Chapter Eight
Epilogue: The Disappearing Castle

The universal tension between public justice and private control underwent a radical change in vocabulary during the 1020s, according to Georges Duby, as new divisions of power were established in France. The heart of the new social unit was the castrum , or castle; it was a tower in the countryside, and its design echoed the walls of a city under regal control. "The castle was an ambivalent symbol: it was both the seat of justice and the base of a potentially oppressive power, a sign of the lord's duty to protect his people and also of his right to command and, if necessary, punish them."^[1]

The Normans who invaded England relied on such castles to maintain their authority over a large and far-flung population.^[2] Castles functioned to protect the realm, as residences for the king, and as centers of shrieval administration. Royal castles also provided a depository for public records, food supplies, wine, and prisoners.^[3] By the early fourteenth century, according to N.J.G. Pounds's recent study The Medieval Castle in England and Wales , at least half of the fifteen hundred castles built since the Conquest had been deserted.^[4] Others were crumbling. Their importance diminished as the king's courts spread their influence and the costs of maintenance increased. Their military significance faded except on the borders, while the number of great

barons diminished until the peerage numbered no more than sixty or so families. Gunpowder made smaller castles useless.^[5]

During the War of the Roses, castles had no military impact:

Strategically castles proved as insignificant as cities. The private castles of the nobility might never have existed for all the effect they had upon the wars. Of the royal castles, only Harlech, for reasons now obscure, withstood a long blockade. The rest of the Welsh castles, like Pembroke and Radnor, and the great northern castles, Alnwick, Bamborough, and Dunstanborough, which figure so prominently in the meager narratives of the 1460's, never held out more than a few weeks.^[6]

Castles had been licensed by the crown, and the custom continued during the fifteenth century in the need to apply for permission to crenellate a dwelling. Thus the outward form of the castle became what Pounds terms an "empty symbol," but nevertheless the "object of ambition of every aspiring member of the upper classes."^[7] By the time of Spenser and Shakespeare, a castle offered status to the newly ennobled, and its designs were perpetrated by academic and charitable institutions. Real fortresses were redesigned according to foreign styles, as when from 1538 to 1540 Henry VIII built coastal artillery forts along the Thames to Portsmouth.

The fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight illustrates the appearance and disappearance of the castle as a sign of status and good manners.^[8] The fantastic and sudden presence of the Green Knight's castle of Hautdesert, just as Gawain prays for harbor, emphasizes its symbolic character, which David Aers identifies as the conflict between individual identity and social standards.^[9] The seductive behavior of Bercilak's wife suggests at first that Hautdesert is designed to call into question the values of the Arthurian community, but the castle turns out to be a courtly mirror of chivalry, a school for refinement. The name of Bercilak's castle, Hautdesert (high reward?), indicates its function as part of a traditional chivalric Bildung , a story of personal moral

development. There is some irony in the poem's celebration of courtly culture. The pentangle Gawain wears represents his private devotion to the "sacralization of the court's values, practices, and language,"^[10] but he never objects to the rules of the game played at the Green Knight's castle. Instead he blames himself for his failure to reveal the girdle he has received from Bercilak's wife. Although Gawain considers himself a moral failure, Bercilak and Arthur's court regard him as a hero and accord him the social status that the image of the castle came to represent.

