Introduction. 3
castle, or rather the fortified hall, was closely connected with the institutions, laws, and customs of the estate, or it might be the shire, wapentake, rape, or hundred, of which it was the defence. Such castles as Belvoir, Clitheroe, Gloucester, Totnes, Dunster, Hastings, Bramber, and Tickhill, were the "capita" or chief seats of ancient sokes, honours, and baronies, having peculiar privileges within their garths and demesnes, with manorial dependencies scattered through many counties, and accumulated in some considerable degree even before the Norman era. Many of the lands were held, even in Saxon times, by the ancient tenure of military service, which, reduced into a system under the Norman kings, often took the form of guarding and keeping in repair some specified part of the lord's castle, a tower, gate-house, hall, or wall, to be paid either in person as castle-guard, or by the commutation known as ward-silver. Something like castle-guard appears indeed in the history of Norwich castle as early as the seventh century, and it was common in the tenth. Like the castle of Chester, that of Durham was the seat of an Earl-Palatine, the subject of the grim humour of Cœur-de-Lion, who of an aged Bishop made a young Earl, whose successors, more fortunate than those of their lay brother, preserved their Earldom and its more than Vice-regal appendages almost unshorn till the Reformation, and with a splendid remnant of judicial and social power to our own day ; and indeed, even now, though his mitre no longer springs out of a coronet, nor is his crozier as formerly combined with a sword, and though the baronial hall has been liberally surrendered for the purposes of education, the lord of Durham is not altogether wanting in pride of place, nor reduced, as yet, even to episcopal poverty.
The "Registrum Honoris de Richmond," a very curious Custumary, specifies the precise part in that castle that each tenant was to defend. At Belvoir, Staunton tower, at Berkeley, Thorpe's tower, are so called because families of those names were responsible for them, and at Dover, Magminot and a score of other towers still bear the names of the chief tenants of that important lordship, and thus preserve the memory of a tenure the substance of which has long been abolished. The connexion between the military tenant and his lord was intimate, and much imbued with the ancient Teutonic equality and independence. The lord held his "aula" for his own safety and that of his tenants ; their mutual support gave power to the one and security to the others ; no man was degraded by such a tenure. The most powerful barons were almost always also tenants holding fiefs under other lords, often far their inferiors in rank and power.B 2
