[265] Garde-robes built upon arches across re-entering angles of a wall occur on each side of a large buttress in the west wall of Southampton. A similar feature occurs at the junction of the north curtain of Porchester castle with one of the Roman towers. In both cases the addition was probably made in the fourteenth century.
[266] These towers appear to be of the fourteenth century, and are therefore much later in date than the towers of the inner curtain.
[267] At Flint, Rhuddlan, and several other castles, the angle-towers were three-quarter circles, the face towards the bailey being a flat wall, on which, at Rhuddlan as at Harlech, the rampart-walk was corbelled out.
[268] These walls, pierced by seven gates and flanked by thirty-nine rectangular towers, were begun under Pope Clement VI. in 1345, and finished c. 1380. The rampart is reached by stairs set against the inner face of the walls. The walls of Aigues-Mortes, built 1272-5, and of Carcassonne, begun earlier and completed later than Aigues-Mortes, belong to an earlier period of fortification, corresponding to that of our Edwardian castles. Of other well-known French examples, the walls of Mont-Saint-Michel are of various dates from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century: those of Domfront are partly of the thirteenth, those of Fougères ([250]) of the fifteenth century, and those of Saint-Malo chiefly of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The thirteenth-century enceinte of Coucy has already been referred to. A list of the numerous remains of town walls in France will be found in Enlart, ii. 623 seq., under the name of each department.
[269] Clark, i. 460, 312, 314.
[270] The cross-wall at Carnarvon is gone.
[271] The polygonal towers which flank the great gatehouse at Denbigh had the same characteristic of obtuse angles, as can be still seen where the masonry has not been stripped from the rubble core.
[272] The threshold of the gateway was from 35 to 40 feet above the bottom of the ditch.
[273] The eastern gateway was defended in the same way.
[274] Le Krak (Kala’at-el-Hosn) was rebuilt in 1202, and held by the Franks till 1271 (Enlart, ii. 536). It was a frontier fortress of the county of Tripoli in Syria, commanding the mountain country to the east, and must be distinguished from the great castle of Kerak in Moab, near the Dead sea, built about 1140, and surrendered in 1188, “the eastern bulwark of the kingdom of Jerusalem” (Oman, Art of War, 541). The entrance to the castle of Kerak has been described above, pp. 240, 241.