CLIFF CASTLES
themselves with forcing them to take up their residence within the town walls. But though the feudal lordship of these nobles had been destroyed, their opulence, their lands, the prestige of their names remained untouched, and in place of disturbing the roads they filled the streets with riot. They reared in the towns those wonderful towers that we still see at Bologna, San Gemigniano, Savona, &c. "From the eighth to the thirteenth century," says Ruskin, "there was little change in the form;—four-square, rising high and without tapering into the air, storey above storey, they stood like giants beside the piles of the basilicas and the Lombardic churches . . . their ruins still frown along the crests of every promontory of the Apeninnes, and are seen from far away in the great Lombard plain, from distances of half a day's journey, dark against the amber sky of the horizon."[1]
I propose dividing my subject of cliff castles into four heads:—
1. Those that were seigneural strongholds.
2. Those that with castle and town occupied a rock.
3. The fastnesses of the routiers, the Companies in the Hundred Years' War.
4. Outpost stations guarding fords, roads into a town, and passes into a country.
And I shall begin with No. 3— The Castles of the routiers.
The face of a country is like that of a woman. It tells the story of its past. The many-windowed English mansion sleeping among turfy lawns to the plash of a fountain, and the cawing of rooks in the beech wood, tell of a tranquil past life-record broken only by transient unrest; whereas the towers on the Continent with their meurtrières and frowning machicolations, bristling on every hill, frequent as church spires, now gutted and ruinous, proclaim a
- ↑ Lectures on Architecture, 1853.
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