William introduced a new concept to the English: a baronial or royal fortress established not just in towns or cities but across the English landscape, defensible in time of war, and capable of serving as a centre of baronial law and tax gathering. This, the dungeons and dragons view of the castle, is one side of the coin. Certainly, some castles were places of fear and torture. But the shadows cast by castles were not always dark. In time of war, the castle could serve to shelter the local population, not just to terrorize them. It could also serve as a symbol of sophistication and cosmopolitan taste, not merely as a brutal reminder of Norman violence. The White Tower, now the oldest structure within the Tower of London, or Colchester Castle, or, slightly later, Norwich Castle built around 1100, were amongst the largest and most impressive buildings raised anywhere in medieval Europe. They served as administrative centres and as symbols of authority. Colchester Castle, for example, was deliberately founded on the ruins of the Roman temple of Claudius, reusing a site and materials originally intended to celebrate Caesar’s successor as imperial conqueror of the English, its walls banded with darker and lighter layers of masonry in a deliberate echo of the imperial walls of Rome and Constantinople. Nearby, the King’s steward Eudo Dapifer established a new monastery, one of the largest and richest Benedictine houses founded anywhere in northern Europe after 1066, described specifically in one of its early charters as a ‘basilica’, literally as a church worthy of a ‘basileus’ or emperor. The Roman military camp at York, reputedly the spot where Constantine first declared his intention to rule as sole Roman emperor, was itself incorporated within the precincts of York Minster.

Castles undoubtedly performed a military function, serving as outposts of lordly or royal authority, impregnable shards of resistance buried deep in the flanks of any army attempting to advance across country, guarding towns, cities and the greater roads and river crossings. But not all were principally of military significance. Many were intended to symbolize power, even when left ungarrisoned, as at Corfe Castle in Dorset, or to serve as lordly residences, posed in a carefully planned landscape. At Castle Acre, for example, one of the principal residences of the Warenne family, the castle itself was built in conjunction with a priory of monks, imported from distant Cluny on the Rhône, and with a park and pleasure grounds surrounding it, as part of a deliberately planned landscape of lordship. Nearby Castle Rising, symbolizing the rise to power of the Aubigny family, was sited on a false crest above the Babingley river, chosen not for military or defensive purposes but for display, dangerously vulnerable to higher ground to the south, but impressively visible both from the sea and by all traffic up and down the river, its keep built in deliberate imitation of the great royal castle at Norwich, itself one of the most impressive stone structures then existing in northern Europe.

Castles such as Arundel or Belvoir or Alnick still impress the spectator, even today, because their sites were selected precisely in order to strike awe into the minds of those who viewed them. So spectacular was the site of Belvoir, that the family which built it, natives of Brittany, chose to use an image of their massive new stone keep on the seal that they employed to authenticate their letters and charters. If we imagine a visitor to England, tacking up the Channel from Sussex to the Thames, the sight from sea first of Pevensey, then Hastings, then Dover, then Richborough, Reculver and Rochester, would have evoked an extraordinary and potent combination of Norman Romanesque combined with more ancient classically Roman architectural monuments, for the most part on a scale that even the kings of France or the Holy Roman emperors of Germany would have been hard put to match. No wonder, then, that the building of castles, by the King and by his barons, was one of the changes after 1066 seared into the memory of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, whose fellow Englishmen and other semi-slave labour would have been required in vast numbers to raise the earth mounds on which such structures rested, and to hew the stones from which their massive walls and keeps were constructed. These were public works, built from the sweat and toil of the defeated English, proclaiming the Normans as the new imperial master race.

In the shadow of the castle stretched the forest. What changed after 1066 was not the royal or aristocratic taste for hunting. Hunting, and the deliberate, often highly ritualized taking of life, had always been a royal sport, be it in ancient Babylon, where the lions’ den in which Daniel was accommodated implies huntsmen to capture the lions, or Judea where King David could compare himself to a partridge hunted upon the mountains (1 Samuel 26:20). Edward the Confessor had probably passed a great deal of his time in the 1050s and 60s hunting in the ancestral parks of the West Saxon kings, and as early as the reign of Cnut not only had hunting in the king’s parks been forbidden to all save the King and his guests, but certain wild creatures – whales, porpoise and sturgeon for example – were recognized as lordly perquisites, reserved for the table of king or earl. It was not merely the King’s right but his duty to shed blood. Capital punishment, into the twentieth century, remained one of the crown’s particular concerns, so that the possibility of the King or Queen’s pardon, from a very early date, certainly by the twelfth century, became a regular aspect of the last days of those condemned to death for homicide. Kings who did not hunt or who refused to shed blood shirked one of the greater obligations of royalty, as teachers in the schools of Paris were later to declare.

