Noble houses in new lands: Castles in medieval Fenland reclamations in the Netherlands

Many Dutch castles and noble houses are situated in high-medieval reclamation regions. In literature sometimes a relationship is suggested between the castles and the reclamations, but empirical evidence is extremely rare, as is scientific research. In recent years, however, the amount of archaeological data on castles has grown enormously and also our knowledge of landscape history has increased. This makes it worthwhile to go back to the relationship between the two. The relationship between reclamations and castle building will be discussed in three wetland regions that were reclaimed during the High Middle Ages. In the first, in Langbroek, large numbers of small castles were built from the middle of the 13th century onwards, mainly by three families. Their spatial distribution suggests an indirect connection with land ownership by the manors in the surrounding villages that had organised the reclamations more than a century earlier. The second case study, Jutphaas, is less clear, although here the large density of castles seems to have been the result of building activities by one or two families. The third case study is situated in the core region of the systematic fenland reclamations along the border between the county of Holland and the bishopric of Utrecht. Here in recent years a number of castle sites have been discovered that may date from the early days of the newly-reclaimed landscape. These castles seem to have been deserted early. The reclamations offered opportunities for ambitious people to climb the social ladder and built or obtain castles and noble houses.