Читать книгу Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 8

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A Castle is a private fortress, built by an individual lord as a military stronghold, and also as an occasional residence. In England at the time of the Norman conquest, this type of military work was known as castel, a word which is obviously the same as the Latin castellum. Castrum, munitio, and municipium are names which are frequently given to it by chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its existence was the direct result of the consolidation of the feudal system. The lord separated his dwelling from those of his vassals: he defended it against the attacks of other individual lords who naturally would seek to aggrandise themselves at his expense: he also needed a stronghold which might be impregnable on occasion against those vassals themselves, and might be a perpetual reminder to them of their subject position. The castle rose within or as an addition to the burh, the independent stronghold of one person within the walled or stockaded town of the many. Thus, at one and the same time, it protected and overawed the burh. Or it rose by itself, like the Peak castle in Derbyshire, on a spot where no burh existed, and so in many cases drew a small community to seek its protection.

An unlimited number of castles implies an unlimited number of independent magnates, uncontrolled by a supreme authority, and each ready to fly at the other’s throat. The feudal lord, however, was the king’s man, and his castle was therefore theoretically the king’s. We have already noticed the edict of Pistes (864), which ordered the destruction of all castles built without royal licence; and, save in periods of total anarchy, legislation of this type, safeguarding feudal order, was in operation during the middle ages wherever the feudal system was at the base of the constitution. The king was de jure, if not de facto, the owner of the castles of his realm.

The castle or private fortress was a feature in French social life and warfare from at any rate the middle of the ninth century. But in England it was certainly an unfamiliar and almost as certainly an unknown feature, until the middle of the eleventh century. Danish pirates who up to this time had visited England, had come from the north and east, and passed on to France. There, in contact with the feudal system as it existed under the later Carolingian monarchs, they may have learned the use of the private fortress. At any rate when the Northmen came back upon England from their continental duchy, they brought with them the fully organised social system of the Continent, and its most powerful symbol, the castle.

Harold’s aula, from Bayeux Tapestry

We have seen that, throughout the Saxon and Danish period, the burh, the home of the community, formed the unit, if the expression may be used, of military defence by fortification. The English or Danish nobleman lived, it may safely be assumed, in houses like the two-storied house in the Bayeux tapestry, where Harold and his friends are feasting on the upper floor, while the ground floor apparently forms a cellar or store-room (36).38 It is possible that such a house, the prototype of the larger medieval dwelling-house, may sometimes have been protected by its encircling thorn hedge or palisade; but it was not a castle. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a castle meant to an Englishman a special type of fortress, of a construction and plan of a character more or less fixed. The loose phraseology which, in later times, applied the title of castle indiscriminately to prehistoric camps and medieval manor-houses, was not yet customary.

The first castles on English soil appear to have been raised by Norman favourites of Edward the Confessor before the Conquest, and to have excited alarm among the English population. In 1048 some foreigners or “Welshmen,” as the English called them, encroached on the territory of Sweyn Godwinsson in Herefordshire, constructed a castel—the first mention of such a thing in the Chronicle—and wrought harm to all the country round. That they were Frenchmen appears from the events of 1052: one of Godwin’s demands to the king at Gloucester was that “the Frenchmen of the castle” should be given up, and in the same year “the Frenchmen of the castle” helped to defend the borders against a Welsh inroad. The very fact that the Frenchmen’s stronghold was known as “the castle” proves that it was at any rate an unfamiliar type of fortress. But, if it was the first, others were soon constructed. When Godwin returned from his outlawry in 1052, and forced himself back into Edward’s good graces, the Frenchmen in London left the city. The archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, made his way to the east coast: some fled westward to Pentecost’s castle, which is probably identical with the Herefordshire fortress, others northward to Robert’s castle, which is now identified with Clavering in Essex. The Herefordshire castle is supposed to have been at Ewias Harold, some twelve miles south of Hereford, where there is still the great mount of a Norman stronghold on the north-west side of the village.39

