![]() ![]() Churches were fortified and the peasantry suffered deprivation as armies crisscrossed the country, ravaging estates and burning property. In response to the crisis, nobles built still more castles, and rivals to the king set up their own mints and produced new coinage. ![]() Matilda then launched an all-out campaign to win back the crown, plunging the country into a civil war that lasted almost 20 years. But her cousin, Stephen of Blois, also a grandchild of William the Conqueror, snatched the throne from under her nose. ![]() ![]() When William’s son King Henry I died in 1135, his rightful heir was his daughter, Empress Matilda. And, in less than a century, the castle became the epicenter of one of the most momentous conflicts in English history. Along with Oxford and Windsor Castles, Wallingford was one of the most significant of these early Norman fortresses. Led by the newly crowned William the Conqueror, the Normans-descended from Norsemen who had settled in northern France in the tenth century-built castles in large numbers throughout England to control lands they had seized from the Anglo-Saxons. Some 20 miles downriver of Oxford and an arrow shot from the eastern bank of the Thames rise the limestone ruins of Wallingford Castle, a massive fortress built following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. ![]()
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