Items14The creator’s order
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White Tower (Tower of London)The starting point: a Norman great tower meant to overawe a conquered city as much as to resist an assault. William I commissioned it after 1066, and at nearly 90 feet it could be seen from almost anywhere in London. Building took about 20 years, so William never saw it finished.
The idea it shows…0 - 2
Restormel CastleIf you want to understand what a shell keep is, this is the one to see. Instead of a square tower, a ring of stone wall was built around the top of an earlier earth mound, the motte, raised around 1100, with the main rooms fitted within an almost perfectly circular plan.
The national listing calls…0 - 3
Dover CastleHenry II spent the 1180s turning this clifftop into what has been called the most advanced castle design in Europe: a great tower that doubled as a palace, wrapped in walls with projecting towers that widened the defenders' field of fire.
The design was tested in 1216, when Prince Louis of France…0 - 4
Château GaillardRichard the Lionheart built this fortress above the Seine in just two years, 1196 to 1198, to guard Normandy against the French king. It packs three separate enclosures, each with its own walls, behind a ditch 20 meters wide, and it was one of the earliest castles to use machicolations, the…0 - 5
Kenilworth CastleKenilworth shows what water could do for a castle. Its sandstone great tower dates to the 1120s, but the real defense was a huge man-made lake, the mere, that surrounded the site and made it hard for attackers to dig beneath the walls.
That was put to the test in 1266, in an extraordinary…0 - 6
Krak des ChevaliersA crusader showcase of walls within walls. The Knights Hospitaller took possession in 1142 and held it until 1271, and the fortress they built pairs an outer wall with an inner citadel, adding doubled walls, many towers and a huge sloping base, the talus or glacis, that made the walls far harder to…0 - 7
Beaumaris CastleConcentric design taken to its logical end. Begun in 1295 on a new site, Beaumaris let Edward I's master builder, James of St George, lay out rings of defenses with near-geometric symmetry: an outer wall with 16 towers and two gates, an inner ward with six more towers and two great gatehouses, and…0 - 8
Malbork CastleMalbork shows a military order building a castle as the seat of a whole state, and in brick rather than stone. The Teutonic Order moved its headquarters here in 1309, and on its completion in 1406 the complex was the world's largest brick castle.
It passed its biggest test. After the knights'…0 - 9
Fortifications of RhodesThis is where you can watch medieval walls being reworked for the age of gunpowder. The Knights Hospitaller fought off an Ottoman attack in 1480, then rebuilt: they widened the moat, thickened the walls to give a broad platform for artillery, raised them for a better field of fire, and greatly…0 - 10
Deal CastleBy the 1530s a castle was no longer a home with walls but a gun platform, and Deal is the clearest English example. It was built in 1539 and 1540 on Henry VIII's order as an artillery fortress against the threat of invasion: squat and low, with six rounded bastions around a central keep, six more…0
