Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/366

340 to pieces—but cannon were an unknown fighting quantity when the Château Gaillard was planned.

Ethical and practical difficulties stood in the way of Richard's castle building. By the treaty of Issoudun (1195) he was

pledged not to fortify the Gambon valley; and he was expressly forbidden to fortify it by Archbishop Gaultier of Rouen, to whom the territory belonged. Richard was not a person to bother over such details. Philip challenged his treaty-breaking; Gaultier met his trespass with an interdict—that closed the churches and that put a stop to all religious rites (save that of baptism) including the rites of marriage and of burial; and while the interdict was in force, and the engineering work was going on in spite of it, there fell a rain of blood that generally was accepted as a visible sign of the wrath of God. But treaty-breaking and interdicts and the wrath of God were all in the day's work for Richard—who went ahead in his usual whirlwind way: establishing a base by erecting a tough little tower on one of the Seine islands facing the Gambon valley, and by building in the mouth of the valley the walled town of Petit Andely—as it was called to distinguish it from the town of Andely (now Grand Andely) a half-mile or so up the valley in a nook among the hills.

The Archbishop—perceiving, I suppose, that such a devil of a king was not to be trifled with—presently came to terms. A charter was executed by which the land that Richard wanted was conveyed to him; and by the time that he had well started his preliminary building and fortifying and was ready to begin his main work the site that he wanted was his own.

In the planning of his castle Richard was his own engineer; and all the experts, headed by Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc, are agreed that he was a very great engineer. His main work, overtopping the precipitous end of the promontory, was in three parts: a donjon, an enclosing citadel rising from a deep and wide dry fosse; an outer court (about 400×225 feet) enclosed by towered ramparts rising from a second deep and wide dry fosse, that cut off the end of the promontory and made it in a way an island. Beyond the second fosse, extending up the slope, was an out-