Status Updates From Castle: A History of the Bu...

'One need only recall the words of the Canterbury monk, for whom the construction of a castle was associated with 'insults, injuries and oppressions'. Forcing Harold's tenants to build castles and burning them alive in their houses (activities which are shown side by side on the Bayeux Tapestry) were all part of the same process of humiliating the king and provoking him to fight.'

'Despite seven years of marriage, Edward and Edith had produced no children. Godwin couldn’t be certain – and neither, of course, can we – but it seemed that his son-in-law was deliberately resisting his daughter’s charms, and spitefully frustrating any chance that there would one day be a little Godwin sitting on the English throne.'

'What really surprised the monk was the thing that these foreigners had built. It was a great mound of earth, topped with a large wooden tower, surrounded by an enclosure of wooden palisades. It was so new and so different that the monk didn’t even have a word of his own to describe it. In the end he had to settle for the word the foreigners themselves used, and called it a castle.'

I wish there were more pictures