ANCIENT AND MODERN FORTRESSES.

ANCIENT AND MODERN FORTRESSES.

Having been moved to put together some ideas on ancient fortresses, with a slight unprofessional glance at modern fortifications, we feel at a loss to say whether the subject was suggested by the prospect of a European war, or by finding, on turning up page 52 of the second volume of Edward King’sMunimenta Antiqua, the curious statement about famous Conisborough Castle, “that, if a person chances to stand in the least degree nearly opposite to any one of the buttresses, the whole building appears, notwithstanding its perfect rotundity, to be a square tower instead of a round one.”

If we led the reader to suppose, that anything he finds in this article will indicate the probable result of the coming European Struggle, we should grossly deceive him; and it is but fair to say, that if the opening sentences have induced him to expect a succinct digest of the history of fortified places from the era of the Flood, he will have to complain that his anticipations are by no means fulfilled. We intend to take advantage of that happy vagrant eclecticism, which nothing in this world but a magazine admits of, and which, in truth, is a blessing too often forgotten and betrayed by its proper guardian, when he consents to be nothing but the expounder of opinion for a polemical or a civic conclave, or the recorder of the pother of local antiquaries. Our remarks on fortresses will follow no specific line, logical, or otherwise—will supply no desideratum—prove no problem, and exhaust no subject of inquiry; and, with these preliminary indications, we now offer them.

Be it a question which, among ancient nations, was most illustrious in deed and thought—the Jewish, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Hellenic, or the Roman—there can be no doubt that the most illustrious race acting within the sphere of modern history is the Norman. And when we give them this local name, we do not mean to confine its comprehension to the descendants of the Rollo who bullied the King of France out of a province, or to those of the band of adventurous men who “came over” with the Conqueror. The real Norman who founded the institutions which still live to attest his greatness, was a mixed being, possessed of the hardy, enduring energy of the North, and the fire and versatility of the South. Most European countries have enjoyed his presence. France has largely partaken of it, so has Spain—though the spirit of the old greatness it produced has died, and the faded lustre of its memory only remains. Italy, Sicily, and portions of Germany, have had their share of these high-spirited wanderers; and indeed often, in the history of European states, might it be traced that, as if by an injection of fresh blood, the Norman element has saved them from immediate dissolution, if it has failed to confer on them a prolonged and invigorated existence.

Greatest, however, of all the obligations to this race are those which we of the British empire owe; for the illustrious adventurers—whose spirit and energy sometimes seemed to consume and destroy the feebler qualities of the people on whom they were ingrafted—found among their Saxon brethren only a reinforcement of those steady and enduring powers, which had not yet acquired a sufficient preponderance in the composition of the Norman. To the character and tendencies of this race we owe the centralising influence which has given power to our democratic institutions. We owe to them the principle of honour, courtesy to women, social disinterestedness, and the many virtues which have grown out of the system of chivalry. In art, we owe to them the great system of ecclesiastical architecture, which, after slumbering for a couple of centuries, is now flourishing in so remarkable a revival, that every genuine vestige of it is preserved with pious care; and even a worshipful municipality, if it design to destroy a remnant of the art, as it would have almost been thanked for doing fifty years ago, is restrained from the act by a feeling of public indignation.

The magnificent system which goes commonly by the name of Gothic architecture, is essentially the work of the Norman race, taking both the character of the architecture and the name of the race in a comprehensive sense.

If it be an inferior achievement, yet it is something to say that to the same race we owe the fortalice of the middle ages—the parent of the modern fortress. The castle, as we know it in romance and history, is essentially a Norman creation. The symmetrical external strength, and the gloomy mysteries of the interior, necessary to make a castle be a castle in poetry or romance, are features entirely belonging to the Norman edifice. The vaulted form of internal roofing, with all its grandeur and gloom—the dungeons beneath—the battlements above—the secret passages—and other mysteries which are necessarily connected with these in architectural arrangement, are all peculiarities of the Norman fortalice. To find what there is in this, inquire howThe Old English Baron—The Castle of Otranto—Mrs Radcliffe’s or Victor Hugo’s novels could have been written without this element of poetic romance. Go higher up, and see how much of the glorious interest of Scott’s novels has been created out of this element; and whether it is presented at Torquelstone or Tillytudlem, all comes of Norman origin. But go still higher, and see how such a tragedy as Macbeth could have existed, if Shakespeare had been a contemporary of the Scottish monarch, and had been bound to describe him living in an extensive craal of wicker or turf huts, instead of placing the whole tragic history in one of those mysterious Norman castles which did not exist until centuries after Macbeth’s day, and were beginning to add to their other interest that of a mellow age in Shakespeare’s.

