Читать книгу Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The Saxon invasions were a rude disturbance to the progress of English civilisation. The Romanised Britons lay more and more at the mercy of the invaders, as the soldiery were called away to take part in the last struggles of the western Empire in Italy. Barbarians from the country north of the wall, Saxon and Jutish pirates from across the sea, saw in the monuments of the Roman occupation fair ground for pillage. It is difficult to estimate the destruction caused by the invaders. But, apart from the havoc wrought by the Teutonic immigrants and the northern tribes, it is certain that the walled city of Roman times did not commend itself as a habitation to the new settlers. The fact that their settlements flank Roman roads, like Ermine street or the Fosseway, at distances of a mile or so from the main thoroughfare, proves little in itself; for the villas of the Roman period, which probably included, like the latifundia of Italy, a considerable population of labourers on each estate, lay at some distance from the main roads. The frequent villages—hams, tuns, and worths—were, however, a new feature; and the life of each village, for which a clearing was made in the wooded country-side, was pastoral, not military. This fact is of importance with regard to the scanty traces of defensive fortifications constructed during the Saxon occupation. Here and there natural opportunities prompted the Saxon invaders to found settlements on sites of Roman cities. The geographical position of London or Exeter, at the head of a broad estuary, made such places natural centres of traffic, of high importance to trade routes. On the other hand, while some of the larger provincial capitals preserved their life in part, other urbes and the smaller oppida, or walled towns, were left desolate. Pons Aelii, near the east end of the Roman wall, was abandoned until in the tenth century a small monastery was founded on the site, and the cluster of houses which gathered round it received the name of Muncanceaster (Monkchester). The place, however, did not recover its importance or become a permanent settlement until the Conqueror founded there his New Castle on the Tyne, which became the nucleus of the city of the middle ages and modern times. The military stations of the Saxon shore were ruined and abandoned. We know of the sack of Anderida in 492 A.D.: the walls of the station were left standing, but the later settlement of Pevensey grew up in the open country outside the walls. Richborough, Othona at the mouth of the Blackwater, Burgh Castle, sheltered no new settlements: the new villages or towns, Sandwich, Bradwell, Burgh, were all at a distance from the Roman walls or outside their area. Othona (Ythanceaster) was deserted when Cedd made it a missionary centre in the seventh century; and the little church, which exists to-day and may have been Cedd’s own church, was built across the site of the east gate of the station. In Leicester, which became an important Danish centre, the topography of the Roman station was much disturbed, and the church of St Nicholas, the nave of which is probably a little earlier than the Norman conquest, was built within the walls directly in front of the blocked west gate of the city. Towns like Chester, Gloucester, or Chichester, which have preserved the line of their Roman streets with little alteration, are rare; and the continuity of plan does not necessarily prove that there was a similar continuity in the life of the places. On the contrary, the present lay-out of either town shows four streets meeting at an open space or Carfax in the centre of the city: no trace remains above ground of the closed forum, which at Silchester and Corstopitum formed the centre of the plan and directed the course of the streets. Silchester, laid waste by Saxon invaders, has shared the fate of Anderida, Othona, and many other once prosperous Romano-British towns.

