The case of Lincoln in the previous chapter shows how the holding of particular castles might be a key element in rebellion, and this chapter is specifically linked with the notion of the fortress as a defined space used in acts of opposition. The topic is well established, particularly in castle studies. Writers in the Anglo-Norman world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries tended to be pretty clear about the ways in which acts of opposition and the use of fortresses, specifically castles, were linked. Orderic Vitalis’ twelfth-century commentary, probably stemming from a lost section of William of Poitiers’ eleventh-century Gesta Guillelmi, on the different fighting strategies of the English and Normans, is a familiar refrain in studies of the period:

The passage is directly referring to the Normans’ establishment of castles as structures used in the suppression of rebellion but numerous commentators have focused on the apparent English unfamiliarity with castles in this passage.Because the English did not have castles, Orderic – or rather William of Poitiers (his source for this part of the narrative) – surmised, their opposition to the king and his magnates was ineffective. They did not know how to counter castles, so the logic runs, nor, apparently, did they make use of them in their own rebellions. The axiomatic truth of the former point is clear if we think of the failed attempts to capture castles at York in 1068 and 1069, and there are few direct assaults on castles recorded in the years after the Conquest. Beside York, the failed 1069 assault by the men of Dorset and Somerset against Montacute Castle (Som.) may be, as Stuart Prior notes, a rare exception. While the places of most effective resistance to William were arguably those which could function as strongholds (albeit not specifically as castles), such as Exeter or Ely, rebels did not use those places to assert their opposition to William on a basis that could have allowed the negotiation of their individual lordship.