IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 288

When William, Duke of Normandy, landed on the Sussex coast in late September 1066, he did not march inland immediately. His initial priority was to establish a secure beachhead, and within days his followers had constructed a fortification at Hastings. It was an elementary structure by subsequent standards: an artificial mound of earth, or motte, surmounted by a timber tower, with an adjacent courtyard enclosed by a rampart, a ditch and a palisade. This enclosure was the bailey, and it accommodated the garrison's provisions, stables and workshops. A fortification of this description could be erected within a few weeks by a substantial labour force, and it required neither stonemasons, nor mortar, nor significant expenditure.

Castles were considerably more than military apparatus. The majority were established in towns, or adjacent to a ford, bridge or highway where traffic could be regulated and tolls exacted. A castle provided its lord with a defended residence, a facility for detaining prisoners and a repository for grain and weaponry. Its tower constituted a visible declaration of status that could be discerned from many miles distant. Where Roman walls survived, as at Lincoln and Colchester, the Normans exploited them; elsewhere they bisected streets, demolished entire districts and cleared extensive areas of housing to create sufficient space for the new fortifications.

How many castles were erected in England after the Conquest is impossible to determine. No comprehensive register was ever maintained, and the surviving records mention castles only when they were contested, taxed or destroyed, which means that any total must be inferred rather than counted. Historians generally speak of several hundred by the close of the twelfth century. The majority were constructed of earth and timber and have left no standing masonry; they survive as grassy mounds in fields and beside village churches. The political disorder of King Stephen's reign generated a proliferation of unlicensed castles, and Henry II subsequently ordered the demolition of those that had been raised without royal authorisation.

The land required for these works had to be obtained from somewhere. Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records that houses were demolished to make room for castles in several towns, including Lincoln and York. The losses were enumerated house by house — a detail that implies someone anticipated that the owners would be compensated, or at least wished to preserve a record of what had been appropriated.

From the 1070s the most eminent lords began to rebuild in stone, and the keep, or donjon, became the most costly building a medieval monarch could commission. Stone had to be quarried, transported and raised by manual labour, and a great tower might require twenty years or more for completion. The most celebrated of them all, the White Tower in London, was commenced about 1078. Its core consists of rough rubble, but its exterior was faced with limestone conveyed by ship from Caen in Normandy, which was pale, fine-grained and readily carved, and which had already been employed in several other Norman buildings.

The White Tower was probably designed by Gundulf, a bishop who had served in Normandy before being appointed to Rochester. Its design demonstrates considerable deliberation. Even by contemporary standards it was an immense structure, rising approximately 27 metres above the river. Its walls taper from about four and a half metres at the foundation to around three at the summit, so that the lower courses carry the weight of the structure and are thickest where an attacker would strike. The entrance was approached by an external staircase that could be removed in an emergency.

Colchester's keep, commenced about 1076, is the largest Norman keep in Europe, encompassing a greater area than the White Tower. It is founded upon the vaults of the Roman Temple of Claudius, a structure that had been the centre of the town's religious observance more than a thousand years previously. The Normans, it appears, preferred foundations that were already ancient and substantial.

At Rochester the keep was begun in 1127 by William de Corbeil, the Archbishop of Canterbury. When King John besieged the castle in 1215, his engineers excavated a tunnel beneath the south-eastern corner of the tower, filled it with kindling and the fat of slaughtered animals, and then ignited the mixture. The timber props were consumed, the corner subsided, and the defenders were compelled to retreat into the section of the building that remained standing. Much of what a visitor observes today is a repair of the thirteenth century.

Henry II, who acceded to the throne in 1154, was the most prolific castle builder of the dynasty. At Dover he constructed a new great tower and a circuit of walls that rendered the castle one of the most formidable in the kingdom. Yet castles also functioned as centres of administration. Courts convened in their halls, sheriffs maintained their accounts there, and in later centuries several keeps were employed as gaols, long after their walls had forfeited any military significance and their garrisons had been disbanded.

The earthworks of hundreds of Norman castles remain visible in the English countryside, usually as a conical mound with a flattened summit and a ditch encircling its base. Excavation has augmented what these configurations can reveal. Prolonged investigation at Hen Domen, a motte-and-bailey in Powys, disclosed a meticulously organised complex with a gatehouse, a bridge and a hall, rather than the improvised structure that earlier archaeologists had envisaged when they began work on the site. What the Normans constructed in earth and timber, it emerged, was as deliberate as anything they erected in stone.

A tally stick is exactly what its name suggests: a piece of wood on which a record is cut. The method is very old and has been used in many parts of the world, long before written accounts became common. A rod of hazel or willow, about the length of a forearm, was smoothed and then notched with a knife, each notch standing for a sum of money, a number of animals or a quantity of grain. The rod was then split lengthwise down the middle, so that every notch was cut in half. Because the grain of the wood ran through both pieces, the two halves could later be laid together and shown to belong to one another. One half went to the person who paid, the other to the official who received.

The Latin word for such a stick was talea, a cutting, from which the English word 'tally' is derived. Tallies were used by the Romans and by their successors, and they appear in the records of medieval France, Italy and the Low Countries. Their advantages were obvious in societies where coins were scarce, paper expensive and literacy limited. A tally required no ink, no scribe and no reader, and its two halves could be checked by anybody able to match them together. In parts of Europe the practice survived into the nineteenth century, long after neighbouring kingdoms had gone over to written accounts.

In England the tally became an instrument of central government. From the twelfth century the Exchequer at Westminster used tallies to record payments into the treasury and, more importantly, payments out of it. A sheriff who delivered tax revenue was handed a notched stick as his receipt; a creditor of the Crown, whether a supplier of horses or a nobleman who had lent the king money, was given a tally instead of cash. The Exchequer kept the other half, and the two were stored together and matched at the annual audit, when the sheriff's accounts were balanced.

