The Castle Doctrine is a Pretty Good Metaphor
What does it mean to say, "a man's home is his castle?"
Illustration: Hohenzollern Castle via Wikimedia Commons.
Many common law systems have something called the castle doctrine. The name has always struck me as deceptively twee, like the various metaphors that political writers pass around. “Third rail” is a kind way of naming the most vicious bigotries and policies you can imagine, just as “castle doctrine” is the origin story of stand your ground laws, defunded child welfare offices, and right wing talking points across the globe.
The doctrine gets its name from English jurist Sir Edward Coke’s 1628 assertion that “a man’s home is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge].” In the European context, this is peculiar to the UK, but thanks to their empire and subsequent export of common law, the doctrine can be now found in many corners of the world, not in the least the United States.
In the modern day, the UK’s castle doctrine isn’t a defense for murder. Not so in the US, where stand-your-ground laws and forgiveness for beating your kids are legally enshrined in the castle doctrine. In the US as in the UK, the metaphor has entered the cultural imagination, where social mores rather than the rule of law uphold it. It doesn’t matter whether your neighbor is legally allowed to smack his kid: it’s rude to notice that he is.
Critiques of this social more often focus on the literal fact that a crumbling Garage Mahal built in the 80s is no castle. Or you might take umbrage with the gendered focus – what about a woman’s home? But, as a medievalist, I find the notion that “a man’s home is his castle” surprisingly apt. That is, it may be your castle, but you didn't build it. Your hands didn't make the furniture, the textiles, the food – but so long as those objects are within a boundary defined by words rather than anything material, it's yours.
And, of course, you can always pawn those valuables when faced with a liquidity crisis.
Now that you have a castle, all your time is stolen by the task of managing it. There are territory disputes with the neighbors to settle, or perhaps escalate into a war. There’s the question of who gets to use what land, and how. Who do you hire to fix the plumbing? Where does the cash to pay them come from? How do you stock the castle on a day-to-day basis, ensuring everyone remains fed and clothed?
Those things, at least, are not terribly unlike the headaches facing your average medieval duke. There are some excellent political histories on the challenges facing medieval landholders, and they mostly boil down to: Just because you claim to have absolute power doesn’t mean that you actually do. Before mass literacy, kings, dukes, and counts had an immense amount of trouble staffing things like treasuries and exchequers, without which it was difficult to enforce laws or levy taxes. A 10th century English peasant might agree that the king held God-given power over him, but would cheerfully miss what this had to do with taxes.1
Most of us are literate today, but the epistemological difficulty in asserting sovereignty remains. Like a duke, you as a modern castle owner may realize that your legal sovereignty is a far cry from actual power, the sort which allows you to control goings-on. For all that work hiring plumbers and battling neighbors, you have no idea what goes on in the kitchens. The cooking, cleaning, and all aspects of the day to day except possibly maintenance are handled either by a wife or a worker. Regardless of the existential importance of the fief’s claim on a few inches of turf grass, it’s not what your children will remember. It’s not even what keeps your belly full, or your heat on. It’s politically important, but practically meaningless.
Out of politeness, everyone calls it your castle. But the situation is always, always a few mistakes from losing it all. A missed payment to your creditors. A sudden death. A divorce. So much is yours, but it takes so little to lose it that one may fairly ask: was it ever truly yours to begin with?
Individualism has convinced Americans that what they need is to be a king. But a thousand years of medieval history stand testament to exactly why that’s a wish for your worst enemy, not yourself.
As I said, the metaphor “a man’s home is his castle” is pretty easy to poke holes in. By comparison, the second part of Sir Coke’s assertion – each man's home is his safest refuge – goes completely ignored. That’s too bad, because everything that is meaningfully wrong with the idea is best expressed there.
It may indeed be true that a man’s home is his refuge, but it’s harder to make that argument for his wife. Domestic abuse survivors in particular are harmed by the idea that the home is an unapproachable private space, where anything the head of household says goes. That can’t be remedied by making the statement gender neutral. An imbalance of power will always be present as long as we believe that closed doors mean safety, mean keeping the barbarians outside, out.
More than that, enforcing that sovereignty requires massive amounts of labor in the form of homemaking, an expectation that overwhelmingly hurts women. If you are sovereign, if the castle is really yours, then you don’t need to rely on your neighbors for help. It’s shameful to buy a premade cake – can’t you bake your own? What do you need a gardner for – aren’t you industrious enough to tend your own garden? Nevermind disability, a black thumb, or simply hating baking. Any failure to assert sovereignty is a moral failing, not a purposeful decision.
There’s better ways of doing it. The nuclear family, now inexorable from castle ownership, is less common in the rest of the world. In many places, the sorts of multigenerational households that have existed for all of human history are still the basic way of arranging private life. My Qashqai friend fondly recalls her childhood in a complex in Iran, where the borders between each household were faint. Her grandmother did all the cooking, her aunt much of the cleaning, and childrearing was a communal responsibility.
That’s a much better division of labor than what the nuclear family and the castle doctrine demand. Wouldn’t you buy less takeout if all your food was made by your one friend who really loved to cook? Wouldn’t household chores drag a lot less if you only ever had to do the ones you enjoyed, and knew that the rest would be done happily by people you loved? Wouldn’t you be more mindful with your clutter, if you knew your aunt had to put it all away?
This arrangement necessitates giving up absolute control of the home, and narrowing one’s private space. But that seems to be a win-win, anyway. A household of four will never achieve the full promise of sovereignty, not without trampling on each other’s individual freedoms, but it will have to deal with all the downsides and all the maintenance that comes with maintaining any domicile. A household of ten can divide and conquer.
The expansion of a castle owner’s mindset to every property holder was meant, I think, to be liberatory. In theory, it breaks down the barriers between rich and poor, allowing everyone the opportunity to hold power in the form of land. But it’s been five centuries since Sir Coke wrote those famous words, and it hasn’t worked out like that. So, from now on, when you find yourself worrying about what the Joneses might think of your store-bought cake, your decision to live with your mom, or raising your kids in the house you bought with your friends, ask yourself:
Do you want a castle, or do you want a life?
See pages 28-32 of On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, by grandpappy of modern medievalism Joseph R. Strayer. The statebuilding literature of the 20th century was largely focused on its potential application to non-Western states, much to its detriment, but this slim volume remains a fascinating and eminently readable introduction to the topic.