Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages

by A. Hamilton Thompson

The barbican was, in fact, an application to the main entrance of the castle of the form of defence hitherto applied most scientifically to the fore-building of the keep.[252] Its general employment as an outer defence was the direct consequence of the removal of interest from the keep to the curtain. Not merely had the wall itself to offer a stout resistance to attack, so that every point was simultaneously engaged in active defence; but the main approaches had to be so arranged as to involve an enemy in perplexity. In the protection of the main avenues of access to the town or castle, we arrive at an unconscious reproduction in stone of the methods employed by prehistoric builders of earthwork. Experience taught the engineers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the lessons which she had taught the makers of Maiden Castle, and the adoption of the concentric plan of fortification followed as a matter of course.

warwick: barbican

The contraction of the main entrance of the castle by a barbican is well seen at Bamburgh, Conisbrough ([217]), and Scarborough ([129]). In the first two instances, owing to the isolated position of the fortress, and the nature of the ground outside, the main approach would have to be in any case by a path made up the steep face of the hill, and immediately below the curtain. Bamburgh was unusually well aided by nature, and the gateway, flanked by two slender round towers, is at a level considerably lower than that of the summit of the rock; in this case, the rising road within the gateway, cut in the basalt, and commanded by the curtain and the keep within the curtain, was the barbican of the castle. The hill on which Conisbrough was set is merely a steep knoll, with a wide outer ditch on its less precipitous side. The outer ward, on the south-west side of the ditch, was apparently an earthwork without stone walls.[253] A gatehouse was set on the edge of the ditch, in advance of and at a lower level than the curtain of the inner ward. Its arrangements, so far as they can be traced, were not greatly superior to those of early stone gatehouses. Its lateral walls, however, were prolonged up the edge of the slope to the entrance of the inner ward. The left-hand wall joined an angle of the curtain half-way up the passage; the wall on the right hand was continued so as to cover the inner gateway, which was at right angles to the passage thus formed.[254] As at Bamburgh, the approach in this case is a narrow gangway between high walls, commanded throughout from the rampart of the inner ward, and, for the second half of the distance, passing immediately beneath it. A passage of this type, with a right-angled turn at its far end, might easily become a death-trap for a besieging force.

At Scarborough the castle cliff is almost entirely separated from the town by a deep ravine, and the approach is along the narrow ridge between this chasm and the northward face of the rock. The gatehouse, flanked by rounded towers, forms part of a small and irregularly shaped walled outwork or barbican placed upon the outer curve of the ravine. From this tête-du-pont, as it may be called, a straight passage, walled on both sides, crosses the head of the ravine, passing over a bridge on its way, and skirting, on the left hand, the sheer edge of the cliff. On the further side, the space widens into the outer ward, commanded and nearly blocked by the rectangular keep. The wall on the left is continued along the edge of the cliff, while that on the right, which, as being more open to attack, is much the thicker, bears away with the curve of the slope, and joins the south curtain of the inner ward upon its west face.[255]

Warwick Castle; Barbican

The examples already given illustrate the precautions which thirteenth-century engineers took to guard their castles from surprise and storm; and the arrangements found in the Welsh castles of Edward I.’s reign are even more remarkable. It will be noticed that in the three castles just mentioned the main gatehouse is thrown forward to the outer end of the barbican, which forms a narrow passage uniting the gatehouse to the inner entrance. In late thirteenth and fourteenth century castles, however, the barbican was, as we see it at Walmgate bar in York, an addition to the front of a gatehouse. This method of covering gateways by outer defences is seen at Kenilworth, where the approach to the outer ward of the castle, across the lake formed by the damming-up of two rivulets, was broken up into sections by three lines of defence. First, an outer earthwork, segmental in shape, and strengthened by round stone bastions, guarded the approach to the first gatehouse. Beyond this gatehouse, which formed a tête-du-pont like the Middle tower at London, a long causeway or dam, with a wall on its eastern face, crossed the lake to the strong gatehouse known as Mortimer’s tower, which, guarded by two portcullises, stood upon the end of the dam, in advance of the curtain. But the ordinary barbican, which was characteristic of the castles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was not a long and elaborately protected line of outer defences, but a stone building thrown out in front of a gatehouse, so as to concentrate the attacking force into a small space, and prevent a combined rush on the principal gateway. The contracted approach thus made was usually, in the later examples, as at Warwick ([231]), Alnwick ([243]), and Porchester, all barbicans of the fourteenth century, a straight lane between walls. At Porchester it is set in front of the twelfth-century gatehouse of the inner ward, which was covered in the early fourteenth century by a rectangular projection, pierced by lateral doorways opening upon the scarp of the inner ward outside the curtain. The barbican proper, somewhat later in date, is composed of two parallel walls, guarding the drawbridge from the base-court or outer ward. A loop cut obliquely through the west wall of this passage opened towards the west gateway of the base-court, so that a surprise of the barbican could be prevented. In this case, as at Alnwick, the approach to the barbican was a drawbridge; but at Alnwick, where the drawbridge crossed an outer loop of the castle ditch, the ditch proper was crossed by a second drawbridge within the barbican.