The domestic, apart from the military, character of the building, is emphasised in the story which follows the description. John of Warneton, the sainted bishop of Thérouanne (d. 1130), was entertained here, when he came to hold a confirmation in Merchem church. After the confirmation was over, he went back to the castle to change his vestments before proceeding to bless the churchyard. As he returned across the sloping bridge, which at its middle point was about 35 feet above the ditch, the press of the people who crowded to see the holy man was so great, and the old enemy, says the chronicler, so alive to the opportunity, that the bridge broke, and the bishop and his admirers, amid a terrible noise of falling joists, boards, and spars, were thrown to the bottom of the ditch. The castle was, in fact, the private residence of a man who, if he could indulge in the peaceful pleasure of entertaining his bishop, could not afford to live in an unfortified house. Private warfare with his neighbours was the business of his life, and he had to make himself as comfortable as he could within his palisade. Jean de Colmieu does not tell us whether the castle stronghold at Merchem took the shape of a tower or not; but Lambert of Ardres has left a description of the great wooden tower of three stories which the carpenter Louis de Bourbourg constructed about 1099 for Arnould, lord of Ardres. The elaborateness of its design and plan is remarkable, and the motte which bore it must have been of considerable size. The ground-floor contained cellars, store-rooms, and granaries. The first floor contained the chief living-rooms—the common hall, the pantry and buttery, the great chamber where Arnould and his wife slept, with two other rooms, one the sleeping-place of the body-servants. Out of the great chamber opened a room or recess with a fire-place, where the folk of the castle were bled, the servants warmed themselves, or the children were taken in cold weather to be warmed. One may assume that the great chamber was at the end of the hall opposite to the pantry and buttery. The kitchen was probably reached, as in the larger dwelling-houses of later days, by a passage between these offices: it was on the same floor as the hall, but occupied a two-storied extension of the donjon on one side.[58] Below the kitchen were the pig-sty, fowl-house, and other like offices. The third stage of the donjon contained the bed-chambers of the daughters of the house: the sons also could sleep on this floor, if they chose, and here slept the guard of the castle, who relieved one another at intervals in the work of keeping watch. On the eastern side of the first floor was a projecting building, called the logium or parlour, and above this on the top floor was the chapel of the house, “made like in carving and painting to the tabernacle (sic) of Solomon.” Lambert speaks of the stairways and passages of the donjon, but his description of the projecting parlour and chapel is not sufficiently explicit, and his admiration may have magnified the proportions of the building. His description, however, is of great service when applied to the tower donjon of stone, the arrangements of which it serves to explain. Here, again, the fortress was clearly designed as a dwelling house: the supply of rooms, if it is not exaggerated, was quite remarkable for the age. The motte or donjon—Lambert gives it these alternative names—rose in the middle of a marsh, which Arnould converted into a lake or moat by forming sluices: his mill was near the first sluice.
No definite description is left of the defences of the bailey in a castle of this date. There is no doubt, however, that the scarp, or encircling bank of earth, was protected, like the summit of the mount, by a hedge or palisade of the traditional type. Such hedges were the normal defence of any kind of stronghold: the edict of Pistes ordered the destruction of all unlicensed castella, firmitates, et haias—castles, strong dwellings, and hedges. In 1225 Henry III. ordered the forester of Galtres to supply the sheriff of Yorkshire with timber for repairing and making good the breaches of the palisade (palicii) of York castle. The “houses” and “bridge” of the same castle—that is, the buildings within the bailey, and the drawbridge by which the bailey was entered across the ditch, were also of timber. As late as 1324 the stockade on the mount was still of wood, surrounding the stone donjon of the thirteenth century.[59] This is an interesting example of the survival, until a late date, of primitive fortification in a strong and important castle. There is abundant evidence, in fact, that the Norman engineer put his trust, not in stone, but in his earthen rampart and its palisades. When, about 1090, the freebooter Ascelin Goël got possession of the castle of Ivry, he enclosed it “with ditches and thick hedges.”[60] In 1093, Philip I. of France and Robert of Normandy took the part of William of Breteuil, the dispossessed lord of Ivry, and laid siege to the fortified town and castle of Bréval (Seine-et-Oise). With the aid of a siege engine, constructed by Robert of Bellême, they were able to destroy the rampart and encircling hedges.[61] Bréval was in a wooded and remote district, where stone would have been hard to obtain in any case. The grand necessity, in places which were in danger of constant attack, was to provide them with adequate defences which could be constructed in the shortest time possible.
Of the nature of the houses within the bailey, little can be said. They doubtless included shelters for the garrison of the castle, stables for their horses, and various sheds or store-houses. The hall, or building, which was the centre of the domestic life of the castle, was, from the earliest times, the chief building within the circumference of the bailey. We read of the destruction of the principalis aula of the castle of Brionne in 1090, by the red-hot darts which were hurled upon its shingled roof;[62] and stone halls, as at Chepstow and Richmond, were built before the beginning of the twelfth century. But it is certain, on the other hand, that the donjon was, now and later, adapted to domestic as well as purely military uses; and it seems likely that the owner of the castle, in certain cases, was content with his dwelling upon the mount, until, at a later date, the strengthening of the whole enclosure with a stone curtain made it possible for him to raise a more convenient dwelling house within the more ample space of the bailey. In the larger castles, however, where there was a strong permanent garrison, a hall was a necessity for their entertainment.