Spenser's Faerie Queene maintains the old dichotomy of the castle, which could represent either justice or oppressive power. The poem recapitulates a long history of literary usage. It uses the word "castle" to refer to houses, palaces, temples, and towers. It draws on centuries of tradition in which the edifice represented vices and virtues; goodness, holiness, and honor; pleasure, felicity, and the soul. Castles are built of glass, on rock or sand, and there is even a parody of the Italian rocca (a castle or fortress), when Malengin lives literally in a "rock," or cave, instead of a more civilized structure (FQ 5.9.4). Spenser's castles may be figures of speech, as in the caste of health (FQ 1.9.31).^[11] Or they can be emblematic, like the sign of Philip II, king of Castile: in a dedicatory sonnet to Lord Howard, Spenser refers to the Spanish Armada as "those huge castes of [the] Castilian king."^[12] The castle can be a synecdoche for a larger war: Spenser represents the whole battle against the Spanish in the Low Countries by the siege of Antwerp (FQ 5.10.25-39), where Arthur imposes "new laws and orders new" (FQ 5.10.27). (In a similar way, the eleventh-century Roman d'Eneas turned the field camp of Aneas into a medieval castle, and the Trojan soldiers wage war as armed knights.)^[13] Or the castle can project psychic states: C. S. Lewis referred to Spenser's houses and castles (the terms are interchangeable in The Faerie Queene ) as "prolonged states of inner weather."^[14]

Spenser's castles also symbolize ideals or a vocation, thereby representing the inscrutable future. In Book IV, Artegall leads Britomart, Scudamor, and Glauce as all four search for Amoret (who has been snatched by Lust). He and Britomart have just recognized each other

for the first time, although Britomart has previously seen in Merlin's glass that Artegall will be her husband. Artegall guides her to "some resting place" where they can heal their wounds, enjoy "dayly feasting both in bowre and hall," and get to know each other (FQ 4.6.39). Artegall's edifice is not a lowly cottage like the House of Care (FQ 4.5.32), whose hammering blacksmiths reminded Coleridge of an opium nightmare.^[15] It is well appointed; indeed, it is too pleasant to be in the middle of nowhere. It is there when needed, then gone. Within what Philip Sidney, using a proverbial phrase, called a "castle in the air,"^[16] a daydream, Artegall lays siege to Britomart, "continuall siege unto her gentle hart" (FQ 4.6.40). The exercise is superfluous, since she is already in love and has been pursuing him since the beginning of Book III. But Artegall needs the absent edifice for a symbolic reason besides the love allegory of wooing. It provides a proper setting for Artegall's declaration of a "custome ancient" (FQ 4.6.44) according to which he must travel from there with no guide, leaving Britomart behind while he strives to bring justice to the world in Book V. The place appears out of nowhere, but this is its significance—only Artegall sees it at first.

The castle, in the eyes of Artegall, represents a vision of a just future, a sign of dominion where the horrors of the past on which it is founded are forgotten. This vision helps explain the imagery of Shakespeare's Richard II . Castles are mentioned more often in Richard II than anywhere else in Shakespeare. Successive scenes are set at Bristol Castle, where Richard's favorites, Bushy and Green, take refuge; at Berkeley Castle, which its lord surrenders in the company of York, who berates his nephew Bullingbroke for his treason before abandoning Richard to join with him; at "Barkloughly castle" (Harlech, in northern Wales), where Richard lands on his return from Ireland, salutes the earth, and learns the extent of his misfortunes; and finally at Flint Castle, where Richard goes to "pine away," realizing that he must soon yield up his crown, jewels, scepter, and "gorgeous palace" (a phrase from Philip Sidney's Defense of Poetry that Prospero will use in The Tempest ).^[17] In each case we hear the word castle , although in later scenes in this well-

balanced drama the term is avoided. At the end of the play, Northumberland tells Richard that he "must to Pomfret," where he later is murdered, not to Pomfret "Castle," and Windsor Castle, where Bulling-broke pardons Aumerle, is not named.

The disappearance of the term reinforces the symbolic nature of castles in the world as the play's characters conceive it. Richard compares the king's two bodies to a castle. The castle wall is both "brass impregnable" where the king can "monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks," and also mere flesh, through which death can bore, piercing the "castle wall, and farewell king!" (Richard II 3.2.165, 170). Bullingbroke compares Richard's ruin to the "tottered battlements" of Flint Castle (Richard II 3.3.52), and Richard rings changes on the humiliation of the lower courtyard or "base court" to which he must descend: "Down court! down king!" (Richard II 3.3.182).^[18] If Richard foresees his loss of kingship at Flint Castle, his descent and the disappearance of the word from the play also comment on the historical transition of the castle from a military outpost—that place of both justice and oppression—to a sign of status. Having lost his castle literally, Richard loses it figuratively as well.