Besides these elements of associative interest, there is the external beauty involved in a marvellous development of strength and symmetry. Take the Norman castle in its most perfect development—the stern square mass in the centre—the flanking round towers at the angles, widening with a graceful sweep towards the earth, after the manner in which the oak stem widens to its root—the varied crest of battlements, turrets, and machicolations which crown all, adjusting their outline to the graceful variations of the square and circular works below,—all make a combination, the grandeur and beauty of which has been attested by its eternal repetition in landscape-painting, since landscape-painting began.

Nor were the beauty and grandeur all that the Norman fortalice could boast of. It was a great achievement in science. Of all the steps taken onwards in fortification, from the primitive earthwork on the steppes of Tartary down to the fortification of Paris, the greatest was taken by that one which combined together the dwelling-house and the fortress, and made that organisation of main edifice and flanking protections of which the great works of Vauban were but a further development, as we shall have occasion more fully to show.

But we must stop here.—External beauty and grandeur, engineering skill, we attribute to the Norman castle; but we cannot award the same praise to its moral objects, which were ever those of subjugation and regal or lordly despotism. In fact, the castle was the embodiment of the feudal system, and ripened into the Parisian Bastille, the largest and most perfect Norman fortress ever built. As one of our kings said of a border keep, the man who built that was a thief in his heart; and they who reared the stately dwellings of the Norman kings and nobles had subjugation and tyranny in their hearts, and indeed embodied these qualities in mason-work; for, after all, these gloomy edifices owe a mighty portion of their influence to that overawing quality which Burke made out to be the source of sublimity. If all admiration of artistic achievement in architecture must depend on the honourableness, the faithfulness, the humaneness of those who were the designers, we fear we would need to abandon our favourite edifices as structural lies, and architectural shams, only fit to be cast into oblivion, and there obtain Christian burial. But so callous are we in the matter of the faith and morality of designers, that we can even confess that the exterior structure so well fitted for defence against an oppressed peasantry, and the dreary dungeons so well fitted for feudal vengeance, when these were driven desperate, only raise our interest by a contemplation of their objects; while the assurance that some murder has been committed within the gloomy recesses—the baser and more brutal the better—simply affords additional zest to the tragic interest of the whole.

Let us cast a glance back to the condition of the art of fortification, at the time when it was taken up by these Normans. The most truly primitive forts are naturally decided by antiquaries to be those which are found constructed solely out of the native materials which the site may have afforded. In this matter time has been by no means impartial to the handiwork of man; since, in some places it remains, and is likely to remain, so long as the crust of the earth keeps together: while in others, the stronghold of the dwellers in vast watery wastes and swamps has melted away with the mud of which it may have been originally formed. So, in the swamps of Friesland, defended in the dawn of history as they were in the seventeenth century, and in the flats of Lincoln, defended against the Normans, many a place of strength has departed; but on the tops of barren hills the rude stone circles remain, the relics of some utterly unknown antiquity.

There is scarcely to be named that part of the world where there are hills, and no hill-forts. They occur in the Holy Land; and Jeremiah speaks of the people being hunted “from every mountain, and from every hill.” On the approach of the Assyrians, we hear that the Israelites possessed themselves of all the tops of the high mountains. They are found all over the East—on the steppes of the Russian provinces—on the German and Scandinavian hills—in all parts of the British empire: while those which have been discovered in the valley of the Mississippi, and other parts of America, are said to have a precise resemblance to the specimens in the county of Angus. Often, of course, efforts have been made to connect them with early historical events—as when the fortified camp of Caractacus has been found in England, and that of Galgacus, in fifty different places of Scotland: while the Germans are naturally anxious to find the circle within which their national hero, Arminius, or Hermann, assembled the tribes who punished the presumption of Varus. But these are all vain speculations; and when or how these forts were made, we shall probably find out when we get the working plans and the engineers’ contract for Stonehenge.

