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96 Mediceval Military Architecture iit England, pendent settlements into a nation and a kingdom. The chronicler records of him that in 547 ' he took to the king- dom ' ; but nothing is said of his coming, like Hengest or Cerdic, from beyond sea. And all the other accounts fall in with the same notion. Henry of Huntingdon, though he has no story to tell, no ballad to translate, was doubtless following some old tradition when he described the Anglian chiefs, after a series of victories over the Welsh, joining together to set a king over them. And all agree in speaking of Bamburgh, called, so the story ran, from the Queen Bebbe, as a special work of Ida. Whatever may be the origin of the name, it suggests the kindred name of the East Prankish Babenberg, which has been cut short into Bamberg by the same process which has cut short Bebbanburh into Bam- burgh. Yet Bamburgh was a fortress by nature, even before Ida had fenced it in, first with a hedge and then with a wall. Here we see the succession of the early stages of fortifi- cation, the palisade first and then the earthen wall, the vallum, not the innriis, of the Roman art of defence. But, whether hedge or wall, the site of Bamburgh was already a castle before it had been fenced in by the simplest forms of art. That mass of isolated basaltic rock frowning over the sea on one side, over the land on the other, was indeed a spot marked out by nature for dominion. Here was the dwelling-place of successive Bernician kings, ealdormen, and earls ; here they took shelter as in an impregnable refuge from the inroads of Scot and Dane. Here the elder Waltheof shut himself up in terror, while his valiant son Uhtred sent forth and rescued the newly-founded church and city of Durham from the invader. Here Gospatric the Earl held his head-quarters, while he and Malcolm of Scotland were ravaging each other's lands in turn. In earlier days a banished Northumbrian king, flying from his own people to seek shelter with the Picts, defended himself for a while at Bamburgh, and gave the native chronicler of Northumber- land an opportunity of giving us our earliest picture of the spot. Baeda, without mentioning the name, had spoken of Bamburgh as a royal city, and it is not only as a fortress, but as a city, that Bamburgh appears in the Northumbrian chronicler. He speaks of ' Bebba civitas ' as ' Urbs munitis- sima non admodum magna.' It did not take in more than the space of two or three fields ; still it was a city, though a city approached by lofty steps, and with a single entrance hollowed in the rock. Its highest point was crowned, not as yet by the keep of the Norman, but by a church, which, according to tho standard of the eighth century, was a goodly