INTRODUCTION.

THE art of construction in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire to the dawn of the Reformation, though of late years much and successfully investigated, has been approached almost exclusively from its ecclesiastical side. This was, for many reasons, to be expected. The service of the altar justified, perhaps required, the highest degree of taste in the design of the temple, and the utmost richness in its ornamentation. Moreover, the greater number of our ecclesiastical buildings are still in use, and even the remains of those that are in decay, being chiefly monastic, are interesting from the intimate connexion of their foundations and endowments with early piety and learning, and from the evidence supplied by their records of the descent of landed property and of the ancestry of the older historic families of the country.

The coËval military structures exhibit, generally, no such splendours of design or excellence of execution, nor do they awaken such sympathies in our breasts. The parish church is the common concern of all who worship within its walls, or whose dead are laid within its sacred precinct; but the castle, always a dangerous and unpopular neighbour, and often associated with local tyranny or the disasters of war, was in most instances ruined or swept away with the general use of gunpowder, and even where preserved, its narrow dimensions and inconvenient arrangements, particulars more or less essential to its value as a place of defence, rendered it, except in a few instances, unfit for a modern residence, and have thus tended to sever it still more completely from the current sympathies and interests of humanity. Nevertheless, there is in these structures, obsolete as they are, or because they are obsolete, much to attract those who care to know of the life and customs of former generations. Many of these buildings were the work and residence of persons who have left their mark upon the history of our country. Some, as York, Lincoln, Norwich, Dover, Rochester, Chester, Colchester, Wallingford, have been the seats of Saxon thanes or Danish jarls, succeeding a Roman or perhaps British occupant; others, as Bamborough, Taunton, Sarum, Tutbury, and Hereford, are associated with the earliest, most celebrated, or most patriotic of our purely English kings; others, as the Tower, Windsor, Winchester, Berkeley, Pontefract, Newark, Carisbrook, were the scene of the splendours of our greatest or the miseries of our most unfortunate monarchs; some, as Oxford, Northampton, Lewes, Kenilworth, are connected with great constitutional struggles between prince and subject; some, as Exeter, Bedford, Rochester, Pembroke, Chepstow, and Raglan, remind us of bloody combats and sieges from the times of the Conqueror to those of Charles the First. Some castles, as Sherborne, the Devizes, Malmesbury, Wolvesley, Newark, Farnham, Norham, and Durham, were constructed by lordly ecclesiastics who brought the arm of the soldier to support the brain of the priest and statesman; some again, as Hedingham, Bungay, Axholm, Alnwick, Raby, Tonbridge, Warwick, Wigmore, Powderham, Goderich, and Helmsley, are intimately bound up with the great baronial names of De Vere, Bigot, Mowbray, Percy, Neville, Clare, Beauchamp, Mortimer, Courtenay, Talbot, and De Ros, those “ancient stocks that so long withstood the waves and weathers of time.” Ludlow is identified with the fairest creation of Milton’s genius; Caerleon and Tintadgel glitter bright in mediÆval romance; while Shrewsbury, Chester, the Welsh castles, Carlisle, Newcastle, Prudhoe, Ford, Hermitage, Jedburgh, Berwick, and a host of subordinate towers and peels, are celebrated in Marchman’s warfare or Border Minstrelsy, and played a part in the politic but unjust aggressions of our earlier Henrys and Edwards.

The histories and remains of these fortresses are full of interest to the antiquary, whether his branch of study be legal, social, architectural, or military. Almost all the most important of our English castles date, in some form or other, from remote antiquity, and their associations were of slow growth, and deeply rooted in many centuries of the national history. Most were the centres of estates which had become great in the course of many generations, and for the protection of which they were established; and the tenure and services of the tenantry had grown up gradually, so that the castle, or rather the fortified hall, was closely connected with the institutions, laws, and customs of the estate, or it might be the shire, wapentake, rape, or hundred, of which it was the defence. Such castles as Belvoir, Clitheroe, Gloucester, Totnes, Dunster, Hastings, Bramber, and Tickhill, were the “capita” or chief seats of ancient sokes, honours, and baronies, having peculiar privileges within their garths and demesnes, with manorial dependencies scattered through many counties, and accumulated in some considerable degree even before the Norman era. Many of the lands were held, even in Saxon times, by the ancient tenure of military service, which, reduced into a system under the Norman kings, often took the form of guarding and keeping in repair some specified part of the lord’s castle, a tower, gate-house, hall, or wall, to be paid either in person as castle-guard, or by the commutation known as ward-silver. Something like castle-guard appears indeed in the history of Norwich castle as early as the seventh century, and it was common in the tenth. Like the castle of Chester, that of Durham was the seat of an Earl-Palatine, the subject of the grim humour of Coeur-de-Lion, who of an aged Bishop made a young Earl, whose successors, more fortunate than those of their lay brother, preserved their Earldom and its more than Vice-regal appendages almost unshorn till the Reformation, and with a splendid remnant of judicial and social power to our own day; and indeed, even now, though his mitre no longer springs out of a coronet, nor is his crozier as formerly combined with a sword, and though the baronial hall has been liberally surrendered for the purposes of education, the lord of Durham is not altogether wanting in pride of place, nor reduced, as yet, even to episcopal poverty.

