Modernity: A Motte-and-Bailey Argument
On the taming of the European aristocrat (REPOST)
Originally posted in September 2023. My subscriber base has doubled since then.
In argumentation, the ‘motte-and-bailey’ fallacy is a conflation of two positions that seem similar, the motte being easily defended while the bailey is more difficult to defend. This metaphor derives from a practical reading of motte-and-bailey structures.
All fortification is about managed risks. As Carl von Clausewitz said, “time which is allowed to pass unused accumulates to the credit of the defender.” An attacking army that crosses the ditch, or moat (‘motte’ is where we get this word), and then gets over the palisade or wall, will enjoy severe advantages over the defender of a small bailey. Nevertheless, standing on a ‘cone’ of earth, even a small tower or keep will still resist attack by men on foot for some time, making it possible for friendly forces to relieve the defenders, or for negotiations to limit the carnage. The palisade is easy to defend, while the bailey is harder to defend, yet the arrangement creates opportunity to manage risk upon enemy breakthrough. An alarm raised fast enough — say, a dog let free in the yard barking at the intruders — can save the occupants of the bailey from a nighttime storming party, for example, even if the property is left damaged.
The motte and bailey design imposes risks on the attacker at relatively low cost to the occupant. A motte-and-bailey castle is cheap. It can be made with local labor and materials. Plans can take advantage of local geography, such as hilltops and bodies of water, to maximize the risks an attacker would take to invest it. The English language uses this term ‘investment’ to describe the material resource demands of siegecraft: evidence of the risks that even simple, cheap fortifications could create for anyone who wanted to harm the prepared homeowner.
These earliest castles were indeed almost all private homes. In his 1992 book The Medieval Siege, historian Jim Bradbury writes that “that the emergence of 'castles' was in most cases simply the improvement of the defences of existing defended residences.” Examples from Medieval Europe are not far advanced from prehistoric ditch-and-palisade structures. “Purpose built castles would emerge, but many of our best known early castles were existing residences, usually already defended,” he writes. European geography lending itself to positional defense, “there was a considerable amount of such improvements made in the tenth century, which has therefore been seen as the time when castles first appeared, but it becomes a less dramatic development when viewed in this way.”
A man’s home is his castle, Sir Edward Coke declared in 1644. That same year, parliamentary troops were repulsed in another bloody attempt on the fortified manor known as Basing House, home to the Marquess of Winchester. Standing on a natural site to command a major crossroad, the manor grounds appear to have been inhabited since the Stone Age and were first fortified during the 13th century with a motte-and-bailey castle. Dirt ramparts and a broad ditch reinforced the obsolete brick walls in the 17th century, making Basing House a small, yet formidable artillery fortress during the English Civil War.
When a real army did show up with a real siege train, however, Basing House was doomed. Any small castle was doomed. No man’s castle could withstand a determined attacker forever, especially if they had powerful guns. During the 17th century, European aristocrats altogether stopped building personal castles for defense, as there was no point anymore, and competed instead at building castles for show — palaces. The age of Versailles loomed.
Crenellations and battlements became aesthetic elements while the machicolations for arrowfire disappeared, as there were no ememies under these towers and walls. The private defensive castle vanished, the centralized state rose, and the decline of European aristocracy began. Cannons had resolved the motte-and-bailey arguments of provincialism. The metropole had conquered.
Kings mostly refrained from spending large sums on fortifications themselves until the gunpowder artillery revolution forced them to do so. Cities had walls, of course, but they represented civic organization. “Royal fortification takes up little space in this present discussion, because what we are really looking at is a matter of social mobility,” Bradbury writes. Castles were connected to the systems of personal obligation that stitched together principalities.
In 10th century East Francia, for example, “Henry I introduced a system which required a proportion of the landed classes to fortify and garrison strongholds: one in every nine was to live in a stronghold and build shelter there for his eight fellows.” Each of these landed men would bring levies, as the peasants were the feudal reserve system. Peasant labor could be conscripted for construction as well. Crucially, this division of labor provided for construction and maintenance of defenses at no cost to the royal purse. Henry’s ninth nobleman “should continue to see to the land, and would supply a proportion of their product to supply the stronghold.”
Fortified points of control were a further form of risk management against rebellion or invasion. “Henry also gave greater emphasis to the training of his army, and the increased use of mounted warriors,” Bradbury notes. A small, mobile, professional force made the most efficient use of Henry’s resources and interior lines in a landlocked state without natural frontiers.
