A. Hamilton Thompson

“ The vast palace of St David’s, on the other hand, displays in all its details, and especially in the ogee-headed doorway of the porch of its larger hall, a sumptuousness of decoration which is not often found in the domestic architecture of the time. The great hall on the west side of the courtyard, the smaller hall and private apartments on the south side, the vaulted cellars which occupy the whole of the basement in each range, are planned upon a scale equal to that of a castle of first-rate size. ”

“ The French term for a fortified wall, forming the outer defence of a single building, is chemise. Thus, in a mount-and-bailey castle, the palisade round the tower on the mount was, strictly speaking, a chemise, while that round the bailey was a curtain. ”

“ The cylindrical donjon in England and Wales was simply an experiment attempted here and there, as an improvement upon the rectangular tower, but was never carried to the general perfection which it attained in France. Its isolation at Coucy, upon the outer face of the inner ward, protected by its own inner ditch, and covered by a strong curtain of its own, are signs of a perfection of engineering skill to which our builders did not attain. ”

“ The wall is solid, and, looking at its fluted outer surface, we may well admire Philip’s military skill, which found it a not too formidable obstacle. A gateway in the east face gave access to the inner ward from the narrowest portion of the middle ward, and the ditch at this point was originally crossed by a stone causeway. The projecting spur of the great tower faced the gateway. The whole formidable design was perfect from the point of view of flanking, while the plan was a step towards the concentric arrangement of one ward within another. ”

“ They were centres for bodies of fighting men, linked to each other by a splendid system of roads. The Roman station at Dorchester, the lines of which are so well preserved to-day, was founded, not within the ramparts of Maiden Castle or Poundbury, but on the lower slopes near the passage of the Frome. The single rampart and single ditch of a Roman town were almost invariable. Free egress as well as entrance, provisions for attack as well as defence, were necessary; and, with these objects in view, immense earthen defences, such as those of Maiden Castle, would be cumbersome. ”

“ The Roman invaders brought to England new methods of military construction and the tradition of an architecture of dressed and cemented stone. Their whole system of warfare was far in advance of that pursued by the British tribes. They had developed the art of siege to a high pitch. Their operations in open field were orderly and scientific. Their walled strongholds were constructed with a view which took into account, not only the mere strength of the ramparts, but also the capacity of the defenders to man them. Men, not fortresses, were the main asset of Roman warfare ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ribbed vaults, Gothic mouldings, and traceried windows afford a clue to the dates of the various parts of a medieval castle, as they do to those of a church; but they are merely incidental to a type of construction to which the solid and impregnable wall is all-important. The cases are rare in which the builders of castles paid much attention to elaborate detail in the minor parts of their building: their decorative work is used with the economy and simplicity appropriate to the massive construction which their fortresses demanded. ”

“ The strength of the castle, however, was not forgotten. No English castle, even when Bamburgh and Richmond are remembered, presents a more formidable defence than the curtain, pierced by a few spare openings and by the narrow western windows of Bek’s hall, which revets and crowns the cliff above the Wear; while, in the fourteenth century, Bishop Hatfield (1345-81) replaced the older keep by a new and probably more lofty polygonal shell. ”

“ Just as, in castles like Exeter and Ludlow, there was from the first a stone wall without a definite keep, the enclosure being virtually a keep in itself, so, in the more limited area of the mount, the encircling wall formed the keep, and, in the larger examples, sheltered upon its inner side buildings, usually of timber, which afforded the necessary cover for the defenders, while their roofs, abutting on the wall below the summit, left room for the rampart-walk and the wooden galleries which were fitted to the curtain in time of siege. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the day the heightened tower showed signs of succumbing to the enemy’s fire and their mining efforts. Eudes, the brave defender of the town, poured down a mixture of burning oil, wax, and pitch, which quenched the enthusiasm of the besiegers, and cost them three hundred men. On the third day, the Northmen established their land camp on the northern bank of the river, near the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. The camp was probably a geweorc such as they wrought by the Thames or the Ouse, but it was girt, not with an earthen rampart, but with walls of clay mingled with stone. ”

“ The conditions of our military architecture in the middle ages were naturally governed by the methods of attack employed by a besieging force. As these had been brought to a high state of perfection in the east, an advance upon which was hardly possible, the history of English fortification, from the Norman conquest to the general adoption of fire-arms in warfare, is that of a progress towards a system of defence in which western Europe lagged far behind the older centres of civilisation. ”

“ Where the curtain was so well defended as in these two castles, a double entrance was a source of strength rather than weakness. The problem for the enemy was how to distribute his forces, so as to keep the whole enceinte under observation. To concentrate an attack upon one gateway was to run the risk of being outflanked and taken in the rear by a sortie from the other. Strong as Château-Gaillard and other castles of the transition had been, they had simply met the prospect of attack with successive lines of defence. ”

“ The wooden donjon on the mount took the form of a square tower surrounded, at the edge of the mount, by a palisade, and approached, as has been described already, by a steep wooden bridge, which crossed the ditch into the bailey. But it is obvious that the existence of a castle in any given place as a permanent centre of royal influence must lead to the abandonment of wooden defences in favour of defences of more lasting material. ”

“ 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 primary object of the house at Wingfield was comfort and pleasure; and its type is as far removed from the military perfection of Caerphilly or Harlech as it can possibly be. The need of a perpetual garrison was not felt; for, in case of war, siege would be only the last resort of an attacking force. Consequently, the defences of the house, apart from the accommodation for barracks and the safety of refugees in the base-court, and from ordinary strength of the gateways,371 were restricted to the provision of a tower as a last resource. ”

