Back to the Mainly The Normans calendar
After a few years the Normans started to change their wooden motte and bailey castles to stone ones. Wood has two major
problems in that when it gets wet, it rots and when it is dry, it burns really well. The motte and bailey castles, built on wet earth mounds, were never
intended to last.
The Normans were also used to making things in stone. The men
who did this were called stonemasons. The first stone castles were intended to show Norman power and strength. A couple were built around London and both, in
some form, still survive today.
Windsor Castle is one of the official residences of the Monarch and is the largest inhabited castle in the world. It was actually badly damaged by a
fire in 1992 because although stone was used for the walls the roofs still had timber supports. The original building was probably started in 1070 and it was
finished in 1086. The other famous one is the White Tower in London, shown today in the picture, sometimes called the Tower of London. This was a massive building.
It was about 36 metres long and 32 metres wide and, at its highest, 27 metres tall. It had Roman walls on two sides and wide ditches and an earth bank and a wooden
fence on the other two.
It is estimated that between 1066, when William arrived, and his death in 1087 (though you don’t know that yet haha), a total of 86 stone castles were
built. If you think that the builders had no modern equipment and each stone block had to be cut by hand, moved to its position and then cemented in, you can see
what a great achievement it was. It is also thought that almost 1,000 motte and bailey castle were built in England.
There were several reasons for building these stone castles, apart from a place for the Lord of the manor to live and govern and his soldiers to be
stationed. They were there to frighten the neighbouring population and this worked really well as they were usually built on the highest ground and could be seen
for miles. Often the old keep of a motte and bailey castle was where the building would start and it was likely a river and forest would be nearby.
The Normans were also very religious people and built many churches,
quite a few of which still survive today. Norman churches are easily recognisable by the rounded windows and square towers. There would be a church in every village.
In the big towns they would build magnificent cathedrals.
The Normans would tend to build churches near to towns so that the people had to worship there and not go out to the smaller old Saxon churches. This
meant, as William had brought his Norman abbots to England, that the word of God was being interpreted the Norman way and the people would hear what the Normans
wanted them to hear.
The Normans didn’t just like building castles and churches, they also liked to hunt. For this reason, in 1079, William created a royal forest so that he
and his barons could hunt deer. In order to do this he destroyed about 20 small villages and so this new area became known as the New Forest and still exists today.
Part of the old forest is included in the New Forest National Park that was established in 2005. Take a visit. The area is also famous for the New Forest ponies.
Forward to 1077AD
