Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/470

 434 MedicBval Military Architecture. would still be one of great strength and equal to the accommodation of even a royal following. When Earl Warren, soon after the Norman Conquest, visited his newly-acquired lordship, he must have been struck with the general analogy of its chief seat to the strong places he had left behind him. The mound or motte, here natural, the circular ditch around it, and the entrenched outworks covering the weaker side, resting upon the ditch and protected by a branch of it, were features as well known in Normandy as in England. No doubt he intended to add to the fortress those works in masonry that were just then become popular upon the Seine and the Orne ; but the internal evidence of the oldest remaining work in stone, the encircling wall, shows it not to have been his work. Probably he found the works required at Lewes, Ryegate, and Castle-acre, quite enough to occupy his means, and was obliged to be content with such defences as he found already to his hand, and to his son or grandson is to be attri- buted the earliest extant masonry, the older part of the curtain, and a part of the outer gatehouse at the foot of the hill. There is no reason to suppose that there ever was a Norman keep. Probably the whole inner ward, as at Exeter and Restormel, was regarded as a shell keep. The present tower is certainly a rather later addition. The view here given shows the ascent from the gatehouse. On the left is seen the exterior of the curtain of the main ward. The castle, as now seen, is composed of a keep, an inner and an outer ward, and the steep slope between them. The Outer Ward is the earthwork on the western side. There are no traces of the gateway by which this must have been entered, nor of any curtain wall surrounding it, or buildings within it. Probably its defences were always of timber placed upon the earthbank which crowns the scarp of the ditch and must have been thrown up out of it. Crossing the centre of the earthwork, the way into the castle reaches and traverses the main or inner ditch by a modern cause- way of earth, replacing the ancient drawbridge, and reaches the