The “Registrum Honoris de Richmond,” a very curious Custumary, specifies the precise part in that castle that each tenant was to defend. At Belvoir, Staunton tower, at Berkeley, Thorpe’s tower, are so called because families of those names were responsible for them, and at Dover, Magminot and a score of other towers still bear the names of the chief tenants of that important lordship, and thus preserve the memory of a tenure the substance of which has long been abolished. The connexion between the military tenant and his lord was intimate, and much imbued with the ancient Teutonic equality and independence. The lord held his “aula” for his own safety and that of his tenants; their mutual support gave power to the one and security to the others; no man was degraded by such a tenure. The most powerful barons were almost always also tenants holding fiefs under other lords, often far their inferiors in rank and power.

It is this ancient history, this connexion with the earliest works of defence, that gives so great an interest to the older castles. When, in later days, and under extraordinary circumstances, it suited the king or some great baron to erect a castle in a new place, the fabric had no root, no associations. The grand characteristic of an old castle, the mighty earthwork, was wanting, and its place was ill supplied by masses of masonry and a ditch of moderate dimensions. No tenants clustered round the place, to it no manors were attached, no dependents held lands by the tenure of its defence. Thus Bere, Beaumaris, Caernarvon, Diganwy, Conway, Harlech, and Caerphilly, grand structures as were most of them, were mere intrusions upon the soil, and when the need that produced them ceased, as they represented no private estate, and were the residence of no great baron, they were left to fall into decay. Not the less are they of great architectural interest. They are mostly of one date, laid out and constructed upon one plan. Though intended for military purposes, within the palace shares with the fortress. The accommodation afforded is ample, the main apartments are spacious, the ornamentation rich. The inner court, gatehouses, and hall of Caerphilly are grander than anything of the sort in Britain.

The castles of a still later period, when built on new sites, were scarcely Castles in the military sense of the term. They were not posted for the defence of a March or a threatened district, but for the residence, more or less secure, of the lord, usually of a newly-acquired estate, very often purchased with the ransoms of prisoners taken in the French wars. Even where the castle most predominated, as at Bodiham, built, as Arundel was largely repaired, with the spoils of war, or at Tattershal, they were rather palace-castles than castle-palaces, and this was especially the case with Bolton, Wressil, and Sheriff-Hutton, works of the latter part of the fourteenth century. In such works the salient towers, loops, embattled parapets, and bold machicolations, are introduced partly for their appearance, partly from custom, but scarcely for any military purpose.

To the student of military architecture, or of the art of the defence of strong places before the introduction of gunpowder, the ground-plans of defensive works and the details of castellated architecture of every period are interesting; sometimes they are to be admired for the grandeur of their earthworks or the enormous strength of their walls; sometimes for their happily-selected site and the skilful disposition of their arrangements for a flanking defence; or, as at Arques, Dover, Sarum, and Windsor, for their subterranean outlets and countermines. Some, as Clitheroe and Peak, were structures purely military, intended to contain only a captain and a small garrison, and provided with scanty accommodation, and quite destitute of ornament; in others, as Ludlow, Caerphilly, and Beaumaris, the interior arrangements were on a scale and of a character to accommodate a Royal Court. Even where the walls are destroyed, there often remain, in the earthworks, traces of a much earlier people than the Normans, a people who, as at Old Sarum, Castle-acre, Marlborough, Clare, Tonbridge, and the Devizes, occupied the ground with bank, ditch, and palisade, long before native skill had attained to the construction of wall or tower. Finally, although the stern necessities of war did not admit of the banded shafts, lofty vault, or woven window-tracery of Tintern, or Fountains, or many a less distinguished church, the ornamentation of the richer castles, as Dover, Rochester, Hedingham, Newcastle, Knaresborough, Castle Rising, and Coningsborough, is marked by a chastened fitness peculiar to such works; and of the ruder and less ornate castles, the ruins of very many present a savage grandeur which few who have visited Caerphilly, Harlech, or Scarborough, can fail to appreciate; any more than that union of strength with beauty so conspicuous in Chepstow, Raglan, and Ludlow, which, enhanced by an illustrious history, attains its highest perfection in Warwick.

