CHAPTER II

CASTLES AND KEEPS, OR DONJONS

The first French castles of the mediæval period seem to have been built for the purpose of arresting invasion and affording shelter to communities decimated by the raids of the Normans. They consisted of simple intrenchments more or less extensive. Surrounded by a _fossé_ or ditch formed of earthworks, the scarp of which was defended by a palisade, they had much in common with the camps of the ancient Romans. In the centre of the enclosure rose the _motte_ (mote or mound), a conical elevation, either natural to the ground, or artificially formed on the model of the Roman _prætorium_. This was surmounted by a building, generally of wood, which served as a post of observation and a retreat less accessible than the _enceinte_ itself.

In these rudimentary dispositions we recognise the germ of those feudal keeps and castles which were such important features of mediæval architecture, notably during the Gothic period.

Defensive works of this nature sprang up at various points of the royal domain which were exposed to the incursions of the Scandinavian pirates; but the temporary concessions of Charles the Bald were claimed as definitive by those to whom they had been made. "When, therefore, that feeble monarch proclaimed the heredity of the feofs at Quierzy-sur-Oise in 877, he did but sanction that which was already an accomplished fact.... When the feudal system was firmly established, the nobles turned their attention to the maintenance of their usurpations alike against the kings of France, strangers, and neighbours. To this end they carefully chose the best strategic positions in their territories, and fortified them in the most durable fashion at their command. The imposts they levied were considerable, and their serfs were subject to endless exactions."[65] Stone castles were accordingly built which, in general arrangement, adhered to primitive models. In 980 Frotaire had raised no less than five around Périgueux, his episcopal town.

[65] Anthyme St. Paul, _Histoire Monumentale de la France_.

In 991 Thibault File-Étoupe built a fortress on the hill of Montlhéry, near the royal residences of Paris and Étampes, which was very formidable to the first five kings of the house of Capet. Later, when it became a royal possession, it was one of the chief bulwarks of the city.

In the Middle Ages the castle bore the same relation to the fortified town as did the keep to the feudal castle, and the history of one is bound up in that of the other.

In a fortified town the castle was the lodging of the leader and his soldiers. It was connected with the ramparts of the place, and had one or more special outlets; it was further provided with defences on the side of the town itself, so that upon occasion it became an isolated stronghold.

The Castle of Carcassonne is a famous example of such offensive and defensive fortification. It was built in the first years of the twelfth century, and is composed of various lodgings for the chief and his garrison, defended east and north, on the side towards the city, by towers and curtains (Fig. 175). At the south-west angle independent reducts and towers guard the courtyards and approaches. The west front overlooks the open country, and here was placed the gate, which was defended by a series of formidable devices so ingenious as to preclude all possibility of surprise.

During the Romanesque and Gothic periods the castle was a miniature town, with its own fortified _enceinte_, composed of walls reinforced by towers which served as refuges at various points of the circumference, and formed so many reducts for the arrest of assailants.

The keep was the citadel of this miniature town, the temporary lodging of the lord whose vassals lived in the internal offices, and whose soldiers occupied the gate-house buildings and the towers of the ramparts. The noble sought to give his special habitation the most formidable aspect possible, and thereby to strike terror to the beholder, a very necessary device in those days of conflict when the friend of night was often the implacable foe of morning. "In times of peace the keep was the receptacle for the treasure, arms, and archives of the family; but the lord did not lodge there; he only took up his quarters in the keep with his wife and children in time of war. As it was not possible for him to defend the place alone, he surrounded himself with a band of the most devoted of his followers who shared his dwelling. From thence he exercised a scrupulous surveillance over the garrison and its approaches, for the keep was always placed at the most vulnerable point of the fortress, and he and his bodyguard held the horde of vassals and retainers in due subservience; as they were able to pass in and out at all hours by secret and well-guarded passages, the garrison was kept in ignorance of the exact means of defence, the lord, as was natural, doing all in his power to make them appear formidable."[66]

[66] Viollet-le-Duc, _Dictionnaire_, vol. v.

Castles and keeps of stone were generally built upon the natural scarp of some spur commanding two valleys and near the banks of a river; the primitive mounds of the feudal fortresses were abandoned; as we have already remarked, these were in many cases artificial, and would have been quite inadequate to the support of the huge masses of masonry of the new architecture.