In French history there was no such interruption as the Saxon invasion caused in our own. The consequence is that the chief provincial capitals of to-day, the centres of local government and religion, are and always have been cities of Roman origin, which, although their Latin name has not always been kept, preserve the names of the Gallic tribes amid which they were founded. Reims, Paris, Amiens, Beauvais, Bourges, Le Mans, Tours, Rouen, Sens, Troyes, Chartres, cities which have taken a most prominent place in French history, and contain the most noble monuments of French religious architecture, have an unbroken history from Roman times and even earlier. The cathedrals of Christianised Gaul rose in the centre of the cities: outside the walls, as time went on, rose abbeys like those of Saint-Ouen at Rouen, Saint-Taurin at Evreux, La Couture and Le Pré at Le Mans. The fortresses of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, like the older castle of Rouen, were founded in a corner of the city, possibly on the site of the Roman arx or citadel, of which we have substantial remains in the abandoned Roman station of Jublains (Naeodunum Diablintum). In time the city grew, extending into suburbs far outside the original walls: a suburb sprang up round the neighbouring monastery. The circuit of the walls was extended beyond their old limit. The eastern Roman wall might be broken down, as at Le Mans, where the cathedral was in a corner of the city, to make way for the thirteenth-century quire of the principal church:23 the defences of the city were here transferred to a new outer ring of wall, the line of which can be seen on the bank of the Sarthe. Within the present extent of such cities the plan of the Roman station can frequently be traced: whatever the vicissitudes of the place may have been, no year has passed in which the chatter of the Vieux-Marché has been silent, or the Grande-Rue has been untrodden daily by busy footsteps. But in English towns of corresponding importance the case is different. If the cities were preserved from pillage, traces of Christianity and civilisation were obliterated. If York kept its position as an inhabited town, its population must have been small and poor: the Anglian sovereigns of Northumbria dwelt, not in the old Roman capital, but at country settlements like Goodmanham. The history of York begins again with the mission of Paulinus and the foundation of the first Saxon cathedral there. We also hear of Lincoln in connection with Paulinus, who consecrated a church there; and this city, like York, was large and important at the time of the Conquest. But, in both these cases, the Anglian invasion first, and the Danish invasion later, caused a serious disturbance to civic and religious life. Although there is evidence that the Saxon bishops who ruled at Dorchester (Oxon.) in the tenth and eleventh centuries looked upon Lincoln as the real seat of their authority, it did not recover its position as an ecclesiastical capital until a Norman bishop raised his cathedral in the south-eastern corner of the hill city. Even then the cathedral stood, not with its front to the via principalis, as at Le Mans, nor with its face to the forum, as at Coutances, but in an enclosure of its own, apart from the main life of the city. When we think of the great ecclesiastical centres of England, there are some names which recall the Roman occupation; but of these Chichester, Exeter, Lincoln, did not become sees of bishops until the time of the Norman conquest; Chester, although regarded as one seat of their authority by the medieval bishops of Lichfield, was never the real capital of their diocese. Bath and Old Sarum were given episcopal rank by Norman prelates. The true Saxon cathedral towns were villages of post-Roman origin—Lichfield, Wells, Sherborne, Durham, Ripon, Elmham, Thetford. The fact is significant; for, upon the continent of Europe, the ecclesiastical importance of a city was the result of its prominent position as the civil metropolis of a district. The choice of these obscure villages for the sees of Saxon prelates is a testimony to the practical abandonment of Roman cities by the invaders.

As a matter of fact, the Saxons trusted little to walls: their strength, after they had settled in the country, lay neither in earthwork, nor in stonework, but in the boundary of wood or marsh that extended round their settlements. Consequently, during the six centuries and a half between the final departure of the Roman legions and the Norman conquest, the history of military construction in England is very obscure. Work in stone, which can be distinguished as Saxon, is practically confined to churches. Such fortifications of this long period as can be identified are entirely in earthwork. In only a few cases we hear of a stone wall of enceinte being built, or an old Roman town wall being repaired. Further, it may safely be said that these fortifications, at any rate until the end of the period, whether their builders were Saxons or Danes, were intended to protect, not private individuals, but a community. Of the private citadel or castle we hear nothing until the period immediately before the Conquest, and then it is heard of only as a foreign importation.

The most formidable earthworks of the Saxon period are the great dykes known as Wansdyke and Offa’s dyke, with the subsidiary works of the Bokerley dyke and Wat’s dyke. Offa’s dyke, which ran from the Dee in the north to the Wye in the south, with a ditch along its western side, and the parallel line of Wat’s dyke,24 are generally acknowledged to have formed the boundary line between the Mercian kingdom of Offa (757-96) and the territory of the conquered Britons. The object and date of Wansdyke and the Bokerley dyke is not so clear. The Wansdyke ran from the Bristol Channel near Portishead, across north Somerset and along the downs south and south-west of Bath, passed through Wiltshire, north of Devizes and south of Marlborough, and, leaving Wiltshire east of Savernake park, turned southwards in the direction of Andover. The Bokerley dyke, in its present state, is only some four miles long, and forms the boundary between Wilts and Dorset, on the road from Salisbury to Cranborne. In both cases the ditch is upon the north or north-east side of the bank or dyke, which is clear proof that the defence was provided against attack from that quarter. The Wansdyke is obviously a late Roman or post-Roman work, for it encroaches in places upon the adjacent Roman road. The system on which it is planned resembles that of the Roman wall, in that its course includes a series of forts, presumably of earlier date. The conclusion which seems irresistible is that propounded by the late General Pitt-Rivers, that the Wansdyke was raised by the Roman Britons, to defend their last refuge in the south-west against the invading Saxons. If this is really the case, one can only wonder at the energy of despair which constructed this huge rampart, and at the uselessness of its builders’ attempt to ward off an invasion from the inland country alone. Ceawlin’s victory at Dyrham in 577 brought Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath into the hands of the Saxons, and cut off the communication between the Britons of the south-west and those of Wales. Whatever part the Wansdyke, on the hills north of which the battle was fought, may have played during the century before the fight at Dyrham, its history must have closed with Ceawlin’s conquest.

