George Thomas Clark

“ What remains of the castle occupies the summit of a knoll of sandstone rock, rising about 70 feet, on the north side abruptly, and elsewhere more or less steeply, from a marshy meadow, which on the north, east, and west is encircled by the folds of the Wansbeck, and on the south by a sweep of a tributary stream, which joins the river just below the castle. Each watercourse flows beneath a steep and high concave bank, thickly wooded, and the result is a sylvan amphitheatre of great seclusion and much beauty. ”

“ It is true that the vision thus beheld from the guarded mount of Lincoln is not equal to that far wider and more noble outlook from a more exalted pinnacle, upon the description of which Milton has poured forth in one glittering roll the full stream of his learning, illuminated by the fire of his genius, but it is nevertheless one in which the student of the past may well take delight. ”

“ GUILDFORD CASTLE, SURREY. GUILDFORD Castle, of which the keep was always the most prominent, and is now the chief remaining, feature, is in position, age, structure, and dimensions, a very remarkable fortress.
It is true, indeed, that though of great age, neither the town nor the castle have played any great part in English history. The town was never walled; the castle never stood a siege. No considerable battle was ever witnessed from its towers; no parliament or great council was ever held within its hall. ”

“ From the castled hill of Belvoir, to the rocks of Newark and Nottingham, and the crowned promontory of Lincoln, the land bristles with the works of man. The constructive taste and skill of many generations, and their deep religious feeling, are represented by a rich variety of ecclesiastical architecture, from the rude and primitive tower of Barton to the lordly spires of Louth and Newark, and the glorious lanthorn of Boston ”

“ Much of the upper course of the Avon lies across Salisbury Plain, where it cleaves that table-land of the chalk by a valley full of sudden but not ungraceful bends and secluded nooks, each bright and rich with vegetation, and in almost every bend a village and its church, there being twenty of the latter in the same number of miles between the entrance of the Avon into the chalk at Beaching-Stoke and the expansion of its ravine at Salisbury. ”

“ The forebuilding which covers it is the finest in England. It is in fair preservation, all but its roofs and part of its east wall, which are modern. As at Rochester, it is of masonry inferior to the keep, at least outside, and there is no cordon at the base of its pilasters, but it contains within more ornamental work than the keep, with which it is so intimately connected that it cannot be an addition. In the north-east and south-west angles of the keep are well-staircases remarkably commodious and well lighted. ”

“ Whose beauty gives the simple soyle some grace.
Unlike the elevated and rock-founded castles of Chepstow and Ludlow, the strength of Skenfrith was in the low and marshy character of its position. The Munnow flows within a few feet of its walls, and overflowed into its ample ditches, and a few yards below the castle is the bridge mentioned by Leland. Skenfrith marks the uniting point of several valleys, and even now, with the advantage of modern roads, is by no means easy of approach. ”

“ HEREFORD CASTLE. THE borderers of England, whether on the north or on the west, were bold, hardy, and aggressive races of men, having for their patrimony the moor and the morass, the wild bleak upland which occurs on the Scottish frontier, or the steep crags and rugged defiles which gave strength and, in ordinary cases, impunity to the Welsh. The Scots, indeed, came of the same stock with the English, and had recently formed a part of the same kingdom, under the same lords; nor was the land immediately south of the Tyne or the Tweed materially richer than that to its immediate north. ”

“ But the Tower has memories surpassing even its associations with the military glories of the state. It has been the prison and the scaffold of not a few of the best and bravest of English blood. Percy and Mortimer, Hastings and Clinton, Neville and Beauchamp, Arundel, Devereux, Stafford, and Howard,—those “old stocks who so long withstood the waves and weathers of time,”—have here found a grave. Here the great house of Plantagenet flourished and was cut down. Here England’s Elizabeth learned the uses of adversity ”

“ The lowlands are laid out as rich water meadows, the uplands studded with masses of oak, elm, and beech, the skirts of the adjacent New Forest. Nothing can be more wild, more natural, nor yet more indebted to the labour and taste of man.
For antiquities, every part of the broad plain of the chalk is dotted over with marks of human habitation, warfare, or sepulture. Almost every headland is crowned by a camp recognised as British by its outline following the irregularities of the ground. ”

