BY the Norman Conquest, London was the primary centre of England's trade and industry, and subsequently became that of royal government. It developed into one of the leading cities of medieval Europe and its buildings were among the most distinguished in the country. Yet five centuries later, Elizabethan illustrations show that the city was still essentially confined within the much repaired Roman walls, with two or three suburbs immediately outside them, several religious foundations a little further away, and a scattering of dwellings lining the approach roads before quickly thinning to the fields of the countryside.

As with Paris, a never-ending sequence of demolition, rebuilding, and expansion has left little evidence of the medieval city, though we have a very considerable idea of what it was like. The same applies to the immediate suburbs, Southwark, Holborn, and Westminster. We know considerably less about the Strand and Charing, the area between the largest city in England and the centre of government, where many palaces and mansions were erected by those who needed to be close to the crown or to the seat of government.

The fire of 1666 and three centuries of commercial development have devastated medieval London and neighbouring Westminster, but it is not always appreciated that the inexorable expansion of the metropolis between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries also destroyed the less well-documented medieval buildings within a 15 mile radius of the city. Nothing remains of the early villages that used to edge the capital such as Kensington, Shoreditch, or Clapham, and little of those further afield at Kingston, Richmond, Greenwich, Harrow, and Uxbridge.

DORSET AND WILTSHIRE

DORSET is a relatively self-contained county, less affected by twentieth-century commercial development or residential expansion than its neighbours, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Dorset is still primarily an agrarian countyof rolling chalk downs, broken by the broad but shallow valleys of the Frome and the Stour and their tributaries. The inhospitable coastline has been little touched, while the county is bounded bythe open expanse of the vale of Marshwood towards Devon, the broader Blackmore Vale towards Somerset, and Cranborne Chase towards Wiltshire. Only the residential onslaught from Poole towards the conurbation of Bournemouth introduces an alien note in this unhurried and quietly contained shire.

Two lines of chalk upland extend across Dorset from near Beaminster, one arching north-east to Cranborne Chase and Wiltshire (the Dorset Heights) and the second stretching in a belt to Dorchester, Lulworth, and the Purbeck Hills. For building purposes, Dorset also benefits from spasmodic outcrops of the limestone belt that sweeps from the Somerset border (Ham stone) and Sturminster Newton (Marnhull) to Yorkshire, with outcrops between Bridport and Weymouth and ‘islands’ at Portland and Purbeck. The golden Ham stone was used for high-quality buildings in the north-west, including the abbeys at Sherborne, Forde, and Cerne. The coarser, duller Coralline limestone from Marnhull was used more widely, as at Fiddleford Manor and Sturminster Newton Manor House, while the comparable local quarries near Abbotsbury provided the stone for Woodsford ‘Castle’ and Athelhampton Hall. Purbeck ‘marble’ was highly popular for decorative work from the later twelfth century, with a ‘golden age’ between c.1250 and 1350, while roofing slates were quarried locally.

CASTLES

THREE royal castles guarded the central Thames valley, Windsor, Wallingford, and Oxford, though this last was founded by a leading baron with the Conqueror's consent and came into royal hands during the twelfth century. Wallingford and Oxford were prominent in the war between Stephen and Matilda, and while Oxford had fallen into disrepair by the early fourteenth century, Wallingford was maintained for residential purposes for a further century. To the west, the Severn estuary was guarded by the royal fortresses at Bristol, Gloucester, and St Briavels. Bristol fell into decay during the fifteenth century and Gloucester from the close of that era, but though St Briavels lapsed from its primary purpose as an administrative centre for the royal forest of Dean, it was maintained for its court and prison function until the mid-nineteenth century.

The region shows a broad span of private castles, chronologically, tenurially, and structurally, with three of them retaining substantive evidence. Those of modest defensive capacity such as Ascott d'Oilly, Stratton Audley, and Deddington had been abandoned before the close of the fourteenth century. The stronghold of the Giffards at Brimpsfield was destroyed on the orders of Edward II in 1322 to join the earlier abandoned earthworks and adulterine sites scattered across the region. Nor does anything survive of Banbury Castle, first erected by bishop Alexander of Lincoln in about 1130 as the administrative centre of the bishop's extensive estates in the area. It was almost entirely rebuilt during the early fourteenth century in concentric form with drum towers and a massive gateway and so maintained until the Civil War.