Earlier in the play, Richard's opponent Bullingbroke makes his first appearance in England after his banishment while traveling through the Gloucestershire countryside, looking for Berkeley Castle. "How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?" he asks Northumberland, who is himself lost and weary, when up rides Northumberland's son, Harry Percy, the Hotspur of 1 Henry IV , whose sole appearance in Richard II occurs in this scene (Richard II 2.3.1). Hotspur has been sent by his uncle Worcester to scout the forces at Berkeley. He has learned that the Lords of York, Seymour, and Berkeley occupy the castle as they await King Richard's return from Ireland. The symbolism of the scene, as Hotspur meets his father and Bullingbroke, turns on what they can and cannot recognize. Hotspur knows where Berkeley Castle is, but he does not recognize Bullingbroke. Chastised by his father, he excuses himself for omitting the proper courtesy to the future Henry IV, saying, "I never in my life

did look on him" (Richard II 2.3.38). But that is a poor excuse for not recognizing a king. It reduces Bullingbroke to the level of the helpless dauphin, who thinks he can hide his majesty from Joan of Arc (1 Henry VI 1.2.65). Symbolically, Bullingbroke has not the aura of royal power to induce recognition in Hotspur. Hotspur can, however, see Berkeley Castle. And he can see it from where he stands, while his father and Bullingbroke cannot. Northumberland echoes Bullingbroke's opening line, "How far is it to Berkeley?" and Percy, who stands just where they do, points it out: "There stands the castle, by yon tuft of trees" (Richard II 2.3.51, 53).

Hotspur's perception is more than just that of someone who has been scouting the local countryside. He views the world as a gallant fighter who lives for glory. In the next play, he will spin the tale of Mortimer's unreal, single combat with Glendower on "Severn's sedgy bank" (1 Henry IV 1.3.98). He will seek bright honor horse to horse with Prince Hal. Hotspur can see Berkeley Castle because he lives by those values of chivalry and honor and combat that literary castles once represented.

Any castle can be polarized between good and evil, a home to some, a source of repression to others. Hotspur's perception makes the castle a romantic image to which his father and Bullingbroke, a couple of opportunists in these plays, are blind. They cannot see the ideal image of chivalry, even though it is just beyond "yon tuft of trees." When they look for a castle, they are looking for a fortress. For them the castle represents the dreary, oppressive necessity of power.

Just as Artegall and Hotspur literally see castles where others do not, Prince Hal is also able to separate the contradictory qualities of oppression and justice symbolized by the medieval castle and also, I would argue, by the character who first appeared in Shakespeare's play as Sir John Oldcastle. (Shakespeare changed the name when descendants of the real John Oldcastle complained about the unseemly depiction of an ancestor who was regarded as a religious martyr, not a figure of fun.)^[19] The name change buried an important line of imagery that reinforces the theme of transition from the old ways to the new in these history

plays, for Prince Hal finds qualities in Falstaff that escape his father the king.

We glimpse a rift in the old world of chivalry, for example, when Hal associates castles (and Falstaff) with inns. In 1 Henry IV , Hal parodies Falstaff's reference to mine "hostess of the tavern" by referring to his boon companion as the "old lad of the castle." But in 2 Henry IV , where the prince and Falstaff carouse at the Old Boar Inn in Eastcheap, Hal refers to Falstaff as "the old boar" (2 Henry IV 2.2.146). Falstaff represents—for Hal as a character within the plays—not only the old castle where good and bad customs obtain but also the old and eventually discredited ways of the past. When he becomes king, Hal gives up the alehouse and sheds Falstaff from his presence. The king who names his most famous victory after the "castle" of Agincourt marks the perception and recognition of loss that occurs when new social modes replace old ways.

