Norman castles rising across England

1067

William the Conqueror's captains began throwing up motte-and-bailey fortifications to dominate the landscape; London's White Tower would begin within months. The rapid castle-building, unprecedented in Anglo-Saxon England, enabled a few thousand Normans to hold down a country of two million in a single generation. By the time of William's death in 1087, over five hundred castles had been raised across the conquered kingdom.