Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/93

 Castles at the Latter Part of the Tzvel/th Century. 77 domini Regis." Wirmegay, a Warenne castle, strong in its marshy approaches, was certainly earlier. At Weting, near the church, was a castle with a mound, on which a few years ago was a fragment of the keep. It was the seat of De Plaiz, who represented Mont Fitchet, and whose heiress married the ancestor of the house of Howard. There was also a castle at Kenningdale, near Diss. Cambridgeshire contained but a few castles, the fens presenting little to attract the spoiler, and being in themselves a secure defence. At Cambridge, upon the banks of the sluggish and winding Cam, a prison has taken the place of the castle ordered by the Conqueror ; but a part of the mound and a fragment of its subsidiary banks remain, and are not to be confounded with the still earlier Roman enclosure. At Ely a large mound with appended earth banks is thought to have been the site of the ancient castle of the bishop of that see. All traces of masonry are gone, as at Wisbeach. The camp at Castle Camps, the seat of the Saxon Wolfwin, once held a Norman castle, the work of the De Veres. Of Chevely, an episcopal castle, a fragment remains. Burwell, the masonry of which belonged to one of Stephen's improvised castles, is remembered as that before which Geoffrey de Mandeville received his fatal wound. A frag- ment of its wall and the mound remain. Swavesey and Bassingbourne were early castles. Hertford, Bedford, and Buckingham, the inland positions of which were insufficient to secure them from invasions from a foe beyond the sea, were not unprovided with castles. Hertford, visited by the Danes in 894, was fortified by Edward the Elder in 914, who there threw up a burh between the rivers Lea, Mineran, and Bean, and in the year following a second burh on the opposite bank of the Lea. Hertford, says Smith in 1588, has two castles, one on each bank of the Lea. These corresponded to the two banks already men- tioned. Upon the still existing mound Peter de Valoines placed the keep ordered by the Conqueror. The Magnavilles next held it, and Henry of Huntingdon calls it, " castrum non immensum sed pulcherrimum." Berkhampstead, as old, and a far more considerable fortress, and the head of a great Honour, has been mentioned as one of the northern defences of the metropolis. Its mound, wholly artificial, still supports the foundations of a Norman shell keep, and appended to it is a large oval platform, the walls and entrances to which remain. The whole is partially encircled by several con- centric lines of bank and ditch, the character of which shows that they were protected by stockades instead of walls of