The first work of fortification by the Teutonic invaders, of which we have any account, is the royal city of Bebbanburh or Bamburgh in Northumberland, which Ida (547-59), king of Northumbria, called after his wife Bebba. This, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,25 was first girt by a hedge, and afterwards—probably long after the days of Ida—by a wall. One of the most noble of English castles stands upon the basaltic rock of Bamburgh, and its walls embrace the site of Ida’s capital. But the later stronghold must not be confounded with the earlier. The burh of Ida, which Penda sought to burn in 651,26 was not the private castle which William Rufus afterwards besieged. The name of Bebbanburh is significant. Burh or burg was a term applied by Saxons to fortified places. Cissbury in Sussex, Badbury and Poundbury in Dorset, Battlesbury and Scratchbury in Wilts, Cadbury, Dolebury, and Worlebury in Somerset, are early camps to which Saxons gave the name of burh. Searobyrig, the later Salisbury, was the name given by them to the great fortress of Old Sarum. Peterborough and Bury St Edmunds bear names derived from burh and its dative byrig, and were towns enclosed by a rampart.27 And, although, by a not very satisfactory method of argument, the Saxon burh has been taken very generally as the prototype of the castle, the very cases on which this argument chiefly rests show that the burh was a fortified town, and not the fortress of an individual lord. It is true that, at any rate until the time of Alfred the Great, the word burh implies a fortified house as well as a fortified collection of dwellings; but the burhs of which we read in connection with the Danish wars were towns and villages. The term is equivalent to the Roman oppidum, the French bourg, or the German burg. The first of the Saxon emperors, Henry the Fowler, made the founding of burhs a leading part of his policy:28 Merseburg, Brandenburg, Würzburg, all bear the familiar suffix. And, had not a later age chosen perversely to call the greatest of our prehistoric camps Maiden Castle, we should have had a Maidenbury of our own to show, far more ancient than the German Magdeburg.29

Some uncertainty attaches to the rare remains of fortifications of burhs “wrought” by Saxons and Danes. It would seem that they cannot have been very strong. The defences consisted of the usual earthen bank with a stockade on the top and an outer ditch; but one may safely assume that the strength of the defence lay mainly in the actual stockade, and that the bank and ditch never reached formidable proportions. Thelwall, near Warrington, takes its name from the wooden stockade, the wall of thills or upright palisades with which Edward the Elder surrounded the village in 923.30 There are exceptional cases in which we hear of a stone wall; but in these instances the burh was a Roman city or station, and the wall was a Roman wall. This may be fairly assumed with regard to the wall of Edward the Elder’s burh at Towcester (921). It was certainly the case at Colchester, where the Danish defenders were worsted in the same year by the fyrd of Kent and Essex. When Alfred the Great “repaired Lundenburh” in 886,31 he undoubtedly made good the weak places in the stone wall which the Romans had made round their city of London.

