Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/268

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seen, and its precinct seems to have taken in the church and the whole peninsula, though in the greater part of its circuit no defence was needed beyond the steep and scarped sides of the rocky hill itself. The castle was the work of a man whose name has been familiar to us for thirty years, a man who was still living, and who was actually in the host before the fortress of his own rearing. Geoffrey of Mayenne was closely connected, as kinsman and as lord, with William the son of Geroy. When Geoffrey fell into the hands of William Talvas, the faithful vassal ransomed his lord by the sacrifice of his own castle of Montacute, which stood just beyond the Sarthon within the borders of Maine. To repair this loss of his friend, no doubt also to repay the invasion of Cenomannian soil by a like invasion of Norman soil, and to put some check in the teeth of the house of Bellême, Geoffrey built the castle of Saint Cenery on the left bank of the Sarthe, and gave it as a gift of thankfulness to the son of Geroy. But the inhabitants of the new stronghold, in their dangerous border position, never knew peace or good luck, but were visited with every kind of evil. The sons of the pious and virtuous Geroy yielded to the influence of the spot; they fell into crime and rebellion, and were punished by banishments and strange deaths. The second lord of Saint Cenery, Robert the brother of William, had rebelled against the Conqueror; he had held his fortress against him, and he had died in a mysterious way of a poisoned apple. His son and successor Arnold found how

spot of all. On two of the knolls remains of its masonry are still to be seen, and the outworks reach far down the hill on its western side. The place seems to have been a simple fortress, with no town or village, beyond such houses as may have grown up around the castle.]
 * [Footnote: rise above the general level of the hill, must have been the most tempting