Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/33

Post-Roman and English Earthworks. 17 depth and breadth are seen to have been very formidable. Though usually artificial, these mounds are not always so. Durham, Launceston, Montacute, Dunster, Restormel, Nant cribba, are natural hills; Windsor, Tickhill, Lewes, Norwich, Ely, and the Devizes, are partly so ; at Sherborne and Hedingham the mound is a natural platform, scarped by art ; at Tutbury, Pontefract and Bramber, where the natural platform was also large, it has been scarped, and a mound thrown up upon it.

Connected with the mound is usually a base court or enclosure, sometimes circular, more commonly oval or horseshoe-shaped, but if of the age of the mound always more or less rounded. This enclosure had also its bank and ditch on its outward faces, its rear resting on the ditch of the mound, and the area was often further strengthened by a bank along the crest of the scarp of the ditch. Now and then, as at Old Sarum, there is an additional but slighter bank placed outside the outer ditch, that is, upon the crest of the counterscarp. This was evidently intended to carry a palisade, and to fulfil the conditions of the covered-way along the crest of one of Vauban's counterscarps. Where the enclosure is circular, the mound is either central, as at Pickering, or Mileham, or at Old Sarum, where it is possibly an addition to an older work, such as Badbury, or it stands on one side, as at Tutbury. Where the area is oblong or oval, the mound may be placed near one end, as at Bramber. At Windsor and Arundel it is on one side of an oblong enclosure, producing a sort of hourglass constriction, and where this is the case a part of its ditch coincides with the ditch of the place. Where the court is only part of a circle it rests upon a part of the ditch of the mound. At Sarum there are two ditches concentrically arranged. At Berkhampstead the mound is outside the court. On the whole, as at Tickhill, Castle Acre, and Lincoln, it is most usual to see the mound on the edge of the court, so that it forms a part of the general " enceinte " of the place. Where the base court is of moderate area, as at Builth and Kilpeck, its platform is often slightly elevated by the addition of a part of the contents of the ditch, which is rarely the case in British camps. At Wigmore and Builth, where the mound stands on the edge of a natural steep, the ditch is there discontinued. The base court is usually two or three times the area of the mound, and sometimes, as at Wallingford or Warwick, much more. No doubt the reason for placing the mound on one side rather than in the centre of the court was to allow of the concentration of the lodgings, stables, &c., on one spot, and to make C