Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/365

Rh fication and satisfaction of the Infidels—instead of carrying on unitedly the Holy War. In a large way, it had been increased beyond all endurance by Philip's invasion of Normandy while Duke Leopold of Austria held Richard a prisoner—settling the score of the standard cast into the ditch before Ptolemaïs—in the castle that the picturesque Blondel searched for and found.

It was the Norman matter that gave Philip uneasiness. His invasion of the Duchy had gone smoothly: because the Normans held that no change of kings could make things worse for them, and that there even was an off chance for improvement under French rule—when they would be well rid, at least, of their Angevin overlord, who fleeced them clean with taxes and whose tax-collectors were Brabançon mercenaries commanded by a swaggering Gascon. Regarding the situation thus philosophically, they had put up no fight worth mentioning and Philip had had matters much his own way.

Richard himself was a bit of a philosopher—at least, on occasion, he could reason with philosophic acuteness—and he also was a military genius. He perceived that such loyalty to him as ever had existed in Normandy was dead, and that treason and invasion were ready at any moment to lock hands: whence he concluded that to hold his Duchy—against foes within ready to unite with foes without—he must create a great strategic fortress that at once would dominate and defy.

Acting on this conviction—and it was some such action that Philip had been nervous about—he set himself to the building at the most exposed point on his frontier of his Château Gaillard, his Cheeky Castle: that equally was intended to be a standing threat to his own subjects and a standing defiance to the French king.

Twenty miles or so southeastward of Rouen—almost twice as far by the windings of the river—the Seine makes a great horseshoe curve to the northward that carries deep into the land of Normandy the land of France. Throughout almost the whole of that long curve the high tableland of Le Vexin rises above the right bank: its projecting points, undercut by the river, forming a series of green-bordered white chalk-cliffs—like the chalk-cliffs of the English Channel—which rise from two to three hundred feet above the stream. Between the outstanding points are many chines worn by rivulets from the table-land; and at the centre of the curve is a wide valley, flanked by high promontories, through which the little river Gambon flows into the Seine. On the left bank, the loop made by the river encloses a great alluvial plain—known as the Peninsula of Bernières—on which are a few villages and many scattered farms. Over that plain an army could march—and has marched—very easily; and an army once across it, and across the narrow river, would be within easy striking distance of Rouen, the Norman capital.

It was at the deepest inset of the river's curve—where his enemy came closest to him—that Richard built his defiant castle: at the extremity of the narrow promontory of rock, three hundred feet high, outstanding between the valley of the Gambon and the valley of the Seine. The site is an ideal one for a medieval fortress. Westward, at a little distance back from the Seine, the rock rises in an almost sheer cliff. Northward and eastward the angle of ascent is less than forty-five degrees. To the southward, the weak side, the narrow promontory mounts by an easy slope to the table-land—that overtops the keep of the castle at a thousand yards away. From that height, even weak cannon could knock the whole place