This was a mini-revolution in military terms, perhaps, but it was also a social evolution. “We are not discussing the appearance of a new class, since most of the aristocracy of the period were descended from the old Carolingian nobility, but rather a change in the balance of power between different social groups,” Bradbury says. Emphasis added:
In particular, it is the age of rising comital power, and of the struggle of princes not only with royalty, but with the menacingly emergent group of castellans. Castles are the sign of the rise of these two groups: counts and castellans. Castles have more to do with internal social struggle in the west than with defence against external invasion. Hence they fail to conform in distribution to frontier patterns. Of course they were used to defend frontiers, but their scatter across the land shows that this is not a complete explanation of their function. They represent much more the rise and fall of individuals and families.
“Comital power,” the power of the count, was materialized in the comital castle. Most provincial noblemen just wanted to rule their roosts in peace, enjoying elevated status over a community, interacting with other aristocrats as a peer. In this everyday world, the typical comital castle loomed over the neighborhood that supported its existence and imbued it with relevance to a larger world, much like the local church.
No single ‘feudal system’ really ever existed anywhere in Europe, of course, for the continent was covered in overlapping social fabrics. Nor was every manor a fortified stronghold; indeed, most aristocrats did not fortify their homes and Henry’s rule should be seen as an unwelcome mandate to many. Nevertheless, this general picture of aristocratic castle-building is valid.
Our modern ‘counties,’ the chief units of local administration in the English language, derive that name from the role that counts played as the local interface with feudal power structures that might be describes as the ‘state’ distinct from the church. If there was a local castle, it would belong to the count.
Smart kings chose castellans for loyalty. As in any era, people with ‘noble blood’ but middling rank could be ambitious, scheming for greater status in the land, or turning against the unjust rule of tyrants, or doing the one in the name of the other. Thus their castles, which were sometimes useful in defense of the kingdom, could also become strongholds of rebellion and resistance to the ruler. Because the comital castle was not fit to manage the risks of sustained attack by a substantial, determined army, however, this was the exception rather than the rule.
A network of small castles could just as easily provide a king with the means to resist uprisings and rebellions. When the English Civil War began in 1642, Basing House belonged to John Paulet, the 35th Marquess of Winchester, a Catholic and staunch Stuart ally whose motto was ‘Love Loyalty’. Thus the local castle in Europe linked the monarchical European state to the locality, and the fate of Basing House was typical of their experiences at the hands of the metropole. London sent Oliver Cromwell, his New Model Army, and siege cannons. It was quite too much for a small, fortified manor to resist.
Macroom Castle in County Limerick began as a 12th century castle and saw some modernization, but not enough. The garrison surrendered after two brief bombardments by Lord Broghill’s heavy field guns. “His Lordship drew two cannon to the aforesaid Castle; which having summoned, they refused,” Cromwell reported to Parliament. Then, “having bestowed about ten shot upon it, which made their stomachs come down,” Broghill accepted the garrison’s surrender.
The entire fire mission lasted perhaps one hour and reflected the New Model Army approach to disciplined gunnery drill that had developed in Thomas Skippon’s Artillery Company. Much as British imperialism was enacted through ‘gunboat diplomacy,’ artillery fire resolved the dialectic of power between metropole and locality within a state.
Inverting the logic of their programmatic construction, remote rural manor houses simply lacked communities strong enough to defend them. Bradbury writes that Otto I, son of Henry I, experienced a rebellion by his son, Liudolf. “In 954 the latter called in the Magyars to his aid, and thus lost the sympathy and support of most of his countrymen,” however. When the revolt fizzled, “the Magyars continued to threaten: they besieged Augsburg, a city surrounded by rather sub standard walls, lacking towers, and by 955 seen as old and in poor condition,” threatening the heart of East Francia.
Civic response saved the kingdom. “Udalrich, bishop of Augsburg, collected a force for its defence,” Bradbury writes. “The Magyars tried to storm the East Gate, but the bishop's men made a sortie and held on.” Feverish overnight repairs to the ramparts, and hasty blockhouse construction, and a procession of women through the city praying for deliverance: morning broke over a desperate scene as “the Magyars brought up engines, their men driven forward with whips, but still failed to take the city.” The relative completeness and modernity of physical defenses were secondary to citizen engagement.
What gave them hope, however, and thus made their morale at all possible, was the promise of relief by the war machine of the East Frankish state. When they saw their salvation approach, the garrison made a sortie. “The bishop of Augsburg himself mounted and encouraged the Christians, though wearing a stole and not armour, and carrying no weapons.” Magyar ‘mangonels,’ traction trebuchets operated by teams of men, could not demolish the defenses or the will of the defenders. “Stones fell around [the bishop] but he was unhurt,” Bradbury says.
