What Is: Motte-and-Bailey Castle

Castles are wonderful tourist attractions with romantic connotations of knights and ladies.  However, they were meant to serve several very practical purposes, defense and intimidation.  A castle was, first and foremost, a fortress.  That it might also be a residence was beside the point.  To that end, Kings and the engineers and artisans who worked for them took particular pains about where and how to build a castle.  The result was the motte-and-bailey system that is still apparent is existing castles today.

Take, for example, Windsor Castle.  Windsor lies in the county of Berkshire along the banks of the Thames River.  William the Conqueror started building it on the remains of earlier Saxon structures.  Like the Tower, its primary purpose was to guard the Thames valley and impress his new Saxon subjects with his might and ability to keep them in line.  The first order of business was the motte.  A motte was a hill suitable for the building of a central tower or keep.  Note that a motte is not a moat.  Moats, or water-filled ditches, were parts of some castle construction, but differed from the motte, or hill on which the castle was situated.  The keep on top of the motte would be surrounded by a courtyard, the enclosed area of which was known as a bailey.  The concentric rings of a large motte-and-bailey structure were known as wards.

Henry II continued William's work on the central keep of Windsor, known as the Round Tower.  This is located in the center of three wards formed by the walls of the castle complex and is easily discernable in aerial photographs of the castle.  Henry III built a royal palace suitable for living in grander state, and Edward III kept up the work.  Motte-and-bailey castles were highly adaptable.  One could keep adding concentric rings of walls and use the available space to turn fortress towers into a palaces.  Each dynasty has left their mark on Windsor, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited royal residences in the world.  Even today, no state visit to the United Kingdom is complete without a carriage ride up the Long Walk and a state banquet at Windsor.