ABSTRACT
The many stone structures associated with mottes had always been considered to represent replacements in more permanent material for the timber tower and its palisade, installed when the artificial earthwork had gained sufficient solidity to bear their weight. As far as England was concerned, builders of castles followed a variety of courses. At first, since the newly arrived Normans were entrenching themselves in haste, they used earthworks mainly of the motte-and-bailey type. The economical little earthworks are naturally common on broken ground, and useful for small castles. The conversion of one sort of earthwork castle into the other is fairly frequent. Most commonly this involves the filling-in of the central depression of a ringwork so as to form a motte. A subordinate feature of medieval earthwork is the outer bank found at many castles. In its simplest form it is a plain bank outside the castle ditch — the counterscarp-bank of normal archaeological reference.
