Mediæval Military Architecture in England, Volume 1 (of 2)

by George Thomas Clark

EARTHWORKS OF THE POST-ROMAN AND ENGLISH PERIODS.

BUT little is recorded of the internal condition of Britain between the departure of the Legions, a.d. 411, and the arrival of the Northmen in force thirty or forty years later; but whatever may have been the effect of Roman dominion, or of the infusion of Roman blood, upon the social or commercial character of the Britons, it is at least certain that they had made little progress in the construction of places of defence. The Romans dealt rather with the country than with the people. The foreign trade under the Roman sway was no doubt considerable, and much land was under cultivation, but the Britons seem to have acquired but few of the Roman arts, and nothing of the Roman discipline. Neither have their descendants, the Welsh, many customs which can be traced distinctly to a Roman origin; and although there are many words in their language which show its origin to be cognate with the Latin, there are comparatively few which can, with any probability, be shown to be derived from the Latin. How far against the Scots and Picts they made use of Roman tactics or employed Roman weapons is but little known. In defending themselves against the Northmen they, no doubt, took advantage of the Roman walls at Richborough and Lymne, and afterwards of Pevensey, but on the whole with only temporary success; and from these they were driven back upon the earthworks of their probably remote predecessors. There is not a shadow of evidence that they constructed any new defensive works in masonry upon the Roman models, or even repaired those that were left to them in the same material.

There do, however, remain certain earthworks which seem to be laid out according to Roman rules, but which contain no traces of Roman habitations, are not connected with great Roman roads, and the banks and ditches of which are of greater height and depth than those generally in use among the Romans in Britain, and which therefore there seems reason to attribute to the post-Roman Britons. Such are Tamworth, Wareham, Wallingford, possibly Cardiff, though upon a Roman road, and the additions to the Roman works at York. The name Wallingford, “the ford of the Welsh,” may be quoted in support of this view. It is difficult to understand how it is that there are no remains in masonry which may be attributed to this period, for it is impossible that with the example of the Romans before their eyes, and a certain admixture of Roman blood in the veins of many of them, the Britons should not have possessed something of the art of construction. This difficulty does not occur in Gaul, whence the Romans were never formally withdrawn. On the Continent indeed, generally, buildings are found of all ages, from the Roman period downwards. Gregory of Tours, in his “Historia Francorum,” written towards the end of the sixth century, describes the fortified place of Merliar as of great extent and strength, in which there were included a sweet-water lake, gardens, and orchards; and M. de Caumont cites a description of an episcopal castle on the Moselle in the same century, which was defended by thirty towers, one of which contained a chapel, and was armed with a balista, and within the place were cultivated lands and a water-mill; and there were many such, like the defences of Carcassonne, of mixed Roman and post-Roman work, that is, of work executed before and about the fifth century.

In Britain, the course of events was different. The Northmen, men of the sea, and accustomed to life in the open air, had no sympathies with the Celts, and utterly disdained what remained of Roman civilisation; slaying or driving out the people, and burning and destroying the Roman buildings, which, in consequence, are in England fragmentary, and in most cases only preserved by having been covered up with earth or incorporated into later structures. The Roman works were mostly on too large a scale for the wants of new settlers, and even where these occupied the Roman towns they cared not to restore or complete the walls, but buried what remained of them in high earthen banks, upon which they pitched their palisades, and within which they threw up their moated citadels. The Northmen respected nothing, adopted nothing. Their earliest mission was one of violence and destruction. They appear, in the south and east at least, in a large measure to have slain and driven out the people of the land, and to have abolished such institutions as they possessed. But not the less did they carry with them the seeds of other institutions of a far more vigorous and very healthful character. Whether Saxons, Angles, or Jutes, though landing on the shores of Britain in quite independent parties, they had the substance of their speech, their customs, and their gods in common. They had the same familiarity with the sea, the same indisposition to occupy Roman buildings, the same absence of all sympathy with the native Britons. If they still held most of their lands in common, the house and the homestead were already private property. Their family ties were strong, as is shown in the nomenclature of their villages. As they conquered, they settled, and practised agriculture, and as they embraced Christianity they gradually established those divisions, civil and ecclesiastical, sokes and rapes, tythings, hundreds, wapentakes, and parishes, which still remain to attest the respect to which they had attained for law and order, for the rights of private property, and their capacity for self-government.

Much akin to, and before long to be incorporated into the English nation, were the Norsemen from the seaboard country north of the Elbe, the Danes of English history and of local tradition, who in the eighth century played the part of the Saxons in the fifth. They scoured the same seas, and harassed the Saxons as the Saxons had harassed the Britons, only the invaders and the invaded being, generally, of the same blood, finally coalesced, and the distinctions between them became well-nigh effaced; still, for three centuries, the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, the Danish name was the terror of the British Isles. They infested every strand, anchored in every bay, ascended every river, penetrated and laid waste the interior of the country.

