We have seen that, throughout the Saxon and Danish period, the _burh_, the home of the community, formed the unit, if the expression may be used, of military defence by fortification. The English or Danish nobleman lived, it may safely be assumed, in houses like the two-storied house in the Bayeux tapestry, where Harold and his friends are feasting on the upper floor, while the ground floor apparently forms a cellar or store-room (36).[38] It is possible that such a house, the prototype of the larger medieval dwelling-house, may sometimes have been protected by its encircling thorn hedge or palisade; but it was not a castle. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a castle meant to an Englishman a special type of fortress, of a construction and plan of a character more or less fixed. The loose phraseology which, in later times, applied the title of castle indiscriminately to prehistoric camps and medieval manor-houses, was not yet customary. The first castles on English soil appear to have been raised by Norman favourites of Edward the Confessor before the Conquest, and to have excited alarm among the English population. In 1048 some foreigners or “Welshmen,” as the English called them, encroached on the territory of Sweyn Godwinsson in Herefordshire, constructed a _castel_—the first mention of such a thing in the Chronicle—and wrought harm to all the country round. That they were Frenchmen appears from the events of 1052: one of Godwin’s demands to the king at Gloucester was that “the Frenchmen of the castle” should be given up, and in the same year “the Frenchmen of the castle” helped to defend the borders against a Welsh inroad. The very fact that the Frenchmen’s stronghold was known as “_the_ castle” proves that it was at any rate an unfamiliar type of fortress. But, if it was the first, others were soon constructed. When Godwin returned from his outlawry in 1052, and forced himself back into Edward’s good graces, the Frenchmen in London left the city. The archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, made his way to the east coast: some fled westward to Pentecost’s castle, which is probably identical with the Herefordshire fortress, others northward to Robert’s castle, which is now identified with Clavering in Essex. The Herefordshire castle is supposed to have been at Ewias Harold, some twelve miles south of Hereford, where there is still the great mount of a Norman stronghold on the north-west side of the village.[39] [Illustration: Hastings Castle: from Bayeux Tapestry]