Page:Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe.djvu/197

 And he was sentenced to be drawn and hanged as a traitor. Mortimer was executed at Tyburn, and the Queen Mother was sent under ward to the manor of Rising. The passage by which the conspirators entered, and by which the Earl was conveyed away, goes by the name of Mortimer's Hole to the present day.

If I were to attempt to deal with castles and towns on rocky heights I would have to fill pages with descriptions of Capdenac, Najarc, Minerve, Les Baux, San Marino, San Leo, and many another, but inasmuch as they are on rocks instead of being in rocks, I must pass them over.

A fourth class of cliff castle, neither the habitation of a routier nor the residence of a feudal seigneur, is that which commands an important ford, or the road or waterway to a town, and which was, in point of fact, an outpost of the garrison.

I can describe but a few.

The Emperor Honorius had conceded to the Visigoths all that portion of Gaul that lay between the Loire and the Pyrenees. The Visigoths were Arians. Far from imitating the Romans, who respected the religion of the vanquished, and cared only that the peoples annexed to the Empire should submit to their administrative and military organisation, the Visigoths sought to impose Arianism on the nations over whom they exercised dominion. The bishops and priests protested energetically against this tyranny, and the Visigoths sought to break their resistance by persecution and exile, but gained nothing thereby save bitter hostility. In the year 511 an event took place that gave to the Aquitanians their religious liberty. The Franks were their deliverers.

Clovis, who coveted the rich provinces of the South, profited by the religious antagonism existing between the Aquitanians and the Goths to gain the confidence of the bishops to whom he promised the destruction of Arian