A good normal gatehouse, which may be taken as typical of the period, is that of Rockingham castle ([226]). Its details indicate that it belongs to the later part of the reign of Henry III. It is upon the east side of the enclosure, and its projection is almost entirely towards the field. The plan is, as usual, a rectangle with a passage through the centre, and with semicylindrical towers projecting on either side of the outer entrance. No vaulting was used. The passage is entered through a porch beneath a drop arch—that is to say, a pointed arch whose two segments are drawn from centres below the springing line—and was guarded, just within the arch, by a portcullis in front of a wooden door. At the inner end of the passage was another door. Openings in the side walls of the passage communicated with rectangular chambers;[249] and in the east walls of these were doorways into semicircular chambers within the towers. There was only one upper floor to the gatehouse and its towers. In this simple building, one is reminded at once of the rectangular stone gatehouse of the early Norman castle, with its upper chamber. Improvement is seen in the substitution, for the original entrance, of a central passage flanked by chambers upon the ground-floor; in the addition of flanking towers of scientific form; and in the protection of the timber doors by an iron portcullis.
Newcastle; Black gate
The gatehouse at Newcastle, known as the Black gate ([227]), which became the entrance to the castle in the thirteenth century, is an example of a more elaborately constructed and exceptional type. The ground plan is simplicity itself, a central passage flanked by towers containing guard-chambers. The towers, however, are not merely projections from a rectangular body, but flank the whole gateway with a wide convex curve. There is a large single vaulted chamber on the ground floor of each, lighted by loops which enabled the occupants to command the castle ditch. The architectural details of the gateway are very simple, but there is a short arcade of trefoiled arches in each of the side walls, and the vaulting of the guard-rooms presents some ingenious peculiarities. The upper portion of the gatehouse was much altered in the seventeenth century. The original design, with its great segmental flanking towers, may have been the prototype of the even more noble gatehouse of Dunstanburgh, which is a work of nearly three-quarters of a century later.[250]
Walled town in state of siege
The upper floors of the gatehouse may be reserved for discussion until we come to the concentric plan, in which the gatehouse became a building of exceptional importance. For military purposes the one necessary upper chamber was that in which the machinery controlling the portcullis was worked. In the floor of this room was the upper end of the groove, through which, by means of a pulley in the ceiling, the iron frame was drawn up or down, hanging here when it was not in use to close the entrance below. Many examples of a portcullis chamber remain, as at Berry Pomeroy and in Bootham bar at York.[251]
York; Walmgate Bar
The entrance of the castle, under improved conditions of fortification, was defended by an outwork or barbican. The term “barbican,” which seems to be of eastern derivation, was used indiscriminately to denote any outwork by which the principal approach to a castle or a gateway of a town was covered. The word “barmkin,” which is possibly, as already noted, a corruption of “barbican,” was applied in the north of England to the outer yard of a “pele,” or fortified (literally, palisaded) residence. In many castles, as at Ludlow, Denbigh, or Manorbier, the outer ward was an addition or supplement to the plan of the castle, guarding the approach to the inner ward or castle proper, and its curtain was subsidiary to the strongly fortified curtain of the inner ward. Such outer wards or base-courts resemble the northern “barmkins,” an exact parallel to which is seen in the base-court of the fifteenth-century fortified house of Wingfield. Covering outworks were by no means uncommon, and also served the purpose of a barbican. As at Château-Gaillard, they might take the form of a walled outer ward, or, as at Llandovery, they might be horn-shaped earthworks, thrown out at an exposed point in the defences; in either case, they had their own ditch, an extension of the main ditch of the castle. But the barbican proper was a walled extension of a gatehouse to the field, confining the approach to the limited area of a narrow passage. The most simple instance is the barbican in front of Walmgate bar at York ([229]), where a gatehouse, originally of the twelfth century, was strengthened by the addition, upon the outer side, of two parallel walls at right angles to the sides of the gateway. Thus, in order to force the gates, an attacking party would have to traverse a long and narrow alley between high walls, in which they were exposed to the missiles of the defenders concentrated upon them from the ramparts of the gatehouse and the adjacent wall.