Hastings Castle: from Bayeux Tapestry

These two may not have been the only castles in England before the Conquest. The reference to Arundel in Domesday Book, for example, seems to imply an origin almost as early for the castle there.40 Ordericus Vitalis speaks of Dover as though there were already a castle there, when William the Conqueror stormed the town after Hastings.41 But Ordericus is our authority for the important and explicit statement that, in 1068, “the fortresses, which the Gauls call castella, had been very few in the provinces of England; and on this account the English, although warlike and daring, had nevertheless shown themselves too feeble to withstand their enemies.”42 A statement of this kind at once disposes of the theory that the burhs of the Danish wars were castles; it could hardly be argued that such burhs were very few, or that the English had not taken advantage of them. As a matter of fact, when William came to England, his military policy consisted in the founding of castles, and many of these in places which had been and were burhs, where, if the burh and castle were one and the same thing, the foundation of a castle was quite unnecessary. Arcem condidit, castellum construxit, munitionem firmavit, are terms used over and over again to describe the making of these new strongholds. To William, the strength of a monarch lay in the castles which he controlled; in warfare the castle formed his natural base of operations. His first work on landing at Hastings was to throw up a castle (38). Harold, on the other hand, although, as the Bayeux tapestry shows us, he had seen something of castles and siege warfare in William’s company, trusted for his defence to the shield-wall of his men, and the protection of the banks and ditches of an old earthwork in advance of his position. In 1067, after his coronation, William stayed at Barking, close to the walls of London, while the city, the Lundenburh whose walls Alfred had restored, was being overawed by the construction of certain firmamenta—one of them, no doubt, the White Tower, the other probably Baynard’s castle, near the present Blackfriars.43 Again, we find him at Winchester, building a strong fortress within the walls of the city—a castle within a burh.

William’s operations in 1068 and 1069 were of great military importance. In 1068 he quelled the resistance of Exeter. The city was still surrounded by its Roman walls, to which the inhabitants now added new battlements and towers. They manned the rampart walks and the projections of the wall,44 which for eighteen days William endeavoured to undermine. When at last the keys of the city were surrendered to him, his first work was to choose within the walls a place where a castle might be raised; and, on departing, he left, as at Winchester, a constable in charge of the castle, the king’s lieutenant charged with the task of keeping the burh under. From Exeter a rebellion in the north called William to York. The insurgents, an irregular band of freebooters, had thrown up defences in remote places in woods and by the mouths of rivers; some were harboured in the larger towns, which they kept in a state of fortification. As William travelled northwards, he founded castles at Warwick and Nottingham. He constructed a fortress in the city of York, and on his way home founded castles at Lincoln, Huntingdon, and Cambridge. No sooner had he left York than the rebels again began to stir; a movement was made on behalf of the ætheling Edgar, and Danish aid was called in. William Malet, the governor of York castle, was hard pressed by the enemy. The Conqueror came to his relief, and, as a result of this visit, founded a second castle in York. Both castles, however, were of little use when the Danes came. The garrison of one or both rashly advanced to fight the invaders within the city itself, and were massacred. It is a significant fact that the castles were left open and deserted; neither the men of York nor the Danes had any use for them. When William came north again on his campaign of vengeance he repaired both the castles. Shortly after, on his expedition to Wales, he founded castles at Chester and Shrewsbury.45

Lincoln; Plan

What do we find to-day at these places where William founded his first English castles? At Hastings, on the cliff which divides the old town from the modern watering-place, there are important remains of a later stone castle within lines of earthwork which are, no doubt, William’s. The mount remains at the north-east corner of the enclosure: the later curtain wall has been carried up its side and over it. The present remains of the castle of Winchester are later than William’s day. At Exeter the gatehouse and much of the adjacent masonry of the castle are unquestionably of a very early “Norman” date. In London we have the White tower, probably much extended from William’s early plan, and not completed till his son’s reign. But the stone fortresses of London and Exeter were exceptional. When we come to his northern castles, we find that at Warwick, York, Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge, and Shrewsbury, the plan of the castle consists of a bailey or enclosed space,46 with a tall mount on the line of its outer defences, and on a side or at an angle of the enceinte remote from the main entrance. At Nottingham the plan of the early castle is not so easy to make out. But, in the other cases, although, at various dates during the middle ages, additions were made in stone, the nucleus of the plan is a collection of earthworks, which takes this form—a motte or mount with a bailey attached. At Lincoln there are two mounts. At York there are two castles, one on either side of the river, but each with its mount. On the mount of the castle north-east of the river is a later stone keep; the mount of the south-western castle has never carried stonework, and its bailey is now almost filled up with modern houses.

