Mont-St-Michel; Châtelet
At Lewes, about the end of the thirteenth century, a barbican was added to the front of a Norman gatehouse which was of much the same character as the gatehouses at Porchester and Tickhill. The addition here took the shape of a short passage with a wall on each side, finished at its outer end by a new and lofty gatehouse, rising from the middle of the outer ditch of the castle, and approached by a mounting roadway. The shape of the new gatehouse is an oblong, with its main axis perpendicular to the road, but its angles were capped by round turrets, corbelled out at a point near the spring of the entrance archway ([98]). Such turrets are known as bartizans, and are common in French military architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were not so usual in England, and are seldom found on such a scale as at Lewes: smaller bartizans, corbelled out at a point nearer the battlements of the building in which they occur, may be seen in the gatehouse at Lincoln, and at the angles of the towers of Belsay ([313]) and Chipchase in Northumberland.[256] The parapet of the barbican gatehouse at Lewes is brought forward from the wall on a row of corbels so as to allow room for six formidable machicolations. The work bears some resemblance to the châtelet which covers the main entrance of the fortified abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel ([235]).[257] In France an outer gatehouse like that at Lewes, or an outer enclosure like that at Scarborough, bore the name of châtelet or bastille. All such defences in advance of a gateway, whatever the special name they may bear, may be classed under the head of barbicans.
Beaumaris Castle; Gateway
tutbury: gatehouse
york: Micklegate bar
