De Re Militari | Book Reviews
Abigail Wheatley
The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England
Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004. 174pp. $90.00. ISBN 9781903153147
The castle has long stood as one of the most recognizable relics from the medieval period. Abigail Wheatley examines the image and understandingErnle Bradford, Sword And The Scimitar: The Saga Of The Crusades (Pen & Sword, 2004), 192pp. of what the castle was, and what it represented, in medieval England. She argues, convincingly, that contemporaries had a broad cultural understanding of what constituted a "castle", and that modern historians have too often characterized castles as only being defensible private noble or royal residences. The bulk of the book is divided into an introductory chapter examining the idea of the castle, and then three broadly thematic chapters that examine different incarnations of castles- the urban castle, the spiritual castle, and the imperial castle.
Castles, and castle imagery, loomed large in the medieval imagination, and castle motifs pervaded many forms of cultural expression. Wheatley immediately introduces the reader to the myriad forms of evidence containing castles and castle imagery. This survey includes heraldic symbols, paper table decorations, seals, sermons, theology, religious treatises, just to name a few. She thus underlines the interdisciplinary nature of her evidence, and demonstrates the total saturation of the castle motif in medieval culture.
Wheatley lays out her argument against a narrow conception of the medieval castle in the first chapter, The Idea of the Castle. She supports her analysis with a wide use of literary and linguistic evidence, evidence that she criticizes previous historians (most especially Charles Coulson) for largely ignoring. Her argument demonstrates that terms such as castrum and castellum did not always only refer to private Norman fortresses when used in literature, or in the historical writings of chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis. However, instead of seeking to replace the " reductive and normative tendencies" of prior castle definitions with another normative definition, she instead tries "to argue for a broader, less specific understanding of the word for the early period after the introduction of the word to Britain at the Conquest." (28) Overall, Wheatley demonstrates effectively that there was wide overlap in the medieval mind between "private fortifications and fortified communal and urban enclosures.” (44)
Her first substantive chapter of case studies, focusing on the urban castle, makes important connections between the medieval conception of Troy as an exemplar of an urban environment, with both positive and negative connotations, and the contemporary experiences of cities such as London. She follows Coulson's re-evaluation of the castle's role and effect on native populaces, and she endorses Coulson's identification of a normative bias in contemporary sources that almost always judged castles to be "oppressive", and she follows him in rejecting that bias. The castle could reflect both harmony and conflict in an urban environment.(52) She makes a very interesting argument regarding the adoption of the London castles into the nascent sense of urban community growing in the twelfth century, and while she analyses this effectively in light of the Trojan foundation myths of Britain, she could have done more with the connection between urban fortifications and communal ideology.
Her second chapter, The Spiritual Castle, is her most ambitious in scope in that it seeks to discuss both the form of ecclesiastical architecture and the role of castle imagery in theological conceptions. She discusses the tensions between ecclesiastical ideology and military concerns, but spends most of her time demonstrating similarities between "defensive and devotional buildings.” (79) In this she is largely successful, and her broader point about the obscuring of the connections between ecclesiastical architecture and defensive architecture by modern historians is well taken. She rightly argues against those who see "the architecture and ideology of castle and church as diametrically opposed: the one built as a symbolic celebration of the spiritual role of medieval society's oratores (those who pray), the other as a manifestation of the practical and violent concerns of its bellatores (those who fight).” (89) She illuminates the heavy reliance on military imagery by Christian theologians and authors, and she demonstrates that this easy familiarity blurred the lines between defensive and contemplative architecture.
The final chapter, The Imperial Castle, is the most convincing and comprehensive of her case studies. It is here that Wheatley reaches her stride in demonstrating that the medieval mind conceived of castles as being important structures across borders and time, and as embodying important links between societies. One of her major case studies are the perceived imperial connections inherent in Edward I's grand castle at Caernarfon, though she establishes them in a novel and compelling fashion. She contextualizes Caernarfon into a wider British context, linking it to Welsh connections to Roman claims to supremacy through Magnus Maximum, rather than Constantine.(140) Overall, she bolsters her case that medieval people understood castles to be general defensive enclosures, rather than narrow feudal private residences.
Overall, Wheatley's book is a welcome addition to our understanding of the ideology of the castle in medieval society. While she convincingly demonstrates that castles had a much wider cultural resonance in the Middle Ages than modern historians often admit, she does not always accurately account for the full range of roles that castles could play. In her attempt to broaden out our understanding of the castle, she claims that contemporaries did not see castles as just private feudal residences, but rather "the word castle seems to have indicated a defensive enclosure of a much more general kind, applicable to urban fortifications, small houses and ecclesiastical foundations as well as the private defenses with which the word is exclusively associated in modern use.”(146) In this she is likely correct, but it is ironic considering her initial goal of getting beyond understandings of castles as merely defensive military structures.