The presence of the double castle at York has been a great temptation to those who would identify the castle with the burh. The fortification of both banks of the river is, on the face of it, so like the system adopted by Edward the Elder, that the York castles have been often quoted as burhs of Edward the Elder’s date, and it has been concluded that similar earthworks must have existed at Nottingham, Stamford, and so on. This idea is quite untenable. Had William followed the example of Edward and Æthelflæd, he would simply have repaired or renewed the defences of the two divisions of the burh at York.47 But what he had to provide against was the spirit of rebellion in the burh itself, as well as the possible use of the water-way by Danish pirates. Which castle he first founded at York we do not know. On the tongue of land which runs out between the Ouse and Foss, outside the burh, and between it and the river approach to the city, one castle rose. The other, a fortress known in later times as the Old Baile, was possibly from the beginning partly within the ramparts of the southern burh. Later, at any rate, the city wall was built across the foot of the outer side of its mount, and enclosed the bailey on two sides. Elsewhere, the distinction between William’s castles and the burhs within which they rose is very noticeable. At Lincoln the castle filled up an angle of the Roman city. At Cambridge, the mount rises on the highest point of a large enclosure—the original burh—surrounded by earthworks of early date. Further, if any documentary proof is needed of anything so self-evident as the distinct nature of the castle and the burh, Domesday is clear upon the point. Apart from the evidence which it gives us with respect to the borough or burh, it speaks in one place of the burgum circa castellum—the burh about the castle. The case in point is the castle of Tutbury in Staffordshire, a fine example of the mount-and-bailey stronghold.48 One important feature here is that the castle, very large in area, and with a ditch of great depth on two sides, was apparently raised on the site of an early hill-fort or burh, and that the actual burh about the castle, the modern village of Tutbury, has grown up under its protection on the slope towards the Dove.

Berkhampstead

The castle, then, was a Norman importation into England. It was a stronghold with a definite plan, so that the word castel had no vague meaning to English ears. It is found in many cases in close proximity to a burh, or fortified dwelling of a community; but it was a royal stronghold, in charge of an individual, and its intention was at once to protect and to keep the burh in subjection. Or, again, it may occupy, as at Tutbury or Conisbrough, the whole site of an early burh; but in such cases the character of the burh is entirely changed by the presence of the castle, and the dwelling-place of the community is shifted to the outskirts of the enclosure. At York, Lincoln, and other places where a castle was constructed within part of a burh, Domesday tells us that the site was vastata in castellis—i.e., that houses were taken down to make room for the new earthworks.

A figure of eight, with the lower portion elongated and widened to form the bailey, may be taken as the normal form of the castle plan. Often, as at Berkhampstead (42), where the mount and bailey were surrounded by a broad wet ditch and outer earthworks, the bailey is much the larger portion of the figure on plan; and it was only in small and unimportant strongholds that the bailey formed, as at Mexborough, a mere forecourt to the mount. At Alnwick (115) the mount stood as part of the outer defences of the enclosure, on the slope to the river; but it was so placed that it divided a western or outer from an eastern or inner ward or bailey, and almost filled up the space between them. The arrangement at Berkeley (186) is somewhat similar. If the larger mount at Lincoln (40) were removed to the centre of the present enclosure, and the lines of the curtain-wall returned inwards to meet it, the plan of Alnwick would be obtained. Possibly, however, both at Alnwick and Berkeley, the outer ward may form an extension of the earlier plan, or may have been merely a covering platform, like the outer earthworks at Hastings. The later stone defences have obscured the original designs in both cases.