What changed after 1066 was not the significance or regularity of the king’s hunt but the environment in which it took place and perhaps the procedures of the hunt itself. Large parts of the country, by no means all of them thickly wooded, were set aside from the ordinary laws of England and declared to be ‘forest’: a newly defined legal concept that came to denote a region in which the preservation of the king’s beasts was the overriding concern. Within such regions, no one might cut green trees and plants, the vert, in which wild beasts lived, or clear waste land and cultivate it, or keep hunting dogs or in any way injure the wildlife, the venison of the forest, under pain of the most draconian punishments, such as cutting off hands or feet and other judicial mutilation. In all likelihood these legal restrictions already applied, before 1066, albeit in slightly modified form, to the greater ducal forests of Normandy. The effect in England was drastically to reduce the proportion of the population entitled to hunt or consume game, from hares and herons to foxes and deer. The hunting of such creatures was now restricted by law to a tiny elite.

Not surprisingly, as successive kings placed more and more of England under forest jurisdiction, the King’s foresters and forest laws became one of the more blatant and resented symbols of raw royal power. It is remarkable how many of the saints venerated by Englishmen in the twelfth century earned their reputation for sanctity in part by resisting the power of foresters. St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who saved the life of a hare from pursuing hounds is matched in this respect by St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln in the 1180s, who kept a pet swan at his manor of Stowe, thereby taming and possessing one of the most regal of wild birds, and who regularly ignored royal prohibitions to excommunicate the king’s foresters guilty of pillage and worse. In the meantime, the creation by the Norman kings of vast wastelands known as forests, policed and set about with the cruellest of punishments, was not only resented by those who inhabited or owned land in such regions, but was regarded as one of the greater sins of pride to which the Norman conquest had given rise.

The creation of the New Forest, for example, not only forced the expulsion and resettlement of large numbers of peasants previously bonded to land now set aside for the king’s deer, but ensured that many of those who held manors within this region, the bishop and monks of Winchester for example, could not properly exploit such land, clear new fields or extend the area under cultivation without incurring heavy fines for their encroachments upon the vert. Not surprisingly, the fact that two of William the Conqueror’s sons, Richard in the 1080s, and William Rufus in 1100, himself King of England, met their deaths as a result of hunting accidents in the New Forest, Richard in a fall from his horse, Rufus shot with a crossbow bolt fired at a deer, was widely interpreted as God’s vengeance. The Normans were punished for their pride by the death of a king and a king’s son in the thick of the English greenwood. Robin Hood, that archetype of the English rebel, cocking a snook at Frenchified sheriffs, was in good company in doing so from the depths of the forest, making his home and his dinner from the vert and venison theoretically reserved for a foreign elite.

Into these forests and in the shadow of their castles, the Normans introduced new and exotic creatures not previously known to the English. Pigs fattened on forest acorns became a far more common element of upper-class diet, clearly reflecting a particular Norman taste for pork. Pea hens and peacocks, already shown in the Bayeux Tapestry as a feature of Duke William’s court in Normandy, now screeched raucously across the lordly English countryside. Fallow deer, smaller than the native red deer, were introduced to the woods, to begin with as something almost as exotic as llamas or ostriches to the modern millionaire. They came ultimately from Turkey, perhaps via the Norman colony in Sicily, and seem to have been introduced to England long before they arrived in France or other parts of northern Europe. The bishop of Norwich, a Norman named Herbert Losinga, wrote a bitter letter of complaint when his own fallow deer, apparently a single specimen, fell victim to local poachers. Rabbits, known to the Romans but thereafter apparently hunted to extinction in England, were reintroduced from Normandy, although perhaps not in large numbers until later in the twelfth century. The word ‘warren’ is a Norman import and the warren itself was carefully protected, with special warreners to guard it and terriers trained to control its rapidly multiplying population. In regions of sand or marginal soil, rabbits bred for their fur as much as for their meat henceforward became a common feature of the English landscape, so common indeed as to be virtually invisible to archaeologists. Those excavating early rabbit warrens have sometimes published their findings as if they were investigating not man-made rabbit burrows but ritual labyrinths or even the burial chambers of prehistoric midgets.