The notches followed a fixed scale, so that an amount could be read at a glance. Broad cuts stood for the largest sums, narrower ones for hundreds and tens, and fine nicks for shillings and pence. A clerk read the stick from the highest value downwards, which meant that an official who could not read or write could still count what was owed. The stick had to be long enough to hold the notches, so the largest sums were recorded on the longest pieces of wood.

Because a tally issued to a creditor could later be handed to the Exchequer in payment of a tax, these sticks began to circulate as a form of credit. A merchant who was owed money by the king might sell the tally to somebody who owed the king money, at a discount; the buyer then presented it at the Exchequer and had the debt cancelled. Tallies were also forged. A dishonest holder might cut extra notches into his half and claim a larger sum, which is precisely why the split mattered, and why the two halves were kept and compared.

By the eighteenth century the system was under strain. The tally office at Westminster had accumulated vast quantities of sticks, and wooden records were cumbersome to store, easy to damage and difficult to search. Reformers complained that tallies concealed rather than recorded what the state owed, and that the nation's accounts were kept in a form nobody could inspect. In 1782 an act of Parliament provided that the accounts of the Exchequer be kept on paper instead, and in 1826 the issuing of tallies was abolished altogether.

The sticks themselves, however, outlived the system. In 1834 the old Palace of Westminster, where Parliament sat, was heated by stoves, and two furnaces beneath the House of Lords were used to dispose of unwanted records. On 16 October the clerk of works ordered the furnaces to be filled with the accumulated tallies. The fires burned so fiercely that they set light to the chimney flues, and flames spread into the debating chambers above. Within hours both Houses had been destroyed, along with most of the medieval palace. The building that burned down had been set alight, in a quite literal sense, by its own accounts.

Only a small number of Exchequer tallies survive, since most were destroyed in the fire of 1834 or lost soon afterwards, and the survivors are now held in museums and record offices. The word 'stock', meaning the capital of a company and hence stocks and shares, is often said to come from the half of the tally kept by the payer, but the derivation is disputed and there may be simpler explanations. What the sticks do show is that record-keeping need not be written to be exact, and that a system can serve a state for centuries without anyone being able to read it.

Every large museum contains objects that arrived in its stores by routes its founders would not have cared to explain. Some were bought, many were given, and a significant number were taken: in wars, in colonial occupations, or under laws that stripped their owners of property because of who they were. In the past thirty years the descendants of those owners have begun to ask for them back, and museums have discovered that the question is far harder than it first appears. Two quite different grounds of claim are involved, and they deserve to be kept apart. The first is that the object was stolen, and that a theft is not undone by the passage of time. The second is that the people who gave it up had no real choice in the matter.

The first kind of claim rests on a principle that lawyers often resist: possession, however long continued, cannot make a wrongful taking right. A painting confiscated from a Jewish family in Vienna or Berlin in 1938 was not sold but seized. The dealer or museum that later bought it, often cheaply and in good faith, acquired something that the seller had no right to sell. The moral force of such a claim does not depend on the identity of the original owner, but it is enormously strengthened when the descendants can be named. A family is not an abstraction: it has documents, photographs and a memory of a wall on which the object once hung.

Europe has shown that this kind of restitution can work. The Washington Principles, agreed in 1998 by representatives of more than forty countries, invited museums to search their collections for art confiscated by the Nazis and to seek fair solutions with the heirs. In Britain a panel was set up to advise on such claims, and in 2009 an act of Parliament allowed national museums, which had previously been forbidden to dispose of items in their care, to return objects looted in the Nazi era. Dozens of works have gone back since then. None of this was easy, but it showed that the legal obstacles were less immovable than they had looked.

Museums advance two serious objections. The first concerns the public. A great collection exists so that anyone may study and enjoy it, and a painting that disappears into a private house or a freeport is, on this view, lost to the world; the museum, it is said, holds its treasures as a trustee for humanity. The second concerns the collections themselves: if every object with a doubtful history had to leave, the encyclopaedic museums would be hollowed out, and the connections between cultures that they exist to display would be broken. These are not trivial arguments, and anyone who cares about public access should feel their weight. But they are arguments about consequences, not about entitlement.

The practical difficulties are considerable. National museums in several countries are barred by statute from disposing of their holdings; trustees may be personally liable if they do so; and the documents needed to prove a claim are often missing. Records were destroyed in the war, dealers kept vague books, and an object may have changed hands five times before it reached a display case. A claim may therefore fail not because it is unjust but because it cannot be proved. Proof depends on archives that the same upheavals destroyed. That is a strong argument for doing the research properly, and a weak one for refusing to do it.

Then there is the question of who should receive the object. Heirs multiply with each generation, and a single painting may be claimed by thirty people, some of whom have never met. Some families sell what they recover, which critics present as proof that the claim was really about money. I find this objection beside the point. If an object was taken from a family, the family may do as it likes with it, and to insist that it must stay in a museum is to say that the original wrong can be corrected only on terms the museum finds congenial.

Where a claim is proved, then, the presumption should be in favour of return, and the burden should rest on the institution to show why it should keep what it has. Restitution of this kind is not a favour granted to the descendants of victims; it is the correction of an injustice that the institution has, however innocently, been enjoying. Not every claim is proved, however, and not every object should go. Where a family cannot be identified, or where the object was freely sold, the honest course is disclosure: a clear account, on the label and in the catalogue, of how the thing came to be there. Long loans, shared ownership and agreements with communities of origin are all better than silence. What is not defensible is the pretence that an object has no history beyond its beauty, because the history is part of what it is.