Clun; Plan

Although the plan followed fixed and familiar lines, there were no fixed dimensions to the castle. The mount was intended to bear the strong tower or donjon: within the bailey were the ordinary lodgings of the garrison, and such domestic buildings as might be needed. The bailey, which inclined, on the whole, to be oval in form, was surrounded by a low earthen bank, outside which was a dry ditch of more or less depth, with a parapet or counterscarp on the further side. The mount was surrounded by its own ditch, which was joined at two points by the main ditch on the side next the bailey. The entrance to the castle was at the end of the bailey, opposite the mount. These dispositions might vary: the mount might be within the enclosure, even, as at Pickering, in its centre, and the position of the entrance might be different, if the site required it. There might be more than one bailey, and these might be set side by side, divided by an intermediate ditch, as on the fairly level site at Clun (43), or end on end, as on the ridge at Montgomery, or a small bailey might project as a kind of outwork common to mount and bailey alike.49 The usual arrangement, however, was as described. The mount might be of any height, of enormous proportions, as at Thetford, or of more modest size, as at Brecon or Trecastle. It was usually entirely artificial; but positions were sometimes chosen in which the ground afforded natural help. The mount, for example, at Hedingham in Essex, on the levelled top of which the later square donjon was built, appears to be partly natural; while the great mount at Mount Bures, not many miles away, is wholly artificial. The bailey, again, might vary much in size. It might have a very large area, as at Lincoln and Tutbury, a moderate area, as at Warkworth (49) or Durham (199); or it might be small and compact, as at Trecastle (44). There are many cases, as at Clifford’s hill, near Northampton, where the mount is found by itself: in such instances, the bailey may have disappeared as the result of local cultivation, and only the more important part of the earthworks may have been left. But it is also probable that here and there the fortified mount with the tower on its summit would be all that was needed, and that the absence of a large garrison would render a bailey unnecessary. The size of the bailey, in any case, would depend upon the importance of the position and the size of the garrison required.

Trecastle; Plan

Castle of Rennes: from Bayeux Tapestry

The mount, at any rate, was the essential feature of this type of fortress. The Bayeux tapestry gives us pictures of some of these mounts, the fidelity of which is demonstrated by the remains which we possess of such castles, and by some pieces of documentary evidence (38). Two points are noticeable: (1) The mounts portrayed are all either in Normandy and Brittany, or, like the castellum at “Hestengaceaster,” are the work of Norman hands. (2) The fortifications shown in connection with these mounts are of timber, not stone. The accuracy of the tapestry is not absolutely photographic, but the workers knew well the type of structure which they wanted to represent. Their work, in fact, whether the castle represented be Dol or Dinan or Bayeux or Hastings, gives us a repeated picture of the recognised type of castle mount. And the two points just noted lead us to the conclusions, (1) that the castle was foreign to England and Englishmen, and (2) that the time-honoured notion that the Englishman raised the earthworks,50 and the Norman built stone castles upon them is open to objection, the fact being that the stone castle was an exception in Normandy itself. The picture of the Breton castle of Dinan (46) shows, as in a section, a large pudding-shaped mount surrounded by a ditch, with a low bank of earth on the side towards the bailey. On the top of the mount is a tower, clearly of timber. Round the edge of the mount, encircling the tower, is a stockade formed of uprights with stout hurdles between—a work to which Cæsar’s description of his breastworks at Alesia might well be applied.51 Access to the mount is gained by a steep ladder, probably formed of planks with projecting pieces of wood nailed to them for foot-holds, which spans the ditch, and has its foot within the bailey. The mount itself—and this may be proved by many surviving examples—is too steep to be scaled with any ease; and the ladder, although affording the defenders an excellent communication with the bailey, is hardly to be climbed with impunity by the opposing force. The ladder ends in a wooden platform at the edge of the mount, which serves as a propugnaculum for the garrison, in front of the stockade. In the picture of the construction of the castle at Hastings, a timber tower and stockade are in course of erection. The pioneers are busy digging earth from the fosse for their nearly completed mount, and compacting the surface with blows from the flat of their spades (38).

Castle of Dinan: from Bayeux Tapestry

In France the mount was usually known as the motte from the turf of which it was composed, and the occurrence of the word Lamotte as part of a place-name is as tell-tale as a name like Mount Bures in England. But a common name for the motte, employed by medieval writers, was the Latin dunio or domgio, a debased form of the word dominio. This became in French donjon, and in English dungeon. The motte at Canterbury is still known by the corrupted name of the Dane John. The mount, the symbol of the dominion of the feudal lord, and the centre of his dominium or demesne, bore his strong tower; and to this tower the name of the mount was transferred. When the tower on the mount was superseded by the heavy and lofty rectangular or cylindrical tower of later times, the new tower kept the old name. By a strange transference of meaning, our English dungeon, frequently applied to the chief tower of a castle until the seventeenth century, became connected with the vaults or store-rooms in the basement of such a tower, and now reminds us less of the dominion of the castle builders than of the cruelty with which they are supposed to have exercised that dominion.