“ The rubble is poor, imperfectly coursed, and held together by the excellence of the mortar, or rather of the lime, for the mortar is carelessly mixed and is full of sea shells, which have been brought with the sand and left uncrushed. It is clear from appearances, both inside and outside the building, that the south-east angle has, at some period soon after its construction, fallen down, and been rebuilt soon afterwards clumsily and in haste. No mere battering by a ram, no strokes from the missiles of a catapult, however ponderous, would have brought down both turret and wall. ”

“ No traces of any wall of masonry are known to exist, but outside it, to the west, and at the foot of the slopes of the castle, is a bank with a ditch, looking very much like a local dyke of the age of that of Offa, but which is reputed to be what remains of the town wall. The curious thing is that this dyke, which, while opposite to the castle is commanded and therefore strengthened by the castle rock, passes southwards along the steep slope of an opposite hill, and is there commanded from the outside, and would be utterly untenable. ”

“ The claims of Scarborough to rank and fame are of a different though scarcely inferior character. Its position above the Northern Ocean is wild and grand in the extreme. Its area, defined and protected by Nature, is calculated to contain, not a garrison, but an army; and its keep, in itself equal to Richmond or most other Norman structures, is here not a citadel but the mere gateway and key to what is really the fortress, and which rises from the seashore above and behind it. ”

“ In the outer side of its wall, to the north, are the remains of another garderobe shaft, and, high up, part of a straight mural staircase. From hence, northwards, is a mere curtain. On the three other faces only the revetment, or traces of it, remain. A heap of rubbish at the south end may be the foundation of the gatehouse. There is no trace of a well, hall, or chapel. The only ashlar remaining is a sort of quoin in the substance of the great wall, and in a window jamb in the horseshoe tower. The masonry is rude but coursed rubble. ”

“ WHITE CASTLE, MONMOUTHSHIRE. WHITE CASTLE, called also from the parish in which it stands, Llanteilo Cresseny, and in the records “Album Castrum,” stands upon very high ground about five miles east of Abergavenny, and commands an extensive and completely panoramic view over a country eminently characteristic of the old red sandstone. Within the wide circumference are mountains and hills green to their summits, deep valleys, oaks and elms of great size and in great profusion, and pastures of unusual richness. ”

“ As the new settler traversed the meads of the Severn, and left behind him the grassy meadows of the Team and the Lugg, and rode up the rising ground to the point where his own or his son’s devotion afterwards established a church, he must have blessed the fate that placed him amidst a country so rich, and in the possession of which the vast earthwork immediately before him would be an assurance of more than ordinary security. ”

“ Lincoln itself is thickly strewed with the footsteps of the past. The Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Englishman, and the Norman, have successively been lords of the soil, and each has left his mark, either in material traces or in a nomenclature still less liable to decay. A great historian, our chief authority also in matters of topography, has pronounced the earthworks to the north of the city to be of British origin. ”

“ Whether its source be taken from the high land of the Devizes, or from the skirts of Savernake, it runs about fifty miles to the sea at Christchurch, and, in that distance, itself, or by its immediate tributaries, traverses a tract very rich in sylvan beauty, and crowded with material traces of the old inhabitants of the land, and of their severe struggle in the sixth century with the fiery deluge by which they were at last swept away, but which brought with it those seeds of civilisation which have nowhere grown more abundant fruit than along the banks of this celebrated stream. ”

“ Beyond the ditch is a broad and comparatively level annular area, sloping slightly from the centre, and in its turn girdled by a second and still more formidable ditch. Of this the counterscarp is a steep bank, outside of and beyond which is the natural slope of the base of the hill, forming what, in military phrase, would be the glacis of the place, and which, on three sides, descends into the ordinary valleys of the district, but to the west is continued downwards until it dies into the meads of Stratford, rendered bright and well wooded by the fertilising waters of the Avon. ”

“ A fortress, whether Saxon or Norman, would, as a rule, attract inhabitants to place themselves under its protection; and, however spacious may have been the area enclosed—and a little under six acres is the very utmost that has ever been assigned to it—there must always have been ample room between the walls and the river to the north, where the present town is located. If ever the town stood upon the west bank, the balance of probability is in favour of its having been transferred across the stream as soon as the earliest stronghold was established there. ”