NO new cathedrals were built in England or Wales after 1250, and few monasteries were established between that time and their dissolution 300 years later. The castles of Edward I in North Wales were almost the last fortresses to be erected in this country before the advent of Henry VIII's coastal forts and blockhouses. A considerable number of churches were extended or rebuilt during the later middle ages but they conformed in plan and liturgical function to those of an earlier age. On the other hand, houses had begun to take a recognisable form during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which reached fulfilment as a prism of society during the following two centuries. They reflected the spread of wealth, the rise of new families, social differentiation, and the organisation and growth of household institutions. Out of the one and a half thousand medieval houses that have survived in England and Wales, nearly 700 are described in these three volumes. They stand as testimony to the first great age of domestic architecture, for that was not an achievement of the Tudors but a development of Plantaganet society between 1300 and 1500. It is these houses that lie at the heart of architectural and related institutional development during the later middle ages.

The crown, the aristocracy, and the gentry of medieval England were the movers and shakers of society. What they did, and how they did it, at national, regional, and local levels affected the government, the economy, the welfare, and the social justice or injustice of the country at all levels of society.

AMBERLEY CASTLE, Sussex

The boundaries of the diocese of Chichester have remained virtually unchanged and coterminous with the county of Sussex since the late seventh century, with the majority of the bishop's medieval manors in West Sussex. Amberley was the most favoured residence, with Aldingbourne, Cakeham, and Drungewick next in popularity. Some thirteenth- and early sixteenth-century structures survive at Cakeham and the moated site at Drungewick, but the extensive remains at Amberley encompass at least seven building phases.

1. The castle was held by the bishops of Chichester throughout the middle ages. Part of a late Norman arch with chevron ornament survives at the entrance to the chamber beneath the first hall (present dining room). This mid-twelfth-century feature may or may not be an insertion. No other element within the castle has such clear late Norman character.

2. The south-east corner of the castle is essentially an early-thirteenth-century house. T-shaped, it is made up of a hall with several ancillary rooms at right angles to it along the line of the outer wall. All the principal rooms were at first-floor level. The external evidence for them is a two-light window in the upper end wall, and the two single lights of the large chamber against the outer wall, heavily restored and altered by the duke of Norfolk in 1908. This early thirteenth-century house was built of rubble, whereas ashlar was used for all later work.

3. During the early to mid-fourteenth century, the great hall with end chamber blocks was developed astride the court, touching a corner of the earlier hall. It may have been built by John Langton (1305–37) rather than Robert Stratford (1337–62) in emulation of the new archiepiscopal halls at Charing, Mayfield, and Maidstone.

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DORSET

THE spectacular backbone of all Dorset studies is the Reverend John Hutchins' The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, first published in two volumes in 1774, the year after his death. Subsequent editions of this indispensable work with new material were issued in four volumes in 1796–1815, edited by R. Gough and J. B. Nichols, and again in 1861–73, edited by W. Shipp and J. W. Hodson (reprinted in 1973). All subsequent and present writers are still in his debt. In contrast, only two Victoria County History volumes have been published (1908, 1968), with neither of them covering individual parishes, and the earlier increasingly out of date. C. Taylor's The Making of the English Landscape: Dorset (1970) is one of the more perspicacious volumes in this national series, but the study of medieval Dorset awaits an author. The bibliography of the county up to 1960 is covered by R. Douch, A Handbook of Local History: Dorset (1952) with a supplement to 1960 (1962).

The buildings of Dorset have been well served. They are very capably described by A. Oswald, Country Houses of Dorset (1st edn 1935, followed by a judiciously extended 2nd edn in 1959), and by J. Newman and N. Pevsner, Buildings of England: Dorset (1972), one of the more eloquent volumes in this series. For a detailed illustrated inventory, the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments covered the county in five volumes (5 in 8) between 1952 and 1975, though this lacks a comprehensive index.