castle guard

castle guard, in the European feudal tenure, an arrangement by which some tenants of the king or of a lesser lord were bound to provide garrisons for royal or other castles. The obligation would in practice be discharged by subtenants, individual knights who held their fiefs by virtue of performing such service for a fixed period each year. Because the castle concerned might be far from the fiefs charged to guard it (e.g., knights of Northamptonshire in the English Midlands had to garrison Dover Castle on the south coast), the duty was early commuted for money payments. Some castle guards, or ward rents, survived into modern times.