This week: Castles
The most expensive secular building of its day, Dover Castle was described by the 13th-century chronicler Matthew Paris as 'the key of England'. But though its imposing fortifications tower over the shortest sea crossing between Britain and the European mainland, it wasn't built in response to any threat of imminent foreign invasion. Instead, its construction in the years after the murder of Thomas Beckett in 1170 owed more to the growing numbers of foreign dignitaries who began to make the pilgrimage across the Channel to Canterbury to pay their respects to the slain archbishop.