Among the English hill-forts, there is the Herefordshire beacon, on the highest point of the Malvern hills, commanding the main pass through the chain. It is an irregular oblong, one hundred and seventy-five feet by one hundred and ten; and the inner wall is a strong work of stones and turf. Three exterior walls encompass it, and an eccentric work lops out at either side, on some engineering principle, which, doubtless, was highly approved of in its day, but is sunk in as deep oblivion as the name of the people who awaited anxiously within the inner ring to see the heads of the enemy, as they strove to mount the steep acclivity, in the year of the world in which the defence was completed. Wales claims the chief specimens in England, for the reason we have already stated—that Wales has hills. Hence we have Moel y Gaer in Flintshire, and a great work close to the Castle of Montgomery, where, King says, it was certainly needless, “unless it had been long prior to the erection of that castle.” There are, besides these, Carn Madryn, Trer Caeri in Carnarvonshire, and Caer Caradoc, which tradition associates with Caractacus. One of the oddest of these forts is Penman Mawr, of which Pennant says, “After climbing for some space among the loose stones, the fronts of three, if not four walls presented themselves very distinctly, one above the other. In most places the facings appeared very perfect, but all dry work. I measured the height of one wall, which was at the time nine feet; the thickness seven feet and a half. Between these walls, in all parts, were innumerable small buildings, mostly circular, and regularly faced within and without, but not disposed in any certain order. These had been much higher, as is evident from the fall of stones which lie scattered at their bottoms. Their diameter, in general, is from twelve to eighteen feet; but some were far less, not exceeding five feet. On the small area of the top had been a group of towers or cells, like the former—one in the centre, and five others surrounding it.”[19]

Some of our northern forts have been, however, on a greater scale. Of the White Caterthun in Strathmore, General Roy says, “The most extraordinary thing that occurs in this British fort is the astonishing dimensions of the rampart, composed entirely of large loose stones, being at least twenty-five feet thick at top, and upwards of one hundred at bottom, reckoning quite to the ditch, which seems, indeed, to be greatly filled up by the tumbling down of the stones. The vast labour that it must have cost to amass so incredible a quantity, and carry them to such a height, surpasses all description. A simple earthen breastwork surrounds the ditch; and beyond this, at the distance of about fifty yards on the two sides, but seventy on each end, there is another double intrenchment, of the same sort, running round the slope of the hill. The intermediate space probably served as a camp for the troops, which the interior post, from its smallness, could only contain a part of. The entrance into this is by a single gate on the east end; but opposite to it there are two leading through the outward intrenchment, between which a work projects, no doubt for containing some men posted there, as an additional security to that quarter.”[20]

The author who is found thus to speak of the rude hill-fort was an experienced officer of engineers, on service in Scotland. The tone of professional respect with which he treats the effort of the primitive engineer is remarkable; one might suppose him discussing the merits of Sebastopol or Cronstadt. In the unprofessional, such works create perhaps all the more astonishment from their unexpected magnitude; for when you are desired to ascend a desolate, uninteresting-looking secondary hill, in a remote district of Scotland, apart from any of the tourist circuits, you do not expect to find its brows covered with some triumph of industrial development. The height necessarily ascended before these works can be seen—a matter which must have made the raising of them all the more formidable—keeps them away from observation. Were they on flat ground, and near watering-places, they would be among the wonders of the world. In the vastness of the mass of collected stones, they are more like the great breakwaters of harbours of refuge than any other works we can name. Even more remarkable than General Roy’s Caterthun, appears to us to be the Barmkyn of Echt, a few miles farther north. The etymologist may call Barmkyn a corruption of Barbican if he likes. The lonely hill is so steep and circular that it seems as if it must have been artificially scarped. Scarcely from below can any curve be seen to interrupt the straight line of the ascent, and one is utterly unprepared for the mighty ramparts of stone—five of them—of which the innermost encloses a space of about an acre, quite flat, and seeming to be levelled, as the sides of the hill seem to be scarped, by art.

It may be a question if these stone masses were ever built, either so as to represent external courses, like the Roman wall in Northumberland, or even in the fashion called cyclopean. They bear, in their heaped character, and the regularity of their course, more resemblance to the moraines on the edge of the glacier, than to any other object, natural or artificial, with which we happen to be acquainted. So ancient, indeed, must they be supposed to be, that in the war with the elements all minuter structural characteristics seem to have been lost, and the stones lie, not as they were placed, but virtually in a heap of ruins.