“ Tickhill Castle is an excellent example of a pre-Norman or English earthwork, composed of mound, fosse, and lower ward, converted into a Norman castle. It exemplifies exactly the manner in which the Norman engineers treated earthworks of this description, and how such works gave rise to one of the two great types of a Norman castle, that with the shell-keep. Tickhill is Laughton on a larger scale, the only difference being that the ditch of the mound is not carried wholly round it, but is wanting towards the attached area. ”

“ Time, the greatest but least violent of revolutionists, has been the principal agent in the changes that have taken place, and the great obstacle to the study of the castle by the antiquary is the rich and redundant mantle of friendly ivy by which it is draped.
Skenfrith belongs to that family of castles of which Coningsborough and Launceston are the English types, and of which Brunlais, and, in some degree, Tretower, are local examples. Its keep is a cylindrical tower, with a widening or battering base, to which the elder antiquaries gave the name of a Juliet. ”

“ But if the smile of the arch-enemy of mankind was, as must be supposed, in derision of man’s attempts at progress, the occasion of it was singularly ill-chosen, for in the whole of Britain it would be difficult to find a tract for the well-being of which man has exerted himself so much and so successfully. ”

“ It may, indeed, be that those who dwell within the city, or have been familiar with it from childhood, are less conscious of this feeling than those who visit it as strangers, and to whom the noble river, ancient walls, and535 venerable minster, stand out unassociated with the concerns of every-day life; but, on the other hand, the men of York cannot but feel for their birthplace something of the love of children for a parent, something of the pride of citizens of no mean city, something of that secret charm by which every man, worthy of the name, is attracted to his native land. ”

“ The court, rectangular, or nearly so, the absence of a keep, the drum-towers capping the four angles, the general character of the gatehouse and its position in the centre of one side, and the domestic buildings placed against the wall of the inner court, are peculiarities common to both. In each also the gatehouse is the grand feature of the building. Further, there is to be observed in both the excessive narrowness of the middle ward, its revetment rendering more than a parapet unnecessary, its slender and subordinate gatehouse, and its lateral postern opening direct through both wards. ”

“ At the east gate the arch is full centred, of 14 feet opening, without chamfer or rebate, or ornament of any kind. Probably there is a portcullis groove, but if so it is blocked up and completely concealed by the woodwork of the modern doors. It is certain that the main entrance of a Norman castle could never have been so constructed that there should be no rebate against which the door should be pressed when closed, and probably the fitting was composed of a ring of stones inserted, as in the doorway in the cross-wall of Rochester keep, without bond, into the exterior arch. ”

“ The position and dimensions of the castle were worthy of the great barons by whom it was constructed, and far too noble for the events with which its name is associated. North-east of, and one-third of a mile from, the market-cross of Pontefract, there is seen a very remarkable table of rock, oval in form, the sides of which are in part a steep slope and in part a cliff of from 30 feet to 40 feet high, rising out of a talus, which, on the north, south, and eastern faces, descends into two deep natural valleys, which unite on the north-eastern front. ”

“ Emerging from the gatehouse, the rugged character of the interior comes at once into view. On the right is a path between two knolls of rock; that on the left moderately high, and not quite extending to the waterward curtain; that on the right high and steep, and its perpendicular face forming the landward curtain, the wall crowning which is 9 feet thick. At the south-east end, where the two ridges unite, is a small circular eminence, which may have been a beacon. This part of the outer ward is a fortress in itself, and upon its highest ground are traces of buildings. ”

“ The White Tower in London has been so often repaired and refaced that it is difficult to be sure of its original masonry. Part of the curtain of the enceinte of Rochester Castle may also be Gundulph’s work. The north wall looks very early, as does the east wall, which is of excellent though rudely coursed rubble, the stones being large and the joints broad, though there are no layers of flat stones as at St. Leonard’s.
Rochester much resembles Hedingham, a very pure and very perfect Norman keep, with three floors, the remains of a forebuilding, and the upper gallery in the main floor. ”