Alerted to the approach of Otto’s army by scouts and smoke signals, the Magyars turned to meet the approaching force, which “included men from all over Germany.” With the standard of St. Michael in the lead, his army engaged them in a field by the river Lech. The Magyars broke and many were drowned in the ensuing rout. “The battle of the Lechfeld in 955 was a genuine turning point in European history,” for “Otto I had won a great reputation as the defender of Christendom, and this assisted greatly in his obtaining from the papacy the title of Holy Roman Emperor.”
Moreover, “the Magyar invasions were halted, and they now chose to settle in Hungary,” where “they became Christian and established a new kingdom.” Rather than return to the steppe lifestyle of their ancestors, the new Hungarians “also developed castles in an interesting way: founding a political organisation based around castles at the centre of counties,” Baldwin explains. “By the time of King Stephen of Hungary, there were some 45 of these castle counties.” Maygyars had become Hungarians by learning to settle down and fortify themselves.
The Hungarians also possessed interesting fortifications in earthwork and timber: they had a policy of scorching the earth around their strongholds, making 'defensive wastes' which included traps and obstacles, and thus making sieges against them difficult. They developed unusual ramparts, some with earth boxed between timber, others where the clay was fired into a ceramic state. This latter technique seems to have been deliberate, and may have been achieved by building vertical air shafts through the rampart then firing timber so that the clay was turned to a shiny, tough consistency which made assault difficult.
Central European geography made siege warfare inevitable, and during the time that armies from civilizations outside Europe were ascendant in the field against European armies, siege warfare was the one domain of war in which Europeans were recognized as true artists. Castle design improvements thus transmitted from west to east so that the fortifications became more advanced as an eastern army invaded westward.
This is what happened in 1241, when the nature of local fortifications shaped the entire Mongol invasion. Hungarian historian Erik Fügedi counted twenty-nine counties that fell under Mongol occupation after the Battle of Mohi that April. Each county had a castle, and most of these were “earth- or mudpies that [before 1241] used to be called castles.” Almost all of them lay vulnerable in the flat topography of the Great Hungarian Plain, which bore the brunt of the genocidal destruction.
“Only six of these comital castles survived the invasion, and all but one of the holdouts was built on an elevated site,” Canadian historian Lindsey Stephen Pow elaborates in his 2012 thesis, “Deep Ditches and Well-built Walls: A Reappraisal of the Mongol Withdrawal from Europe in 1242.”
The Mongols had brought an excellent siege train with them. A corps of Arab engineers operated trebuchets, gravity-operated catapults that threw massive stones. These hirelings operated with unusual efficiency, for example deplying their unwieldy weapons in the midst of the Battle of Mohi to devastate the defensive wagon circle around the Hungarian camp.
Comital castles on open plains made of earth and wood ramparts stood no chance: the bombardment began swiftly; with defenders suppressed, auxilliary troops would fill the moat with gabions of bundled branches filled with earth; then the walls would be overwhelmed in force and the defenders overrun, massacred, their buildings burned, animals taken.
According to the Carmen miserabile, or “Sad Song for the Destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary by the Tartars,” an account of the invasion by Master Rogerius, the population at least 70 villages gathered at a common point to construct a “new village” called Pereg. The Mongols destroyed it in a week. The residents of Pest also made “useless preparations” that failed against the onslaught, and so they were slaughtered. Blocking forces ambushed refugees and cut off the population from reaching mountains or forests. To the Mongols, this extinction was a game hunt.
Pow is one of five authors credited for an essay, “Contextualizing the Mongol Invasion of Hungary in 1241–42,” which ran in a 2018 edition of The Hungarian Historical Review. Of the five authors, he is the only one who is not Hungarian. Long dead, Fügedi’s work had been tested against new archaeology. “Recently, a number of sites with enormous ditches around churches have been found in the Great Hungarian Plain,” the authors write. “Evidently villagers were gathering at these sites for mutual defense, but in all cases, the settlements appear to have fallen to the invader.” The Mongols took their time annihilating each of them.
After all, the Mongols did consume precious time to destroy these sites. No European army could stand up to them in the field, but King Béla IV of Hungary had escaped their encirclement at Mohi and he would not submit. “Clearly, Mongol objectives were being foiled,” the authors write, for they had indeed taken so long to annihilate Hungarians.
