THE CASTLE CAPTURED BY DE LACY.

101

ciled. Fulke Fitz-Warine was married to Hawyse, the daughter of Joyce de Dinan; and after the marriage festivities the greater part of the household left Ludlow, leaving the castle to the care of thirty faithful knights and seventy good soldiers. Then Marion of the Heath, mindful only of her love, sent word to Arnold of the state of the castle, and begged him to visit her. He could enter, she told him, through the same window by which he had escaped. Arnold told all this to Walter de Lacy, and they determined to make an attempt on the castle. Arnold entered the tower by a ladder of leather, which he left hanging. In an hour or two more than a hundred men had made their way into the Tower of Pendover, as it was called, by the same means. They killed in their beds the knights and soldiers, opened the gates to admit their companions, burnt the town,

and killed the people. Marion at daybreak was roused by the shouts of the victors. Seeing what had taken place she seized Arnold's sword, thrust it through him where he lay sleeping, and then, flinging herself from a high window, "broke her neck." De Lacy held the castle for some time. It was besieged by Joyce, and the outer ward was taken after the besiegers had made a fire fed with bacon and grease, which burned so fiercely that it destroyed not only the triple doors of the gateway tower, but even the tower itself. But De Lacy still held the inner ward and the keep; and his ally, the Welsh prince Jorwerth, approached Ludlow with a great force, gave battle to Joyce and Fulke Fitz-Warine, and compelled them to retire. Afterwards Joyce was taken prisoner and was himself carried to Ludlow. But these were the days of Henry II., the "hammer of feudalism," a king not to be trifled with. He obliged Walter de Lacy to set free his prisoner, and to restore the castle. Joyce died soon afterwards; and, according to the historian of his house, the Castle of Ludlow was then granted to his son-in-law, Fulke Fitz-Warine.

But this is most probably romance rather than history. The Fitz-Warine historian, however, was very well acquainted with Ludlow Castle, and his references to the wards

and towers are, therefore, of considerable interest. What is certain is that, soon after the death of Joyce, Ludlow was restored by Henry II. to Hugh de Lacy, a very powerful lord in Ireland, who was Keeper of Dublin. We need not follow the fortunes of the place too minutely. With some intervals, a Lacy held Ludlow Castle until 1249, when the widow of Walter de Lacy married a Poitevin named Geoffry de Genville. An heiress of the Genvilles married Roger de Mortimer, Earl of March, afterwards the "gentle Mortimer" of the" shewolf of France," the Queen Isabella, mother of Edward III. The power and wealth of the Mortimers had been constantly increasing since the reign of Henry III., and this marriage added greatly to their already vast estates. The Mortimers held Ludlow for five generations, through some of the most turbulent times in English history; but their principal castle was still Wigmore, their chief seat, and the centre of their oldest estates and main power. Wigmore lies eight miles to the south-west of Ludlow; and the great Mortimer Castle there is in far more complete ruin than that of Ludlow. Edmund de Mortimer, the fifth Earl of March, died childless in 1424. Ludlow Castle and the earldom descended to his nephew, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, who held it through the Wars of the Roses, and transmitted it to his son, King Edward IV.

We have thus brought Ludlow Castle under the immediate control of the crown. Throughout all the centuries we have traversed, the Welsh were at constant feud with the Lords of the Border, and Ludlow frequently appears in the records. In 1225 a peace was concluded at Ludlow between Henry III. and Llewellyn, Prince of North Wales. Roger de Mortimer entertained the young King Edward III. and his mother in both his castles, Ludlow and Wigmore, and tournaments were held under the walls. Ludlow was in full splendour when the banner of the Mortimers floated from its keep; but that great house, like many another famous in history, has so utterly passed away, that not even one of the stately monuments of the Earls of March, or their descendants, has survived to our time. The family long since became extinct. In the words of Chief Justice Crewe, when giving judgment concerning the contested Earldom of Oxford, "Time hath his revolutions. There must be a period and an end to all temporal things, finis rerum, an end of names and dignities, and whatsoever is terrene. For where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, what is more, and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality."*

The townsfolk of Ludlow were steady Yorkists, as was perhaps natural; "and if they occasionally suffered, and that severely, from the fortunes of war, on the whole they were gainers." Their ancient franchises were confirmed by Richard, Duke of York, and in 1478 Edward IV. gave them an extended charter. It was at Mortimer's Cross, a few miles from Ludlow, that Edward, who had just received the news of the disastrous battle of Wakefield, encountered a large force of Welsh and Irish under Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, defeated them, and then advanced to London, where he was crowned. On the morning of the battle there appeared

"Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun,"t

66

*This judgment, which Lord Macaulay (chap. 8, note) praises as 'among the finest specimens of the ancient English eloquence," will be found in Cruise's "Treatise on the Origin and Nature of Dignities," 1823.

"King Henry VI.," Pt. III., act v., scene 1. These were, of course, parhelia.

