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hand, he has not, we think, conclusively made out his case for the very early origin of all the fortified mounds. We concur with Mr. Freeman in holding that the words 'erexerunt aggeres,' applied by William of Jumièges to the strongholds raised by the Norman nobles in William's early days, imply that, at this date, such mounds were still being made; and the Norman settlers, under Edward, may therefore have raised some in England. Indeed, we read in Domesday of Rayleigh, with its typical moated mound: 'in hoc manerio Suenus fecit suum castellum.' The words imply, though they may not prove, that he raised the mound in William's reign. Of Wigmore also, Domesday states: Willelmus comes fecit illud castellum' (Mr. Clark, we have seen, had assigned it, in error, to 921, and thereby destroyed the force of this entry). It is obvious, moreover, that both before, and immediately after the Conquest, Normans would have need, in many cases, of rapidly constructed strongholds. Now, as Mr. Clark points out (i. 43), a castle of masonry required both time and money: the architects, overlookers, and probably the masons had to be imported from Normandy, and, in many cases, the stone for the exterior': the new settlers, therefore, if they found no mound to their hand, would have no alternative but to construct one for themselves, a task which only required unskilled labour. Nor is this a matter of conjecture. The Bayeux Tapestry shows us such a mound being actually raised at Hastings, and crowned by its timber defences. This fortress it terms a 'castellum,' and Wace a' chastel.' But we venture to go further still, and to assert that more than a century later the motte was still thrown up, where a stronghold was needed in a hurry. In the curious Anglo-Norman poem on the Conquest of Ireland, we read that Richard Fleming, on receiving the barony of Slane, Un mot fit jeter Pur ses enemis grever.' So too when Hugh Tirel was forced to abandon the castle he had raised at Trim, the Irish, we learn, la mot firent tut de geter, Desque a la terre tut verser,' after setting fire to the wooden buildings that stood on it. This description of levelling the mote' is conclusive as to the character of the fortress.

Therefore, rash though it may be to differ on such a point from Mr. Clark, we hold it proved that these fortified mottes were, at least in some cases, erected in the Conqueror's days; and if this is proved of some, it becomes probable of many. Indeed, so far as what we may term private castles are concerned, there is actually, we think, a presumption in favour of this late origin. Mr. Clark, it is true, argues (i. 23) that they were usually the caput of some great estate, even before the

Conquest.

Conquest. But we must remember that it does not follow from a motte forming the caput of an extensive Norman fief, that it occupied a similar position before the Conquest. For the fief might, and did, represent an aggregation of English estates. Let us take the case of Castle Acre, the subject of a brilliant paper by Dr. Jessopp, and of one of the latest, if not the last, of Mr. Clark's monographs.* It is, as he observes,' an excellent example' (i. 18) of the moated mound, combined with a rectangular Roman encampment, inside which it stands. We may note that, as at Pevensey and Porchester, only a portion of the Roman enclosure is occupied by the later stronghold. Now, Castle Acre, Mr. Clark observes, is best known to antiquaries as the caput of the 140 lordships held by Earl Warenne at Domesday,' in Norfolk. But careful analysis of that priceless record reveals the fact that the manor had formed part of a comparatively small estate, which had belonged, before the Conquest, to 'Toche,' and had then passed to Frederic de Warenne, on whose death-at the hands, it is said, of the famous Hereward-it had been added to the great fief of his brother. Castle Acre, therefore, was not an old seat of wide dominion, so that in this instance Mr. Clark's theory fails. It is only our reluctance to differ from so great a master of his subject, where we cannot be certain of our point, that has led us to admit, for the majority of these mounds, the early date claimed by Mr. Clark. At Pevensey, for instance, it is quite possible that the existing mound is not English, but was thrown up at the Conquest.

Another point that has been left in doubt is the alleged weakness of England, at the Conquest, in castles. Orderic, as Mr. Freeman rightly points out, not only asserts this weakness, but assigns to it the inability of the English to offer prolonged resistance. Mr. Clark, however, denies the fact :

'Every part of England, much of Scotland, and the accessible parts of the Welsh border, were covered with strong places, which were, no doubt, defended, and well defended, with palisades, as more suitable to made ground than work in masonry. . . . If, at the Conquest, no English stronghold held out, it was not that such places were less capable of defence than those in Normandy, but that England was broken up into parties. . . . The conquest of England was made possible, not by the absence of strong places, but by the want of organization for their defence.' †

But this view directly contradicts the plain words of Orderic: 'munitiones (quas castella Galli nuncupant) Anglicis provinciis

*Archæological Journal,' xlvi. 282-5.