In these stormy hills, indeed, it is difficult to suppose that anything less imperishable than the gneiss, or granite, of which the blocks forming the circular forts are composed, would have preserved the original plan. In flatter and more turfy districts of Scotland, as well as in England, there are mounds seeming to be artificial, and cast in circular terraces, as if they had been put on a turning lathe and bevelled down. There is one of these—perhaps the most remarkable in Britain—at Old Sarum, and it was generally supposed to have some connection with the franchise of that scheduled corporation. How these could have been very available for forts it is difficult to imagine; and to devise any other purpose to which they can have been applicable would be still more difficult. But when it was reported in England, as it was about seventy years ago, that there were some ancient hill-forts in Scotland made of glass, the antiquaries, not having a prescience of the Crystal Palace before their eyes, turned from puzzling themselves about the earthen mounds in England, to burst forth in scornful laughter about the glass fortresses of Scotland. But people who have had much experience in the ways of this world, learn how the same word may, without the slightest misapplication, be used for very different things. The dingy slag-like lumps, with a vitreous fraction, found in the heather of some Scottish fortified hills, has undoubtedly a claim to the vitreous character, perhaps as strong as the glittering diaphanous squares which are to let in all the sun, and exclude the wind and rain, at Sydenham. That they were the creation of fire is certain; and though the geologists sought at first to make out a case of volcano, yet it became evident that it was administered by the hand of man; for the materials, which had been calcined and vitrified so as to resemble in a considerable degree the scoriæ of a glass-house, were built into walls round the summits of steep circular hills;—those with which we are acquainted have much the appearance, from their extreme steepness and regularity, of having been scarped. And then come the questions—were the vitrified masses produced by some accident, such as the burning of a stronghold? or were they a deliberate method of cementing stones together by fusion? or, perchance, were they the wide circuits within which might be consumed some whole forest of trees, cut down and piled together within a ring of stone, whether as a vast beacon, reddening the sky from the Tweed to Cape Wrath, or a sacrifice to the ancient God of fire?—Questions these which we respectfully decline taking the responsibility of answering.

The step from such rude Titanic works as these to the Norman fortress is great—and perhaps a word or two on other forms of places of strength may be suitable, as showing distinctly that the feudal castles were the combination of the rude strength of the primitive fortress with domiciliary comfort—that they brought the defensive strength, supposed to reside only in inaccessible mountain regions or swamps, into the midst of rich agriculture and smiling abundance—that they no longer rendered necessary a retreat to the place of strength, as one may suppose the whole community of a district to have retreated to a hill-fort, but were themselves alike the abode of luxurious ease in time of peace, and of resistance and fierce contest in time of war. Perhaps we may best comprehend how original was the idea of the union of fortress and house or palace in one, by observing how few are the vestiges of such a combination having existed elsewhere before the establishment of the feudal system. Towns undoubtedly seem to have been fortified from the beginning of town life; and of the extent to which the system was carried, let us take once for all the account which honest old Herodotus gives of Babylon, with its walls two hundred cubits high, on which a chariot could be driven with four horses abreast, and its hundred gates of brass. But, of anything of the nature of a domestic fortress in which people lived in their ordinary manner during peace, and defended themselves in war, we remember but few vestiges.

Separate buildings like towers there probably have been in many times and places, and they may have been used as fortresses. Along the Roman Wall were the square towers called mile-castles, which are interesting, not only as the best remains of the arrangements made by the great aggressors for the protection of their frontier, but as the models on which the ancient inhabitants would probably build their castles—if they built any. It is singular enough that the Border peel towers—built a thousand years after the Romans had abandoned Britain to her fate—have, in their compact squareness, more resemblance to these castella, than any type of earlier British castellated architecture possesses. Since the publication of Mr Bruce’s book on the Roman Wall, to which we lately had occasion to refer, no one need remain ignorant of any feature, however minute, which, now existing, attests what these mile-castles originally were. Mr Bruce tells us, in a summary description, that “they derive their modern name from the circumstance of their being usually placed at the distance of a Roman mile from each other. They were quadrangular buildings, differing somewhat in size, but usually measuring from sixty to seventy feet in each direction. With two exceptions, they have been placed against the southern face of the wall: the castle of Portgate, every trace of which is now obliterated, and another near Æsica, the foundations of which may with some difficulty still be traced, seem to have projected equally to the north and south of the wall. Though generally placed about seven furlongs from each other, the nature of the ground, independently of distance, has frequently determined the spot of their location. Whenever the wall has had occasion to traverse a river or a mountain pass, a mile-castle has uniformly been placed on the one side or other to guard the defile. The mile-towers have generally had but one gate of entrance, which was of very substantial masonry, and was uniformly placed in the centre of the south wall: the most perfect specimen now remaining, however, has a northern as well as a southern gateway. It is not easy to conjecture what were the internal arrangements of these buildings—probably they afforded little accommodation, beyond what their four strong walls and well-barred gates gave.”[21]

They were evidently mere barracks or stations, nor can much more be said for any of the Roman works in the lands of their conquests. Roman troops were taught, in the conflict with the barbarian, to look solely to discipline; and the places called forts, apart from these square towers along the wall, were merely intrenched camps.

