‘National’ Requisitioning for ‘Public’ Use of ‘Private’ Castles in Pre-Nation State France

Abstract

As a constitutional maxim ‘the Englishman’s house is his castle’ seems to be no older than the time of Sir Edward Coke, chief justice of Common Pleas to James I. In reality no fortress had been exclusive private property: the picture of ‘robber-barons’ eventually tamed by pious kings is pure caricature – but a doctrine does not have to be accurate to achieve influence.¹ This scenario, as persistent as it has been pervasive, was sanctioned by the triumph of the Whig barons in 1649, finalised in 1688, over theoretically absolute monarchy. It became a Radical shibboleth. William Pitt, nearly a century later, popularly romanticised eighteenth-century landlordism to assert that ‘the poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown The king of England cannot enter – all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.’ Hardly surprising that the medieval castle, from being thought a bastion of righteous privilege, soon acquired an image of rumbustious individualism, of privacy made absolute by moat and drawbridge as well as by force of law. From this to the romantic novelists’ distortions was but a short step. It was easily forgotten that, like the county ‘power house’ of Pitt’s day,² ensconced in its park, perhaps also embellished with ponds,³ with discreetly placed home-farm, the castle was a noble mansion or gentleman’s seat, and not private but a place of public resort. The Age of Enlightenment had odd notions about ‘feudalism’,⁴ taking its aristocratic privilege to be as unconditional as their own. Some historical realism did, however, survive, in that the era of Palladianism and then of Strawberry Hill Gothick did, at least, identify medieval castles as the counterparts of their own grandiose ch&teaux, different as their architecture was (though in France less so). Since then the