There is, after all, a very great deal in a name. A “Lancashire man” has a commercial sound: you detect the chink of coin in it, and it has, in truth, a modern appropriateness, for Lancashire is nowadays nothing if not commercial. Call him, however, a “Lancastrian,” and he becomes at once to the imagination an embattled warrior worthy of figuring, with all the circumstances of chivalry, in the Wars of the Roses.
LANCASTER.
THE NORMAN WAY
There are still some few traces of the Roman antiquity of Lancaster, in the castle—the castle on the river Lune, that gave the place its name—but it is in Norman and mediæval circumstances that it chiefly figures. The castle, the very beginning and origin of Lancaster, stands on a bold hill rising above the Lune in so convenient a situation for defence that Nature might almost have thoughtfully provided it for the purpose, and represents the stronghold built by Roger of Poictou, who held all Lancashire from William the Conqueror. Exactly how much of the once formidable Roman castrum he found here cannot be known, for the Normans were more intent upon conquering and securing their military successes with fortresses, than upon preserving antiquities. The cult of the antique was, in fact, not yet born; and when, about 1094, the great Roger began to build the grim keep that still remains the chief feature of Lancaster Castle, he spared nothing in the way of Roman altars and sculptured relics that might in any way serve his turn. To him and his builders they were relics of old, forgotten things, already dead and damned with Paganism and the Roman rule, some, six hundred years: as remote a period, for example, as from our day backwards to that of Edward the Second, which seems to ourselves no inconsiderable space of time.
So into the foundations of his immensely thick castle walls, and into the rubble core of them went many Roman inscribed stones that antiquaries would now dearly prize. Adrian’s Tower, with the Well Tower, was built originally in Roman times: the first so early as A.D. 125, and the Well Tower in A.D. 305, by Constantius Chlorus. Roger, the Norman, seems to have repaired and added to these. In Roman times the basement of Adrian’s Tower was a place where the corn for the garrison was ground. Later it became a bakery, and has since 1892 been a museum. In the excavations of 1890, an old floor and a considerable deal of rubbish were removed, to a depth of eight and a half feet, revealing the original level. In the course of these works a portion of the Roman millstone for grinding corn was discovered, and here it remains, in company with such diverse objects as a Roman altar, found in the foundations of the Shire Hall in 1797; some pikes captured from the Scottish rebels of 1715, forbidding festoons of fetters, and a “madman’s chair,” fitted with bolts and chains, as used at the time when the dark lower chambers of the keep served the purpose of county lunatic asylum, and, together with the fearful treatment accorded the lunatics, served only to confirm them in their lunacy. There are indeed some very fearful things in this old fortress, place of judgment, and prison of Lancaster Castle, which has been everything, from the home of kings down to debtors’ prison and county gaol.
As Shire Hall, Sessions House, Assize Courts, and gaol it still remains. Prominent among the gruesome sights of the castle are the dungeons in the Well Tower, one below the other, in the basement, where prisoners lay in darkness, secured to the floor by the iron rings that still remain. The roof of the upper dungeon bears witness to the method of its construction. The earth having been first spread with a strongly made layer of wattled osiers, liquid cement was then run over them, and in drying formed a compact mass.
The earth was then easily excavated beneath the ingeniously constructed roof. Some few of the osiers still remain in it.
MALEFACTOR-BRANDING