These two may not have been the only castles in England before the Conquest. The reference to Arundel in Domesday Book, for example, seems to imply an origin almost as early for the castle there.[40] Ordericus Vitalis speaks of Dover as though there were already a castle there, when William the Conqueror stormed the town after Hastings.[41] But Ordericus is our authority for the important and explicit statement that, in 1068, “the fortresses, which the Gauls call _castella_, had been very few in the provinces of England; and on this account the English, although warlike and daring, had nevertheless shown themselves too feeble to withstand their enemies.”[42] A statement of this kind at once disposes of the theory that the _burhs_ of the Danish wars were castles; it could hardly be argued that such _burhs_ were very few, or that the English had not taken advantage of them. As a matter of fact, when William came to England, his military policy consisted in the founding of castles, and many of these in places which had been and were _burhs_, where, if the _burh_ and castle were one and the same thing, the foundation of a castle was quite unnecessary. _Arcem condidit_, _castellum construxit_, _munitionem firmavit_, are terms used over and over again to describe the making of these new strongholds. To William, the strength of a monarch lay in the castles which he controlled; in warfare the castle formed his natural base of operations. His first work on landing at Hastings was to throw up a castle (38). Harold, on the other hand, although, as the Bayeux tapestry shows us, he had seen something of castles and siege warfare in William’s company, trusted for his defence to the shield-wall of his men, and the protection of the banks and ditches of an old earthwork in advance of his position. In 1067, after his coronation, William stayed at Barking, close to the walls of London, while the city, the Lundenburh whose walls Alfred had restored, was being overawed by the construction of certain _firmamenta_—one of them, no doubt, the White Tower, the other probably Baynard’s castle, near the present Blackfriars.[43] Again, we find him at Winchester, building a strong fortress within the walls of the city—a castle within a _burh_.