Where mount-and-bailey castles are found without a trace of stonework, it does not follow that they are necessarily of a date immediately subsequent to the Conquest. Many of these castles, founded by the Conqueror and his followers, became permanent strongholds, and in due course of time were fortified with stone walls and towers. Others were probably founded as an immediate consequence of the Conquest, and were abandoned in favour of other sites. Thus it has been thought that the earthworks at Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, were abandoned by Ilbert de Lacy, when he fixed upon Pontefract as the head of his honour.[63] Trecastle may have been deserted by Bernard of Newmarch for Brecon, or it may have been held by a small garrison as the western outpost of his barony. But it is well known that, for a long time after the Conquest, in the period of constant strife between the Norman kings and their barons, a large number of castles came into existence in defiance of royal edicts. We know that, during the reign of Stephen, when every man did what was right in his own eyes, an almost incredible number of unlicensed or “adulterine”[64] castles were constructed. As a result of the agreement between Stephen and Henry II., many of these were destroyed, and the number of English castles was materially lessened. Later on, when the revolt of the Mowbrays against Henry II. took place, the victory of the king’s party was followed by the destruction of the Mowbray castles at Thirsk, Kirkby Malzeard, and Kinnard’s Ferry in the isle of Axholme, and of Bishop Pudsey’s castle at Northallerton. Of these four castles earthworks or traces of earthworks, but no stonework, remain. It is reasonable to suppose that the material of their fortifications was timber. Haste in the construction of castles, speed in their destruction, during the century following the Conquest, are easily explained if their works were merely of earth and wood. And it is thus possible that, when we meet with a mount-and-bailey fortress, unnamed in history and untouched by medieval stonemasons, it may be neither on a site chosen and then abandoned by an early Norman lord, nor a mere outpost of some greater castle, but a stronghold hastily entrenched and heaped up in time of rebellion, by some noble of the time of Stephen or Henry II., and dismantled when peace was restored, and the authority of the sovereign recognised.
CHAPTER IV
THE PROGRESS OF ATTACK AND DEFENCE
The earthwork fortifications, the progress of which we have traced up to the Norman conquest, were of a very simple kind. It is obvious that, in the history of military architecture, any improvement in defence is the consequence of improved methods of attack. The stone-walled town of the middle ages, the castle or private citadel, with its curtain wall and the subdivision of its enclosure into more than one bailey, succeeded the palisaded earthwork as a natural result of the development of the art of siege. Against an enemy whose artillery was comparatively feeble the stockaded enclosure was effective enough: slingers and bowmen, working at close quarters, might do damage to the defenders, but the palisade on the bank, divided from the besiegers by a formidable ditch, was proof against missiles launched against it by individuals, and could be carried only by a determined rush, or if it were not sufficiently protected against fire. Modern warfare against uncivilised tribes has shown that a stronghold defended by a thick hedge is a serious problem to a besieging force. If, under modern conditions, the stockade is a barrier to troops equipped with powerful firearms, the difficulty which it afforded to the early medieval warrior is obvious.
The age of firearms, however, which brought the death-blow to medieval siegecraft, was long in coming; and meanwhile the progress of the science of attack depended upon the improvement in methods which could be employed only in close proximity to the besieged stronghold, or within a very limited range. Engines for hurling stones or javelins increased in size and strength. Devices were brought into play for scaling or undermining the defences of the town or castle. The attack was directed against the defences rather than against the defenders. A casual stone might do injury to the medieval soldier, or an arrow might pierce between the joints of his harness; but his armour, which became more heavy and more carefully protected as the chance of risk from such missiles increased, made loss of life in the course of a siege a misfortune rather than an inevitable contingency. His first anxiety, therefore, was to make the defensive works which sheltered him impregnable. As the enemy multiplied his designs against the palisaded enclosure, the palisade gave place to the stone wall; as the enemy’s means for prosecuting his attempts increased in power, the wall increased in height and strength; and at last, during the transitional epoch in which firearms gradually superseded the older and more primitive weapons of attack, the wall presented to the besieger a thoroughly guarded front which rendered his medieval siege tactics obsolete, and called for new developments in his craft.
The progress of fortification under these conditions will be the subject of the remaining chapters of this book, with special reference to the castle, in the defences of which the military engineers of the middle ages displayed the epitome of their science. Before we proceed, however, to the growth of the stone-walled castle, some description is necessary of the improvement in siege-engines and methods of attack by which its development was governed. It must be kept in mind that the siegecraft of the middle ages advanced upon lines that were by no means new. Its engines, its devices for breaking down or scaling walls and towers, were not new inventions, but relics of Roman military science. With the decay of the Roman power in western Europe, these materials of warfare, unknown to the Teutonic conquerors of Britain, had fallen into disuse. Preserved in the east by the Byzantine empire, the inheritor of Roman civilisation, they became familiar to the barbarians who overran Europe in the dark ages; and their revival in the parts of Europe most remote from the historic centres of Roman influence was due in no small measure to the adoption of traditional siegecraft by the invading tribes which had come into conflict with Byzantine strategy. So far as England is concerned, the first advance in the art of attack was the direct result of the Norman conquest; while subsequent improvement in western Europe generally was primarily due to the knowledge of eastern warfare gained during the Crusades. A slight retrospect, under these conditions, is desirable, which will give us some insight into the methods of siegecraft during the period of whose strongholds and art of fortification we already have seen something.