Read the passage and answer the following questions.
Medieval Europe abounded in castles. Germany alone had ten thousand and more, most of them now vanished; all that a summer journey in the Rhineland and the south-west now can show arc a handful of ruins and a few nineteenth-century restorations. Nevertheless, anyone journeying from Spain to the Dvina, from Calabria to Wales, will find castles rearing up again and again to dominate the open landscape. There they still stand, in desolate and uninhabited districts where the only visible forms of life are herdsmen and their flocks, with hawks circling the battlements, far from the traffic and comfortably distant even from the nearest small town: these were the strongholds of the European aristocracy.
The weight of aristocratic dominance was felt in Europe until well after the French Revolution; political and social structure. the Church, the general tenor of thought and feeling were all influenced by it. Over the centuries, consciously or unconsciously, the other classes of this older European society—the clergy, the bourgeoisie, and the 'common people'—adopted many of the outward characteristics of the aristocracy, who became their model, their standard, their ideal. Aristocratic values and ambitions were adopted alongside aristocratic manners and fashions of dress. Yet the aristocracies were the object of much contentious criticism and complaint; from the thirteenth century onwards their military value and their political importance were both called in question. Nevertheless, their opponents continued to their principal imitators. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the reforming Papacy and its clerical supporters, although opposed to the excessively aristocratic control of the Church (as is shown by the Investiture Contest) nevertheless, themselves first adopted and then strengthened the forms of this control. Noblemen who became bishops or who founded new Orders helped to implant aristocratic principles and forms of government deep within the structure and spiritual life of the Church. Again, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the urban bourgeoisie. made prosperous and even rich by trade and industry, were rising to political power as the servants and legal proteges of the monarchy. These 'Patricians' were critical of the aristocracy and hostile towards it. Yet they also imitated the aristocracy and tried to gain admittance to the closed circle and to achieve equality of status. Even the unarmed peasantry, who usually had to suffer more from the unrelieved weight of aristocratic dominance, long remained tenaciously loyal to their lords, held to their allegiance by that combination of love and fear, Amor et Timor, which was so characteristic of the medieval relationship between lord and servant, between God and man.
The castle and strongholds of the aristocracy remind us of the reality of their power and superiority. Through the long-warring centuries when men went defenceless and insecure, the 'house: the lord's fortified dwelling, promised protection, security and peace to all whom it sheltered. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries, if not later, Europe was in many ways all too open. Attack came from the sea, in the Mediterranean from Saracens and Vikings, the latter usually in their swift, dragon-prowed, easily manoeuvred longboats, manned by some sixteen pairs of oarsmen and with a full complement of perhaps sixty men. 'There were periods when the British Isles and the French coasts were being raided every year by Vikings and in the heart of the continent marauding Magyar armies met invading bands of Saracens. The name of Pontresina, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, is a memento of the stormy tenth century. It means pons Saracenorum the 'fortified Saracen bridge; the place where plundering expeditions halted on their way up from the Mediterranean.
It was recognized in theory that the Church and the monarchy were the principal powers and that they were bound by the nature of their office to ensure peace and security and to do justice: but at this period they were too weak, too torn by internal conflicts to fulfil their obligations. Thus, more and more power passed into the hands of warriors invested by the monarchy and the Church with lands and rights of jurisdiction who in return undertook to support their overlords and to protect the unarmed peasantry.
Their first concern, however, was self-protection. It is almost impossible for us to realize how primitive the great majority of these early medieval ‘castels’ really were. Until about 1150 the fortified houses of the Anglo-Norman nobility were simple dwellings surrounded by a mound of earth and a wooden stockade. These were the mottee and bailey castles; the mottee was the mound and its stockade, the bailey an open court lying below and also stockade. Both were protected, where possible by yet another ditch filled with water, the moat. In the middle of the mottee there was a wooden tower, the keep or donjon, which only became a genuine stronghold at a later date and in places where stone was readily available. The stone castles of the French and Germany nobility usually had only a single communal room in which all activities took place.
 In such straitened surroundings, where warmth, light and comfort were lacking, there was no way of creating an air of privacy. It is easy enough to understand why the life of the landed nobility was often so unrestrained, so filled with harshness, cruelty and brutality, even in later, more ‘chivalrous’ periods. The barons daily life was bare and uneventful, punctuated by war, bunting (a rehearsal for war), and feasting. Boys were trained to fight from the age of seven or eight, and their education in arms continued until they were twenty-one, although in some cases they started to fight as early as fifteen. The peasants of the surrounding countryside, bound to their lords by a great variety of ties, produced the sparse fare which was all that the undeveloped agriculture of the early medieval period could sustain. Hunting was a constant necessity, to make up for the lack of butcher’s meat, and in England and Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, even the kings had to progress from one crown estate to another, from one bishop’s palace to the next, to maintain themselves and their retinue.