[215] The domestic buildings may be in part earlier, but were largely reconstructed in the thirteenth century.
[216] The tower is sometimes described as being of five stages: the dome, however, was merely a vault, and did not form a separate stage.
[217] An account of Flint castle is given by Harvey, Castles and Walled Towns, p. 123 seq. Speed’s map of Flintshire, made c. 1604, shows that the tower was joined to the adjacent curtain by a wall, the rampart-walk of which probably gave access to the entrance on the first floor of the tower.
[218] In 1277 the castle of Flint was a timber structure, so that the present work cannot be earlier than the end of the thirteenth century. The masonry is composed of large blocks of yellow sandstone, decayed where they are exposed to the tide. There was an outer bailey, the platform of which alone remains, with a ditch between it and the castle proper.
[219] These holes do not, however, surround the tower, so that the passage may have been only partially roofed.
[220] The keep of Launceston was probably built about the close of the twelfth century: that at Flint later, as already noted.
[221] Reproduced in Memorials of Old Yorkshire, 1909, opposite p. 256.
[222] I.e., retaining walls used to face (revêtir) a sloping surface.
[223] A bartizan is a small turret or lookout corbelled out at an angle of a tower or on the surface of a wall. The word is connected with “brattice” (bretèche); and such turrets, like the machicolated parapet, are the stone counterpart of the bratticing and hoarding of timber applied to fortresses at an earlier date.
[224] Ventress’s model of the castle, made in 1852, shows the great hall near the north-east corner of the outer ward, its west end being nearly opposite the main entrance of the castle. The outer ward nearly surrounded the small inner ward, which contained the keep.