The Definition of a Castle

INTRODUCTION

The Definition of a Castle

WHAT is a Castle?

Probably every person to whom this simple query is propounded thinks for a moment that the answer is easy. But a little reflection, concerning the widely divergent structures to which the name is applied in daily conversation, will suffice to show him that a definition is not so readily to be found as he had expected. The word " castle " is linked to all manner of things, from prehistoric earthworks down to preposterous erections of the twentieth century, with mock battlements and sham drawbridges, built for misguided lovers of the romantic or for ostentatious profiteers.

To take an example of the first class-everyone has heard of " Maiden Castle," the vast ringed series of banks and ditches, three miles outside Dorchester, which probably served several successive British tribes as a stronghold long ere the Romans came to this Island. Certainly nothing could be more unlike a castle, as generally conceived, than this complicated structure, which is represented in the first illustration of this book. Yet " Castle " it has been called for at least eight hundred years, though it has none of the features which we associate with the name, save that it was once a place of defence - a fortress of the days that knew not of brick or of hewn stone. And, oddly enough, we know that the Romans called these British hill-forts castella. Juvenal describing the ordinary avocations of the legionary officer of his own day -somewhere about 120 A.D.- mentions among them " diruere castella Brigantum "-to destroy the castles of Yorkshire Brigantes - tough enemies of the legion that lay garrisoned at the newly founded Eboracum.

Yet if Dorsetshire had not persisted in calling Maiden Castle by that name through long ages, which of us now would call it anything but an earthwork or a tribal camp of refuge? The name castle would not other similar cases scattered all over the realm from occur to us.

There are other similar cases scattered all over the realm from Cornwall to Northumberland, where the enquirer, expecting to find mediaeval stonework, discovers nought but prehistoric spade-work.

But at the other end of the scale this same deceptive word "castle" is applied to certain very large mansions of Georgian, Victorian, or even twentieth century date, which have a sufficiently pretentious and semi-military aspect to deter the auctioneer or the compiler of local guide-books from calling them Halls or Manors. Some of them stand on the sites of genuine castles of the Middle Ages, of which every external feature has disappeared, and have inherited the name from their vanished predecessors. Others are mere usurpers of the name of castle, solely in virtue of their battlements and towers-anything big and Gothic in style may get the designation, if its owner is hardened enough to bestow it on a building of yesterday or the day before. The only exception that I can see is that a dwelling of pure classical architecture will not earn the name, however large and pretentious it may be. Colonnades, pediments and statuary may make a" palace," perhaps-but not a" castle." For that public opinion requires loop-holes, machicolations, the semblance of a portcullised gate-house, and (above all) battlements that fret the sky line. I refrain from quoting examples of modern castellated architecture, left certain owners should accuse me of malevolence. But a terrible example may be seen in the second illustration of this book.

The French of to-day are even worse than ourselves in the misuse of the name " castle "-they apply it to any large residential dwelling in the countryside, even when it has no signs of defensive decoration, and is of pure seventeenth or eighteenth century domestic architecture. Moft of our " halls " and " manors " would be called Chateaux by our neighbours across the Channel.

But to get to the heart of the question, as to what is a Castle in the proper sense of the term, we must commence by ruling out prehistoric tribal camps at one end, and Victorian mock-antiques at the other. The Society of Antiquarians has a much-valued " Earthworks Committee," to which I relinquish the examination of the former class. The latter may be studied in the photographs of the auctioneer or the land-agent, which adorn the outside pages of the Times or the Morning Post.

 

Victorian Castellated Architecture -- A Sad Example

We shall be getting near a definition if we rule that a castle is a "fortified dwelling intended for purposes of residence and defence." A British hill-camp is not a fortified dwellingthough it may once have contained many huts or wigwams,and a Victorian caftle is not intended for purposes of defence, however apparently formidable its aspect.

I do not think that we can properly include among castles such military buildings as were not intended for purposes of residence. They may be called forts, blockhouses, towers, redoubts, or what you please. It is difficult to draw the line: for example the modern antiquary has determined to call the small garrison-towers, which lie along the Roman Wall in Northumbria at regular intervals, "mile castles." But I doubt the applicability of the term. On a parallel line of argument we should have to call each of the mural towers that line the enceinte of the Tower of London a "castle." In each case these structures are, in fact, only parts of a greater whole, not independent units. Nor could one properly describe Mr. Pitt's line of Martello Towers, along the coast of Kent and Sussex, as castles. They are small and non-residential, mere emplacements for a few guns to command a stretch of foreshore in a time of threatened invasion. And modern usage has also denied the name of castle to military structures of recent date, placed for purely tactical reasons to block a pass, or to deny access to the entrance of a harbour. To these the title " fort " or " battery " is applied, even though they may be so far residential as to afford shelter to a certain limited garrison.

On the other hand we must carefully exclude also, from our definition of castles, all fortified towns. These are residential, it is true, and essentially places of defence. But they are much too large to be considered in the light of a single fortified dwelling. They must be called fortresses, even though in some cases their whole circuit may be no greater than that of certain exceptionally large and complicated castles. It is quite common both in Britain and on the Continent to find a castle on a height, with a town which has grown up below it, and has ended by protecting itself by a line of walls joining on to those of the castle above-as did, for example, Edinburgh in the sixteenth century. And it is still more common to find an ancient walled town, in some corner of which a royal or baronial master has built himself a separate stronghold, long after the town was originally fortified-as happened at Lincoln or Exeter. But in all these cases the castle is a distinct unit from the town, though it may be either enclosed within it or built against one of its sides. Invariably the castle was cut off from the town, and was built so as to be capable of further defence, even after the town had fallen into the hands of an enemy. It was not a mere part of the town.