LORD BRIDGEWATER, PRESIDENT.

103

LUDLOW CASTLE

B.

and Edward afterwards adopted a bright sun as his badge. It was this king who established the Council of Wales, for the direction of the affairs of the Marches; and in 1472 his two sons were sent to Ludlow, where the Council was sitting in the name of the elder, the Prince of Wales, then but an infant in arms. The children remained at Ludlow until 1483, when, having celebrated in the castle the high festival of St. George's Day, they were removed to a prison, and a grave, in the Tower of London. Henry VII. also sent Prince Arthur, his infant son, born in 1486, to Ludlow; and was himself a frequent visitor here until the prince's untimely death in 1502. From the Castle of Ludlow his body was conveyed in great state to Worcester, where it was interred in the cathedral. The Council of Wales was afterwards established with greater solemnity, and placed under a Lord President. In 1535, the President reports that the castle was in a ruinous state. But in 1559 Queen Elizabeth appointed Sir Henry Sidney Lord President; and in his time, probably at his own expense, the castle was restored to more than its old magnificence. He held the office of President for twenty-seven years, and had many successors, of whom the most noticeable for us are John, Earl of Bridgewater, President from 1633 to 1646, when the castle was surrendered to the Parliamentary general, Sir William Brereton; and Richard Vaughan, Earl of Carbery, President from 1661 to 1672. Under the Earl of Bridgewater the "Masque of Comus," of which we shall presently have more to say, was performed in the great hall of the castle. The Earl of Carbery brought Samuel Butler with him as his secretary, and afterwards made him steward of the castle. There is a tradition that great part of "Hudibras" was written in the Castle of Ludlow. The jurisdiction of the Lords President was abolished by an Act passed in 1689. A governor of the castle was appointed; but the buildings fell gradually into disrepair. The lead was removed from the roof by an order of George I. Nature resumed her sway. Ferns and grasses clothed the wide sweep of walls; and the castle, resigning its life of long centuries, became a record

K. 100

509

A. Outer Ward.
B. Middle Ward.

C. Inner Ward.

D. Keep.

E. Gatehouse.

F. Chapel.

SCALE

100

G. Kitchen
H. Hall.

1 Oren Tower.

J. Postern Tower and Well.
K. Junction of Town Wall.
L. Mortimer's Tower.

LUDLOW CASTLE. (From the Plan by Mr. Clark.)

"Of the memorial majesty of time,
Impersonated in its calm decay."

And now we may enter the courts of the castle, proceeding under the massive outer wall to the portal on the side toward the town. Trees, but here of no great age, brush the walls; and when we have passed the portal-tower we find ourselves in the wide outer ward, the largest of the three wards enclosed within the fortress. The character and form of these three wards will best be understood from the ground-plan. We look across a grassy open space, bounded by the enclosing walls, with Mortimer's Tower almost immediately in front of us, to the wall and gateway of the middle ward, whilst the tall, square

Norman keep lifts itself in sombre dignity to the left of the gateway. This middle ward is covered by a ditch cut in the rock, thirteen yards broad and four yards deep. The general plan of the castle and much of the remaining building represents the Norman fortress begun by Roger de Lacy, and finished, if we may trust his historian, by Joyce de Dinan. The keep-in part, at least-is Early Norman, and must have been in existence in the days of Joyce and Fulke FitzWarine; but the castle displays the work of various lords and of various ages. The gateway opening to the middle ward was rebuilt by Sir Henry Sidney, and the windows above it are Elizabethan. They light a room pointed out as that which was occupied by Butler; but it is tolerably certain that the President's secretary was better lodged, and in a different part of the castle. The great mass of buildings adjoining the outer wall on the north-west side of the middle ward is of the Decorated period, though it was much altered in the days of the Tudors; but for the most part it represents the dominion of the Mortimers, and may possibly have been the work of the famous Roger de Mortimer, the paramour of Queen Isabella. Toward the centre is the great hall, a noble apartment, sixty feet long by thirty broad, and thirty-five feet high to the corbels of its open timber roof. There are windows on either side looking up the Teme and Corvedale and into the court. West of the hall is the buttery tower, and at the east end are the state-rooms, contained within a grand and lofty structure, rectangular in plan and projecting beyond the hall. There are other buildings; and altogether this great mass, roofless as it is, with sprays of ivy stealing through the window openings, and fluttering in the breeze that sweeps by, is grand and impressive. The kitchen, wholly of Decorated character, is a square building, placed against the wall of the inner ward. Toward the centre of the middle ward is a very remarkable chapel, dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene. All that remains of it is the circular nave, but a long choir or chancel projected to the enclosing wall of the ward. The nave is very late Norman work, roughly enriched. Finally, the inner ward, much smaller than the others, occupies the highest ground within the enclosure, and contains the keep. This is a square tower, with a basement, a first, second, and third floors, and was probably, in its first