Hungarians. Sometimes it was an old Frankish palace that was fortified.
With the decay of Carolingian power in the West, these seats of public
authority became the hereditary possessions of counts and viscounts,
but continued to dominate wide areas of country.^25 Then, in the tenth
century, a second wave of castle-building ushered in more fundamental
changes in society. The growth of rural bourgs accompanied the pro-
liferation of strongholds belonging to a warrior-aristocracy in which
many newly-risen families stood beside the old official dynasties. Often
the castle of a rural lord was just a wooden tower on a mound or
‘motte’, within an enclosure or ‘bailey’: yet it has been calculated that
the building of a respectable motte required the labour of fifty villagers
for forty days, which in itself implies a draining of the old public juris-
diction and corvéesinto the hands of landlords.^26
Seignorial jurisdiction
Seignorial incastellamentofollowed different time-scales in different
areas, and achieved varying intensities. It appears to have begun in the
early tenth century in northern Italy, raided by both Hungarians and
Saracens, and then spread to Provence.^27 Further north and west, dukes
and counts were not constructing their own castles till about 1000 or
later, when some of them managed to use castle-building to stop the
further parcelling out of territorial power and actually consolidate new
principalities. Fulk Nerra, who succeeded to the county of Anjou in
987, built many castles as he pushed out the boundaries of his lands
(particularly eastward along the Loire towards Tours) and filled them
with knights. His skill was in controlling the castellans who possessed
these strongholds, whether as his officers, or as vassals calling the castles
their own. But even in Anjou, there were by the 1060s lineages of
castellans prepared to assert their landed rights against the count’s right
of disposition.^28
In the Île de France, the king was at this same period struggling to
impose his authority on a group of castellans from whom he would
eventually draw the officers of his household and state. By the reign of
48 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^25) Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 72–3 (40), 156–7 (13); Fossier, Enfance de
l’Europe, 201, 204.
(^26) Musset, ‘Peuplement en bourgage’, 188; the Bayeux tapestry shows the clearly wooden
towers being set on fire during the campaign of duke William and earl Harold against the
Bretons.^27 Fossier, Enfance de l’Europe, 207.
(^28) Richer, Histoire de France, 2 vols., ed. R. Latouche (Paris, 1930–64), ii. 292 (ch. 90);
R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages(London, 1953), 80–9; O. Guillot, Le Comté
d’Anjou et son entourage au XIesiècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972), i. 281–352, esp. 307–9 and 347–8;
B. S. Bachrach, ‘Enforcement of the Forma Fidelitas: The Techniques Used by Fulk Nerra,
Count of the Angevins (987–1040)’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 796–819.