Introduction

THE TOPIC of ‘castles and landscapes’ has seen much fruitful research in recent years, as scholars from several disciplines have sought to examine the impact of the castle on the landscape and vice versa. Research in this field is still in its infancy, but the welcome publication of a monograph explicitly dealing with the ‘landscape approach’ as a way of studying the medieval castle marks a significant stage in a subject still heavily influenced by military determinism.

This paper considers two aspects of castle-building and the landscape. The first concerns the relationship between castles and the wider pattern of settlement in northern East Anglia (chiefly Norfolk and Suffolk) during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is apparent from studies carried out elsewhere in the country that differences in regional landscapes structured patterns of castle-building, but this phenomenon has not yet been fully explored in an East Anglian context. Thus it has been argued that in the Midlands (an area characterised by village nucleations) and in non-Midland areas, such as the south-west (where dispersed farms and hamlets are the norm) variation in the settlement pattern had a profound effect on the distribution and location of castles. In East Anglia there existed an idiosyncratic settlement pattern, characterised, in contrast to elsewhere, by the predominance of farmsteads clustered around the edges of commons and greens. The precise chronology of this development, and the reasons for its occurrence, remain a matter of debate, but the process of ‘common edge drift’ probably started before the Norman Conquest and continued throughout the eleventh century. The relevance of this broader process to castle studies relates to the second theme of this paper: the nature of ‘designed’ or ‘ornamental’ landscapes in Anglo-Norman East Anglia. These landscapes comprise the archaeological remains of features such as settlements, parks, fishponds and religious houses which were originally located around castle buildings and which had been contrived partly to improve the residential surroundings.