work will show that this chamber was not the chapel, but corresponded with the 'crypt' at London : 'LONDON. 'A door leads into the crypt of the chapel, 13 ft. 6 in. broad by 39 ft. long, having an apsidal east end, and 17 ft. high to the crown of its very plain vault.' (i. 209.) 'COLCHESTER. It is The chapel is composed of a nave and apse and of four lateral recesses or side chapels. in length 45 ft., and in breadth 15 ft., and 17 ft. 6 in. high to the crown of its barrel vault.' The two chambers, as inspection will show, are precisely similar in character, and there is quite unconscious humour in Mr. Clark's comment on the Colchester vault that this is a very curious and rare example of a castle chapel.' Glancing at the material employed in these early keeps, we find that, at Malling, the masonry is rude, and the material 'roughly but decidedly coursed, with a slight tendency to the herring-bone pattern. The joints are very open, and the mortar has been very freely used.' So too the Tower, built in great haste, is of rubble, rudely coursed, with very open joints.' At Colchester also we have rude rubble roughly coursed, and with a very free use of mortar.' But we do not value very highly the evidence of masonry, and have seen experts puzzled and misled by it. The circumstances of the locality, and those of the erection, must have had considerable influence. This makes it the more important to date as many keeps as possible that they may form a groundwork of study. The citadel, for instance, of Holderness-' famosum illud et nobile castrum, quod dicitur Scartheburch,' as William of Newburgh termed it which has been carefully studied by Mr. Clark and figures on the cover of his book, can be dated with certainty. The Pipe Rolls of 1158-1169 record an expenditure of some 3007. on the turris' and the castellum,' so that the keep is of the same period as those of Newcastle and Bamborough. The story of this 'arx magna et præclara' is curious and instructive; and Mr. Clark seems hardly to have grasped what William says in his chapter De situ castelli Scartheburch.' The Earl of Ålbemarle, we read, had built it, surrounding the summit of the rock with a wall, and placing the keep at the very entrance to the stronghold (' turrim in faucium angustiis fabricavit '). This 'tower' in course of time fell down ('processu temporis collapsa'); and Henry II. then raised the existing keep on its site (in ipsis autem faucibus'). Mr. Clark has overlooked this 'collapse,' which is a fact of importance, as suggesting a similar fate for other towers. It is, we believe, the only recorded case of the kind in military architecture, though there are several ecclesiastical instances, as at Winchester under Henry I. (1107), Worcester under Henry II. (1175), and St. Edmund's under John (1210), when turris fortissima absque omni impulsu turbinis aut tempestatis magis prodigiosaliter quam causaliter cecidit.' Indeed, Professor Willis went so far as to say that such a collapse was a circumstance of such common occurrence that there is some evidence against a tower being Norman work if it had not fallen down.'* This may not always have been due to 'jerry-building,' as at Peterborough Cathedral: in castles, haste, may have sometimes been the cause, when the builders, as at Bridgnorth, worked day and night, with the fear of interruption before their eyes. Mr. Clark, though he has done so much to advance our knowledge of his subject, would not, we feel assured, claim to have made it perfect. His chief deficiency is his failure to distinguish between 'turris' and 'castrum.' Unless this distinction be grasped and kept in mind, mediæval military architecture cannot be really understood. Of this Rochester affords a most striking instance. Mr. Hartshorne had proved that its noble keep (turris') was built by William Archbishop of Canterbury between 1126 and 1139. It could not, therefore, as had been supposed, be the castrum' built by Gundulf under William Rufus. But what that castrum was no one was able to explain. Mr. Parker and Mr. Freeman looked about for some tower' to represent it; and Mr. Clark persists that Gundulf built a 'castle, that is a tower of some sort,' but cannot solve the mystery. Now what Gundulf really built was not a tower at all, but a castrum,'-that is, a stone wall round the castle enclosure; and this conclusion is proved to be right by the actual remains of the wall, which correspond with the style he employed. This discovery has its corollaries; such, for instance, as the fact that a castle could exist without a keep, if, as at Rochester, it had a good wall round a strong position. This was also the case at Exeter, and probably at Newcastle and Conisborough. It was, again, because he had missed this essential distinction, that Mr. Clark has gone so far astray over Newcastle and Arques, allowing his misunderstanding of a word to overcome his own better judgment. It was thus again that he was led to assert that Gloucester 'had a mound and a shell-keep,' though the turris,' which occurs in all our records, proves its keep to have been of the other type. The Vol. 179.-No. 357. 'Gent. Mag.,' Sept. 1862. E tower tower of Bristol and the tower of Gloucester were names once as familiar as is to us the Tower of London. One of the results of this failure to distinguish between 'turris' and castellum' was that Mr. Freeman invariably confused the moveable wooden tower used by besiegers at the time with the entrenched posts constructed for a blockade. Thus, at the blockade of Arques in 1053, a 'castellum,' we read, was raised by the Normans at the foot of the heights. This he rendered: A ditch and palisade at the foot of the hill protected a wooden tower,' for this tower,' he held, was doubtless of wood.'* So, writing of the siege of Domfront, a few years earlier, he rendered castella circumponit quatuor' by surrounded the town with four towers'; † and he also spoke of 'the temporary towers which were often used in the military art of the time and which are sometimes called castles.'