The history of such castles as are connected with public events is seldom difficult to trace. They are mentioned by the ancient chroniclers, and their repairs and various particulars concerning them are often entered on the Pipe rolls, and in other of the records of the realm. About a score, such as Arundel, Bamborough, Taunton, Wigmore, and Hereford, are named in the Saxon annals, and in charters of the eighth and following centuries; and others, though unnamed in these authorities, may from their general similarity safely be attributed to the same people and period. The castles on the Welsh Marches, as Ludlow, Montgomery, Chester, Rhuddlan, Cardiff, Chepstow, and Pembroke, had their special jurisdictions; their courts of law and of record; their chancellor, chancery, and official seal; the lord’s “Vicecomes” exercised powers of pit and gallows, and his court passed fines and recoveries, and other early instruments for the conveyance of land. In the northern Marches such castles as Norham, Prudhoe, Cockermouth, Alnwick, Naworth, Caerlaverock, and Home, constructed for the defence of an exposed frontier or a debatable district, the home of those who lived by “snaffle, spur, and spear,” are commemorated in the records of either country. Others were originally royal castles, as Dover, Canterbury, Winchester, London, Nottingham, and York; or, as Kenilworth, Bridgenorth, and Rochester, fell by escheat or forfeiture into the hands of the crown, and so were maintained at the public expense, and the cost of their repairs charged in the sheriffs’ accounts of each county.

However complete, and it is usually much the reverse, may be the history of a castle, any knowledge we may desire as to its particulars greatly depends upon what may remain of the structure, either in masonry or earthworks, and to understand these the first thing necessary is a plan, and this is just what is wanting in most guides or handbooks of castles. With a good plan not only the age and much of the details of any castle can be ascertained, but sometimes the work recorded in the Pipe or Fabric rolls may be recognised. Original plans indeed there are none; no doubt the military architects, like their ecclesiastical brethren, drew and worked from designs and plans, but these have not been preserved. No such thing is known to exist as an original design or a working drawing of a Norman or even an Edwardian castle. In ecclesiastical researches, from the known uniformity of the arrangements, this want is scarcely felt, but the plan and details of a castle vary with the disposition of the ground or the caprice of the builder, and although a hall, a kitchen, a chapel, a well, and a barrack are indispensable features in a castle, these parts have nothing of the regularity of position of a nave or choir, a cloister, a chapter-house, or a refectory. Nevertheless, great as is the variety in both the plans and details of castles even of the same age, their architects and engineers worked by certain rules, so that if these be studied a clue will be obtained to the age of the work executed. The dimensions, plan, and profile of the earthworks, the presence, absence, or figure of the keep, the thickness of the walls, the plan, figure, proportion and position of the mural towers, the character of the entrance, the material employed, and the particulars of the masonry, all, if carefully observed, afford a clue to the date of the building or of some of its parts, so that as a general proposition, a Norman castle may be known from one of the early English period, or from those of the first or second Edward, and still more readily from those built in the reign of Richard the Second. What these rules are, in what these differences consist, will appear further on.

MediÆval architecture has only been scientifically studied during the last forty or fifty years, and military architecture for a still shorter period. Rickman, who first taught us to read the date of a building in its details, was induced to turn his attention to architecture by the advice of Mr. Blore, who died but the other day.

But Rickman, a member of the Society of Friends, scarcely notices castles, and they have by no means shared in the flood of light directed by Willis upon our cathedrals. Rickman’s rules, however, apply as much to one class of buildings as to the other. What has been done, and what has to be done, towards a history of the architecture of castles, though aided by contemporary records and especially by sheriffs’ accounts and Fabric rolls, has been mainly attained by attention to the internal evidence afforded by the buildings themselves and their earthworks. Even where the castle is a ruin, where the ashlar casing has been stripped off, and little left but the rubble and concrete of the interior of the walls, as at Bramber, Saffron-Walden, and Thurnham, and the disintegrating effect of the weather has had full play, it is not impossible, nor very often difficult, to detect the general age of the several parts of the building by the thickness of the walls and the character of the materials and workmanship, as well as by the outline of the works. The absence of ornament and the general removal of window-dressings and door-cases often, it is true, render the absolute date difficult to discover, but even then, the general figure of the openings, the rough contour of the arches, the position and proportion of the buttresses may be detected, and a tolerably safe conclusion formed. Perhaps, on the whole, the greatest difficulties the military antiquary has to contend with are those where, as at Norwich, Lancaster, York, Oxford, Caermarthen, or Haverfordwest, the building is converted into a gaol, or where, as at Appleby and Chilham, it is part of or attached to a modern residence. Warwick, so remarkable on many accounts, is especially so for the skilful manner in which it has been made suitable for modern habitation without materially obscuring its ancient parts, and this merit may be claimed for Tamworth, and perhaps for Raby.

