Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages

by A. Hamilton Thompson

GOODRICH CASTLE: round tower with spur at base

GOODRICH CASTLE: buttery hatches

In France the treatment of the donjon was pursued with more variation than in England. To the middle of the twelfth century belongs, for instance, the donjon of Etampes (Seine-et-Oise), which takes the form of a quatrefoil ([172]). The donjon of Provins (Seine-et-Marne) is of much the same date, the ground-plan forming an octagon flanked by four cylindrical turrets. Although both these towers have analogies in England, they were constructed nevertheless by French engineers at a period before even the rectangular tower had become common with ours.[203] They are also only two out of many diverse experiments. The cylindrical form, however, commended itself to the builders of the finest French examples. Château-Gaillard ([163]) follows closely upon Conisbrough in point of date, having been begun by Richard I. in 1196. The donjon is not, as at Conisbrough, a tower to which the line of a somewhat earlier curtain has been adapted, but is part of a homogeneous scheme of fortification. The site of the castle is the top of a very steep and almost isolated hill on the right bank of the Seine: the west slope is a precipice, and the only practicable attack could be made from the ridge joining the hill to the high ground on the south. The donjon is set so that its west face projects from the curtain of the inner ward, upon the very edge of the precipice. The interior forms a regular cylinder, and the west face is a segment of a circle. On this side the solidity of the masonry is increased by a tremendous outward slope or batter, the whole height of the basement and adjacent curtain. Towards the inner ward, however, the cylinder is strengthened by a covering spur, also battered, so that, while the interior of the castle was commanded from the rampart, the tower offered to the besiegers an angle of immense thickness and strength, immediately opposite the gateway of the inner ward. A possible prototype in France of this form of defence is the donjon of La-Roche-Guyon (Seine-et-Oise), higher up the Seine, where the spur covers about a quarter of the circumference of the tower. Philip Augustus adopted the same device a few years later in the White tower at Issoudun (Indre).[204] It is seen at Goodrich ([174]), Chepstow, and elsewhere.

Château-Gaillard

As the upper portion of the tower of Château-Gaillard is gone, its internal arrangements are difficult to decipher. It was purely a tower of defence; but the inaccessible nature of the west side allowed of large windows being made in that face upon the first floor. There was probably a low second floor, above which was the roof and rampart-walk. The rampart was defended with the aid of a device, unusual at the time, although very general at a later period. The sides of the tower within the ward were furnished with narrow buttress projections above the battering base, which gradually increased in breadth as they went higher. These divided the face of the tower into a series of recesses spanned by low arches, on the outer face of which the parapet was carried. The top of each recess, between the parapet and the wall, was left open, so that the defenders could use the holes for raining down missiles upon their opponents. Such holes, formed by corbelling out a parapet in advance of a wall or tower, are called machicolations (mâchicoulis),[205] and gradually superseded the external gallery of timber. Holes in stone roofs for the same purpose are found at an earlier date, as in the fore-building at Scarborough; and, as early as 1160, they appear in connection with the parapet of a donjon at Niort (Deux-Sèvres).[206] The general tradition is that they were invented by the Crusaders in Syria, where wood for hoarding was not easily obtained; and this is probably true.[207] They appear in a state of perfection, which testifies to a long course of previous experiment, at the great Syrian castle of Le Krak des Chevaliers ([176]), begun in 1202. But hoarding continued in use in Europe long after the building of Château-Gaillard, and even the donjon of Coucy (Aisne), by far the finest of all cylindrical donjons, was garnished with timber hoarding carried on stone corbels—an interesting example of the transition from one form of defence to another.

Le Krak des Chevaliers