"By the close of the tenth century and the opening years of the eleventh, Foulques Nerra was raising castles throughout his own territories in Anjou, and on every available point of vantage he could wrest from his neighbour, the Count of Blois and Tours; the latter built fortresses to resist the aggressor and complete the network of strongholds begun by his father, Thibault the Trickster, one of the most turbulent nobles of his day."[67]

[67] Anthyme St. Paul, _Histoire Monumentale de la France_.

The keep of Langeais, on a precipitous hill overlooking the Loire, was founded by Foulques Nerra at the close of the tenth century; the walls, which are still standing on three sides, show traces of Gallo-Roman methods of construction; the dressed stones are of small size, and brick and stone are used conjointly for the voussoirs of the window arches.

A large number of castles and keeps were built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, among others those of Plessy, Grimoult, Le Pin, and La Pommeraye, the last on a mound surrounded by deep moats which separate three lines of circumvallation from each other; Beaugency-sur-Loire, the vast keep of which was four stories high; and Loches, which is ascribed to Foulques Nerra, but which seems to belong rather to the twelfth century, at which period military architecture had made a great advance. The keep of Loches is perhaps the finest of all such structures in France; in height it is nearly 100 feet; the ramparts seem to date from the thirteenth century; the form of the towers on plan is a pointed arch, a shape adopted as offering greater resistance at the part most frequently attacked by the sapper.

At Falaise, where the castle like that of Domfront is built on a rugged promontory, the ramparts are later than the keep, the architectural details of which point to the twelfth century. This hypothesis is supported by a passage in the Chronicle of Robert du Mont, quoted by M. de Caumont. In 1123 Henry II. rebuilt the keep and ramparts of Arques, and carried out similar restorations at Gisors, Falaise, Argentan, Exmes, Domfront, Amboise, and Vernon.

Other keeps of equal interest in point of situation, plan, or details of construction are:--Ste. Suzanne, Nogent-le-Rotrou, Broue, L'Islot, Tonnay-Boutonne, Pons, Chamboy, Montbazon, Lavardin, Montrichard, and Huriet in the Bourbonnais. All these, in common with those first described, are square or rectangular on plan. From the end of the twelfth century onwards the cylindrical form predominates in the plan of keeps and towers. On the whole, it offered the best resistance to the mediæval assailant. The convex surface was of equal strength all round, and as we have seen in the preceding chapter, the circular trace for towers gave the garrison the best chance of defending their bases from the curtain, and of opposing the work of sappers and miners.

The great advance made in architecture by the general adoption of an expedient so simple and easy of execution as the vault on intersecting arches manifested itself very strongly in military structures. The heavy wooden floors of the earlier keeps, which were so apt to catch fire, were replaced by less ponderous vaults, binding the circular walls firmly together, and forming a flooring for the various stories less unsteady and infinitely more durable than the huge beams and joists of earlier days.

A further improvement was the pointed roof, round on plan, now generally adopted as better calculated to withstand projectiles or combustibles which shattered the angles of the roof in the old square towers, and set fire to the timbers.

The form of keeps, however, varied considerably throughout the twelfth century. At Houdan the keep is a great tower strengthened by four turrets; at Étampes it is composed of four clustered towers, forming a quatrefoil on plan; the vaulted stories are marked by many curious features, among others a deep well, the opening of which is in the second floor. Some historians date this building from the eleventh century; there are indications, however, in the details of the architecture and sculptures, which point to the early part of the reign of Philip Augustus.

The keep of Provins, which belongs to the twelfth century, has certain very original features. It rises from a solid mound of masonry, and has a circular _enceinte_. The base of the keep itself is square, and is flanked at each angle by a turret. An octagonal tower surmounts the square base, and is connected with the flanking turrets by flying buttresses. The keep of Gisors is also octagonal in form, one of its octagons being at a tangent to the circular _enceinte_ which crowns the feudal _motte_ or mound. It was built in the twelfth century, and was considerably augmented by the line of walls and square towers which Philip Augustus drew round the mound.

