In early September 1051, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that ‘the French had built a castle’, the first Norman castle in England. Yet for centuries the circumstances behind the construction of this castle and its actual location have remained a mystery until now.

In the first ever account of this subject, Terry Wardle looks at the history behind the building of the castle and the man who built it, the Norman soldier Osbern. The book looks at the troubled history of eleventh-century England, with the growing threat from Scandinavian raiders and the civil conflict within England between the monarchy and powerful Anglo-Saxon families, and traces the events which allowed a relatively unknown Norman soldier to snatch his place in history with the building of the first Norman castle in England, fifteen years before the Norman Conquest in 1066.