I have seen the castle defined in one excellent book as " the private stronghold of a single owner," and in another as " the product of the feudal system, and the home of the feudal lord." While acknowledging that there is much plausibility in each of these two definitions, I must point out, with regard to the first, that a castle need not be the property of a single owner, unless the body of citizens composing a republican state can be said to be a single person, and to have private property-which seems to be an over great stretching of terms. For example the " Castello " at the south-eastern extremity of the main island of Venice is certainly a castle, but as certainly it did not belong to the Doge or any other individual, but to the State of Venice. And equally so the Swiss Cantons sometimes built, and more often maintained, castles which held down the regions which they had won from their Austrian, Burgundian, and Milanese enemies. We can not, therefore, insist on a castle being necessarily private property. While with regard to the other definition which makes it " the home of the feudal lord," we can not call an Italian or a Swiss Commonwealth a feudal lord, and moreover many castles were not baronial but royal, built and maintained by the king, as the suzerain of all barons and the representative of the State. The King of England did not hold the Tower of London or Dover Castle as a private individual, but as king. I hold, therefore, that the question of proprietorship does not affect the definition of the word " castle," and that the only conditions which govern the proper use of the term are size, character, and purpose. That is to say, a castle is a military structure larger than a mere tower, peel, or blockhouse, but not amounting to a fortified town. It must be residential, but the name would not cover military buildings intended for residence but not for defence - e.g., modern barracks. For the same reason the name ought not to be applied (but often is applied) to modern residences quite unsuited for defensive purposes, but having some delusive show of fortification. Lastly, a castle must, however complicated in its internal arrangements, be a unit in itself, and not a mere part of a town or some other agglomeration of buildings. But a castle may exist inside a town, or adhering to it, provided that it is essentially separate, and can be cut off from it - e.g., by the closing of gates and the lifting of drawbridges.

We have arrived at this definition guided by commonsense and logic only. But it may be well to make a note on the curious history of the word " castle," since much confusion has been caused both to medieval monastic chroniclers and to modern historians by mistranslation of the words caftrum, castellum, castle, castello, chateau. Castrum in classical Latin was a very vague word, meaning a closed place such as a fort, a walled enclosure, or a stronghold of any sort. Its plural castra, as every schoolboy knows, means a military camp, of the type of the great legionary square, girt by ditch and palisade, such as the Romans built in their prime. Castellum was a diminutive of castrum, and should have meant a closed place of a smaller sort-as Wycliffe thought when translating the Latin Bible into English, for by castella " he understondeth litil touns." But he was not quite correct - at the time when the Vulgate translation was made, in the earliest years of the fifth century, castellum was being used in a very vague sense, as was also castrum. Both seem to have applied to populated places, small and great, whether they were regularly fortified or not. And when St. Jerome was translating the Septuagint or the New Testament into Latin, he regularly rendered Kwun into castellum, though the Greek word meant a mere village of any sort. This turned out to be a trap for unskilled Latinists in the later Middle Ages, when the feudal castle had become a familiar phenomenon. And so we find the author of the Cursor Mundi, about 1300 A.D., stating that Bethany was the " Castle " of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, in which they entertained Our Lord. No doubt he conceived them as a feudal family, with a portcullis and a coat of arms.

Now both in Carolingian France and Anglo-Saxon England castellum was used in the eighth and ninth centuries, as St. Jerome had used it in the fifth, to mean merely an inhabited place, not always a small one. Egbert of Kent and Offa of Mercia in charters call Rochester a castellum, and the considerable towns of Mācon and Vitry were castella to a Frankish chronicler. Hence much confusion has arisen, and subsequent historians, both medieval and modern, failed to understand that castellum merely meant a town in the days of Egbert or Charlemagne, and not a fortified residential building. It was only in the tenth century that the word began to be used for what was then a new thingthe stronghold that the feudal lord,who had risen on the ruins of the Carolingian Empire,was beginning to build all over Continental Europe. It is a misfortune that no new word was coined to express what was actually a new phenomenon. But both chroniclers and clerks drawing up charters preferred to use old terms, not only castellum but arx, munitio, turris, all words old and familiar and with no necessary connection with the feudal caftle, and so all equally delusive to readers in later ages. There is a transitional period in the tenth and eleventh centuries during which it is impossible to discover, except from the context, whether a writer is speaking of a castellum of the sort that St. Jerome or Charlemagne knew, or of one of the new royal or baronial strongholds. But finally the old sense was forgotten, and the new use of the word passed from the Latin into the spoken tongues of most of the nations of Europe, and castle, chateau, kastel, castello, castillo, in the sense of a baronial stronghold, appears on the map all over Christendom, even as far as the AEgean, where kastros and kastris are in many cases legacies from the Frankish barons, who built their castles to hold down the scraps which they had torn away from the Byzantine Empire.