Colchester Castle: great tower or keep.

It may safely be assumed that the very large majority of castles of the eleventh and early twelfth century were constructed on this plan. There were exceptions, and certainly several English castles have stonework of the period of the Conquest. London and Colchester (47) had rectangular donjons from the first. At Richmond (93) the stonework of part of the curtain and of the lower part of the rectangular tower-keep is unquestionably of the eleventh century, when the castle was constructed by Alan of Brittany. In several other places, in the curtain at Tamworth (48) and in part of the curtain at Lincoln, there is eleventh century stonework. But more will be said of these cases later. It is enough to say here that, in most cases, stonework forms a late Norman or Plantagenet addition to early Norman earthwork. At Newcastle part of the early mount remained, side by side with the late twelfth century tower-keep, until within the last hundred years. Warkworth, most instructive of English castles, preserves the base of its mount and the area of its original bailey: the mount bears a strong tower-house of the early fifteenth century; on the line of the bank of the bailey is a stone curtain of about the year 1200; within the area is a series of elaborate and beautiful buildings of two or three dates (49). Warkworth is the epitome of the history of the castle, from its Norman origin to its practical identification, in the later middle ages, with the large manor house; and to Warkworth we shall return more than once.

Tamworth; Eleventh Century Stonework

Warkworth; Plan

There are exceptional cases in which two mounts occur. At Lincoln (40), the smaller mount is at the south-east corner of the enclosure, and probably may have carried the original donjon. The larger mount, of formidable height and steepness, is west of the centre of the south side. Both mounts, as is usual, are half within and half without the line of the rampart. The stone curtain-wall has been brought up their sides, and the larger mount is crowned by a stone “shell” keep of the late twelfth century. The provision of this second mount was possibly due to the exposed position of the castle, which formed the outer defence of the city on the west and south-west, and needed its greatest strength on that side. At Pontefract and Lewes, again, there were two mounts, one at each end of the enclosure. At both places, the later stone keep was built in connection with the western mount, at the end nearest the town and the slope of the ridge on which it was built. The sites are rather similar, and, in either case, the eastern mount overlooked the river-valley defended by the castle. It is not certain that two mounts ever formed part of an original plan. The natural tendency would be to throw up the mount at first on the side nearer the valley, where the slope was steeper, and the labour required in construction would be less. An attack, however, on the town and castle would come most naturally from the higher ground to the west, which commanded the castle and its defences. A new mount would, in process of time, be constructed on this side, and the old mount would become of secondary importance. At Lewes (50), where the slope of the hill is abrupt, the western mount rises from a higher level, and commands a much wider stretch of country than the mount at the north-east angle of the enclosure. At Lincoln, where an enemy’s force had no advantage of higher ground, the larger mount simply occupies the most advantageous position, protecting the most exposed side of the enclosure, and commanding one of the most extensive views in England. The foot of one mount is little more than two hundred feet distant from the foot of the other; while, at Lewes and Pontefract, the length of the whole bailey lay between the mounts. Thus, while it is possible that, at Lewes and Pontefract, both mounts may be original, with the idea of strengthening the enclosure at either end with a donjon, two original mounts at Lincoln would not have this excuse; and we may infer that, at some date later than the foundation of Lincoln castle, the Norman lords of the fortress threw up a new mount at a point from which the slope of the hill and the approaches from the valley of the Trent could be commanded more thoroughly.