‡ This misapprehension became more serious when he reached the siege of Bamborough under William Rufus. Of this he wrote: 6 'The castle of Bebbe was not to be taken by any open attack. William therefore took the slower means of warfare. He made one of those towers § which were so often made in such cases, to act as a check on the besieged castle, to form in fact an imperfect kind of blockade.' In this case, we may parenthetically observe, a 'tower' would have been peculiarly useless, as the blockading post is known to have been occupied by cavalry. But there is something more to come. William, in grim humour, bestowed on his fortified post the name of 'Malvoisin,' as an 'evil neighbour,' to the rebel stronghold. He called it, says the Chronicle, on his space Malueisin, þæt is on Englisc yfel nehebur.' The Normans were apt to bestow on one another nicknames which clung to them closely; and they carried the same tendency into operations of war. Henry I., in 1119, gave the offensive name of ' Mateputain' to a castle he erected oversea, just as Richard I., with equal offensiveness, bestowed on the castle in which (1190) he held his Christmas feast, in dangerous proximity to Messina, the name of Mate-griffun.' The mysterious' matfelon' of a London church has, we suspect, a similar derivation. But, oddly enough, taking 'Malvoisin' as a generic, not as a proper name, the historian proceeded to apply it broadcast. *Norm. Conq.,' iii. (2nd ed.) 129. † Ibid. ii. 231. § It is castel' in the Chronicle, and 'castellum' in Florence. " William Rufus,' ii. 51. Ibid. p. 606. 'The 'The Malvoisin at Bridgnorth,' we read, comes from Florence "castellum firmare cœpit"; while the castris constructis' of Orderic gives rise to the remark : The Malvoisins before Arundel seem to have struck all our writers.... We get them in the Chronicle; . . . castelas. They were doubtless of wood.' Mr. Clark evidently accepts Mr. Freeman's view; he follows him wholly in the case of Bamborough,* and he tells us that Bridgenorth was besieged by Henry I., who brought the wooden turret known as a malvoisin to bear upon its walls' (i. 202). Need we repeat that the castrum' of Florence can have no such meaning, and that theyfel nehebur' was a name as purely local as that of the 'evil hedge'?† Mr. Freeman, however, continued thus: "The Malvoisin was clearly such a tower as we often hear of,. temporary and of wood, but still not moveable, as is implied in Florence's word "firmavit." But the name seems afterwards to have been transferred to moveable towers; see Du Cange in "Malveisin," where he refers to the passage about the siege of Dover in Roger of Wendover (iii. 380): "Misso prius ad patrem suum propter petrariam que Malveisine' Gallico nuncupatur, qua cum machinis aliis Franci ante castrum locata muros acriter crebris ictibus verberabant."'‡ In this passage the Pelion of error is piled upon the Ossa of confusion. Du Cange gives no authority for supposing that moveable towers were called 'malvoisins'; on the contrary, he wrote under malveisin,' 'petrariæ speciem facit Mathæus Paris.' And the petrariæ- tormenta quæ vulge perreriæ vocantur'-were well-known engines of war for casting stones. But though Du Cange was guiltless of confusing them with moveable towers, we cannot acquit him, or his latest editor,§ of mistaking 'malvoisin' for a generic instead of a proper name. In the authority he gives, quoted by Mr. Freeman, we merely read of a notable pierrière (petraria), that was nicknamed 'Malvoisin,' just as a certain gun was known as 'Mons Meg.' That this is certain is shown by the story of the siege of Acre (1191), where the 'Itinerarium' tells us that the Saracens and the French had respectively nicknamed their favourite engines the bad kinsman' and 'the bad neighbour.' Yet, here again, Mr. Freeman's error is duly adopted by Mr. Clark (i. 118), who describes the 'petraria' of Louis as a "malvoisin" to overtop the walls.' *Arch. Journal,' xlvi. 98. + William Rufus,' ii. 446. E 2 But But there was a real name for the moveable towers; and that was berefridum (in various forms), which Du Cange renders: 'machina bellica lignea in modum excelsioris turris exstructa. . . rotisque quatuor vecta, tantæ proceritatis ut ejus fastigium oppidorum et castrorum obsessorum muros æquaret.' Such a tower is mentioned at the siege of Courcy (1091), though Mr. Freeman held it to be there not a moving tower, it would seem, but one of those of which we have so often heard.'* It. must, however, have been a moveable tower, for Orderic speaks of it as 'ingens machina quam berfredum vocitant.' These machines have a special interest, not only because they gave its name, by transition, to our own belfry,' but also because we find them employed from at least the days of the Emperor Leo to those, incredible though it may sound, of our own Civil War. The system of attack, like that of defence, in mediæval times, had its roots in a distant past. It was Vegetius, De Re Militari, that Geoffrey of Anjou studied during the siege of Montreuil, where he raised three of those blockading forts of which we have spoken. But to return to the beffrois. We find them mentioned not only at Courcy (1091), but at the taking of Jerusalem (1099), the siege of Dyrrhachium, that of Damietta, that of Bedford, and others. At the taking of Constantinople (1453) by the Turks, a wooden turret,' in Gibbon's words, was advanced on rollers . . . incessant volleys were securely discharged from the loopholes . . . as high as the level of the platform a scaling-ladder could be raised by pulleys to form a bridge, and grapple with the adverse rampart. But most remarkable was the Royalists' device against Canon Frome in 1645. The machine,' writes Mr. Webb, which was called a "sow," was considered to be the largest that had been hitherto employed; it was a tower of wood, mounted on wheels, and drawn by oxen, with rooms loopholed and musket-proof one above the other, high enough to overlook all the works.' The writer adds that a similar machine had been used against Gloucester at the recommendation of the learned Chillingworth,' and that there are other traces of such 'sows' during the Civil War.† 6 It is impossible even to glance through Mr. Clark's volumes without being made aware of the very prominent part played by the castles he describes in our mediæval history. The keen eye of Mr. Freeman and his strong democratic instinct combined to make him quick to discern the importance of the *Will. Rufus,' ii. 520. The Civil War in Herefordshire,' ii. 240. castle |