Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/111

Castles at the Latter Part of the Twelfth Centtiry, 95 safe and skilful protection of the historian of the Roman wall. Bamburgh is probably the oldest, and in all respects the noblest and most historical of the Northumbrian fortresses. It was founded by the flame-bearing Ida in the sixth century, when it was enclosed by a hedge and afterwards by a wall, but most of its circuit was already fortified by a natural cliff of great height. The castle occupies the whole of this elevated platform of basalt, one side of which is upon the sea beach. The wall is built along the edge of the precipice, and rising above all is a magnificent square Norman keep of rather late date, somewhat altered indeed within and still inhabited, but retaining most of its original features, and altogether presenting a very grand appearance. Bamburgh, like Alnwick, has come under the wand of the enchanter, and any reference to it would indeed be incomplete which took no notice of the following passage drawn from the SatiLvday Reviezv : — "At Bamburgh, above all, we feel that we are pilgrims come to do our service at one of the great cradles of our national life. It is the one spot in northern England around- which the same interest gathers which belongs to the landing-places of Hengest, of ^lle, and of Cerdic, in the southern lands. It is to the Angle what these spots are to the Jute and the Saxon. The beginnings of the Anglian kingdoms are less rich in romantic and personal lore than are those of their Jutish and Saxon neighbours. Unless we chose to accept the tale about Octa and Ebussa, we have no record of the actual leaders of the first Teutonic settlements in the Anglian parts of Britain. The earliest kingdoms seem not to have been founded by new comers from beyond the sea, but to have been formed by the fusing together of smaller independent settlements. Yet around Bamburgh and its founder, Ida, all Northumbrian history gathers. Though its keep is more than five hundred years later than Ida's time, — though it is only here and there that we see fragments of masonry which we even guess may be older than the keep, — it is still a perfectly allowable figure when the poet of northern Britain speaks of Bamburgh as ' King Ida s fortress.' The founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, the first who bore the kingly name in Bamburgh, the warrior whom the trembling Briton spoke of as the * flame-bearer,' appears, in the one slight authentic notice of him, not as the leader of a new colony from the older England, but rather as the man who gathered together a number of scattered inde-