The _Château Gaillard_, built at the close of the twelfth century on an eminence commanding the Seine at Les Andelys, has several peculiarities of arrangement. The round keep is first enclosed by a circular _enceinte_, or rather by a square, the angles of which have been rounded. This in its turn is surrounded by an elliptic enclosure connected with the defences of the castle, and consisting of a series of segmental towers united by very narrow curtains. In this massive structure the art of the architect manifests itself only in the robust solidity of the masonry. It is the keep in its purely military character. No trace of decoration mitigates its austerity.

Philip Augustus, having possessed himself of the Château Gaillard, fortified Gisors on the same formidable scale, and proceeded to build the castle of Dourdan as well as his own palace fortress of the Louvre, in Paris. Upon the death of the king, Enguerrand III. began to build a fortress at Coucy, which he completed in less than ten years (1223-1230). Its grandiose proportions and formidable system of defence surpassed everything that had gone before. Coucy was, in fact, the architectural manifestation of that haughty ambition to which Enguerrand is said to have given free expression during the minority of his sovereign.

Next in importance to the castles and keeps of the thirteenth century, already enumerated, are the following:--The White Tower of Issoudun; the Tower of Blandy; the octagonal keep of Châtillon-sur-Loing, Semur; the royal fortresses of Angers, built by St. Louis; Montargis, Boulogne, Chinon, and Saumur; the _Tour Constance_ or keep of Aigues-Mortes, ascribed to St. Louis; the castle of Najac, built by his brother, Alphonse of Poitiers; the castles of Bourbon l'Archambault and Chalusset, and the castle of Clisson, rebuilt or begun by Olivier I., Lord of Clisson, after his return from the Holy Land, etc.

In the fourteenth century military architecture developed chiefly on reconstructive lines. Ancient fortresses were reorganised in accordance with the new methods of attack and (consequently) of defence, and the weak points brought to light by recent sieges were dealt with. The same process was applied to the construction of towers which had hitherto been furnished with several rows of loopholes, an excellent expedient for the defence of curtains and approaches, but subject to this drawback, that it directed attention to the most vulnerable points. The first effect of the use of cannon in warfare was to increase the thickness of the walls; subsequently, such structural modifications were adopted as were required by the novel method of massing all the defences at the summit of machicolated walls. The principal castles of this period were Vincennes, near Paris, built by Philip of Valois and Charles V., and the vast fortified palace at Avignon, constructed by the Popes Benedict XII., Clement VI., Innocent VI., and Urban V., of which we shall have more to say in Part IV. Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix and Béarn, built square keeps in the _Bastide_ of Béarn, at Montaner, and at Mauvezin, besides circular keeps at Lourdes and at Foix.

Among keeps and castles completed or entirely built in the fourteenth century, Anthyme St. Paul enumerates those of Roquetaillade, Bourdeilles, Polignac, Briquebec, Hardelot, Rambures, Lavardin (the foundations of which were laid in the twelfth century), Montrond, Turenne, Billy, Murat, and Hérisson, the curious keep of Montbard, the keeps of Romefort, Pouzauges, Noirmoutier, and many others.

At the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century Louis of Orleans, son of Charles V., took advantage of the madness of his brother Charles VI. to fortify various positions on which he relied for the furtherance of his ambitious schemes. In 1393 and the years immediately following he acquired various estates in Valois: Montépilloy, Pierrefonds, and La Ferté-Milon, the castle of which he rebuilt entirely. He also bought the domain of Coucy in 1400, after the death of the last male descendant of Enguerrand III.

Coucy, Pierrefonds, and La Ferté-Milon have been so exhaustively described in special works, notably those of Viollet-le-Duc, that we need not reproduce them here. We have cited them as characteristic types of those colossal fortresses and keeps, admirable alike in grandiose proportion and refinement of detail which are the supreme expression of feudal power.

Several other castles were built in Albigeois, Auvergne, Limousin, Guyenne, La Vendée, and Provence, notably at Tarascon. The keeps of Trèves in Anjou also date from this period.

Important castles sprang up all over Brittany in the fifteenth century. Such were Combourg, Fougères, Montauban, St. Malo, Vitré, Elven, Sucinio, Dinan, Tonquédec, etc.

Many of these buildings which date from the close of the century were remarkable for their ingenuity of arrangement and richness of decoration. But though worthy of all attention from the artistic point of view, they do not come within the scope of our present study--that of _military_ architecture in the Gothic period.