ABSTRACT
The approximate century after the Conquest can be treated as a single more or less homogeneous period. Not that there was no development in design — one would certainly expect something of the kind from the period in which occurred the First and Second Crusades, the early stirrings of the Gothic, and the coming of the House of Anjou to England — but there was little strictly military development in this country, and probably not very much elsewhere in Christendom. In Outremer the Crusaders found Byzantine models and Syrian masons; military technique in fact was far in advance of anything they were accustomed to use in their own countries. They did not interfere with this, but wisely followed the advice and methods of local masters; only they seem to have lived in keeps — as they had done in the lands from which they came — rather more than had previously been usual in the East. What is more interesting is that the many who returned from the Crusades did not attempt to build Crusader castles in Europe (see Chapter 8, infra).
