Self-advertising noblemen, ecclesiastics, gentry and merchants, between 1200 and 1578, obtained licence to fortify 409 castles and manors, 43 religious establishments, and about 55 towns and town houses. Taking fifteen case-studies, put in context, Dr Charles Coulson illustrates the results of aristocratic aspiration on the ground and in the records.

The truth about licences to crenellate is as remote from tradition as it is with Bodiam Castle (Fortress 10 (1991), 3–15). Since the error is widespread we need only refer to the late David Cathcart King's great Castellarium Anglicanum to give the essence of it. He wrote of early baronial fortresses: ‘the king's concern with these private castles was inevitable. Over their foundation he had the negative control of requiring licences to crenellate.’ This he modified for the reigns of the first three Norman kings, believing that ‘in general, barons built castles where they pleased on their fiefs’, caution more than confirmed by Richard Eales (1990) and the present writer. Traditional ideas derive from the notion that feudalism was essentially anarchic, and ‘private castles’ as hostile to the peace and to royal power as the ‘turbulent barons’ who built them; combined with faith in the virility of monarchy in England, unlike Europe. So David King then qualified his previous realism: ‘the requirement of a licence to crenellate enabled the kings to control the building of new castles so well that, from the reign of Stephen onwards, it is impossible to think of more than one permanent castle built for a purpose hostile to the Crown’. He had in mind ‘the remote and sinister Dunstanburgh’.

But relatively few castles were founded after the great post-Conquest explosion. Regulation of additional fortification (e.g. Thomas of Lancaster's Pontefract) not of new castles was needed if kings really had wished to check them, strong ones particularly. In fact, the famous ‘adulterine castles’ of the 1135–54 Anarchy were simply objectionable to the few contemporary clerics who used the term, not unlicensed. Until the reign of King John there are no true licences; and when they begin to be known their character is honorific not restrictive. They signified royal favour, like other privileges, but most castle-builders did not trouble to ask for it.