Shakespeare's Henry VI plays (written earlier in Shakespeare's career) continue the devaluation of the sign of the castle. Henry V is no sooner dead in the first scene of 1 Henry VI than the scene shifts to France for an early demonstration of how gunpowder made castle architecture obsolete. A French sharpshooter kills Salisbury as the English stand on a turret's top, looking down into Orleans. Outmoded by new weapons and specialized fortresses, the castle no longer represents a threat.

Although written earlier than Henry V , the Henry VI plays represent a later era, when chivalry was further in decline. In what was probably the third scene Shakespeare wrote, he uses the Tower of London as an image for polarizing the sides of a religious dispute. Cardinal Winchester's men have locked out Gloucester, the lord protector, who represents the crown. Ethical lines are clearly drawn, for Gloucester's character coincides with John Foxe's estimate of him as "the good Duke" and "a supporter of the poor commons."^[20] The evil cardinal maintains the inside of the tower, just as the "custom of the castle" places the Other inside a castle, which a knight errant seeks to enter. Here, as in the origins of the Weeping Castle founded by Dialetes, religious difference underlies the

confrontation between chivalry and foul ways. Like Foxe's Book of Martyrs , Shakespeare's plays typically project the Protestant Reformation back into history. His King John, for example, brazenly and anachronistically defies the pope and employs Falconbridge to expropriate church property.

Although Winchester meets Gloucester outside the walls, where the mayor of London intervenes to separate the two adversaries, what Gloucester says to Winchester two acts later shows that the Tower represents more than a young playwright's haphazard choice of location. The word "castle" occurs in a figure of speech that in combination with the scene at the Tower shows the sediment of the old romance image. Gloucester confronts Winchester in Parliament and accuses him of plotting against him, "In that thou laidst a trap to take my life, / As well at London Bridge as at the Tower" (1 Henry VI 3.1.22-23). Winchester angrily answers, "And am I not a prelate of the Church?" as if to say that the accusation is absurd. But Gloucester's retort has the ring of truth in the way it implicates Winchester in a tradition of nobles whose private fortresses protected foul customs. The "use" Gloucester complains of is mere theft:

Yes, as an outlaw in a  castle keeps
And useth  it to patronage his theft.
(1 Henry VI  3.1.147-148; my emphasis)

But Gloucester's role as prototype of English xenophobic Protestantism charges his lines with the fundamental antagonism of religious difference.

The Henry VI plays empty knights errant and castles of their heroic status. York calls Talbot a "noble chevalier" (1 Henry VI 4.3.14), and Somerset calls his attack on Bordeaux a "wild adventure" (1 Henry VI 4.4.7): these phrases use the language of chivalry.^[21] Yet even though Talbot praises old Bedford as one who once "couched lance" (1 Henry VI 3.3.134), that medieval military tactic seems to vanish before our eyes, because it never occurs in the history plays. Similarly the English no longer trust themselves to castles.^[22]

Castles nonetheless retain a symbolic function. At the beginning of 2 Henry, VI , a spirit conjured up at the urging of Eleanor, the duchess of Gloucester, warns that Somerset, a Lancastrian, should "shun castles" (2 Henry VI 1.4.35). The prophecy proves ambiguous, as the castle turns out to be no fortress but an inn.^[23] Richard of York observes Somerset's place of death after he kills him and solves the riddle of the prophecy:

For underneath an alehouse' paltry sign,
The Castle in Saint Albans, Somerset
Hath made the wizard famous in his death.
        (2  Henry VI  5.2.67-69)

Somerset's death at an alehouse suggests that as long as there is genuine contest for values, there is a need for a symbolic site of social confrontation. C. S. Lewis somewhere remarks on the disappointment of the early explorers, who found few wealthy cities waiting in the New World. What was the use of traveling if not to reach, like Ulysses, exciting civilizations?^[24] The only castles Columbus saw in the New World were those that sailed from Europe and anchored off the flat beaches. Both the bow and the stern of Spanish ships were referred to as a "castle": the sterncastle (castillo de popa , where Columbus stood when land was first sighted in 1492) and the forecastle (castillo de proa ).^[25]

Later conquistadors, however, found masonry structures in mainland America. So powerful was the custom of the castle as a way of thinking about social confrontation that the fantasy of the Spaniards provided castles for the Indians in America. Then they made them disappear.

