[9] Outer court.
[10] "The pleasance" was a garden, planted with fruit trees and groves, which served for a place of promenade, and for divers outdoor pastimes.
[11] In this figure the black tint indicates the Roman substructions preserved and surmounted by new works; the yellow the Roman buildings entirely razed; the red the defences added by the lord of La Roche-Pont; and the grey the domestic buildings rebuilt or repaired.
[12] An outer wall of no great height.
CHAPTER X.
The Duke of Burgundy was making all speed to reduce his vassal. In the space of a fortnight he had gathered six or seven thousand men, and was beginning his march. Anseric and Baron Guy had not failed to make the most of this respite. They provisioned the castle for three months at least. They fabricated four large trebuchets and half-a-dozen catapults. Timber in sufficient quantity had been cut in the forest for making hoardings, palisades, and wooden defences. Thirty stone-cutters were constantly at work making projectiles of sixty and a hundred pounds weight for the mangonels. Each workman could produce ten in a day, and at the end of a fortnight they had amassed a store of four thousand five hundred. In the town, cross-bows and quarrels were being made; for the townsmen who had to render service were bound to come armed, equipped, and provided with missiles in sufficient quantity. There were archers also, for whom arrows of ashwood, bows of yew, and cords of long-fibred hemp were being made.
Although the lord of Roche-Pont could not, as stated above, assemble more than eighteen hundred men, and therefore could not contemplate defending the whole plateau—that is to say, the castle and the abbey—Baron Guy, who had reasons for it, urged him not to allow the enemy to occupy the monastery without defending it, even were it feebly. "You ought to defend the monastery," he would say to his nephew, "whenever the interests of the suzerain are involved; and since henceforth you are going to do homage for your fief to the king of France, he is your suzerain; his interests, therefore, are involved, and it is your duty to defend the abbey."
To this specious reasoning Anseric could find nothing to answer. The northern wall of the abbey was therefore put in a state of defence; they connected its north-east angle with the débris of the Roman wall still existing on the edge of the plateau by a strong palisade and ditch, and barricaded the western brow above the town, between the abbey and the bailey of the castle.