Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/92

 76 Mediceval Military Architecture in England. another Bigot castle, was destroyed by Henry II. Clare, the manor whence the earls of Gloucester and Hertford derived their family name, retains its mound with part of a polygonal keep, and outworks in earth and masonry on a scale commensurate with the power of their lords. The area is occupied in part by a railway station. Eye, the mound of which remains, was a castle at Domesday, the seat of Robert Malet, and afterwards was given by Henry 11. to Ranulph, Earl of Chester. Dunwich, though not a walled town, was protected by a deep ditch and high bank, upon which as late as the reign of Henry III. was a palisade. The chief castle of Norfolk was Norwich, a place of immense strength and high antiquity. Its rectangular keep of great size and more ornate than usual, though much injured by injudicious repairs, and closed against the anti- quary by its conversion to the base uses of a prison, still predominates grandly over the fine old city, of which it was long the glory and the dread. Its deep, single ditch, far older than its works in masonry, is now for the most part filled up and built over. The city also was strongly walled. Haganet, a Norfolk castle taken by the Earl of Leicester and his invading Flemings, is utterly destroyed. Mileham, of which the moated mound, though low, and a fragment of a square keep remain, was the work of Alan, son of Flaald, who held the manor from the Conqueror. To him also is attributed the adjacent castle of Burgh wood, of which large earthworks remain. Orford, an almost solitary example of a Norman polygonal keep, is tolerably perfect. The keep of Castle Rising, though smaller in dimensions than Norwich, resembles it in type. It is the most highly-ornamented keep in England, and, though a ruin, is well preserved and cared for. Here also is that great rarity, a tolerably perfect and unaltered fore-building and entrance. This keep stands within a lofty bank, beyond which, on one side, is a spacious outwork, also heavily embanked. Castle Acre, best known for its Norman priory, contains also the mound and other earthworks and part of the shell keep of a large castle, and near to these is the town of Lynn, once strongly fortified, and still possessing an early gatehouse. At Thetford, girt by a double ditch, is the great mound thrown up by the Danes in 865-6 to command the then adjacent city, but this post, so important before the Conquest, does not seem to have been occupied afterwards. Other Norfolk castles were Buckenham and Tateshall, of which the date is doubtful, and Marnham, of which it was reported in the reign of Edward I. — " Quod erectio castri de Marnham est in prsejudicium