The burh, the fortified stronghold of a Saxon community, comes into prominence as the result of the Danish invasions of the ninth century. The method of the invaders was in almost every case the same. Seamen before everything else, they sought in their long ships the estuaries of rivers, and proceeded to penetrate inland as far as the stream would take them. From a base of operations, preferably an island in the river, where they could harbour their boats safely, they rode into the surrounding country, burning and pillaging. In 835, allied with the Britons of Cornwall, they came up the Tamar, and fought a battle with Egbert at Hingston down, west of Tavistock, in which they suffered defeat.32 In 843, they effected their first permanent settlement in France, on the island of Noirmoutier, south of the estuary of the Loire: they invaded the banks of the river, sacking Nantes and killing the bishop, and, after their summer campaign was over, settled down to build houses for winter quarters on their island.33 Each of the great French rivers was infested during the next few years by bands of northern pirates. Northmen in 845 sailed up the Garonne to Toulouse, and up the Seine to Paris, where destruction was avoided only by buying them off. Towns which lay near the rivers or sea coast were invariably sacked. Sometimes the pirates, growing bolder, left their ships and rode for some distance inland. In 851, starting from Rouen, they pillaged Beauvais. In 855, after burning Angers, they took to the land and sacked Poitiers. In both cases, however, their return journey was successfully cut off by a French army. In 856 the Danes of the Seine made their winter quarters at Jeufosse, on the bend of the river between Vernon and Mantes, and within no great distance of Paris. Within the next few years, they established themselves in strong posts at Oissel, above Rouen, and at Melun, above Paris. The greater part of the last sixteen years of Charles the Bald (d. 877) was occupied in defending Paris against their annual forays, repairing the bridges they had destroyed, and so cutting off their return from expeditions up the Marne and Oise. But, although they were constantly checked, they always returned. They abandoned the siege of Paris in 885-6, but only after Charles the Fat had paid them off. The last great invasion of France by the Northmen was in 911, when, by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, Charles the Simple ceded the duchy of Normandy to Rollo.

The actual settlement of the Northmen in England began in 851, eight years after the occupation of Noirmoutier. They wintered in Thanet, and sailed thence up the Stour and Thames, taking Canterbury and London. As in France, their landward excursions from their boats were less successful, and they were seriously beaten by Æthelwulf at Ockley in Surrey. But failure did not hinder them from returning. As in France, the system of buying off their attacks was adopted—a ready inducement to repeated plunder. In 887 they were in the Humber, and dealt a final blow to the decaying power of Northumbria at York. Next year they invaded Mercia up the Trent, and established themselves at Nottingham. The years 870 and 871 were remarkable for their land operations. The defeat of the East Anglian king Edmund in Suffolk laid Mercia and Lindsey open to their ravages, and so established their power in what was to become the Danelaw; while in 871, within reach of the Danish camp on the Thames at Reading, occurred the great series of battles in Berkshire and Wiltshire, in which Alfred’s bravery was proved. The details of Alfred’s defence of Wessex against the Northmen are well known: the compromise effected at Wedmore in 878 preserved the south of England to Englishmen, but established the Danes north of a line which may roughly be represented by the course of the Welland, Soar, upper Trent, and Mersey.

England, however, had to endure a long intestine warfare for years after the death of Alfred. The strenuous efforts of his children, Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd, prevented the men of the Danelaw from extending their power southwards. But the Northmen used persevering tactics, and not merely the enemy within, but fresh invasions from without, disturbed the peace of the monarchs of Wessex during the later part of the tenth century. After the disastrous reign of Ethelred the Redeless came a period of Danish rule over the whole of England; while the reigns of the last Saxon kings formed the prelude to the final invasion of the Northmen, the Norman conquest.

