Life on a Mediaeval Barony. William Stearns Davis
of every kind blend in a hubbub. Lastly we notice, close to the inner drawbridge, another building again with a tall chimney. This is the castle cookhouse, where the dinners are prepared for the great hall within. A glance through the door shows the vast fireplace where one can roast a whole sheep or a small beef entire. The cookhouse is located here because of the danger of fire in the inner castle, and because the position is convenient for the great number of the servitors who must eat in their barracks. When it is mealtime, however, this arrangement compels a prodigious running to and fro all through the dinner hour between kitchen and hall on the part of the twenty-odd sergeants and squires who serve Baron Conon's guests and family. It bothers not the appetites of pious Christians that their food is cooked amid contending odors and that many of the doings near the cookhouse make its condition extraordinarily unsanitary.
We have now crossed the bailey and its teeming life. Before us rises the inner ward of the castle. Here are the gate and the walls of the bailey over again, but far more pretentious and formidable. There is another moat filled with muddy water; another drawbridge larger than the outer one. The two gate towers are higher; their structures are thicker, more solid. The curtain walls are so lofty that arbalistiers thereon can pick off the enemy who may have gained the parapet of the outer defenses. Finally, between the gate towers and the towers at the end of the curtains, both to right and left, there is interposed an extra tower, making the flanking fire much more close and deadly. Consequently, the foe who could force his way into the bailey would thus probably find it merely a bloody cockpit. The retreating garrison would set fire to all the rude wooden buildings, and rake the outer court with their bows and engines. If it would cost dearly to win the bailey, what would it not cost to storm the castle proper?
Inner Court, Donjon and Palais
The gate to the inner ward is flung wide, but the portcullis still slides in its grooves, being dropped every night to make sure that low fellows from the barracks do not prowl around the seigneurial residence in the darkness. Just at present swarms of people are going to and fro between the two great sections of the castle, and jostling and laughing in the narrow passages. As we pass through to the inner ward we realize a certain touch of refinement. The pavement is cleaner. Most of the servitors are better dressed and better mannered. Before us opens the great court of the castle, set with stone flags and reasonably well swept. Here the baron and his brother will practice their martial exercises when the weather is bad and they must avoid the tilting grounds. Here the horses will be mounted when Conon, Adela, and all their noble friends assemble to ride out for hunting or hawking. On either side the stately towers set into the walls frown downward, but our gaze is ahead. Straight before one rises first a rather elegant stone building with large pointed windows and a high sloping roof, and then looming before that an enormous round citadel—one that dwarfs all the other towers. It stands at the apex of the triangle; on one side is the castle court, but to right and left the crags at its base are falling precipitously away to the Rapide and the Claire.
The stone building is the palais, the actual residence of the baron. The giant tower is the donjon, the great keep of the castle, built on the site of Heribert's old stronghold, but twenty times as formidable. The palais is nearest to us, but since the apartments of the seigneur are there, and we wish to examine these later, it is best to pass around one end thereof and visit the donjon first.
Baron Garnier had built his donjon about one hundred and ten feet high and some fifty-five feet in diameter, with walls a dozen feet thick. This size is large, but not extraordinary. At Coucy they are planning a tower two hundred and twenty-five feet high and ninety-five feet in diameter. If Garnier had built a little earlier he would have made it square, like that pitiless tower at Loches, which is only one hundred feet high, but is seventy-six feet on its longest side. To enter the donjon we go over still another drawbridge, although the ditch below is dry, and on penetrating a small door in the masonry we wind up a passageway through the thick wall. Passing from the bright morning light of the court, one seems plunged into pitchy darkness. Strangers stumble up steep stairways, with here and there a twinkle of light from loopholes a couple of feet high, although barely wide enough at their openings to allow the free flight of an arrow. Far below may be caught glimpses of the twinkling, rushing Rapide, and of the bright green country stretching away in the distance.
The Donjon
When St. Aliquis was rebuilt by Baron Garnier's architect, although the donjon was greatly improved, much of the old masonry of the original tower was retained, as well as the general arrangement of the staircases, loopholes, and succession of halls, chambers, and lofts. We see what the castle resembled in Heribert's day. By a turn or two in the gaunt entrance we come to the original great hall of the castle. It is offensively dark; the windows are mere loopholes at the end of deep, cone-shaped passages let into the walls. Even on this balmy June morning the atmosphere is clammy. As our eyes adjust themselves, however, we see that we are in a huge vaulted chamber with a great fireplace, and with a kind of wooden gallery about eight feet above the floor, around the entire circuit. In this great chamber can be assembled a good fraction of the entire garrison. The seigneur or his spokesmen standing in the center or near the fireplace can give orders which every man present can understand. Directions can thus be given for any move needful for the defense of the castle.
As we shall see, there is now a newer and better hall in the more modern and airy palais, but the older hall is still used at great feasts for the overflow of guests. Even now are standing long oaken tables, duly hacked by the trencher knives of many boisterous diners; and on the walls—blackened by the smoke from the great fireplace—are hanging venerable trophies of the chase, antlers, the head of a bear, great boar tusks, as well as an array of all kinds of hunting weapons used by departed generations.
If we were to follow the staircase down from the hall we would come to an even darker vaulted apartment used sometimes as a supplementary dormitory for the humbler guests, but also (to the astonishment of later-day medical usage) with small rooms set off to be used as a kind of sick ward; because every physician, whether schooled at Salerno, Cordova, or Montpellier, will tell you that darkness is the friend of health and that few invalids can hope to get better unless they are kept as shaded and sequestered as possible.
The Prison and the Watch Tower
If we wished to pursue still lower, descending a black staircase with lanterns, the rocks would begin to drip dampness. We could hear the rushing of the Rapide against the base of the castle. The journey would end at a barred iron door. Within would be a fetid, reeking chamber lit only by two or three tiny chinks in the masonry, and with the bare rock for the floor. Here is Baron Conon's prison. He is counted a merciful seigneur, yet he thinks nothing of thrusting genuine offenders therein and keeping them for weeks, if not months, before releasing or hanging. Lucky if Maître Denis, the turnkey, remembers to bring down a coarse loaf each day, and if the rats do not devour the prisoners' toes; but we shall consider all such nice matters later[6].
It is alleged that from these lower vaults there is an underground passage leading from the castle to a secret sallyport at the foot of the precipice by the Rapide. If a passage exists, however, it is known only to Conon and a very few trusted retainers. But not all such stories are false; many castles have such secret passages; and at Coucy they are quietly planning to introduce a rather elaborate system of the same. Quite possibly St. Aliquis possesses something of this nature.
Far pleasanter is it now to ascend from the main hall through a couple of stages of upper and airier chambers (now used as apartments by part of the castle folk) until by a dizzy ladder we reach the summit of the donjon itself. Here on one edge of the broad platform is a little round turret carrying us still higher. From the turret flutters the orange banner of St. Aliquis, with some kind of a black dragon (in memory, possibly, of the viking raid) broidered upon it, and the arrogant legend of the noble family, "Rather break than bend." To lower this banner were a horrid disgrace. Never is it to be struck unless the castle surrenders, when it will be sadly flung into the moat.
Under the flagstaff