- Brinklow Castle
Brinklow Castle known locally as "The Tump" was in the village of
Brinklow in the county ofWarwickshire betweenCoventry and Rugby (gbmapping|SP438796).This was a Norman earthwork
motte and bailey castle which was founded byRobert de Mowbray to guard theFosse Way . It was probably abandoned by 1173. The castle itself may have stood on the site of an ancient burial mound or roman signal station.Impressive earthworks remain.
Brinklow seen to of firstly been used as a prehistoric barrow thus the old English of hlāw in the name Brinklow (Creighton: 2002, 70) which was later modified by Earl Alberic (Early Aubrey) (Williams A , Martin GH eds: 2003, 655) the first Norman lord of Brinklow, but he left his Earldom in Northumbria and thus lost his lands in England before the writing of the Domesday, however his land and title had not been reassigned by the time of the Domesday recording thus we have a good record of his land holdings (Holt: 1972, 6) (Chatwin: 1948, 4). Brinklow is a motte and bailey castle of grand size, the motte is 12m high and it original bailey was 121m wide by 152m long, later it seems that Brinklow’s bailey was modified to enclose a smaller area by cutting a ditch and forming a rampart in the middle of the bailey as can be seen in the figure six below (Chatwin: 1948, 4) this seems to suggest that Brinklow slowly declined when of use as the strong military defence of the Fosse-way were in decline or other factors such as less need to controlled the economic movement on the Fosses-way (Hanson: 2008, 13).
References
* [http://www.castleuk.net/castle_lists_midlands/140/brinklowcastle.htm Brinklow Castle 1]
* [http://homepage.mac.com/philipdavis/English%20sites/3518.html Brinklow Castle 2]
*Fry, Plantagenet Somerset, "The David & Charles Book of Castles", David & Charles, 1980. ISBN 0-7153-7976-3* [Creighton C, 2002: Castles and Landscapes Power, Community and Fortification in Medieval England. Equinox, Great Britain]
* [Chatwin P, 1955: Brandon Castle, Warwickshire, Birmingham and Warwickshire archaeology society, 73, 63-83]
* [Holt, J. 1972: Politics and Property in Early Medieval England, Past and Present, 57, 3-52]
* [Hanson, K 2008: Norman castles and their positioning inside an English County: A study of Norman castles in Warwickshire. Unpublised BA desertation]
* [Williams A (Ed), Martin GH (Ed), 2003: Domesday book, A complete Translation. Penguin books, England]
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