Castles in Medieval Society. Fortresses in England, France and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages
Charles Coulson has been writing about castles for the last thirty years (as the twenty-seven entries under his own name in the wide-ranging bibliography testify), and this book is a summation of this three decades of work. His central thesis is that the serious academic study of castles took some disastrous wrong-turns in its infancy, at the end of the nineteenth century. Principally, scholars became obsessed with the narrowly military function of castles, to the exclusion of virtually all other considerations. For Coulson, this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of castles within medieval society, and it is this which he sets out to examine over some 400-odd pages. For a start, he takes issue with modern definitions of the very word ‘castle’, taking a decidedly catholic approach to the subject; for Coulson, a ‘castle’ was anything which contemporaries referred to as such, regardless of the strength (or otherwise) of its fortifications, and including fortified towns, which were frequently referred as ‘castles’ in both records and chronicles. From this standpoint, the rather sterile controversies amongst castle-historians over the last century concerning exactly what constitutes a ‘proper’ castle, with ‘serious’ fortifications, have rather missed the point. Given a nobility which portrayed itself – and was portrayed – as the bellatores, ‘those who fought’, it is hardly surprising that their buildings should have taken on a martial aspect, even if those buildings were not actually built primarily for martial purposes.
Instead, Coulson sees castles primarily as an expression and embodiement of lordship, serving a practical purpose as the administrative centres of the estates, or castellaries, of which they were an integral part. Thus he argues that the hostility of so many contemporary clerical writers to castles was motivated not by antipathy to castles per se (after all, as he points out, many prelates were themselves enthusiastic castle builders), but by antagonism to the castle building of particular lay lords, where it encroached upon clerical jurisdiction. Similarly, examining the language of dire military necessity that was habitually employed in petitions for licences to crenellate and grants of murage, which stressed the public-spirited intentions of the petitioner to defend his neighbourhood against a clear and present danger of rampant violence, he argues that far from being a genuine reflection of endemic disorder in medieval society, this language was merely a routine bureaucratic topos, deliberately deployed to elicit a routinely favourable bureaucratic response. He demonstrates that the customary rendability of castles in Capetian France functioned as a means of exercising and publicly expressing overlordship, rather than arising simply from a military imperative to gain control of castles for the defence of the realm in times of war. He also shows that even in war zones such as the Anglo-Scottish Marches, castles were customarily treated just like any other form of landed property, and were allowed to pass into the hands of widows and minors, notwithstanding the primacy which modern historians have placed on their military role (although perhaps warfare was not as endemic in the Marches as he seeks to portray).
In accordance with Coulson’s thesis, there is very little of warfare or sieges in this work (and certainly no attackers crawling up garderobe chutes), a justifiable omission, given that most castles saw little or no actual warfare throughout their existence, and given the existing preponderance of rather more militaristic studies. However, Coulson perhaps slightly overstates his case; after all, there were some castles built primarily as military fortifications. In addition, for all his attempts to make a virtue of it (7-8), Coulson’s exclusive reliance on printed records does render his comparisons between France and England slightly problematic (otherwise one of the book’s major strengths), given the very different history of publishing medieval records in the two countries, and indeed the very different nature of those records themselves. And as he himself admits (8), his approach involves considerable geographical and chronological leaps, which gives a somewhat disjointed feel to his argument; in particular, following the vagaries of his own previous research, this often leads to conditions in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France being compared to fourteenth-century England – and this does indeed provoke ‘some irritation’ (8).
Coulson’s writing style is idiosyncratic; in particular, the many discursive footnotes are written in a curiously clipped style, somewhat akin to a reader’s scribbled marginal annotations. The fact that he tends to couch his arguments in terms of class-conflict gives the work a somewhat dated air (especially since we’ve all been told that the class war is now over), and in keeping with this, he is combative in the extreme – indeed, it is perhaps somewhat curious that he should criticize Ella Armitage for ‘anti-Clark rancour’ (53n.), given the decidedly rancourous tone of his own work. However, this does produce a text which is never less than lively and readable. And there can be no doubt that this is an important, agenda-setting work, offering a comprehensive overview of the radically revisionist ideas which Coulson has been developing since the early-Seventies. He performs a valuable service in helping to drag castles from out of ‘the shadow of the general’s armchair’ [1], and putting them firmly into the context of the largely peaceable society of which they were an integral part. Addressing as it does fundamental questions about the nature of medieval lordship, it will be of interest to a far wider readership than just the rather narrow field of castle studies. Doubtless, many will violently disagree with part or all of this book; however, nobody with any interest in the medieval castle can afford to ignore it.
[1] The memorable title of David Stocker’s review article in Archaeological Journal cxlix (1992).