ABSTRACT
As the scholarship on castles in medieval England has developed, it has come to place increasing emphasis on the importance of their non-military functions. The castle has come to be seen as a central idea in medieval culture as well as a site for the performance of lordship, aristocratic display and conspicuous consumption.1 The scholarly reaction to the possession of castles by clergy, however, has tended to be somewhat narrower. Like knight service, possession of castles by ecclesiastics is thought of almost invariably as either a function of land tenure or an expression of an overwhelmingly ‘worldly’ mindset. In this view, clerics were simply behaving like other lords on their estates.2 Ecclesiastics’ castles are artefacts of feudalism. It is the purpose of this chapter to question this view from two angles. First, it is argued that fortifications fell into the hands of clergy as a result of their generalship as often as their lordship. Second, prelates’ castles can sometimes be shown to have distinctive qualities that gave them a recognisably ecclesiastical aspect when compared to other fortresses of a similar date.
