The account of William Malet's completion of a castle at Eye appears in Little Domesday Book because of its economic impact upon the market at Hoxne. The quotation serves to illustrate why medievalists have argued that the encastellation of the European landscape altered economic paths of growth, and reshaped military and political institutions. The next two chapters assess the circumstances in which lords invested in residence-church-market centres of lordship, such as that established at Eye c. 1066x86, and the ways in which they transformed economic relationships with dependent peasantries during the eleventh century. Before discussing the local contexts of these agglomerations of power focused upon castles, there is a brief historiographical analysis of the significance of the Norman Conquest and the place of castles and knights in early eleventh century England and France.

Historiographical perspectives on the Norman Conquest, castles and knights

The most powerful tradition, as initially set out by Round, suggests that the Conquest was a turning-point because the Normans brought over feudal institutions from Normandy, and through their energy reshaped the cultural, religious and social horizons of the one and a half million English people who supported and served around ten thousand French lords, knights and their followers. Its counterpoint, however, stresses the importance of the late Anglo-Saxon heritage in the making of Anglo-Norman institutions, such as knight service. To this debate can be added two current perspectives informed by comparative history. One approach, as elaborated by Bartlett and Bates, focuses upon the themes of conquest, colonization and domination by the Normans and other social groupings from northern France and Germany (which formerly comprised the Carolingian heartlands) in the creation of new societies in England, southern Italy, the Iberian peninsula and other outlying parts of southern and eastern Europe, in which Frankish and ‘post-Carolingian’ values gained the upper hand over divergent indigenous local traditions, thereby sustaining the ‘Europeanization of Europe’.