Orkney is full of their traces, their language is the key to the topographical nomenclature of Caithness, the gigantic works at Flamborough Head are attributed to them; the great cutting, by which they carried a branch of the Thames across Southwark, is on record. In the year a.d. 1000, Ethelred found them forming much of the population of Cumberland. Such terminations as eye, ness, holm, and by, so common along the shores of England, or over the lands watered by the Trent and the Humber, the Tees and the Tyne, and not unknown on the western coast, show the extent and permanence of their settlements. It does not, however, appear that the Danish earthworks differed materially from those thrown up by the other northern nations in England. Camps tending to the circular form and headlands fortified by segmental lines of bank and ditch belong to all, and all when they settled and acquired property underwent very similar changes in their habits and modes of life.

No doubt, among the earlier works of the Northmen, those thrown up to cover their landing and protect their ships, were the semicircular lines of ditch and bank found on capes and headlands and projecting cliffs on various parts of the sea-coast. Usually they are of limited area, as the invaders came commonly in very small bodies, but the Flamborough entrenchment has a line of bank and ditch three and a half miles long, of a most formidable character, and including a very large area.

Along the coast of South Wales are many small camps, probably of Danish origin, such as Sully, Porthkerry, Colhugh, Dunraven, Pennard, Penmaen, five others on the headland of Gower, and five or six along the southern shore of Pembrokeshire. Besides these material traces of the invaders, are a long list of such names as Haverford (fiord), Stackpole, Hubberton, Angle, Hubberston, Herbrandston, Gateholm, Stockholm, Skomer, Musselwick, Haroldston, Ramsey, Strumble, Swansea, savouring intensely of the Baltic. The Dinas’ Head between Newport and Fishguard bays, though bearing a Welsh name, is fortified by an entrenchment due without doubt to the Northmen.

These and similar works evidently belong to the earlier period of the northern invasions, when the long black galleys of the vikings visited at not infrequent intervals the British and Irish shores, before they settled in either land. In the fifth and sixth centuries settlements began to be formed in Britain, and speedily assumed dimensions very formidable to the natives. The south-eastern coast of Britain, infested even in Roman times by the sea-rovers, and thence known as the Saxon shore, had been fortified by the Romans, but the works, intrinsically strong, were too weak in British hands to stem the progress of the foe. In a.d. 530, Cerdic and Cynric took the Isle of Wight, and slew many Britons at a place where Wightgar was afterwards buried, and where he probably threw up the work which bore his name, and afterwards, as now, was known as Carisbroke. In 547, Ida, the “flame-bearer” of the Welsh bards, founded Bebbanburgh, now Bamborough, and enclosed it first by a hedge [hegge], and afterwards by a wall; and in 552 Cynric engaged the Britons at Sorbiodunum, afterwards Searo-burh, and now Old Sarum; as did in 571 Cuthwulf or Cutha at Bedcanford or Bedford, in each of these two latter places, as at Carisbroke and probably at Twynham or Christchurch, throwing up the works which yet remain. The conquest of the Romano-British cities of Cirencester, Bath, and Gloucester, and the whole left bank of the Severn, from the Avon of Bristol to that of Worcester, was the immediate consequence of the victory of Deorham in 571, and was followed by the possession of Pengwern, afterwards Shrewsbury, a most important post, and one by means of which the Mercians, and after them the Normans, held the Middle March of Wales. All along the line from Christchurch and Carisbroke, by Berkeley and Gloucester, Worcester, Warwick and Shrewsbury, earthworks were then thrown up, most of which are still to be seen.

With the social changes among the invaders changed also the character of their military, or rather of their mixed military and domestic, works. The British encampments, intended for the residence of a tribe having all things in common, were, both in position and arrangements, utterly unsuited to the new inhabitants. The Roman stations, intended for garrisons, save where they formed part of an existing city, were scarcely less so, nor were the earlier works of the Northmen suited to their later wants. These were mostly of a hasty character, thrown up to cover a landing or to hold at bay a superior force. No sooner had the strangers gained a permanent footing in a district than their operations assumed a different character. Their ideas were not, like those of the Romans, of an imperial character; they laid out no great lines of road, took at first no precautions for the general defence or administration of the country. Self-government prevailed. Each family held and gave name to its special allotment. This is the key to the plan of the later and great majority of purely English earthworks. They were not intended for the defence of a tribe or territory, nor for the accommodation of fighting men, but for the centre and defence of a private estate, for the accommodation of the lord and his household, for the protection of his tenants generally, should they be attacked, and for the safe housing, in time of war, of their flocks and herds.