UT180 Citadels of Power Bklt.Qxp

Citadels of Power: The Castle in History and Archaeology Professor Thomas J. Finan Saint Louis University Recorded Books™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. Citadels of Power: The Castle in History and Archaeology Professor Thomas J. Finan Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan RECORDING Producer - David Markowitz Director - Ian McCulloch COURSE GUIDE Editor - James Gallagher Design - Edward White Lecture content ©2011 by Thomas J. Finan Course guide ©2011 by Recorded Books, LLC 72010 by Recorded Books, LLC Cover image: Doonagore Castle near Doolin in County Clare, Ireland © Shutterstock.com #UT180 ISBN: 978-1-4498-4969-6 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus Citadels of Power: The Castle in History and Archaeology About Your Professor.......................................................................................4 Introduction....................................................................................................5 Lecture 1 What Is a Castle? Why Study a Castle? ........................................6 Lecture 2 Earthen and Timber Castles ......................................................10 Lecture 3 Building a Castle.......................................................................13 Lecture 4 The Norman Stone Keep...........................................................17 Lecture 5 The Concentric Castle ..............................................................21 Lecture 6 The Social Organization of Castles.............................................25 Lecture 7 The Landscape of Castles ..........................................................29 Lecture 8 Sieges .......................................................................................33 Lecture 9 Castles in the Kingdom of England............................................37 Lecture 10 The Castles of Wales .................................................................41 Lecture 11 Castles of Ireland and Scotland..................................................44 Lecture 12 Castles in France ......................................................................49 Lecture 13 Crusader Castles .......................................................................53 Lecture 14 The End of Castles....................................................................58 Course Materials...........................................................................................62 Recorded Books ............................................................................................64 3 About Your Professor Photo courtesy of Thomas J. Finan Thomas J. Finan Thomas J. Finan is an assistant professor of history and the director of the Center for International Studies at Saint Louis University. He received his Ph.D. in history from the Catholic University of America in 2001, and he holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Finan was Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and a visiting scholar in the Department of Medieval History at Trinity College, Dublin, during the 1999–2000 school year. Finan’s research interests include the history and archaeology of medieval castles of Ireland, and more particularly the archaeology of the later medieval Gaelic lordships in the western regions of Ireland. For the last ten years he has been director and codirector of the Kilteasheen Archaeological Project, a project that investigated the remains of a thirteenth-century ecclesiastical complex and hall house. The project, funded by the Royal Irish Academy, was one of the largest ongoing research excavations in Ireland in the last decade. Finan has also directed research excavations in Missouri, and he worked as a site supervisor in Ireland, Wales, and England. Finan has published a number of articles related to castles and fortifications in the western part of Ireland. He recently edited Medieval Lough Cé: History, Archaeology, and Landscape, a collection of essays that investigate the Gaelic lordship of Moylurg in the later medieval ages. He is presently completing a monograph on the King’s Cantreds that investigates the relationship between eth- nic and environmental ideology in medieval Roscommon. He is immediate past president of the American Society © Four Courts Press of Irish Medieval Studies, and he is active in a number of international archaeological and castle study organizations, including the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Chateau Gaillard Conference. Finan lives in St. Louis with his wife, Marti, and his two sons, Tommy and Conor. 4 © Shutterstock.com Lismore Castle in Waterford County, Ireland. Introduction Castles, along with knights, cathedrals, and monks, are likely one of the more important features of the medieval world, and castles continue to draw a great deal of attention from tourists as well as medieval historians, art historians, and archaeologists. Yet, despite their relative importance within medieval society, castles are also one of the least understood features of the medieval landscape. This course will consider the chronology of medieval fortifications and castles, and it will then consider the social and landscape natures of castles. It will examine the role of the castle in particular regions in Europe in the Middle Ages, most particularly the British Isles, France, and the Crusader settlements in the Holy Land. The modern visitor to a medieval castle in Europe is often faced with a somewhat artificial representation of a castle that has more to do with nine- teenth-century Romantic ideas of the castle than the reality of what a castle meant in the Middle Ages. Most national antiquities authorities lean toward the idea of preserving remains as we find them as opposed to reconstructing remains at a set time; therefore, castles today are more often than not simply the stone shells of what were once very complicated buildings. Over the last thirty years, as a result of archaeological and historical research throughout Europe, scholars now know that the stone edifices that exist in the modern landscape were just one part of a castle’s nature. Earth and timber castles (which do not survive as easily as stone) are now known to have been militarily sound fortifications and not the “second class” castle, as has often been assumed. Scholars have also considered the way in which castles are constructed that define how spaces were used within and with- out the castle, so that the castle’s primary functions (military, administrative, and residential) were emphasized. 5 Lecture 1 What Is a Castle? Why Study a Castle? The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Oliver H. Creighton and Robert Higham’s Medieval Castles. Why study castles? While your author would likely ask the question “Why not study castles?” the fact of the matter is that most people know that castles, along with cathedrals and monasteries, were one of the most important architectural features of the medieval era. The other factor to consider is that castles (again, along with monasteries and cathedrals) still exist in the modern European countryside and therefore still inspire and inform the popular imagination of visitors today. For a moment, close your eyes and imagine a castle. Try to remember at least five different aspects of the castle that you imagine. You likely pictured a large, grey-stone building with tall walls, corner drum towers, a draw- bridge, and perhaps a moat. But where did this image of a castle come from? Have you ever actually been to a castle? Have you ever actually looked at a castle, either in person or in pictures or video? In short, our preconceptions about castles tell us what we think we should see in a castle, and in some ways this has in fact shaped castle studies over the course of the twentieth century. Through most of the twentieth century, castle studies were dominated by two related ways of understanding castles: the castle as military structure and the castle as architectural feature. These two views are related in that most of the people who studied castles throughout the twentieth century in Europe tended to be government civil servants who were tasked with the responsibility of maintaining the stone fabric of these monuments (along with other monuments in the European countryside). Many of these civil servants also happened to be retired members of the military, and so in that sense they often brought a very militaristic perspective to the care of castles. When they looked at a castle, the first thing that they might have noticed were the defensive features of the castle, such as the walls, the gatehouse, and the placement of arrow loops. At the same time, though, these civil servants were often called to provide reports on the histories of the castles that focused on the actual standing remains of the castle, which, more often than not, meant the stone ruins of castles. The way that they would present this material was typically in an art historical fashion, considering the designs and decorations of the castles within the contexts of particular art historical traditions, like the Romanesque or the Gothic styles of architecture. 6 The connection between these two views of castles effectively focused attention on just the military component of the standing remains of castles, which, in short, limits our understanding of these complex structures. The further impact of the Second

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