Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/56

40 Mediæval Military Architecture in England. or sheriffs, who were appointed and could be displaced at pleasure. But this policy was at first, in certain districts, necessarily postponed ; though even then William made it to be understood that the chief castles of the realm, by whomsoever built, were royal castles ; and their actual acquisition was always an important part of the policy of both him and his successors so long as castles were of consequence. Thus Windsor, Cambridge, Exeter, Corfe, Wareham, Winchester, Porchester, Southampton, Carisbrooke, Canterbury, Dover, Lincoln, Rockingham, Nottingham, Stafford, Guildford, Warwick, Marlborough, and York were royal castles from the commencement. Wallingford, Gloucester, Bristol, Oxford, Tutbury, Worcester, though built by subjects, were not the less claimed and officered by the Crown. Even Durham, though held by the bishops, and Leicester, Lincoln, and Huntingdon, by the lords of those earldoms, were from time to time in the hands of the Crown, whose rights over them were of a far more direct character than those it claimed to exercise over the lands and other feudal possessions of the same lords.

Arundel, Shrewsbury, Montgomery, Bridgenorth, and some less important fortresses, fell to the Crown on the overthrow of the house of Talvas ; and with this event a number of castles on the Welsh border, built by tenants of Earl Roger, became fiefs in capite, dependent directly upon the Crown. Besides these, there are on record in England about forty or fifty castles built by local barons, which, when it suited the Crown, were taken in hand and repaired and garrisoned at its charge.

Of nearly all the castles on record, as existing in the reigns of the Conqueror and his sons, the sites are well known ; and of very many, fragments of the masonry remain. What is very remarkable is, that of this masonry there is but little which can be referred to the reign of either the Conqueror or William Rufus, — that is, to the eleventh century. Of that period are certainly London and Malling, Guildford, Bramber, Carlisle, the gate-house of Exeter, the lower story of Chepstow, the keeps of Chester, Goderich, Walden, Wolvesey, Colchester, and Newcastle, though this last looks later than its recorded date. Newcastle was probably on the site of an earlier castle ; at least, the entry in the Hundred Rolls (ii., 119), — "Juratores dicunt quod Vicecomes ... fecit quandam inquisitionem .... super motam castri predictæ villæ," — looks like it. There is some reason to regard the keep at Malling as the earliest Norman military building now extant in England, and as the work of Gundulf, the