Investigation is, in this country, ever apt to strip our stone edifices of their hoar antiquity. Mr Petrie has “taken the shine,” as the Cockneys say, out of the round towers of Ireland, by showing that they have the ordinary details of the Romanesque ecclesiastical work, and has rendered it unnecessary to decide whether they are anchorite hermitages for a multitude of rivals to St Simeon Stylites, or temples for Photic or for Phalic worship. Criticism has gone in the same way back upon our castles, proving, in truth, that very few of them are so old as they were supposed to be. Yet there is a particular class of buildings of a systematically castellated type, which the scythe of the archæological iconoclast has not yet swept—on the age of which no particle of authentic light has been cast, and which we are thus entitled to count as old as we like.

These are the circular towers called sometimes Dunes, Burghs, Danish forts, Pictish forts, &c., scattered hither and thither in the far northwest of Scotland. They are supposed to be of Scandinavian origin—to have been the fortresses built by the Seakings, but nothing in the least degree resembling them has been found elsewhere within Scandinavian land. Their mysterious builders have carefully avoided every particle of incidental evidence that might lead to a betrayal of their origin. Graceful and symmetrical as they are in their outline—perfectly circular, and rising without a bulge in a decreasing sweep from the broad base—there is not a single ornament or moulding to let the antiquary detect them, as the Romanesque work proved the betrayal of the Irish round towers. Nay, there is not the mark of chiselling on the stones to show that human hands have touched them. That can be inferred from the structure alone; and the unhewn lumps of mica schist or gneiss are laid in distinct courses perfectly parallel and round, by the selection of rough stones of equal size, and the insertion of minute splinters to make up deficiencies—for, as there is no stone hewing, there is also no cement.

It is the most puzzling of the peculiarity of these perplexing buildings, that they have tiers of galleries running round them within the thickness of the wall. To form the roofs of these tiny serpentine chambers, large slabs have been necessary, but, in some marvellous manner, they have been obtained without being wrought; for, on the largest, it is vain to look for the mark of a chisel, or even artificial squaring or smoothing. It would seem, at least in such of them as we have seen, that the thinnest large slabs of schist had been collected in the mountains, and brought probably from great distances to fulfil the object of the builder.

It seems to have been ever taken for granted that these round towers must have been fortresses, and the only remaining question seemed to be—by what people, nation, or language were they so used? Was it by the Phœnicians? A great antiquary showed that in Tyre and Sidon there must have been edifices precisely of the same character, though no vestige of them now remains. Did they belong to the Caledonians of the days of Tacitus, or to the Atacotti, or to the Dalriads, or to the Albanich, or to the Siol Torquil, or the Fion Gall, or the Dubh Gall? Or, were they erected especially by some individual Aulaf or Maccus, or Sigurd, or Thorfin, or Godred M‘Sitric, or Diarmid M‘Maelnambo—all gentlemen having their own peculiar claims on the architectural merit? It occurred to us one day to ask internally the question, whether they were fortresses or strongholds at all? It arose as we looked down from the broken edge of the galleried wall of one of those towers in solitary Glen-Elg Beg. It stands, a hoar ruin on the edge of a precipice, where a torrent takes a sudden turn; and nothing could be better conceived for the landscape ideal of the remains of some robber stronghold of the middle ages, than the remnant of circular masonry rising flush from the edge of the precipice. But it was precisely the force with which these apparent conditions of a fortified character were conveyed, that showed the utter want of them in the others scattered throughout the valley. What could they have defended? Whom could they have resisted?

Primitive fortresses are places where considerable armies or large numbers of people go for protection from besieging enemies. Now, though the outside circle of these burghs is considerable, yet, from the thickness of the galleried wall, they only contain an inner area of from twenty to thirty feet—the size of a moderate dining-room. And, while the numbers they could have held were thus few, they possessed no means like the medieval castles for assault, and could have been easily pulled to pieces by an enemy. Nor, if they were places of strength, can it be easily conceived why there should be a whole cluster of them in a place like Glen Beg, and no others in the neighbouring districts.

The notion, indeed, of their being strongholds, seems to have been grasped at once by their striking resemblance in structure and dimensions to the Norman flanking round towers. But the Norman towers were only outworks, to aid in defence of the central keep, and could have been of small service as detached forts. There are many things which have a warlike resemblance to this part of a feudal castle;—a windmill, as Don Quixote’s chivalrous eye at once told him, possesses the character very decidedly—so does a modern blast-furnace. The columbarium lingering on the grounds of some old mansion is often mistaken for a tower; and the prototype of the columbarium, the Roman tomb, eminently anticipated the form of the Norman tower. Of one of these Byron says,—

“There is a stern old tower of other days,Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone;Such as an army’s baffled strength delays,Standing with half its battlements alone.”

“There is a stern old tower of other days,Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone;Such as an army’s baffled strength delays,Standing with half its battlements alone.”

