If we led the reader to suppose, that anything he finds in this article will indicate the probable result of the coming European Struggle, we should grossly deceive him; and it is but fair to say, that if the opening sentences have induced him to expect a succinct digest of the history of fortified places from the era of the Flood, he will have to complain that his anticipations are by no means fulfilled. We intend to take advantage of that happy vagrant eclecticism, which nothing in this world but a magazine admits of, and which, in truth, is a blessing too often forgotten and betrayed by its proper guardian, when he consents to be nothing but the expounder of opinion for a polemical or a civic conclave, or the recorder of the pother of local antiquaries. Our remarks on fortresses will follow no specific line, logical, or otherwise—will supply no desideratum—prove no problem, and exhaust no subject of inquiry; and, with these preliminary indications, we now offer them.
Be it a question which, among ancient nations, was most illustrious in deed and thought—the Jewish, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Egyptian, the Hellenic, or the Roman—there can be no doubt that the most illustrious race acting within the sphere of modern history is the Norman. And when we give them this local name, we do not mean to confine its comprehension to the descendants of the Rollo who bullied the King of France out of a province, or to those of the band of adventurous men who “came over” with the Conqueror. The real Norman who founded the institutions which still live to attest his greatness, was a mixed being, possessed of the hardy, enduring energy of the North, and the fire and versatility of the South. Most European countries have enjoyed his presence. France has largely partaken of it, so has Spain—though the spirit of the old greatness it produced has died, and the faded lustre of its memory only remains. Italy, Sicily, and portions of Germany, have had their share of these high-spirited wanderers; and indeed often, in the history of European states, might it be traced that, as if by an injection of fresh blood, the Norman element has saved them from immediate dissolution, if it has failed to confer on them a prolonged and invigorated existence.
Greatest, however, of all the obligations to this race are those which we of the British empire owe; for the illustrious adventurers—whose spirit and energy sometimes seemed to consume and destroy the feebler qualities of the people on whom they were ingrafted—found among their Saxon brethren only a reinforcement of those steady and enduring powers, which had not yet acquired a sufficient preponderance in the composition of the Norman. To the character and tendencies of this race we owe the centralising influence which has given power to our democratic institutions. We owe to them the principle of honour, courtesy to women, social disinterestedness, and the many virtues which have grown out of the system of chivalry. In art, we owe to them the great system of ecclesiastical architecture, which, after slumbering for a couple of centuries, is now flourishing in so remarkable a revival, that every genuine vestige of it is preserved with pious care; and even a worshipful municipality, if it design to destroy a remnant of the art, as it would have almost been thanked for doing fifty years ago, is restrained from the act by a feeling of public indignation.
The magnificent system which goes commonly by the name of Gothic architecture, is essentially the work of the Norman race, taking both the character of the architecture and the name of the race in a comprehensive sense.
If it be an inferior achievement, yet it is something to say that to the same race we owe the fortalice of the middle ages—the parent of the modern fortress. The castle, as we know it in romance and history, is essentially a Norman creation. The symmetrical external strength, and the gloomy mysteries of the interior, necessary to make a castle be a castle in poetry or romance, are features entirely belonging to the Norman edifice. The vaulted form of internal roofing, with all its grandeur and gloom—the dungeons beneath—the battlements above—the secret passages—and other mysteries which are necessarily connected with these in architectural arrangement, are all peculiarities of the Norman fortalice. To find what there is in this, inquire how The Old English Baron—The Castle of Otranto—Mrs Radcliffe’s or Victor Hugo’s novels could have been written without this element of poetic romance. Go higher up, and see how much of the glorious interest of Scott’s novels has been created out of this element; and whether it is presented at Torquelstone or Tillytudlem, all comes of Norman origin. But go still higher, and see how such a tragedy as Macbeth could have existed, if Shakespeare had been a contemporary of the Scottish monarch, and had been bound to describe him living in an extensive craal of wicker or turf huts, instead of placing the whole tragic history in one of those mysterious Norman castles which did not exist until centuries after Macbeth’s day, and were beginning to add to their other interest that of a mellow age in Shakespeare’s.
