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310 real or apparent, was sufficient to awaken suspicion, and call forth the exercise of tyranny. From some cause, we know not what, history has not however exempted the character of his wife from the perfidy of betraying him; the earl suddenly fell under the displeasure of his royal kinsman, who, after suffering Waltheof to languish by a long confinement in prison, ordered him to be beheaded at Winchester. The Conqueror now desired to bestow the Countess Judith's hand on Simon de St. Liz, a Norman in his confidence, who had come to seek his fortunes in England, but whose bodily deformity caused her to reject him. Indignant at such an unexpected resistance to his wishes, the king seized her possessions, amongst them sixteen houses in Northampton, and part of the revenue of the town, and transferred them, with her eldest daughter Matilda, into the hands of his favourite. It is to this inheritor of Waltheof's united rank and estates that the erection of Northampton castle has been assigned, nor does there seem to exist any strong reason for discrediting the generally-received opinion.

After so great a lapse of time, and considering the distraction and civil war that prevailed within a century after the castle is reported to have been built, such structures being the first to suffer in the general disturbance, it is not surprising that so little of the first edifice should remain. Enough however is still traceable to mark the outline of its bulwarks, to shew where the bastions stood out from the curtain wall, where the moat separated the inner from the outer bailey, whilst the postern gate yet continues. In regarding the general figure of the plan, and judging from the existing mounds of earth, the debris of ancient buildings, the line of decayed and ruinous walls, and then comparing these with other buildings of a similar kind which still remain in a more integral state, for example, with Pevensey or with Pickering, there appears to have been a keep within the inner bailey, probably at the north-east end; in connection with this, the enceinte or boundary wall, which was occasionally flanked with circular towers, the enclosed area being occupied with erections, usually of wood, of a more domestic nature. The Nen flowed in its natural channel to the west, and the waters of the same river filled the moat, and encompassed the fortress on every side, though the moat itself is only visible at present as a dry ditch to the south. The few existing marks of a strictly