“There is a stern old tower of other days,Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone;Such as an army’s baffled strength delays,Standing with half its battlements alone.”

“There is a stern old tower of other days,

Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone;

Such as an army’s baffled strength delays,

Standing with half its battlements alone.”

One of these tombs is the nucleus of the castle of St Angelo, others were incrusted into the fortified mansions of the quarrelsome Colonna—so like were they, though built as the quiet mansions of the dead, to the towers of feudal fortresses.

Shall we venture a theory about these Highland round towers? We have not yet found one to our own satisfaction; but the reader, if he likes, may take the following, which we guarantee to be of the average quality of such theories. It is well known that, when the Scots under Kenneth M‘Alpine conquered the Picts, they saved from death just two inhabitants of that devoted race, a father and son; their disinterested object in this clemency was, to find out how the Picts got their beer. It seems that they possessed a precious and much-coveted secret, in the means of brewing heather-ale. The Scots offered to spare the lives of the captives, if they would reveal the secret. The father promised to do so if they would, in the first place, comply with his request,—a very odd one for a father to make in such circumstances—to put to death his son. They did so; and then the father uttered a loud yell of triumph—the secret of the beer would be for ever hidden in his bloody grave. He could not trust to the firmness of his son; he could entirely rely on his own, and he was ready to bear all tortures rather than make the revelation. Now, why not suppose that these mysterious buildings were just breweries of heather-ale, and that, in the various galleries, decreasing as they ascend until they become mere pigeon-holes, the brewsts of the different years were binned for the use of hospitable dinner-giving Picts? No one can disprove the theory, and this is more than can be said for many another.

The more they are examined, the more are the actual fortresses of Britain stripped of any pretensions to extreme antiquity, and brought within the Norman period. There are two leading objects of fortification—the protective and the aggressive; and, according to the view we have been supporting, it has been the function of the Norman, in the development of European history, to have been the inventor and propagator of the kind of works adapted to the latter object. Fortresses of mere refuge are on the tops of hills, or in other inaccessible places. It does not suit the aggressor to go to the wilds—he must have his elements of strength in the very middle of the people whom he is to rule over. If a rock happens to be found bulging out of a fine alluvial district—as the plutonic upheavings of trap have supplied in Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton—it is well; but, where there are no natural strengths, they must be artificially constructed—and art has in this department far outstripped nature, or has rather found in her own resources better means of defence against her instruments of destruction than nature provides.

The Saxons did not raise strongholds of this kind, nor did the northern races, in their native districts; and, indeed, it is rather curious to observe that there is scarcely a feudal castle to be found in the Scandinavian territories, whence issued the race who strewed all Europe with fortresses. Scott speaks of Bamborough as “Ida’s castle, huge and square;” but there can now be little doubt that it is a Norman edifice. If the tall gaunt tower of Conisborough retain its Saxon antiquity, yet it is evident that it must have been a rude and feeble strength, standing alone without the outworks, which were the great achievement of Norman engineering. Some other bare towers of this character are supposed to be of ante-Norman origin, as the round tower of Trematon, in Cornwall, and that of Launceston, on the apex of a conical rock, round the base of which Norman works have been raised.

Scott is historically correct, as he almost ever is, when he thus describes the abode of Cedric the Saxon:—“A low irregular building, containing several courtyards or enclosures, extending over a considerable space of ground; and which, though its size argued the inhabitant to be a person of wealth, differed entirely from the tall, turreted, and castellated buildings in which the Norman nobility resided, and which had become the universal style of architecture throughout England.”

William the Norman found no castles to resist him. He resolved that any one who came after him should complain of no such omission. England proper immediately bristled with strongholds. They were afterwards extended to Wales and Ireland; and it is perhaps the most remarkable episode in the history of Norman fortification, as indicative of the systematic zeal with which the system was conducted, that during the brief tenure of Scotland, the opportunity was taken for dispersing throughout the country Edwardian castles.

The earliest Norman form was the vast square keep, such as Bamborough New Castle, or the Tower of London. The value of projecting angles seems soon to have been felt, but it does not appear that the noble flanking round towers, which make a perfect Norman fortress, were devised until the days of the Edwards. The central strength then consisted of a square work, with a round tower at each angle. When the work was very large, demi-towers might project here and there from its face. This was the leading principle of modern fortification—the protection of the face. It is understood that no plain wall-plate, however strong, can be defended from an enemy ready to sacrifice a sufficient number of men to batter it open and rush in by the breach. The object, then, is by outworks to keep the assailants at a distance. The flanking towers accomplished this for the Norman fortress, and the work of a siege was not in those days utterly unlike what it now is in general character, though the less destructive character of the weapons on either side made it a much closer affair.