Besides these elements of associative interest, there is the external beauty involved in a marvellous development of strength and symmetry. Take the Norman castle in its most perfect development—the stern square mass in the centre—the flanking round towers at the angles, widening with a graceful sweep towards the earth, after the manner in which the oak stem widens to its root—the varied crest of battlements, turrets, and machicolations which crown all, adjusting their outline to the graceful variations of the square and circular works below,—all make a combination, the grandeur and beauty of which has been attested by its eternal repetition in landscape-painting, since landscape-painting began.
Nor were the beauty and grandeur all that the Norman fortalice could boast of. It was a great achievement in science. Of all the steps taken onwards in fortification, from the primitive earthwork on the steppes of Tartary down to the fortification of Paris, the greatest was taken by that one which combined together the dwelling-house and the fortress, and made that organisation of main edifice and flanking protections of which the great works of Vauban were but a further development, as we shall have occasion more fully to show.
But we must stop here.—External beauty and grandeur, engineering skill, we attribute to the Norman castle; but we cannot award the same praise to its moral objects, which were ever those of subjugation and regal or lordly despotism. In fact, the castle was the embodiment of the feudal system, and ripened into the Parisian Bastille, the largest and most perfect Norman fortress ever built. As one of our kings said of a border keep, the man who built that was a thief in his heart; and they who reared the stately dwellings of the Norman kings and nobles had subjugation and tyranny in their hearts, and indeed embodied these qualities in mason-work; for, after all, these gloomy edifices owe a mighty portion of their influence to that overawing quality which Burke made out to be the source of sublimity. If all admiration of artistic achievement in architecture must depend on the honourableness, the faithfulness, the humaneness of those who were the designers, we fear we would need to abandon our favourite edifices as structural lies, and architectural shams, only fit to be cast into oblivion, and there obtain Christian burial. But so callous are we in the matter of the faith and morality of designers, that we can even confess that the exterior structure so well fitted for defence against an oppressed peasantry, and the dreary dungeons so well fitted for feudal vengeance, when these were driven desperate, only raise our interest by a contemplation of their objects; while the assurance that some murder has been committed within the gloomy recesses—the baser and more brutal the better—simply affords additional zest to the tragic interest of the whole.
Let us cast a glance back to the condition of the art of fortification, at the time when it was taken up by these Normans. The most truly primitive forts are naturally decided by antiquaries to be those which are found constructed solely out of the native materials which the site may have afforded. In this matter time has been by no means impartial to the handiwork of man; since, in some places it remains, and is likely to remain, so long as the crust of the earth keeps together: while in others, the stronghold of the dwellers in vast watery wastes and swamps has melted away with the mud of which it may have been originally formed. So, in the swamps of Friesland, defended in the dawn of history as they were in the seventeenth century, and in the flats of Lincoln, defended against the Normans, many a place of strength has departed; but on the tops of barren hills the rude stone circles remain, the relics of some utterly unknown antiquity.
There is scarcely to be named that part of the world where there are hills, and no hill-forts. They occur in the Holy Land; and Jeremiah speaks of the people being hunted “from every mountain, and from every hill.” On the approach of the Assyrians, we hear that the Israelites possessed themselves of all the tops of the high mountains. They are found all over the East—on the steppes of the Russian provinces—on the German and Scandinavian hills—in all parts of the British empire: while those which have been discovered in the valley of the Mississippi, and other parts of America, are said to have a precise resemblance to the specimens in the county of Angus. Often, of course, efforts have been made to connect them with early historical events—as when the fortified camp of Caractacus has been found in England, and that of Galgacus, in fifty different places of Scotland: while the Germans are naturally anxious to find the circle within which their national hero, Arminius, or Hermann, assembled the tribes who punished the presumption of Varus. But these are all vain speculations; and when or how these forts were made, we shall probably find out when we get the working plans and the engineers’ contract for Stonehenge.