At Windsor Castle (see Figure 2) and Arundel (see Figure 5) in southern
England the dramatic height of a motte can still be admired. These
castle mounds were first topped by palisades without towers, which were
rebuilt first in stone and then as towers in the twelfth century. At Arundel,
the home of the dukes of Norfolk since the sixteenth century, most
of the buildings within the castle walls date from the 1890s. At Windsor,
Sir Jeffry Wyatville, the architect of King George IV, added a thirty
three-foot-high stone wall to the low Norman great tower to create its
present imposing height. The machicolations are also Wyatville’s work.
Beyond the motte, the castle buildings we admire today are the result of
nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and the rebuilding
of medieval architecture.
World History
