When William the Conqueror to richard iii(1066_1485)

He trouble with gardens is that they don't keep. Over 1,ooo years, owners tend to lose interest and let them go, or else successive generations make so many alterations that nothing is left of the original scheme - which is why no medieval gardens still exist in their original form. All the information we have to show what they once looked like comes from old tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, where a certain amount of artistic licence may well have come into play. Household accounts and building contracts, preserved in family archives, sometimes show details of spending on gardens. Early poetry and literature, such as The Romance of the Rose and some of Chaucer's stories, often describe gardens and the plants that grew in them, but they were written in romantic terms rather than giving the sort of factual information that a gardener would find useful. Rare early gardening books are valuable for building up a picture of the plants that were available at various times, but dates of plant introductions were very often not recorded at the time. The best garden historians can do nowadays is trace them back to the earliest known reference in a book -which explains why job lots' of plant introduction dates coincide with the dates of major herbals and other important books. What are not very reliable are the stories that were passed by word of mouth, as they often experienced a good deal of alteration or misunderstanding before being written down. This is why we have so many conflicting stories over 'garden myths and mysteries', such as who really introduced the potato. But one thing we do know is that, in the autumn of 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, arrived on Pevensey beach with a i2,000-strong army and became William I of England (alias William the Conqueror) after his success in the battle of Hastings. The Normans had landed. at WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR'S CASTLES Now, it's all very well taking over a turbulent country - which England was then - but it's quite another to hang on to it, and that's where the Normans' talent for castle-building paid dividends. William put up castles all around the country, particularly at large towns such as Lincoln, Colchester, Cambridge, Norwich, Guildford, Exeter and York, where a show of strength was needed to quell the locals. But most of his castles weren't made of stone, since they took specialist craftsmen several years to build. They were 'instant' castles made of earth and timber, which could be quickly slung together by unskilled labour. They were a typical Norman design known as motte and bailey castles. The 'motte' was a mound of earth on which stood a wooden tower or keep', and the 'bailey' was a courtyard surrounded by a ditch next to a tall fence, which acted as a first line of defence against intruders. It was very effective. if your bailey was overrun by attackers, you simply shinned up your motte, locked yourself in the tower and rained arrows down on the milling hordes below.