Like the Romans, their successors made use of earthworks and of timber both for attack and defence, and for permanent works employed masonry of a very Roman character. Such accounts as have descended to us of the great sieges of the Middle Ages show that the machines and methods in use were those handed down by tradition from Rome, many of them being such as Cæsar employed, while others were the same as those sculptured on the column of Trajan or described by Vegetius. Mines and countermines, battering-rams, balistæ, catapults, the cat, the mouse, the sow, and a large family of devices for reaching under cover the wall to be undermined, were all derived from Roman warfare, and were employed, if not with the skill and discipline of Rome, with a degree of vigour and boldness that was scarcely less effective.
Moreover, the political circumstances of France were eminently favourable to the construction of great military works. The great duchies and scarcely subordinate kingdoms which afterwards composed the French monarchy were, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, independent states, each with an open frontier needing defences, and with a brave and wealthy baronage very able and very willing to supply them. Hence France contains within its present borders not only cities of Roman origin and celebrated under the immediate successors of the Romans, but the remains of the castle-palaces of the dukes and barons of Normandy and Brittany; of Burgundy, Provence, Navarre, Flanders, Anjou, and many a lesser province; and he is but little qualified to judge of castles or of fortified mediæval cities who is unacquainted with Arques, or Falaise, or Loches; Coucy or Château-Gaillard, or Etampes; Carcassonne, Avignon, Villeneuve, or Beaucaire, or the splendid restoration of Pierrefonds.
The possession of these great works has drawn forth, though tardily, a few writers capable of comprehending and describing them. Those in Normandy are the subject of the well-known lectures of M. de Caumont, delivered at Caen in 1830 and published in 1835. They contain a very interesting section on military works, with plans and elevations which, though roughly executed and on a small scale, are valuable; his descriptions are clear, and his conclusions generally sound. Others, before M. de Caumont, have described particular structures, but he seems to have been the first to attempt a general classification based upon a critical examination of the examples in his own province.
Of detached writings, monographs, may be mentioned those of M. Deville upon Château-Gaillard, Tancarville, and Arques, published in 1828, 1834, and 1839. The first is particularly strong in its history of the castle and of its famous siege, and the last excellent both in history and description; and all three are accompanied by clear ground-plans.
The great work of Viollet-le-Duc, though not confined to military architecture, contains by much the most comprehensive, as well as the most detailed, account of French castles yet given to the world; and as, besides the general resemblance between all European castles, those of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Normandy are almost counterparts of those of the same period, and often built by the same nobles or their sons, in England, it has deservedly become our chief authority. Also the castles of France, being on a larger scale and often more perfect than our own, M. Le-Duc has been able to explain more satisfactorily than could have been done here, certain details, such, for example, as those of the gateway, drawbridge, and portcullis, and especially of the timber superstructures for vertical defence, known as “hourdes” and “bretasches,” terms represented with us by the “hoard” of a London builder, and the “brattice” of the mining engineer. M. Le-Duc’s work has given occasion and matter for a small volume from the press of Mr. Parker. There is besides a work in German, “Geschichte der Militär-Architectur des fruhern Mittelalters,” by M. G. H. Krieg von Hochfelden, which contains much of great interest concerning German castles, as well as a general notice of those in France and England.
Although military architecture in England, setting aside the works of the Romans, begins with the age, and probably with the actual period, of the Norman Conquest, the country contains numerous examples of military works of an earlier, and in many instances no doubt of a very remote, time. These works, executed in earth, or at least of which no parts but banks, mounds, and ditches remain, are sometimes of great size, but usually of extreme simplicity of plan. Of most of them, the Roman again excepted, the relative age is all that we can hope to ascertain, but even from this knowledge we are at present very far; and although it is probable that the simple encampments, of irregular outline, and on high ground, are the work of the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and those of circular or more regular outline, having higher banks, and placed in more accessible positions, are the works of the post-Roman period, yet the outlines are often so mixed, and the arrangement of the mounds and banks so alike, that it cannot always certainly be said what is sepulchral, what merely commemorative or monumental, and what military; what the works of the earlier or later Celts, what of the Saxons, what of their Danish conquerors, and sometimes even, though not often, what is Roman.
The particulars of these various earthworks, so different in plan and extending over so many centuries, deserve a separate notice, and therefore, though originally intended to have been here treated of, it seemed more prudent to lay this branch of the subject aside for the present, in the hope that it may be taken up when the completion of the larger scale Ordnance Maps shall afford more accurate and copious data than now can conveniently be procured. The subject, in fact, should have entered into the instructions given to the officers of the Survey, by which means we should at least have avoided the obscure and sometimes contradictory system of nomenclature by which these works have been designated at different periods of this great, and in most respects admirable, national undertaking.
But, although it be expedient here to pass by in silence those earthworks, irregular, rectangular, or concentric, which have no direct connexion with the subsequent castles of masonry, and therefore with military architecture, there remain, nevertheless, certain earthworks which are so connected, and which must therefore here be noticed, and are of importance sufficient to require a separate chapter for their consideration.