Moreover, within the affected area there were at least seven strongholds, including two fortified monasteries, that the Mongols did not take the time to destroy. “The Mongols achieved very little against fortifications which were built of stone along Western European guidelines,” Pow says. “There were only ten ‘new-style’ stone castles in Hungary at the time of the invasion, and five of these were found along the border with Austria. However, all five of those located deep in Mongol occupied territory survived the occupation,” he writes. “These modern castles were situated atop hills, which made Mongol tactics considerably less effective.”
Pow in fact argues “that the Mongols left Europe in 1242 primarily because its fortifications, being both numerous and defensible, presented a strategic problem that was not surmountable with their available manpower and siege engines.”
Outside of the Great Hungarian Plain, communities and strongholds were still holding out. Along the Danube, daily work parties broke the river ice when it froze over, but it was just a matter of time until the Mongols crossed. Calls for relief by the Holy Roman Empire and the pope grew louder. “A letter from the Hungarian defenders of many different castles, monasteries, and towns, written in 1242, asked for military aid from Rome,” Pow and his fellow authors note.
“Nevertheless, the defenders described a well-planned defense in response to the Mongols crossing the river and voiced confidence in their ability to repel the invaders from their strategic position.”
Trading space for time worked. Invasion risk had been managed. The Mongol horde crossed the Danube and destroyed everything they could touch, but turned away at the Esztergom fortress, a fortified city, and a fortified monastery. Brick church structures from the period also show no signs of destruction.
Rogerius noted that “with the exception of a few castles, they occupied the whole country and as they passed through they left the country desolate and empty.” Yet they did move on through, and leave, and then bully the Hungarian king from afar with threats and ultimatums, a form of Mongol imperialism called Dasht-i-Qipchaq, rather than resume the invasion.
When a Mongol army did return in 1285, Hungarians were much better-prepared — and the invasion did not go as well. No sooner had the withdrawal of 1242 been completed than Béla IV issued charters “to strengthen the kingdom and better protect its remaining people by creating policies that favored the quick building of castles on suitable sites,” according to Pow and his fellow authors. Fügedi says between 147 and 172 new castles were constructed from 1242 to 1300, and twenty-two towns received privileges to improve and maintain their own defenses. Western castle design spread throughout Hungary and castles were sited on higher elevations.
Of course, peasants resented the conscription of their labor to build these public works, while commoners resented the taxes they paid for defense. No one grumbled about it when the Mongols approached again, however. Hungarians simply rushed to their hardened shelters, a kind of national civil defense project beyond the resources of most aristocrats, and waited for the storm to settle.
This historical brief on the medieval project of sovereign security has been the argumentation motte. It should be evident to the reader by now that the castle developed along with the state, indeed that the age of states (and nations, and national governments) has erased the earlier model of private residency castles. Technology was the final blow: culverin cannons at Basing House, or a bunker buster bomb today, put absolute limits on private resistance to state power.
My argumentation bailey is that this process simultaneously evicted the aristocrat not only from his comital castle, but from the countryside, and eventually from European society altogether. With no castles to limit the risks of confronting the state, landed gentry became increasingly less landed, relying ever more on laws and principles for protection.
In his 1856 history The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis DeTocqueville writes that the nobility fled the country life for the cultural life of the city. At Versailles, Louis XIV drew them to his court and brought them to heel. Grinding and squeezing the French aristocrats, he reduced their economic power. Ending their mandate for military service reduced their relevance to military affairs. By the time two world wars literally destroyed most of European aristocracy, they had long since passed out of the business of linking locality to metropole. County governments developed new federatative forms of connection with larger states.
I submit that the decline and fall of the comital castle led to the decline and end of the aristocrat altogether, much as a species declines when bereft of its habitat. Fortified manors could not withstand change. Flushed from their obsolete countryside habitats, neither could the nobility. This is a social history beyond the scope of one essay. My thesis is not even that original. However, it is enough for now to establish that the moat is filled in, the walls are reduced, and an historiographical army has surrounded this bailey. Unlike the Mongols, I have plenty of time.
World War BC? On Tollense, Troy, And The Deep History Of The Professional Soldier
“Over 10,000 human bones were found. This is the largest series of human remains that we have from this period in this region,” archaeologist Detlef Jantzen told Deutche Welle in 2017. Painstaking digs of the prehistoric battlefield at Tollense, Germany had by then revealed “a whole series of bronze weapons, such as lances, arrowheads and knives … a few wooden clubs which were used for battle as well as — and this is also remarkable — the remains of about five horses. Even though it's unclear exactly how many there were, it does show that horses died on that battlefield.”