Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/144

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ahead from the Exchequer Gate you see the east gateway of the castle, a Norman arch with later semi-circular turrets corbelled out on either side of it. Inside is a fine oriel window, brought from John of Gaunt's house below the hill. The enclosure is an irregular square of old British earthworks, seven acres in extent. The west gate is walled up and the Assize Court within the castle enclosure is near it. In the angles on either side of the east gate are two towers in the curtain wall, one, "the observatory tower," crowns an ancient mound, and on the south side is a larger mound, forty feet high, on which is the keep, a very good specimen of very early work, in shape an irregular polygon. The castle was one of the eight founded by the Conqueror himself, apparently never so massive a building as his castle, which is now being excavated at Old Sarum, the walls of which, built of the flints of the locality, are twelve feet thick and faced with stone. At Lincoln the Roman walls were ten to twelve feet thick and twenty feet high. Massive fragments of this wall still exist in different places, the biggest being near the Newport Arch. Near here too is "The Mint Wall," seventy feet long by thirty feet high, and three and a half feet thick, which probably formed the north wall of the Basilica. Most of the fighting in Lincoln used to take place around this spot, as Stephen felt to his cost. The old West Gate of the Roman city was found just to the north of the castle west gate. The line which joined the Roman East and West Gates ran straight then, and crossed the Ermine Street, now called here the Bailgate, near the church of St. Paulinus, but the result of some destructive assaults must have so filled the road that the street now called 'East Gate' was deflected from its course southwards and has to make a sharp bend to get back to its proper line.

Getting back to the 'Bail,' or open space between the castle gate and the Exchequer Gate, we can go down that bit of the old Ermine Street called "Steep Street" (and I don't think any street can better deserve its name) and come into the High Street of Lincoln. If we go right down this, we shall see all that is of most interest in the town below the hill. First is the "Jew's House" where the murderer of Little St. Hugh is said to have lived, a most interesting specimen of Norman domestic architecture, and more ornate than that at Boothby-Pagnell of a similar date. The house has a round-headed