Not quite the opening paragraph...............

     "One governing concept shaped a castle:  not residence, but defense.  As fortress, it was an emblem of medieval life as dominating as the cross.  In the Romance of the Rose, that vast compendium of everything but romance, the castle enclosing the Rose is the central structure which must be besieged and penetrated to reach the goal of sexual desire.  In real life, all its arrangements testified to the fact of violence, the expectation of attack, which had carved the history of the Middle Ages.  The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and Roman legions for its ramparts.  After the Empire's collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority.  Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy."
-Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous 14th Century