† i. 39. paucissimæ

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paucissimæ fuerant.' Mr. Freeman, of course, held that Orderic referred to the new class of buildings,' donjons of masonry, and urged that they seem to have been new inventions in Normandy itself.' Yet the words of William of Jumièges— 'aggeres erexerunt'-on which he relied, do not imply this; and the Tapestry pictures of the Breton campaign, in which Harold accompanied William, show still the old type, the palisaded mound. So, too, Mr. Clark tells us that no shellkeep or masonry has been found, in Normandy, as old as the Conquest; while of the rectangular type, 'not above half a dozen examples can be shown with certainty to have been constructed in Normandy before the latter part of the eleventh century, and but very few, if any, before the Norman Conquest' (i. 35). We are inclined to differ from both writers as to the solution of the problem, and to hold that, while Mr. Freeman was mistaken in supposing that Orderic referred to a new type of castle, Mr. Clark has failed to explain away the chronicler's words. Without insisting on our own suggestion that many of these moated mounds may be actually subsequent to the Conquest, it is possible to reconcile all the facts by supposing that a long period of peace had done its work, that the old strongholds had been neglected, and the timbered mounds-where they existed-abandoned, like the keeps of later days, for more pleasant dwellings below. An earthwork, till it was stockaded, was not deemed a 'castle'; and even when it was, its fortification would probably be less elaborate than in the troubled Norman land. Englishmen could still fight in the field, but they had had no recent experience of a war of sieges. towns, moreover, we strongly suspect, the long long canker of peace' had done its worst. At Lincoln, for instance, where a rising trade must have led to an increase of houses within the walls, we read in Domesday that no fewer than a hundred and sixty-six dwellings were destroyed propter castellum.' Mr. Freeman assigned this wholesale destruction to the building of the castle and its outworks'; but Mr. Clark holds it certain that the houses were not removed to allow of the extension of its area, for the Norman walls stand upon the English banks.' He therefore believes that the area of the fortress had been invaded by houses for the citizens; and this view, we think, is strengthened by a comparison with Colchester, where the existence of a similar castle area within the town walls involved no removal of houses, the local trade being small, and the town not extending. But if at so important a place as Lincoln the castle could be thus treated, one may fairly maintain, as against Mr. Clark, that except in exposed border districts-the castles

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of England, at the death of the Confessor, had, as in later times, become mere obsolete relics of a stormy past.

On the whole we lean to the view practically held by Mr. Parker, in his preface to the work of Viollet-le-Duc (1879) and elsewhere. According to this, the tower (or rectangular' keep) was not introduced into England till after the Conquest, indeed till towards the close of the Conqueror's reign. Mr. Parker holds that these structures really originated here, being probably invented by Gundulf, whose tower at Malling, he tells us, was examined by French antiquaries in 1840, and acknowledged by them to be earlier than anything of the kind in Normandy. But we hesitate to go so far as this, in view of the early and authentic mention of the Tower of Rouen. As to the mention of 'towers' by such later writers as Wace, or even William of Malmesbury, we must remember how apt were medieval writers to carry back too far the practice of their own day.

The conclusion at which we have arrived makes it the more necessary to insist that the Tower of London, so far as we know, cannot have been built earlier than 1078. It may, indeed, be somewhat later, and, as we have said, it is likely to have been one of the earliest 'towers' built. At the Newcastle Congress (1884) Mr. Clark contrasted it with the local keep, assigned in these volumes to 1080, but now known to have been built about 1172-4. The Tower, he observed, was the work of the Conqueror immediately on his arrival, the other was the work of his grandson (sic) rather above a century later.'* This would date the construction of the Tower about 1066-1070, but we think that this can only be a slip, and is not Mr. Clark's real opinion.

Although the author has, in these volumes, given us two elaborate descriptions of the White Tower' at London, and one of the keep at Colchester, it does not seem to have occurred to him that the two should be classed together. Colchester keep, as he truly says, 'is a peculiar and, in many respects, a very remarkable structure.' Many archæologists have tried their hands at it, both in this and in the last century. In the words of Mr. F. M. Nichols, who has published an excellent account of it in the 'Essex Archæological Transactions,' it 'is distinguished from every other example of its kind in this country by the magnitude of its area, as well as by the singularity of its form, materials, and mode of construction.' In some of his conclusions we cannot concur, but he has at least the merit of having seen that the keep of Colchester

* 'Arch. Journ.,' xli. 419.

cannot

cannot be dissociated' from the Tower of London. No one,' he writes, 'who compares the ground-plan of these two buildings can treat them as independent designs: the architect of London must have had Colchester in his thoughts, or the architect of Colchester must have imitated the keep of London.' For size these mighty structures exceed all others; but the strange thing is that Colchester keep covers about half as much ground again as the Tower of London, an area of some 20,000 feet as against one of 14,000 feet. It is the south-east angle of these buildings in which they so closely resemble one another. As Mr. Clark writes of London :

The south wall terminates eastward in a half-round bow of 42 feet diameter, projecting on the east wall. This marks the apse of the chapel, and is the great peculiarity of this tower.'

But this is also the great peculiarity of Colchester. It is strange that the resemblance should not have received more attention from our author, but stranger still that Mr. Freeman saw, not resemblance, but contrast. Of Colchester keep we find him writing:

'No one would think of calling it a tower. Its vast rectangular mass is broken only by the apsidal projection for the chapel in the east wall, as in the example at Kidwelly; in the Tower of London the apse is made in the thickness of the wall.'*

Of this astounding paragraph one can only say that, in records, it was duly called a tower (turris '); that Kidwelly was not a keep at all, but an Edwardian castle, 'a court surrounded by four round towers,' † which had no more in common with Colchester than Monmouth with Macedon; and that- —as everyone who knows the Tower must be aware-the

apse is a bold projection, and is not 'a mere recess' in the thickness of the wall. One is reminded of what Mr. Freeman wrote of the double range of shops' at Chester :

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That it should often have been likened to the arcades at Bern only shows how many people there are who are quite unable to take in any real likeness or unlikeness.' +

Mr. Clark is less successful, at Colchester, than usual, probably because, like all archæologists, he has been wholly misled by the chapel.' Comparison of these extracts from his own

* English Towns and Districts,' p. 411.
Ibid. p. 135.

† Ibid. p. 32.

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