Lewes; Plan

Builth; Plan

The provision of more than one bailey, as at Clun (43), where two small baileys, separated by ditches, cover the south and west sides of the mount, was due, partly to the irregular nature of the site, and partly to the need for the multiplication of defences. Such an arrangement, inconvenient in time of peace, would be a considerable advantage in case of siege, when each bailey would provide a separate difficulty to the assailants, and a separate rallying point to the defenders. At Builth (50), where the whole area of the castle earthworks is small, and the ditches of mount and bailey are of considerable strength, the main bailey is a narrow segmental platform covering the south side of the mount. On the west side of the mount is a smaller and narrower platform, between which and the main bailey is a broad ditch, forming a cross-cut or traverse between the ditches of the mount and bailey. As the enclosure is very nearly circular, with the mount north-west of the centre, this second platform is somewhat squeezed into the space, and the ditch between it and the counterscarp which runs continuously round both mount and bailey is very narrow. In the more usual instances, where the mount and its ditch form a regular circle, which intersects with the bailey and its ditch, a secondary platform, as has been noted, occurs outside the line of both ditches, and is surrounded by a ditch of its own, communicating with both. This is the case with the very symmetrical example of a mount-and-bailey castle at Mexborough, at Lilbourne in Northants, Hallaton in Leicestershire (51), and other cases. Here the secondary platform is an excrescence on one side of the meeting of the two circles. Such platforms were mere outworks where additional defence was necessary; it is possible that on them stone-throwing engines might be planted by the defenders, as the narrowness of the ditch would at these points bring the assailants more nearly within range than at any other point within the enclosure. Such engines would encumber the larger bailey, which would necessarily be kept as clear as possible for the operations of the main body of the garrison.

Hallaton; Plan

The mount-and-bailey castle has been derived by some from a Teutonic origin,52 but it is difficult to trace it with any certainty at an early period outside France and Normandy. There are many remains of these castles in Normandy itself. The famous castle of Domfront (Orne), founded originally by Guillaume Talvas (d. 1030), ancestor of the house of Bellême, possibly took this form: as at Newcastle, a rectangular tower of stone took the place, in the twelfth century, of the tower on the mount.53 The writer of a monograph on the castle of Domfront enumerates five such mounts which exist or are known to have existed within the local arrondissement.54 Two, at Sept-Forges and Lucé, remain intact, covered by plantations of trees. At Sept-Forges the church and castle were side by side, as may still be seen at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire.55 At Lucé there are traces of a bailey. On the other hand, at La Baroche, a large mount seems to have borne the whole castle: one may compare with this the great mount of Restormel in Cornwall, which is the natural summit of a hill, artificially scarped and surrounded by a fosse, like a contour fort of early times. It is important to notice that on these artificial mounts of southern Normandy, there appears “no ruin, no trace of construction in masonry.” The inference is obvious. The buildings which they carried were of wood, and have yielded to the action of fire or the weather. On no other hypothesis can the speed with which castles were constructed in England after the Conquest, or the ease with which they were destroyed, be explained. William’s subjects in Normandy threw up fortifications against him with a speed which positively forbids us to imagine that they procured masons to work in stone. In 1061, Robert, son of Giroie, one of the powerful nobles of the Alençonnais, joined forces with the Angevins against William, and fortified his castles of La-Roche-sur-Igé and Saint-Cénéri. His cousin, Arnold, son of Robert, driven from the castle of Échauffour, returned secretly and burned it.56 The quickness with which the two castles at York were constructed, destroyed, and repaired, allowed no time for dressing stone.

The points which our evidence leads us to accept may be recapitulated as follows:—(1) The castle was a foreign importation into England, of the period of the Norman conquest. (2) It consisted, in its simplest form, of a moated mount or motte, with a bailey or base-court attached. (3) Its earliest fortifications were entirely of timber, save in rare instances.

