ANN WILLIAMS

I was recently conducting a tutorial with a student who had been asked whether
or not William the Conqueror had introduced feudalism into England. The
student maintained that he had, supporting his argument by the absence of
feudal vocabulary in Old English. Knights, he declared, were unknown in Eng-
land and in English before the Norman Conquest. When I remarked that the
word 'knight' itself was Old English, he was, to use the vulgar parlance, gob.
smacked. I don't say that his conclusion was thereby wrong (or indeed right) but
introduce the anecdote simply to justify a paper on pre-Conquest England as
suitable fare for a Knights Conference. ^*

I must make it clear at the outset that this is not a paper on the origin of
English castles. The word 'castle', unlike the word 'knight', is not Old English. It
first appears in an English context in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1051, when
'pa welisce menn gewroht aenne caste! on Herefordscire'. ¹ In its Old English setting,
the foreign word castel stands out, not least, alas, because it is now the one most
familiar to modem ears. There were several native words which the chronicler
could have used to describe a fortification -- burh, geweorc, herebeorg; Old English
had even borrowed, in the form ceaster, the Latin word castrum from which
castle' itself is derived. The chronicler chose none of them. What King

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