‘For the fortresses (munitiones) which the Gauls call castles (castella) had been very few in the English provinces, and for this reason the English, although warlike and courageous, had nevertheless shown themselves too weak to withstand their enemies.’ Thus Ordericus Vitalis writing, it is true, in c.1125, yet the chronicler to be valued above all others for the depth and detail of his information about Anglo-Norman feudal society in the late eleventh century as well as the early twelfth, and, though not contemporary, an authority also for the history of the Norman Conquest of England, because of his careful use of a wide range of sources and his well-placed position in the monastery of St Evroul. It is good thus to begin with a reliable early twelfth-century statement that the origin of the castle in England is to all intents and purposes to be found in the Norman Conquest because, although this has been the accepted view amongst historians at least since Mrs Armitage's day, the absence of native castles in pre-Conquest England is again being questioned at the present time, together with the absence of feudalism. In fact, as has been sufficiently argued in the last chapter, the two things go together, though those who argue for pre-Conquest English feudalism on the one hand, and those who argue for pre-Conquest English castles on the other, too seldom realize their alliance, so far is the social significance of the castle short of general acceptance in this country (though not in France – le vieux château féodal). Indeed one may suggest at this stage, by way of introduction, two curious and recurrent traits amongst many English historians of all generations past and present. The first is an anachronistic nationalism which, coming to the boil in 1066, leads to a disinclination to admit the importance of the Conquest and to a conviction that anything important the Normans can claim to have introduced was already here before they came, whether castles or Romanesque churches, feudalism or the reformation of the Church. The second, which logically is incompatible with the first though the two are sometimes found together, is the belief that feudalism is a foreign and a bad thing to which the English (whoever they may have been) never really took, but got rid of with native genius as soon as ever they could.