The most interesting feature, from a military point of view, of the contest between Wessex and the Danelaw, is the systematic defence of the Midland rivers by burhs during the reign of Edward the Elder, either by himself or his sister Æthelflæd. Æthelflæd, who fixed her chief residence at Tamworth, on the edge of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, ruled over Mercia, and fortified her frontier between 909 and her death in 921. Her brother died in 925: his activity in constructing burhs began about 913. Of the construction of these fortresses two phrases are used: their builders either “wrought” or “timbered” them. Both words probably mean the same thing: the town or village to be fortified was enclosed within the usual wooden stockade.34 The identity of a few of the burhs is uncertain; but the remainder may be classified as follows: (1) Burhs wrought by Æthelflæd on the river banks of her frontier: these include Runcorn and possibly Warburton on the Mersey, Bridgnorth and possibly Shrewsbury on the Severn, Tamworth and Stafford on tributaries of the Trent, and Warwick on the Avon. (2) Frontier burhs taken by Æthelflæd from the Danes were Derby and Leicester, both on tributaries of the Trent. (3) Eddisbury in Cheshire, an early hill fortress, was the site of one of Æthelflæd’s burhs: here the inference is that the existing hill fort was palisaded by her orders, and garrisoned as a camp of refuge. Of Edward’s burhs, Witham and Maldon on the Essex Blackwater, of which some probable traces remain, belong to class (1), as also does Thelwall, his fortified post on the Mersey. To class (2) belong Colchester, Huntingdon, and Tempsford, the first on the Colne, the two latter on the Great Ouse. None of Edward’s works bear any analogy to class (3), unless his last burh, Bakewell in Derbyshire, may be taken into account. But (4) Bakewell represents a push northward along a hostile border, and may be claimed, with Towcester, as belonging to a fourth class of burh, unconnected with a navigable river, but providing a constant menace to the enemy. (5) Towcester may, however, also be classed with Colchester as a Roman burh with stone walls. A sixth class of burh was riverine, like class (1), but with this difference, that it was double. There was one burh on one side, the other on the opposite side of the river. The cases are Hertford on the Lea, Buckingham and Bedford on the Ouse, Stamford on the Welland, and Nottingham on the Trent. At Hertford and Buckingham both burhs were the work of Edward. At Bedford, Stamford, and Nottingham, the northern burh was in the hands of the enemy, and Edward took it by converting the southern suburb into a fortified and garrisoned post. His proceedings were exactly analogous to those of Charles the Bald in 862. He gained control of the navigable rivers by placing garrisons on both their banks; the natural places which he chose were the existing towns on the river, and the garrison, as at Nottingham, was formed out of the inhabitants.

Some of these burhs, as we have seen, were in the occupation of the Northmen; and at a later date, when the frontier of the west Saxon kingdom had been pushed back, and English kings were again placed on the defensive, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford, and Leicester became known as the five burhs, the centre of Danish power in the Midlands. There is no reason to suppose that there was any essential difference between the burhs of Danes and Saxons—that the burh which Æthelflæd took at Derby was in any way different from her own burh at Tamworth. When the Danes first landed on a river bank or island and beached their ships, they constructed what is called in the Chronicle a geweorc, i.e., a thing wrought. This probably consisted of a slight bank and ditch enclosing the landward side of their position. Where they raised permanent dwellings within the enceinte, the burh grew out of the geweorc, just as a Roman station developed out of a mere camp. However, it is unsafe to push the phraseology of the Chronicle too far, or to fasten a too technical meaning upon its words; and the fact remains that the term geweorc may be very well applied to a wrought burh. The Danish burhs at Huntingdon and Tempsford, the landmarks of their progress up the Ouse to recover Bedford in 921, are called indiscriminately burh and geweorc.

Map of Saxon and Danish Burhs

[The line from the Mersey to the Wash roughly indicates the Danish frontier.]

Many of the burhs wrought or taken during the Danish war became, after the Norman conquest, sites of castles; and the presence of a Norman castle at such places has led to the still popular inference that the castle simply usurped the earthworks of the earlier stronghold, and that therefore the burh was equivalent to the later castle.35 It is not surprising that all the five places where we hear of a burh on either side of the river should have been chosen for the foundation of later castles. But the castle earthworks of Hertford and Bedford, the castles of which there is record at Buckingham and Stamford, were private strongholds which formed part of the defences of one of the burhs, but were not identical with either. The Conqueror’s castle of Nottingham, greatly transformed in its present state, looked down from its sandstone cliff upon the northern burh where Edward welded together Englishman and Dane in one common work of defence and bond of citizenship.36 But even were it not self-evident that the burh is identical with the burgus or burgum of Domesday and the “borough” whose organisation plays so large a part in English history, there is one fact which makes its identification with the castle impossible. At Hertford, Buckingham, Bedford, Stamford, Nottingham, there were two burhs, but there never has been more than one castle. When the Conqueror wrought a castle on either side of the river at York, he did not repeat Edward the Elder’s tactics literally: he applied them to a form of fortification of which Edward knew nothing. If the test by which the Norman castle is identified with the Saxon burh fails in these instances, we are obviously forbidden to make the identification in the cases of single burhs like Warwick or Tamworth. The great earthen mount and curtain wall which stand in the south-west corner of Tamworth, beside the Tame, are not the remains of Æthelflæd’s burh, although it is not improbable that they were raised on the site of her dwelling-house. Her burh is the town of Tamworth itself; and although her wall of palisades is gone, there are still traces of the ditch with which, in the eighth century, Offa had ringed the burh about.

