Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/454

 420 MedicEval Militaiy Architecture. these strong places the king or some great Norman baron usually availed himself, substituting, as occasion served, Norman masonry for the earlier and less perfect defences. Sometimes the casde was within the circuit of the town, as at Chichester, Chester, Leicester, and Lincoln, Roman cities with English additions ; sometimes it was outside the town wall, but abutting upon it, as at Carlisle, Warwick, and Winchester. In each case the castle had its own proper defences, so that while, on the one hand, it could be held with the town against a common foe, on the other it could be held against the town, and used to overawe the citizens. Here the castle was placed within the Roman area, in its north-eastern quarter, and stood, not improbably, on the site of some considerable Roman building, to which the existing, but not accessible, sewers are thought to have belonged. Eudo died in 1120 at his castle of Preaux in Normandy, and was buried here at St. John's. He lived, therefore, twenty-four years after his religious foundation, and somewhat more than that time after the construction of his castle. He was also the founder, some time in the reign of Henry L, of the hospital of St. Mary Magdalen, in tlie suburbs of Colchester. He married Rohaise, whom Dugdale in his Baronage, citing Will, of Jumieges, calls the daughter of Walter Giffard, Earl of Buckingham, and widow of Fitz Gilbert, an error which, admitted into the earlier, is corrected in the later edition of the Monasticon, whence it appears that Rohaise was the daughter of Fitz Gilbert and a preceding Rohaise, and was married to Eudo in her nonage, '-ante habiles annos nupta est." She laid the second stone of St. John's, Eudo himself laying the first. The issue of this marriage was Margaret, Eudo's sole heiress, who married William de Magnaville, and was mother of Geoffrey Earl of Essex, and in her right seneschal or sewer of Normandy. Geoffrey, who played his cards to great advantage between Stephen and the Empress Maud, received from the latter the lands of Eudo Dapifer in Normandy, with the office of Dapifer, and an option, under certain circumstances, of the lands of which Eudo died seized in England. These, however, he does not seem to have obtained ; in the contemporary Pipe Rolls they are accounted for as in the Crown, and they do not appear in the Inquisitions on Geoffrey's descendants. The castle, which from the endowment of its chapel must certainly have belonged to Eudo, came into the possession of the Crown. Morant cites a grant of it by Maud to Alberic de Vere, from an early edition of the Foedera (xiii. 251), but there is no such deed in the later or the latest edition. He also cites a deed in his own possession, of the reign of Richard or John, showing that with other demesne manors the castle of Colchester and the Hundred were in the king's hands, and in the custody of the sheriff of Essex. In Stowe's An^ials mention is made of a certain Hubert de St. Clare who warded off an arrow from Henry I. at the siege of Bridge- north in TT65 at the cost of his own life, and whom Stowe