Pevensey; Vaulting in basement of north tower
The tower at Carew just mentioned is at earliest of late thirteenth-century date, and has several advanced features. Though its projection from the curtain is regularly rounded, its inward projection is rectangular, so that its plan is actually an oblong with a rounded end. It seems to have been intended to have been used in connection with the gatehouse: its first and second floors had no direct communication with each other, but both communicated with the gatehouse, and the ground-floor of the gatehouse had a large lateral opening in the direction of the first floor of the tower. The corresponding tower at the north-east angle was used in connection with the domestic buildings, and had a vaulted chapel ([248]) upon its first floor, from the north wall of which open two rooms for the use of the priest, with a garde-robe in the second. One tower, therefore, was purely defensive, additional precautions having been taken, no doubt, to guard a postern which opens from the basement upon the scarp of the ditch; while the other was merely an annexe to one of the two dwelling-houses within the enclosure. The use of the eastern and south-western towers at Warkworth ([49]) was equally distinct. We have seen that the south-west tower (Cradyfargus) was used in connection with the domestic buildings: this may not have been its original purpose, but it was certainly thus employed early in the fourteenth century. The great feature of the east tower is the huge loop in each of its five outer faces, designed for a cross-bow 16 feet long: these loops, splayed throughout and fan-tailed at top and bottom, are the finest examples of cross-loops left in England, and declare the main purpose of the tower at once. In later years, when the cross-bow was out of fashion, the interior of the tower was somewhat altered, and a fireplace inserted.
Carew; Chapel
Door of main gatehouse
Chepstow Castle
Stair to vaulted chamber in outer bailey
Chepstow Castle
The best examples of curtain-towers, both abroad and in England, form complete cylinders, like the angle-towers at Coucy, or polygons, like some of the towers at Carnarvon. But room was spared if the cylinder or polygon was left incomplete, and its inner face made nearly flush with the curtain. The two towers on the curtain of the inner ward at Pembroke projected with semicircular curves into the outer ward, but were flat at the back: the south tower covered the gateway of the inner ward, which was not in the face of the wall, but round an angle. The towers of the outer ward, on the other hand, are mostly complete cylinders: the stairs were vices contained in rectangular turrets on one side, the outer walls of which are curved to meet the circumference of the towers ([181]).[266] Marten’s tower at Chepstow, and the towers of the curtain of the fine early fourteenth-century castle of Llanstephan, are cases in which the projection of the tower is only external. The tower which caps the eastern angle at Llanstephan is a half-cylinder, springing, not directly from the curtain, but from a broad rectangular projection on its face.[267] The variations which might be noticed in the attachment of towers to the curtain are manifold: but, as time goes on, the ordinary curtain-tower, where it was not placed at an angle of a ward, stood flush with the curtain on its inner side ([228]). Where the tower stood on the curtain by itself, unattached to other buildings within the castle, there was usually an entrance to the basement direct from the bailey, on one side of which a vice in a turret attached to the tower rose to the upper floors and roof, communicating on the level of the first floor with the curtain. The doorway opening on the curtain was fitted with a strong door, and, in Marten’s tower at Chepstow castle, where the tower was of special importance, standing as it does at the lowest and most vulnerable point of the site, was provided with a portcullis.