We may now examine the evidence which, in default of actual remains, survives with regard to the timber constructions of these castles and their use. The tower on the mount first demands our attention. Apart from the pictures of the Bayeux tapestry, certain early twelfth century chronicles of northern France have preserved for us accounts of the main features of this structure and its enceinte.57 Jean de Colmieu describes the castle of Merchem, close by the church, as munitio quedam quam castrum vel municipium dicere possumus. “It is the custom,” he says, “with the rich men and nobles of this district, because they spend their time in enmity and slaughter, and in order that they may thereby be safer from their enemies, and by their superior power either conquer their equals or oppress their inferiors, to heap up a mount of earth as high as they can, and to dig round it a ditch of some breadth and great depth, and, instead of a wall, to fortify the topmost edge of the mount round about with a rampart (vallo) very strongly compacted of planks of timber, and having towers, as far as possible, arranged along its circuit. Within the rampart they build in the midst a house or a citadel (arx) commanding the whole site. The gate of entry to the place”—the word used is villa, implying a place of habitation rather than a stronghold—“can be approached only by a bridge, which, rising at first from the outer lip of the ditch, is gradually raised higher. Supported by uprights in pairs, or in sets of three, which are fixed beneath it at convenient intervals, it rises by a graduated slope across the breadth of the ditch, so that it reaches the mount on a level with its summit and at its outer edge, and touches the threshold of the enclosure.” It will be noticed that the moated mount described here had no bailey. It was also obviously not merely a fortified stronghold, a place of refuge in time of war, but a definite residence of the local lord. The turrets round the timber rampart of the mount are mentioned as occasional, not invariable features of the design. The habitation within the rampart may be a strong tower or a mere house. The sense of the passage shows clearly that there was a doorway in the rampart, by which the house was approached from the bridge. Finally, the description is not applicable merely to a single castle, but is a generic description of strongholds in a particular neighbourhood.

The domestic, apart from the military, character of the building, is emphasised in the story which follows the description. John of Warneton, the sainted bishop of Thérouanne (d. 1130), was entertained here, when he came to hold a confirmation in Merchem church. After the confirmation was over, he went back to the castle to change his vestments before proceeding to bless the churchyard. As he returned across the sloping bridge, which at its middle point was about 35 feet above the ditch, the press of the people who crowded to see the holy man was so great, and the old enemy, says the chronicler, so alive to the opportunity, that the bridge broke, and the bishop and his admirers, amid a terrible noise of falling joists, boards, and spars, were thrown to the bottom of the ditch. The castle was, in fact, the private residence of a man who, if he could indulge in the peaceful pleasure of entertaining his bishop, could not afford to live in an unfortified house. Private warfare with his neighbours was the business of his life, and he had to make himself as comfortable as he could within his palisade. Jean de Colmieu does not tell us whether the castle stronghold at Merchem took the shape of a tower or not; but Lambert of Ardres has left a description of the great wooden tower of three stories which the carpenter Louis de Bourbourg constructed about 1099 for Arnould, lord of Ardres. The elaborateness of its design and plan is remarkable, and the motte which bore it must have been of considerable size. The ground-floor contained cellars, store-rooms, and granaries. The first floor contained the chief living-rooms—the common hall, the pantry and buttery, the great chamber where Arnould and his wife slept, with two other rooms, one the sleeping-place of the body-servants. Out of the great chamber opened a room or recess with a fire-place, where the folk of the castle were bled, the servants warmed themselves, or the children were taken in cold weather to be warmed. One may assume that the great chamber was at the end of the hall opposite to the pantry and buttery. The kitchen was probably reached, as in the larger dwelling-houses of later days, by a passage between these offices: it was on the same floor as the hall, but occupied a two-storied extension of the donjon on one side.58 Below the kitchen were the pig-sty, fowl-house, and other like offices. The third stage of the donjon contained the bed-chambers of the daughters of the house: the sons also could sleep on this floor, if they chose, and here slept the guard of the castle, who relieved one another at intervals in the work of keeping watch. On the eastern side of the first floor was a projecting building, called the logium or parlour, and above this on the top floor was the chapel of the house, “made like in carving and painting to the tabernacle (sic) of Solomon.” Lambert speaks of the stairways and passages of the donjon, but his description of the projecting parlour and chapel is not sufficiently explicit, and his admiration may have magnified the proportions of the building. His description, however, is of great service when applied to the tower donjon of stone, the arrangements of which it serves to explain. Here, again, the fortress was clearly designed as a dwelling house: the supply of rooms, if it is not exaggerated, was quite remarkable for the age. The motte or donjon—Lambert gives it these alternative names—rose in the middle of a marsh, which Arnould converted into a lake or moat by forming sluices: his mill was near the first sluice.

