Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

Yet all the while, there lurked in Richard’s heart a misgiving that, in the last resort, his diplomacy would prove to have been in vain; that, strive as he might to turn away the tide of war from his own borders by stirring up north and east and south to overwhelm the Crown of France, still, after all, the day must come when the Angevins would have to stake their political existence solely upon their own military resources, and to stand at bay, unaided, unsupported, alone, behind whatever bulwark they might be able to devise by their own military genius. It was the genius and the foresight of Richard himself which insured that when the crisis came, the bulwark was ready, even though it were doomed to prove unavailing in the end. The last and mightiest of the many mighty fortresses reared by Angevin hands since the first great builder of the race had begun his castle-building in the Loire valley was the Château-Gaillard, the “saucy castle” of Richard the Lion-heart. He “fixed its site where the Seine bends suddenly at Gaillon in a great semicircle to the north, and where the valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its banks. Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills; within the river curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken with green islets and dappled with the grey and blue of the sky, flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen.”[1877] Some three-quarters of a league from the right bank of the river, in a valley opening upon it from the eastward and watered by the little stream of Gambon, stood the town of Andely. Between the town and the river stretched a lake, or rather perhaps a marsh,[1878] through which the Gambon and another lesser rivulet descending from the hills to the north of Andely found their way by two separate issues into the Seine, nearly opposite two islets, of which the larger and more northerly was known as the Isle of Andely.[1879] The space enclosed between the three rivers and the marsh seems to have been a tract of waste land, occupied only by a toll-house for the collection of dues from the vessels passing up and down the Seine[1880]—dues which formed one of the most important items in the revenue of the archbishop of Rouen, to whom Andely and its neighbourhood belonged.[1881] Over against this spot, on the southern bank of the Gambon, in the angle formed by its junction with the Seine, a mass of limestone crag rose abruptly to the height of three hundred feet. Its western side, almost perpendicular, looked down upon the great river, the northern, scarcely less steep, over the Gambon and the lake beyond; to the north-east and south-west its rocky slopes died down into deep ravines, and only a narrow neck of land at its south-eastern extremity connected it with the lofty plateau covered with a dense woodland known as the Forest of Andely, which stretches along the eastern side of the Seine valley between Andely and Gaillon. One glance at the site was enough to rivet a soldier’s gaze. If, instead of the metropolitan church of Normandy, a lay baron had owned the soil of Andely, we may be sure that long ago that lofty brow would have received its fitting crown; if the power of Fulk the Builder had reached to the banks of the Seine, we may doubt whether the anathemas of the Norman primate would not have availed as little to wrest such a spot from his grasp as those of the archbishop of Tours had availed to wrest from him the site of Montrichard. But a greater castle-builder than Fulk Nerra himself was the architect of Château-Gaillard.

Richard’s historical connexion with the “rock of Andely” has its ill-omened beginning in a ghastly story of the fate of three French prisoners whom he flung from its summit into the ravine below, in vengeance for the slaughter of some Welsh auxiliaries who had been surprised and cut to pieces by the French king’s troops in the neighbouring valley.[1882] By the opening of 1196, however, he had devised for it a more honourable use. In a treaty with Philip, drawn up in January of that year, the fief of Andely was made the subject of special provisions whereby it was reserved as a sort of neutral zone between the territories of the two kings, and a significant clause was added: “Andely shall not be fortified.”[1883] As by the same treaty the older bulwarks of Normandy—Nonancourt, Ivry, Pacy, Vernon, Gaillon, Neufmarché, Gisors—were resigned into Philip’s hands, this clause, if strictly fulfilled, would have left the Seine without a barrier and Rouen at the mercy of the French king. The agreement in short, like all those which bore the signatures of Philip and Richard, was made only to be broken; both parties broke it without delay; and while Philip was forming his league with the Bretons for the ruin of Anjou, Richard was tracing out in the valley of the Gambon and on the rock of Andely the plan of a line of fortifications which were to interpose an insurmountable barrier between his Norman capital and the French invader. His first act was to seize the Isle of Andely.[1884] Here he built a lofty octagonal tower, encircled by a ditch and rampart, and threw a bridge over the river from each side of the island, linking it thus to either shore.[1885] On the right, beyond the eastern bridge, he traced out the walls of a new town, which took the name of the New or the Lesser Andely,[1886] a secure stronghold whose artificial defences of ramparts and towers were surrounded by the further protection of the lake on its eastern side, the Seine on the west, and the two lesser rivers to north and south, a bridge spanning each of these two little streams forming the sole means of access from the mainland.[1887] The southern bridge, that over the Gambon, linked this New Andely with the foot of the rock which was to be crowned with the mightiest work of all. Richard began by digging out to a yet greater depth the ravines which parted this rock from the surrounding heights, so as to make it wholly inaccessible save by the one connecting isthmus at its south-eastern extremity. On its summit, which formed a plateau some six hundred feet in length and two hundred in breadth at the widest part, he reared a triple fortress. The outer ward consisted of a triangular enclosure; its apex, facing the isthmus already mentioned, was crowned by a large round tower,[1888] with walls ten feet in thickness; the extremities of its base were strengthened by similar towers, and two smaller ones broke the line of the connecting curtain-wall. This was surrounded by a ditch dug in the rock to a depth of more than forty feet, and having a perpendicular counterscarp. Fronting the base of this outer fortress across the ditch on its north-western side was a rampart surmounted by a wall ninety feet long and eight feet thick, also flanked by two round towers; from these a similar wall ran all round the edges of the plateau, where the steep sides of the rock itself took the place of rampart and ditch. The wall on the south-west side—the river-front—was broken by another tower, cylindrical without, octagonal within; and its northern extremity was protected by two mighty rectangular bastions. Close against one of these stood a round tower, which served as the base of a third enclosure, the heart and citadel of the whole fortress. Two-thirds of its elliptical outline, on the east and south, were formed by a succession of semicircular bastions, or segments of towers, seventeen in number, each parted from its neighbour by scarcely more than two feet of curtain-wall—an arrangement apparently imitated from the fortress of Cherbourg, which was accounted the greatest marvel of military architecture in Normandy, until its fame was eclipsed by that of Richard’s work.[1889] This portion of the enclosure was built upon a rampart formed by the excavation of a ditch about fifteen to twenty feet in width; the counterscarp, like that of the outer ditches, was perpendicular; and a series of casemates cut in the rock ran along on this side for a distance of about eighty feet. On the western side of the citadel stood the keep, a mighty circular tower, with walls of the thickness of twelve feet, terminating at an angle of twenty feet in depth where it projected into the enclosure; it had two or perhaps three stages,[1890] and was lighted by two great arched windows, whence the eye could range at will over the wooded hills and dales of the Vexin, or the winding course of the river broadening onward to Rouen. Behind the keep was placed the principal dwelling-house, and under this a staircase cut out of the rock gave access to an underground passage leading to some outworks and a tower near the foot of the hill, whence a wall was carried down to the river-bank, just beyond the northern extremity of a long narrow island known as the “isle of the Three Kings”—doubtless from some one of the many meetings held in this district by Louis VII. or Philip Augustus and the two Henrys.[1891] The river itself was barred by a double stockade, crossing its bed from shore to shore.[1892]

Plan VIII.