Everybody knows that an Englishman’s house is his castle, but it should also be remembered that in early times an Englishman’s castle was his house. Castles were not necessarily military strongholds; many of them were so, but many of them, again, were nothing more than fortified houses, and it is in these fortified houses that we must seek the first germs of our own homes, the earliest evidences of domestic architecture. In this inquiry we need not trouble ourselves about Roman villas; they were exotic, and there is no reason to believe that they had any influence on English houses. Nor need we spend much time on the centuries which elapsed between the extinction of the Roman civilisation and the Norman Conquest. The country was widely populated during those years, but any one who has climbed the bleak downs whereon its inhabitants clustered, or scrambled up the vast earthworks which were the strongholds of its chieftains, may well wonder how the race survived. Some kind of shelter from the weather there must have been, probably in the shape of wooden buildings. But such primitive structures cannot be considered as architecture, and we will now concern ourselves only with buildings of a permanent nature on which a certain amount of trained skill has been bestowed, buildings, in fact, which convey definite information as to their arrangement, and may be classed, more or less, as works of art. Such buildings--at any rate so far as they are dwellings--are not to be found of a date prior to the Conquest, nor, with few exceptions, for more than half a century later. The “castles” of the Conqueror were probably merely the huge earthworks which he found scattered throughout the land. Any new works which he caused to be made were probably of wood. It was not until the middle of the twelfth century that stone buildings superseded to any great extent these wooden structures; at least few existing remains can be dated earlier than then; and it is in the midst of the great ditches of these earthen “castles” that many of the stone keeps of that time were built, the encircling outer mounds being further strengthened by stone walls. The few remains of the stone castles built during the reigns of the Conqueror and his sons do not provide us with any definite link between themselves and their predecessors of wood, although it is probable that they embodied in a permanent form the kind of accommodation previously provided in more perishable materials; the most important part of this accommodation being the hall. They certainly do not seem to have had any long ancestry on the other side of the Channel, for it is doubtful whether any building of this nature in Normandy can be dated prior to the Conquest. But although the exact causes which determined their shape are still to seek, it is clear that the fashion became established of erecting stone castles, wherein the keep was the principal building.