There is room for considerable classification, and even for abundant technical nomenclature, among the besieging engines used before the invention of gunpowder. The term mangona, or mangonel, was generally applicable to ballistic engines, moved by springs, or quick descending weights. The trebuchet, the matafunda, the ribaudequin, and the petrary, were special machines for discharging what the Americans call rocks. There were the robinet, the espringal, and the bricole, which discharged huge iron bolts and other miscellaneous mischievous articles. The oddest of all names to find among these wicked and destructive agents is conveyed in a sentence by Grose, who says that “Beugles, or bibles, were also engines for throwing large stones, as we learn from an ancient poem;” and he quotes as his authority the Romance of Claris, in the Royal library of Paris (No. 7534).

“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,Gétent trop manuement.”

“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,Gétent trop manuement.”

“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,Gétent trop manuement.”

“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,

Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,

Gétent trop manuement.”

Besides the ram and the testudo, with which every boy becomes acquainted in the plates to hisRoman Antiquities, there were the instruments bearing the quadrupedal names of the war-wolf, the cat, and the sow. “The cattus or cat-house, gattus or cat,” says the instructive Grose, “was a covered shed, occasionally fixed on wheels, and used for covering of soldiers employed in filling up the ditch, preparing the way for the movable tower, or mining the wall. It was called a cat because under it soldiers lay in watch like a cat for its prey. Some of these cats had crenelles and chinks, from whence the archers could discharge their arrows. These were called castellated cats. Sometimes under this machine the besiegers worked a small kind of ram.”[22]The sow reminds all true Scotsmen of Black Agnes of Dunbar jeering Salisbury with the farrowing of his sow, when she toppled on its wooden roof a mass of rock, and beheld the mutilated sappers crawling from beneath their shattered protector, like so many pigs. But the chief of all besieging works was the movable tower, brought up face to face with the defenders, and containing battering-rams below, with the various instruments already mentioned, employed in its several upper storeys. To oppose such a formidable engine, which could only be applied by some commander of vast resources, the flanking round towers were of invaluable service, as the bastions and outworks are at the present day. The main difference in the projectile direction of the operations in the two is, that while the fire of a fort is chiefly horizontal, the assaults made by the Norman keep were vertical, and hence came the crest of machicolations and turrets which has given so picturesque a character to the whole school of baronial architecture.

The instances of the Norman castle in its more perfect shape, still existing, are very interesting in a historical view. It may be observed, that in the settled districts of England there are specimens of the older and ruder style of Norman work; but that, in the Edwardian conquests, the fully developed form is the oldest of which vestiges are to be found.

Aberconway, or Snowdon Castle in Carnarvonshire, must have been one of the most formidable specimens, from the great extent of its curtain walls, and its numerous round towers. It was built, say authorities on which we place no reliance, except in so far as they correspond with the character of the edifice, in 1284; it served the purpose for which the strongest fortresses are required—that of a frontier defence. In Flintshire there are Hawarden and Rhudland. Beaumaris, in Anglesea, has some fine diminishing towers. Carew, in Pembrokeshire, has a sort of angular buttresses, instead of the graceful increment towards the base, in the round towers; but it is a luxuriant and noble specimen; and though Welsh tradition says it belonged to the princes of South Wales—no man can tell how many hundreds of years before William or Rollo either—and was given by Rhys ap Theodore, with his daughter, Nest, as a marriage portion to Gerrald de Carrio, yet we take the liberty of holding that it as clearly bears the mark of the invader of Wales, as any government-house in Canada or New Zealand bears evidence that it is not the work of the natives. We take Cilgarron, Haverford-west, and Mannorbeer castles, in the same county, to belong to the same category.

The same characteristics do not so frequently occur in the southern English counties, though there is Pevensey in Sussex, Goodrich in Herefordshire, and Cowling in Kent, and there may be several other instances. They reappear on the Border, where they were connected with the Scottish wars; the forms may be seen in Prudho, Twizel, the outworks of Bamborough, and in a modernised shape at Alnwick.