No definite description is left of the defences of the bailey in a castle of this date. There is no doubt, however, that the scarp, or encircling bank of earth, was protected, like the summit of the mount, by a hedge or palisade of the traditional type. Such hedges were the normal defence of any kind of stronghold: the edict of Pistes ordered the destruction of all unlicensed castella, firmitates, et haias—castles, strong dwellings, and hedges. In 1225 Henry III. ordered the forester of Galtres to supply the sheriff of Yorkshire with timber for repairing and making good the breaches of the palisade (palicii) of York castle. The “houses” and “bridge” of the same castle—that is, the buildings within the bailey, and the drawbridge by which the bailey was entered across the ditch, were also of timber. As late as 1324 the stockade on the mount was still of wood, surrounding the stone donjon of the thirteenth century.59 This is an interesting example of the survival, until a late date, of primitive fortification in a strong and important castle. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that the Norman engineer put his trust, not in stone, but in his earthen rampart and its palisades. When, about 1090, the freebooter Ascelin Goël got possession of the castle of Ivry, he enclosed it “with ditches and thick hedges.”60 In 1093, Philip I. of France and Robert of Normandy took the part of William of Breteuil, the dispossessed lord of Ivry, and laid siege to the fortified town and castle of Bréval (Seine-et-Oise). With the aid of a siege engine, constructed by Robert of Bellême, they were able to destroy the rampart and encircling hedges.61 Bréval was in a wooded and remote district, where stone would have been hard to obtain in any case. The grand necessity, in places which were in danger of constant attack, was to provide them with adequate defences which could be constructed in the shortest time possible.

Of the nature of the houses within the bailey, little can be said. They doubtless included shelters for the garrison of the castle, stables for their horses, and various sheds or store-houses. The hall, or building, which was the centre of the domestic life of the castle, was, from the earliest times, the chief building within the circumference of the bailey. We read of the destruction of the principalis aula of the castle of Brionne in 1090, by the red-hot darts which were hurled upon its shingled roof;62 and stone halls, as at Chepstow and Richmond, were built before the beginning of the twelfth century. But it is certain, on the other hand, that the donjon was, now and later, adapted to domestic as well as purely military uses; and it seems likely that the owner of the castle, in certain cases, was content with his dwelling upon the mount, until, at a later date, the strengthening of the whole enclosure with a stone curtain made it possible for him to raise a more convenient dwelling house within the more ample space of the bailey. In the larger castles, however, where there was a strong permanent garrison, a hall was a necessity for their entertainment.

Where mount-and-bailey castles are found without a trace of stonework, it does not follow that they are necessarily of a date immediately subsequent to the Conquest. Many of these castles, founded by the Conqueror and his followers, became permanent strongholds, and in due course of time were fortified with stone walls and towers. Others were probably founded as an immediate consequence of the Conquest, and were abandoned in favour of other sites. Thus it has been thought that the earthworks at Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, were abandoned by Ilbert de Lacy, when he fixed upon Pontefract as the head of his honour.63 Trecastle may have been deserted by Bernard of Newmarch for Brecon, or it may have been held by a small garrison as the western outpost of his barony. But it is well known that, for a long time after the Conquest, in the period of constant strife between the Norman kings and their barons, a large number of castles came into existence in defiance of royal edicts. We know that, during the reign of Stephen, when every man did what was right in his own eyes, an almost incredible number of unlicensed or “adulterine”64 castles were constructed. As a result of the agreement between Stephen and Henry II., many of these were destroyed, and the number of English castles was materially lessened. Later on, when the revolt of the Mowbrays against Henry II. took place, the victory of the king’s party was followed by the destruction of the Mowbray castles at Thirsk, Kirkby Malzeard, and Kinnard’s Ferry in the isle of Axholme, and of Bishop Pudsey’s castle at Northallerton. Of these four castles earthworks or traces of earthworks, but no stonework, remain. It is reasonable to suppose that the material of their fortifications was timber. Haste in the construction of castles, speed in their destruction, during the century following the Conquest, are easily explained if their works were merely of earth and wood. And it is thus possible that, when we meet with a mount-and-bailey fortress, unnamed in history and untouched by medieval stonemasons, it may be neither on a site chosen and then abandoned by an early Norman lord, nor a mere outpost of some greater castle, but a stronghold hastily entrenched and heaped up in time of rebellion, by some noble of the time of Stephen or Henry II., and dismantled when peace was restored, and the authority of the sovereign recognised.