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easier – the county was part of Harold’s own earldom. William was deploying a tried-and-tested technique of medieval warfare: attack your enemy in his own back yard. Terrorize his tenants, burn his crops, slaughter his sheep and cattle. To act in this brutal way exposes the weakness of your opponent’s lordship, and underlines his inability to protect his own people. Castle-building, of course, fits perfectly into this catalogue of terror. 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. And it was a tactic that proved highly effective.
    The Battle of Hastings, contemporaries recognized, was a strange affair. One side – the English – just stood stock still, trusting to the ancient tactic of presenting a solid wall of shields to the enemy. The Normans, for their part, had little option but to try and break this wall, using archers to rain down arrows on to their enemies’ heads, and charging up the hill on horseback, throwing their spears at the English line. It went on all day, which shows that it was a very close-run thing, with both sides equally matched. Two mistakes, however, eventually cost Harold the battle, the crown and his life. First, the English line failed when some of the less-experienced recruits, seeing the Normans retreating, and thinking the day was theirs, broke ranks and charged down the hill in pursuit. It was, it turned out, a cunning Norman ruse. No sooner had the line broken than the Normans wheeled round and attacked their pursuers. The second mistake, as everyone knows, was Harold’s own. Late in the day, at precisely the wrong moment, he looked up.
    Few battles ended as decisively as Hastings. Not only was Harold killed; all his brothers and a large number of major English landowners also perished. And yet, in spite of this catastrophic defeat, the remaining English leaders in London showed themselves in no rush to submit to William. Instead, they persuaded young Prince Edgar to wear the crown. William was obliged to continue pressing his candidacy with violence. After a short rest at Hastings, he headed east along the coast, burning and sacking the towns of Romney and Dover. The town of Dover was protected by an ancient fort on the top of the cliffs, which quickly submitted. At this point, one of our main sources for the duke’s career, his chaplain, William of Poitiers, says that, having taken possession of this fortress, William ‘spent eight days adding the fortifications that it lacked’. This has long been taken by some historians as an indication that, when the chips were down, it was possible to build a motte-and-bailey castle really quickly. You will notice, however, that the chaplain’s words are not very specific, and it takes a considerable leap of imagination to believe that what Dover ‘lacked’ was a motte – especially since there is no trace of one at the castle today. Nevertheless, the figure of eight days has in the past been eagerly seized upon, and seems to be supported by the comments of another chronicler on the building of a castle at York, which did have a motte.
    The figure of eight days can be tested, to some extent, by measuring the size of an ‘average’ motte, and the amount of soil one man could shift in a day. A recent geophysical survey of the motte at Hamstead Marshal in Berkshire has revealed its volume to be 10,000 cubic metres – a weight of 22,000 tonnes. How much earth a man could move in a day is more speculative, but some idea can be gleaned from nineteenth-century military manuals. The regulations of the Victorian Army suggest that one soldier could dig fifteen cubic feet in an hour, or eighty cubic feet in