“ A castle is a military post which may include one or more dwelling-houses within its walls: the house which may be turned into a castle, when occasion requires, is on a different footing. Bishops’ palaces, such as Auckland, Cawood, Wells, or Lincoln, are examples of the large manor-house in which fortification was merely a measure of precaution. The splendid houses of the bishops of St David’s are not the least remarkable of the remains of medieval architecture, half-domestic, half-military, which are common in south-west Wales. ”

“ There are, however, a few round towers which, although they have not their own curtain in the sense of Coucy, are yet within defences of a peculiar nature, and therefore stand in a class apart. The most remarkable of these is Launceston, where the tower stands upon the summit of a lofty artificial mount of early Norman origin, and is approached by a steep and well-defended stair, ascending the face of the mount to the main entrance. Round the outer edge of the mount remain the lower courses of a stone wall, concentric with the keep. ”

“ 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.54 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. ”

“ Our engineers had to pass through a long epoch of gradual experiment before they could arrive at a finished system of flanking or of concentric lines of defence. The traditional mount-and-bailey plan provided the foundation of the plan of the stone castle. The traditional importance of the keep as the ultimate place of refuge dictated the arrangement of ward behind ward, culminating in the great tower. Meanwhile, the improvement of flanking defences led more and more to the concentration of engineering skill upon the curtain, so that the keep gradually took a place of secondary importance. ”

“ The small chapel at Richmond, in a tower of the east curtain, is almost beyond doubt that which was granted by Alan of Brittany to St Mary’s abbey at York about 1085. The details are very rude in character: there is a plain wall arcade, supported on shafts, the capitals of which have rough voluting and no abaci. The same type of capital is found in the wall arcading of the original gatehouse at Ludlow (95) , and also, though with more finished ornament, in that of the circular nave of St Mary Magdalene’s chapel (108) within the same castle. ”

“ Norman builders, coming from a country where the continuity of Roman influence was never broken, used the ordinary Roman method of a compound wall, in which a solid rubble core was faced with ashlar on one or both sides. It is only natural that in early stone castles, which were constructed as quickly as possible, the facing should be of a rough description, of coursed rubble or of “herring-bone” courses laid in thick beds of mortar. At a subsequent date, when masonry was added to already fortified sites, the work could be pursued in a more leisurely manner. ”

“ Of the towers of Henry II.’s reign, those which, like Castle Rising, are low in proportion to the area they cover, generally have the best provision for living purposes. Lofty towers, like Newcastle or Conisbrough, can never have been comfortable residences; and it is not surprising to find that at Newcastle, about half a century after the building of the tower, a more commodious dwelling-house was built within the castle area.224 But we have seen already that in early castles, as at Oxford, a hall for the lord or his constable was generally, if not always, built within the bailey. ”

“ The masonry is largely faced with courses of small cubical stones, following the manner inherited by the Romanesque builders of France from their Roman predecessors: tiles are introduced in the arched heads of the windows in the upper stage, which are not mere loops, but have a considerable outward opening. This keep was obviously intended to be at once stronghold and dwelling-house. Such a building was a translation into stone of a wooden construction like the tower-house on the motte at Ardres. It is built on a promontory above a small stream, and is defended by a ditch on the landward side. ”

“ Against an enemy whose artillery was comparatively feeble the stockaded enclosure was effective enough: slingers and bowmen, working at close quarters, might do damage to the defenders, but the palisade on the bank, divided from the besiegers by a formidable ditch, was proof against missiles launched against it by individuals, and could be carried only by a determined rush, or if it were not sufficiently protected against fire. Modern warfare against uncivilised tribes has shown that a stronghold defended by a thick hedge is a serious problem to a besieging force. ”

“ During the last twenty years of the twelfth century, lessons learned by the Crusaders from the traditional methods of fortification employed in the Eastern empire exercised a profound influence upon the military architecture of France and England; and the application of these lessons during the thirteenth century entirely altered the defensive scheme of the castle, until the plan of masterpieces of fortification like Caerphilly and Harlech presented an entire contrast to the plan of defensive strongholds like Norham and Scarborough. ”

“ Hurstmonceaux is a house designed for ease and comfort, but keeping something of the outer semblance of the stronghold of an English landowner. A further step was taken at Cowdray, near Midhurst. Here the house, nominally a castle, was built about 1530 by Sir William Fitzwilliam: the battlements of the great hall and its beautiful porch-tower are the only relic of military architecture which it retains; and these are really no more military in character than the battlements of a church tower or clerestory. ”

“ A wall superseded the palisade round the mount, or a strong tower was built, either in connection with the mount or on a new site, which commanded the whole enclosure. Thus the passive strength of the castle was ensured. But stone walls and towers, however strong, were in themselves an insufficient protection, unless the defenders could keep themselves fully informed of the movements of the enemy. It was necessary that they should be able to command the field in which the besiegers worked, and especially the foot of the wall or tower on which the attack was concentrated. ”

“ The burhs of the Danish wars were, with the exception of London, Towcester, Colchester, and a few more, not stone-walled cities of Roman foundation, such as those which in France were the natural prey of the Norman marauders, but villages or small towns which had grown into existence for the most part since the Saxon conquest, and owed their strength to walls of timber. In France military art, as regards both fortification and siege-craft, was altogether on a higher plane. ”