Ireland is rich in these quadrilateral flanked edifices. There is Enniscorthy guarding the bridge of the Slaney in Wexford, and Dunmore in Meath, one of the most entire and regular specimens, if we may judge by the representation of Grose, who, to do him justice, never idealises. It is one of the many castles attributed to De Lacey, the governor of Meath. Another of them, Kilkea, continued long to raise its flanking round towers after it had laughed at the ferocious raids of the O’Moors and O’Dempsies in the English pale. Two of the best specimens, Lea, in Queen’s county, and Ferns in Wexford, were attacked and taken in the romantic inroad of Edward Bruce, who thought that, as his brother had, by one gallant achievement, wrested a crown in Scotland from the encroaching Norman, he might as well endeavour to take one in Ireland. Grandison Castle, with two beautiful specimens of the bell-shaped round tower, is attributed to the reign of James I.; but, though it is not the peculiar defect of Irish antiquities to be post-dated, this portion must, we think, belong to the Norman period. There are fine specimens of the round tower at Ballylachan and Ballynafad, whence the M‘Donoughs were driven forth, and the utterly un-Norman names of these buildings do not exclude them from identification as the work of the courtly invaders. In Ireland, however, this sort of work never ceased. There were ever O’Shauchnessies, O’Donahues, O’Rourkes, or O’Dempsies, keeping the Norman or the Saxon at work in making fortresses; and perhaps the latest specimen of it is a relic of the ’48, which we saw the other day in an antiquarian rummage in ancient and ruiniferous Cashel, being a large iron box with loopholes projecting out from the barrack where it was placed, to rake the street into which it projected with musketry from the loopholes.

In Scotland, the Anglo-Norman origin of the earliest true baronial fortresses is attested with remarkable precision. In the first place, there is not a vestige in Scotland of the earlier kind of square keep, such as might have been raised in the days of the Conqueror, or of William Rufus, with its semicircular arches and dog-toothed decorations. The pointed architecture and the Edwardian baronial had come into use ere any of the fortresses of which we possess remains were erected. Hence, the oldest of the Scottish castles were evidently built by Edward to secure his conquest. They may be enumerated as those of Caerlaverock, Bothwell, Dirleton, Kildrummie, and Lochindorb. These names at once excite recollections of the war of independence, when these castles were taken and retaken, and were surrounded by the most interesting and enduring associations of that majestic conflict.

The architectural progeny which this style of building left in Scotland, is very different from its growth into the bastioned fortifications of other countries. The Scottish laird, or chief, when he made his house a fortress, as he had imminent necessity for doing, could not afford to erect the great flanking towers of the Normans; but he stuck little turrets on the corners of his block-house, which served his purpose admirably; and there are no better flanked fortresses, considered with a view to the form of attack to which they were subjected, than our peel-houses.

On the other hand, in the Continental castles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Heidelberg, Perronne, and Plessis la Tour, as the old representations give it, we see the flanking system extending itself laterally, until it forms something between the Norman keep and the modern fortress. It was on Plessis that Philip de Comines moralises, as a large prison into which the great King Louis had virtually immured himself, becoming, by his own exertions for the enlargement of his power, and his protection from secret enemies, nothing better than the hapless immured prisoner, whose lot he forced upon so many others.

The one great leading step which modern fortification took beyond the mere flanking system, is the discovery of the glacis for covering the stone-work, and protecting it from the attacks of cannon. The whole system, it appears, is now on trial. The charge against it is, that every addition made to it in the way of protecting works, only renders a fort the more certain of ultimate capture, since these protecting works are themselves easily taken. It is said that they save the main work from a general escalade which is never likely to be attempted, but facilitate a deliberate siege, which is the proper method of taking fortified places. It is said that in fortification we must, as in other matters of war, recur to the first principle, that the best way to protect ourselves is to kill our enemy. Of old, the main defences of a vessel were to protect the deck by castles stem and stern from a boarding enemy; now the arrangement is directed to the destruction of the enemy before he can board. Our old knights in armour were a sort of moving fortresses made more for protection than destruction. In Italy, the steel encasement was brought to such perfection, that at the battle of Tornoue, under Charles VIII., we are told by Father Daniel that a number of Italian knights were overthrown, but could not be killed until the country people brought huge stones and sledge-hammers and broke their shells, like those of so many lobsters. It sounds like an odd accompaniment of civilisation that she should make the external form of warfare more destructive and less defensive—but so it is; and a reform in fortification is proposed, which, by the abandonment of the flanking system, and something like a restoration of the primitive form, is to make the fort more terrible to the invader, as a means of making it a more effective defence.

We profess not to enter on so great a question. Mere theories we have herein offered to our reader; and as they are given in all innocence and good-humour, all we pray is, that he will not, if they differ from his own, condemn us to some dire mysterious fate. Let him, if we displease him, simply content himself with the old established remedy, and mutter to himself, “Pooh! humbug!” And we on our part engage that we shall live in all charity with all men who accept not our theory; and will by no means endeavour to prove that they are sensual, lewd, dishonourable people, deserving of some dire punishment.

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