The more they are examined, the more are the actual fortresses of Britain stripped of any pretensions to extreme antiquity, and brought within the Norman period. There are two leading objects of fortification—the protective and the aggressive; and, according to the view we have been supporting, it has been the function of the Norman, in the development of European history, to have been the inventor and propagator of the kind of works adapted to the latter object. Fortresses of mere refuge are on the tops of hills, or in other inaccessible places. It does not suit the aggressor to go to the wilds—he must have his elements of strength in the very middle of the people whom he is to rule over. If a rock happens to be found bulging out of a fine alluvial district—as the plutonic upheavings of trap have supplied in Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton—it is well; but, where there are no natural strengths, they must be artificially constructed—and art has in this department far outstripped nature, or has rather found in her own resources better means of defence against her instruments of destruction than nature provides.
The Saxons did not raise strongholds of this kind, nor did the northern races, in their native districts; and, indeed, it is rather curious to observe that there is scarcely a feudal castle to be found in the Scandinavian territories, whence issued the race who strewed all Europe with fortresses. Scott speaks of Bamborough as “Ida’s castle, huge and square;” but there can now be little doubt that it is a Norman edifice. If the tall gaunt tower of Conisborough retain its Saxon antiquity, yet it is evident that it must have been a rude and feeble strength, standing alone without the outworks, which were the great achievement of Norman engineering. Some other bare towers of this character are supposed to be of ante-Norman origin, as the round tower of Trematon, in Cornwall, and that of Launceston, on the apex of a conical rock, round the base of which Norman works have been raised.
Scott is historically correct, as he almost ever is, when he thus describes the abode of Cedric the Saxon:—“A low irregular building, containing several courtyards or enclosures, extending over a considerable space of ground; and which, though its size argued the inhabitant to be a person of wealth, differed entirely from the tall, turreted, and castellated buildings in which the Norman nobility resided, and which had become the universal style of architecture throughout England.”
William the Norman found no castles to resist him. He resolved that any one who came after him should complain of no such omission. England proper immediately bristled with strongholds. They were afterwards extended to Wales and Ireland; and it is perhaps the most remarkable episode in the history of Norman fortification, as indicative of the systematic zeal with which the system was conducted, that during the brief tenure of Scotland, the opportunity was taken for dispersing throughout the country Edwardian castles.
The earliest Norman form was the vast square keep, such as Bamborough New Castle, or the Tower of London. The value of projecting angles seems soon to have been felt, but it does not appear that the noble flanking round towers, which make a perfect Norman fortress, were devised until the days of the Edwards. The central strength then consisted of a square work, with a round tower at each angle. When the work was very large, demi-towers might project here and there from its face. This was the leading principle of modern fortification—the protection of the face. It is understood that no plain wall-plate, however strong, can be defended from an enemy ready to sacrifice a sufficient number of men to batter it open and rush in by the breach. The object, then, is by outworks to keep the assailants at a distance. The flanking towers accomplished this for the Norman fortress, and the work of a siege was not in those days utterly unlike what it now is in general character, though the less destructive character of the weapons on either side made it a much closer affair.
There is room for considerable classification, and even for abundant technical nomenclature, among the besieging engines used before the invention of gunpowder. The term mangona, or mangonel, was generally applicable to ballistic engines, moved by springs, or quick descending weights. The trebuchet, the matafunda, the ribaudequin, and the petrary, were special machines for discharging what the Americans call rocks. There were the robinet, the espringal, and the bricole, which discharged huge iron bolts and other miscellaneous mischievous articles. The oddest of all names to find among these wicked and destructive agents is conveyed in a sentence by Grose, who says that “Beugles, or bibles, were also engines for throwing large stones, as we learn from an ancient poem;” and he quotes as his authority the Romance of Claris, in the Royal library of Paris (No. 7534).
“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,
Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,
Gétent trop manuement.”
Besides the ram and the testudo, with which every boy becomes acquainted in the plates to his Roman Antiquities, there were the instruments bearing the quadrupedal names of the war-wolf, the cat, and the sow. “The cattus or cat-house, gattus or cat,” says the instructive Grose, “was a covered shed, occasionally fixed on wheels, and used for covering of soldiers employed in filling up the ditch, preparing the way for the movable tower, or mining the wall. It was called a cat because under it soldiers lay in watch like a cat for its prey. Some of these cats had crenelles and chinks, from whence the archers could discharge their arrows. These were called castellated cats. Sometimes under this machine the besiegers worked a small kind of ram.”[[22]] The sow reminds all true Scotsmen of Black Agnes of Dunbar jeering Salisbury with the farrowing of his sow, when she toppled on its wooden roof a mass of rock, and beheld the mutilated sappers crawling from beneath their shattered protector, like so many pigs. But the chief of all besieging works was the movable tower, brought up face to face with the defenders, and containing battering-rams below, with the various instruments already mentioned, employed in its several upper storeys. To oppose such a formidable engine, which could only be applied by some commander of vast resources, the flanking round towers were of invaluable service, as the bastions and outworks are at the present day. The main difference in the projectile direction of the operations in the two is, that while the fire of a fort is chiefly horizontal, the assaults made by the Norman keep were vertical, and hence came the crest of machicolations and turrets which has given so picturesque a character to the whole school of baronial architecture.