Free Castle by Marc Morris Page A

their design. In one way or another, each one is different from its peers, and there are many examples that are far removed from the simple stone box. In Suffolk, for example, the little stone keep at Orford is a particularly ingenious and intentionally whimsical creation, with circular rooms and three large buttressing towers. More imposing and hardly less original, the tall, almost windowless keep at Conisbrough is a similarly rounded and buttressed affair. At Norwich, the great keep, much-restored in the nineteenth century, is thought to belong to the early decades of the twelfth century and has no close parallels in England, except nearby Castle Rising, which was clearly inspired by its bigger neighbour. But whatever shape he settled on, the twelfth-century lord who wanted to dazzle his neighbours was going to be building a great tower. From the start of the century, new keeps were constructed up and down the country, from Newcastle in the north to Porchester in the south; altogether, more than fifty had been erected by the century’s end. Dover in Kent, one of the last to be built, was also one of the greatest – a final hurrah for the keep, and a worthy descendant of the Tower of London.
    To build on this scale, of course, took enormous resources, and for this reason many of the more important keeps were built by kings. In twelfth-century England, there were four of them: Henry I (1100–35), Stephen (1135–54), Henry II (1154–89) and Richard I (1189–99). From the point of view of castle building, Stephen and Richard were not very important. Stephen was too busy fighting his cousin Matilda for control of the country throughout his troubled reign, and had neither the time nor the money to invest in large-scale building projects. Richard I does enjoy a reputation as a castle-builder, but it derives from his magnificent new fortress (Château Gaillard) at Les Andelys in Normandy, rather than the improvements that he carried out to his English castles. Our great castle-building kings in the twelfth century are the two Henrys. Henry I, youngest son of William the Conqueror, was a famously unpleasant individual, but nevertheless a noted builder of stone castles. Usually credited with the huge keep at Norwich, he is also thought to have built new towers at Canterbury, Gloucester and Corfe. He ruled England successfully, through a combination of administrative genius and calculated brutality (unlike Edward I, who only does it in a Hollywood film, Henry really did throw one of his enemies out of a castle window). As Duke of Normandy, however, Henry had a much harder time, and therefore invested most of his castle-building budget in his troubled dukedom. The king was responsible for the keeps at Caen, Domfront and Arques, as well and repairs and rebuildings at other Norman castles.
    The prize for building keeps in England, however, must go to Henry II. Always remembered for his ill-timed rhetorical question, ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’, Henry II also deserves lasting fame as England’s pre-eminent builder of great towers. At the start of his reign, young Henry’s position was the opposite to that of his namesake and grandfather, Henry I. With strong support from his Norman barons, the new king’s grip on his Continental inheritance had long been secure. In England, however, he was a newcomer, and found at his accession that the power of the Crown had been much diminished during the war-torn reign of his predecessor, King Stephen. Henry therefore set about re-establishing the Crown’s authority, and he did this in the most visible way possible – by building castles. The king was responsible for brand new keeps at Scarborough, Newcastle, Orford and Dover, as well as the small keep at the Peak in Derbyshire, and perhaps a now-vanished tower at Nottingham.
    But, as with motte and baileys, the building of stone towers was not exclusively a royal affair. Great barons of the twelfth century also adopted