Our county historians are often diffuse upon the descent of a castelry, and the particulars of its area and tenures, but their descriptions of the buildings are seldom intelligible. Even Surtees, so distinguished for the wealth and lucidity of his style, whose history of Durham contains, entombed in folio, chapters that in a more accessible form would have met with far more than antiquarian attention, never attempts scientific description. Hunter, whose histories of Hallamshire and of the Deanery of Doncaster are perfect as records of the descent of families and property, is not at home in architectural detail; and even Whitaker, who, with Hunter, was quite aware of the interest which attaches to earthworks, gives plans of but few of them, and says very little about the details of the castles. To come down to the latest period, even Raine, Hodgson, and Eyton, in their histories of Durham, Northumberland, and Salop, so copious and so accurate in all matters of record, pass by with but short notice the various earthworks and castles in which those counties are so rich, and the details of which would be so valuable. We look in vain in the pages of these writers for any general conclusions as to the age, style, and points of resemblance or difference between these works, points which certainly fall within the province of the topographer.

The great work of King, the “Munimenta Antiqua,” three-quarters of a century or more older than most of the above, and full of absurd theories, misplaced learning, and fanciful and incorrect descriptions, recognises the importance of plans and details, and although those given with great show of accuracy are often very incorrect, they are worth a good deal, and with all its absurdities the book is on the whole valuable.

The “Vetusta Monumenta,” a work of the same school and period, includes a few castles, and gives plans and sections of two, the Tower and Hedingham, correctly, and in great detail. Unfortunately, these large and needlessly expensive plates are accompanied by no proper descriptions. The voluminous works of the industrious Britton include very few castles, but what there are, as Rochester, Kenilworth, and Castle Rising, are drawn and planned with extreme accuracy. The drawings of Grose and the brothers Buck serve to show the condition of many English castles a century ago, though the descriptions of Grose are poor, and his drawings are by no means clear. Buck’s perspective is very incorrect, but this allows of the bringing into view more of a building than can really be seen at once, which has its advantages.

Since the rise, during the last twenty years, of numerous county archÆological societies, castles have received more attention; but no distinct work has appeared upon English castles, though many of the most remarkable are noticed by Mr. Parker in his excellent works on domestic architecture. More recently has appeared the book of the late Mr. Wykeham Martin upon his ancestral castle of Ledes, a work not only well illustrated and furnished with an excellent ground-plan, but in which the architecture and arrangements of the fortress are treated in a scientific manner, and his conclusions supported, in many instances, by original documents.

England contains many curious and some grand examples of military architecture; but that insular position and those industrious habits which have given her internal peace have not been favourable to the erection of fortresses of the larger class: for these we must pass to the Continent, and especially to France. In France not only were the works of imperial Rome of a grand and substantial character, but they were adopted and employed by the people after the fall of the empire, and both Franks and Visigoths, unlike our English Saxons, practised the arts of attack and defence upon Roman principles, and remodelled the older works to meet the later circumstances of the period. In the southern provinces, especially, are still to be found castles and fortified towns such as Tholouse, Narbonne, Beziers, and Carcassonne, where the old Roman circumvallation has been preserved, and may still be recognised amidst the additions and alterations of succeeding ages.

Like the Romans, their successors made use of earthworks and of timber both for attack and defence, and for permanent works employed masonry of a very Roman character. Such accounts as have descended to us of the great sieges of the Middle Ages show that the machines and methods in use were those handed down by tradition from Rome, many of them being such as CÆsar employed, while others were the same as those sculptured on the column of Trajan or described by Vegetius. Mines and countermines, battering-rams, balistÆ, catapults, the cat, the mouse, the sow, and a large family of devices for reaching under cover the wall to be undermined, were all derived from Roman warfare, and were employed, if not with the skill and discipline of Rome, with a degree of vigour and boldness that was scarcely less effective.