Earthwork at Tempsford.

There is no trace of any arx or citadel within these enclosures. Their defenders were the citizens. In France, for reasons sufficiently indicated, the art of fortification was more advanced. Roman traditions survived there without that abrupt break which the historical continuity of England had suffered. No fortress of stone and wood, such as that which Charles the Bald, in 869, built within the enceinte of the abbey of St Denis, is heard of in Saxon England. The state of society in which, as early as 864, Charles found it necessary, by the edict of Pistes, to forbid his vassals to raise private fortresses without royal authority, did not exist in England, and was only beginning to exist there two centuries later. In both centuries we have to deal with the same invaders, but with defenders whose state of social development was quite different. Although the private fortress or castle was introduced into England by the Normans, and although the type of earthwork associated with it was developed to its highest extent by Northmen, not only in Normandy and England, but also in Denmark, it is nevertheless probable that the earliest development of that form of earthwork took place on Frankish soil. The Danish geweorc or burh, where it can be traced with any certainty—and this is in very few cases—supplied accommodation for the force, and probably a harbour for its vessels, but no private stronghold belonging to a prominent leader. The earthwork called Gannock’s castle (32), close to the Ouse near Tempsford, is sometimes supposed to be the geweorc wrought by the Danes in 921. In plan, it very closely resembles a rather small mount-and-bailey castle of the usual early Norman type, and could have accommodated only a very small body of defenders. But the point in which it differs from the ordinary mount-and-bailey plan—the smallness of the mount, which is a mere thickening of the earthen bank, and the absence of a moat round its base—may show that here the Danes anticipated their Norman successors with a plan with which some of them may have gained acquaintance during marauding expeditions in France. This, however, is mere conjecture, and the utility of such a fortress for the immediate purposes of the Danes may well be questioned.37 Of the private dwellings of the Danish leaders, and how far they may have approximated to the later type of the castle, we know nothing. St Mary’s abbey at York is on the site of Galmanho, the residence of the Danish earls outside the western wall of the Roman city, but nothing of its earthworks remain. If they were at all considerable, like those of a mount-and-bailey castle of Norman times, it seems strange that no trace of them should be left.

The details of the doings of the Danish army, during the reign of Ethelred the Redeless (979-1016), are recorded at great length in the Chronicle. They show the old tactics, familiar for two hundred years: the long ships are brought to the nearest point convenient for a campaign of pillage; there the “army is a-horsed,” and they ride at their will inland, lighting their “war-beacons,” the blazing villages of the country-side, as they go. Year after year records its tale of disaster, until the partition of England in 1016 between Cnut and Edmund Ironside. The whole story of river and land warfare, of plundering and burning, of the paying of Danegeld as a temporary sop to the army, is in no way different from the record of the Danish operations in France during the ninth century. In France the Danish conquest was quicker, because the invaders had to deal from the beginning with a worn-out civilisation: the partition of France, owing to the superiority of the Danes to their opponents, was effected within seventy years of their first settlement. The power of Normandy, however, was checked by the rise of the Capetian dynasty in the later part of the tenth century: the Northmen were kept strictly to their Danelaw, and their subsequent expansion took place, not in France, but in England. On the other hand, in England, the Danish invaders of the ninth century had to contend with the rising power of Wessex and a race younger and more vigorous than the contemporary Gauls of Neustria. Their inroads were therefore checked and their conquest was delayed until the house of Wessex had run its natural course, and Englishmen and Danes had had time to be practically amalgamated into one nation. The glory of Wessex ceases with Edmund Ironside, the glory of the Danes with Cnut. Before Cnut died, the child William already had succeeded to his father’s duchy of Normandy, and thirty-one years after the death of Cnut, William was king of England, and, for all practical purposes, the inroads of the Northmen from Scandinavia were over.