The Mayan civilization was in decline when Cortés sailed before the walls of Tulum in the Yucatan in 1519. With watchtowers and a superstructure resembling a castle—although recent research has shown the temple towering over the Caribbean Sea to be astronomically aligned, much like Stonehenge or Ireland's Newgrange—the edifice must have seemed reassuringly familiar. The result is inscrutable, like the fate of Castle Cruel. The explorers then proceeded west. In a passage that is often cited to show how romances colored the perceptions of the Span-

ish conquistadors, Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes his first vision of Mexico City:

We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues^[26] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.^[27]

Michael Murrin compares this vision to the dream of empire represented by Spenser's fairyland—politically, those realms controlled by the Habsburgs, who were interlopers, according to Spenser's myth, on lands previously visited by English heroes.^[28] Stephen Greenblatt identifies a crisis of representation, the impossibility of describing the absolutely other. The Spanish are excluded, but by destroying the city, they make it real and therefore subject to possession. First they identify themselves with the Aztecs; then comes the terrible moment when they begin to regard the Indians as totally alien and other.^[29] Both critics read the passage as wish fulfillment, which they associate with romances.^[30] But the reference to Amadis and its enchantments has a slightly different function in this passage by Díaz.

The purpose of the passage is to conjure a vision of a castle in order to make it disappear. "Of all these wonders that I then beheld," Díaz writes in his account later in the century, "today all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing."^[31] How could such a center of power be overthrown?

The passage answers us in the language of romances. Following the expected topos, the Spaniards observe and scorn the local customs. They wander among the flowers and fruit trees, palaces and gardens, temples and idols, zoos, aviaries, slave markets, and scenes of human sacrifice—foul customs in abundance. The Spaniards are greeted, escorted into town, lodged and dined, the usual ritual of hospitality. Because the Aztecs keep the Spaniards at arm's length culturally, they do not imprison them or ask them to do anything. To the contrary, the

Spaniards even "placed their artillery in a convenient direction," as if Montezuma completely disregarded it. Montezuma, it seems, plays the role of an unwilling keeper of foul customs. He provides what the Spaniards need to eat and feed their horses "according to [their] own use and custom."^[32] A contest of courtesy, and Montezuma's undoing! For Cortés takes Montezuma prisoner, plays off the fictions created by the power of the Aztecs and their customs of human sacrifice, staves off a rival Spanish offensive, survives a native siege of his headquarters, then manages to withdraw with his treasure. The old romance image becomes the new historical truth.

The custom of the castle topos ended when chivalric romances no longer persuaded audiences that their fictions, even when playful, represented such serious issues. Although a flexible mode of thinking about tradition and social convention was lost, castles continued to appear in Gothic fiction as images of domestic ideology.^[33] Novels like Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) and those of later writers like Anne Radcliffe or Jane Austen or Emily Brontë begin with the premise that a castle, or its later variant the country house, represents a social space of confinement or oppression as well as good manners.

In the early modern era, a refinement of manners accompanies the growth of manors—from the French châteaux to the great English country houses. The pun is well established by 1603 when Anne, the fallen wife of Thomas Heywood's play A Woman Killed with Kindness , is carted off to the country by Jenkin, who quips, "A man cannot say by my old master Frankford as he may say by me, that he wants manors; for he hath three or four."^[34] As castles give way to rural estates, new images arise for the containment of social behavior. The literary depiction of social intercourse shifts from violence to domestic etiquette. Social justice dwindles into social sentiment. Morality becomes less a series of prohibitions than prescriptions for correctness.^[35] The novel, the new narrative mode, found new ways to represent the strains of civil society.