Moreover, the political circumstances of France were eminently favourable to the construction of great military works. The great duchies and scarcely subordinate kingdoms which afterwards composed the French monarchy were, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, independent states, each with an open frontier needing defences, and with a brave and wealthy baronage very able and very willing to supply them. Hence France contains within its present borders not only cities of Roman origin and celebrated under the immediate successors of the Romans, but the remains of the castle-palaces of the dukes and barons of Normandy and Brittany; of Burgundy, Provence, Navarre, Flanders, Anjou, and many a lesser province; and he is but little qualified to judge of castles or of fortified mediÆval cities who is unacquainted with Arques, or Falaise, or Loches; Coucy or ChÂteau-Gaillard, or Etampes; Carcassonne, Avignon, Villeneuve, or Beaucaire, or the splendid restoration of Pierrefonds.

The possession of these great works has drawn forth, though tardily, a few writers capable of comprehending and describing them. Those in Normandy are the subject of the well-known lectures of M. de Caumont, delivered at Caen in 1830 and published in 1835. They contain a very interesting section on military works, with plans and elevations which, though roughly executed and on a small scale, are valuable; his descriptions are clear, and his conclusions generally sound. Others, before M. de Caumont, have described particular structures, but he seems to have been the first to attempt a general classification based upon a critical examination of the examples in his own province.

Of detached writings, monographs, may be mentioned those of M. Deville upon ChÂteau-Gaillard, Tancarville, and Arques, published in 1828, 1834, and 1839. The first is particularly strong in its history of the castle and of its famous siege, and the last excellent both in history and description; and all three are accompanied by clear ground-plans.

The great work of Viollet-le-Duc, though not confined to military architecture, contains by much the most comprehensive, as well as the most detailed, account of French castles yet given to the world; and as, besides the general resemblance between all European castles, those of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Normandy are almost counterparts of those of the same period, and often built by the same nobles or their sons, in England, it has deservedly become our chief authority. Also the castles of France, being on a larger scale and often more perfect than our own, M. Le-Duc has been able to explain more satisfactorily than could have been done here, certain details, such, for example, as those of the gateway, drawbridge, and portcullis, and especially of the timber superstructures for vertical defence, known as “hourdes” and “bretasches,” terms represented with us by the “hoard” of a London builder, and the “brattice” of the mining engineer. M. Le-Duc’s work has given occasion and matter for a small volume from the press of Mr. Parker. There is besides a work in German, “Geschichte der MilitÄr-Architectur des fruhern Mittelalters,” by M. G. H. Krieg von Hochfelden, which contains much of great interest concerning German castles, as well as a general notice of those in France and England.

Although military architecture in England, setting aside the works of the Romans, begins with the age, and probably with the actual period, of the Norman Conquest, the country contains numerous examples of military works of an earlier, and in many instances no doubt of a very remote, time. These works, executed in earth, or at least of which no parts but banks, mounds, and ditches remain, are sometimes of great size, but usually of extreme simplicity of plan. Of most of them, the Roman again excepted, the relative age is all that we can hope to ascertain, but even from this knowledge we are at present very far; and although it is probable that the simple encampments, of irregular outline, and on high ground, are the work of the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and those of circular or more regular outline, having higher banks, and placed in more accessible positions, are the works of the post-Roman period, yet the outlines are often so mixed, and the arrangement of the mounds and banks so alike, that it cannot always certainly be said what is sepulchral, what merely commemorative or monumental, and what military; what the works of the earlier or later Celts, what of the Saxons, what of their Danish conquerors, and sometimes even, though not often, what is Roman.

The particulars of these various earthworks, so different in plan and extending over so many centuries, deserve a separate notice, and therefore, though originally intended to have been here treated of, it seemed more prudent to lay this branch of the subject aside for the present, in the hope that it may be taken up when the completion of the larger scale Ordnance Maps shall afford more accurate and copious data than now can conveniently be procured. The subject, in fact, should have entered into the instructions given to the officers of the Survey, by which means we should at least have avoided the obscure and sometimes contradictory system of nomenclature by which these works have been designated at different periods of this great, and in most respects admirable, national undertaking.

But, although it be expedient here to pass by in silence those earthworks, irregular, rectangular, or concentric, which have no direct connexion with the subsequent castles of masonry, and therefore with military architecture, there remain, nevertheless, certain earthworks which are so connected, and which must therefore here be noticed, and are of importance sufficient to require a separate chapter for their consideration.

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