CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

THE art of construction in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire to the dawn of the Reformation, though of late years much and successfully investigated, has been approached almost exclusively from its ecclesiastical side. This was, for many reasons, to be expected. The service of the altar justified, perhaps required, the highest degree of taste in the design of the temple, and the utmost richness in its ornamentation. Moreover, the greater number of our ecclesiastical buildings are still in use, and even the remains of those that are in decay, being chiefly monastic, are interesting from the intimate connexion of their foundations and endowments with early piety and learning, and from the evidence supplied by their records of the descent of landed property and of the ancestry of the older historic families of the country.

The coëval military structures exhibit, generally, no such splendours of design or excellence of execution, nor do they awaken such sympathies in our breasts. The parish church is the common concern of all who worship within its walls, or whose dead are laid within its sacred precinct; but the castle, always a dangerous and unpopular neighbour, and often associated with local tyranny or the disasters of war, was in most instances ruined or swept away with the general use of gunpowder, and even where preserved, its narrow dimensions and inconvenient arrangements, particulars more or less essential to its value as a place of defence, rendered it, except in a few instances, unfit for a modern residence, and have thus tended to sever it still more completely from the current sympathies and interests of humanity. Nevertheless, there is in these structures, obsolete as they are, or because they are obsolete, much to attract those who care to know of the life and customs of former generations. Many of these buildings were the work and residence of persons who have left their mark upon the history of our country. Some, as York, Lincoln, Norwich, Dover, Rochester, Chester, Colchester, Wallingford, have been the seats of Saxon thanes or Danish jarls, succeeding a Roman or perhaps British occupant; others, as Bamborough, Taunton, Sarum, Tutbury, and Hereford, are associated with the earliest, most celebrated, or most patriotic of our purely English kings; others, as the Tower, Windsor, Winchester, Berkeley, Pontefract, Newark, Carisbrook, were the scene of the splendours of our greatest or the miseries of our most unfortunate monarchs; some, as Oxford, Northampton, Lewes, Kenilworth, are connected with great constitutional struggles between prince and subject; some, as Exeter, Bedford, Rochester, Pembroke, Chepstow, and Raglan, remind us of bloody combats and sieges from the times of the Conqueror to those of Charles the First. Some castles, as Sherborne, the Devizes, Malmesbury, Wolvesley, Newark, Farnham, Norham, and Durham, were constructed by lordly ecclesiastics who brought the arm of the soldier to support the brain of the priest and statesman; some again, as Hedingham, Bungay, Axholm, Alnwick, Raby, Tonbridge, Warwick, Wigmore, Powderham, Goderich, and Helmsley, are intimately bound up with the great baronial names of De Vere, Bigot, Mowbray, Percy, Neville, Clare, Beauchamp, Mortimer, Courtenay, Talbot, and De Ros, those “ancient stocks that so long withstood the waves and weathers of time.” Ludlow is identified with the fairest creation of Milton’s genius; Caerleon and Tintadgel glitter bright in mediæval romance; while Shrewsbury, Chester, the Welsh castles, Carlisle, Newcastle, Prudhoe, Ford, Hermitage, Jedburgh, Berwick, and a host of subordinate towers and peels, are celebrated in Marchman’s warfare or Border Minstrelsy, and played a part in the politic but unjust aggressions of our earlier Henrys and Edwards.

The histories and remains of these fortresses are full of interest to the antiquary, whether his branch of study be legal, social, architectural, or military. Almost all the most important of our English castles date, in some form or other, from remote antiquity, and their associations were of slow growth, and deeply rooted in many centuries of the national history. Most were the centres of estates which had become great in the course of many generations, and for the protection of which they were established; and the tenure and services of the tenantry had grown up gradually, so that the castle, or rather the fortified hall, was closely connected with the institutions, laws, and customs of the estate, or it might be the shire, wapentake, rape, or hundred, of which it was the defence. Such castles as Belvoir, Clitheroe, Gloucester, Totnes, Dunster, Hastings, Bramber, and Tickhill, were the “capita” or chief seats of ancient sokes, honours, and baronies, having peculiar privileges within their garths and demesnes, with manorial dependencies scattered through many counties, and accumulated in some considerable degree even before the Norman era. Many of the lands were held, even in Saxon times, by the ancient tenure of military service, which, reduced into a system under the Norman kings, often took the form of guarding and keeping in repair some specified part of the lord’s castle, a tower, gate-house, hall, or wall, to be paid either in person as castle-guard, or by the commutation known as ward-silver. Something like castle-guard appears indeed in the history of Norwich castle as early as the seventh century, and it was common in the tenth. Like the castle of Chester, that of Durham was the seat of an Earl-Palatine, the subject of the grim humour of Cœur-de-Lion, who of an aged Bishop made a young Earl, whose successors, more fortunate than those of their lay brother, preserved their Earldom and its more than Vice-regal appendages almost unshorn till the Reformation, and with a splendid remnant of judicial and social power to our own day; and indeed, even now, though his mitre no longer springs out of a coronet, nor is his crozier as formerly combined with a sword, and though the baronial hall has been liberally surrendered for the purposes of education, the lord of Durham is not altogether wanting in pride of place, nor reduced, as yet, even to episcopal poverty.

The “Registrum Honoris de Richmond,” a very curious Custumary, specifies the precise part in that castle that each tenant was to defend. At Belvoir, Staunton tower, at Berkeley, Thorpe’s tower, are so called because families of those names were responsible for them, and at Dover, Magminot and a score of other towers still bear the names of the chief tenants of that important lordship, and thus preserve the memory of a tenure the substance of which has long been abolished. The connexion between the military tenant and his lord was intimate, and much imbued with the ancient Teutonic equality and independence. The lord held his “aula” for his own safety and that of his tenants; their mutual support gave power to the one and security to the others; no man was degraded by such a tenure. The most powerful barons were almost always also tenants holding fiefs under other lords, often far their inferiors in rank and power.

It is this ancient history, this connexion with the earliest works of defence, that gives so great an interest to the older castles. When, in later days, and under extraordinary circumstances, it suited the king or some great baron to erect a castle in a new place, the fabric had no root, no associations. The grand characteristic of an old castle, the mighty earthwork, was wanting, and its place was ill supplied by masses of masonry and a ditch of moderate dimensions. No tenants clustered round the place, to it no manors were attached, no dependents held lands by the tenure of its defence. Thus Bere, Beaumaris, Caernarvon, Diganwy, Conway, Harlech, and Caerphilly, grand structures as were most of them, were mere intrusions upon the soil, and when the need that produced them ceased, as they represented no private estate, and were the residence of no great baron, they were left to fall into decay. Not the less are they of great architectural interest. They are mostly of one date, laid out and constructed upon one plan. Though intended for military purposes, within the palace shares with the fortress. The accommodation afforded is ample, the main apartments are spacious, the ornamentation rich. The inner court, gatehouses, and hall of Caerphilly are grander than anything of the sort in Britain.

The castles of a still later period, when built on new sites, were scarcely Castles in the military sense of the term. They were not posted for the defence of a March or a threatened district, but for the residence, more or less secure, of the lord, usually of a newly-acquired estate, very often purchased with the ransoms of prisoners taken in the French wars. Even where the castle most predominated, as at Bodiham, built, as Arundel was largely repaired, with the spoils of war, or at Tattershal, they were rather palace-castles than castle-palaces, and this was especially the case with Bolton, Wressil, and Sheriff-Hutton, works of the latter part of the fourteenth century. In such works the salient towers, loops, embattled parapets, and bold machicolations, are introduced partly for their appearance, partly from custom, but scarcely for any military purpose.