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 On The Border By Wirt Sikes

In the days which reach back to the domain of fable, and which so mingle history with poetry that it is hard to separate the rugged but respectable truth from delicious but disreputable falsehood, there was in the island which is now Victoria's queendom a giant of the race of Ham. He was a son of Neptune Mareoticus, and a great tyrant, and Hercules slew him. His name was Albion, and the island was named after him. Subsequently Brutus, the grandson of Æneas, named it Britain after his own name, and Britain it was called until late in the sixth century, Cambria being part of it. In 585 the Saxons named Cambria Wales, and the boundaries thereof remained undisturbed throughout the succeeding thousand years, mostly devoted to hard fighting. The river Wye, from its mouth at the town of Chepstow to the little village of Redbrook, fourteen miles straight north, forms this ancient boundary line between the Welsh domains and the English. On reaching Redbrook the river turns its back on Gloucestershire and the English, and goes winding into Herefordshire and the Welsh heart again, across the green and golden plains, and over the far-off hills up to its source among the crags of Plinlimmon. By driving over the iron bridge which at Chepstow spans the Wye - a graceful juvenile structure sixty years old - we pass out of Wales into old England. There is nothing in the aspect of things to tell the story. But the stones on one side of the river were in the old days sacred in the eyes of the patriotic Cymry, while for those on the other side their scorn was measureless.

The border barons of Norman blood, who took possession of this region forcibly when William the Conqueror became King of England, were compelled to hem in the Welsh people by a chain of tremendous military castles. The Saxons were under a like necessity in their day, but the fortresses they erected to protect themselves from the Welsh were not very strong. They were usually of timber, with banks and palisades for further strength about the domestic offices, and a moat around all, with no other wall than the mound thrown up in digging it. These structures were not enough for the Norman lords marchers: in some cases they used the site of the Saxon fortress to build their stone castles on, but the site was all that had value to them. In order to keep what they had forcibly seized, they must intrench themselves in strongholds capable of defying the most terrific sieges, and which furthermore must be large enough to hold their families and retainers, as well as their warriors in enormous numbers. Hence the prodigious strength and extent of the border castles,
 
Wye Bridge at Chepstow
whose ruins now make the country picturesque, and which provoked from Dr. Johnson the remark that the court-yard of a castle in Wales is capable of containing all the castles in Scotland. Hence the extensive ruins of "huge Caerphilly", of Raglan, of Chepstow, and of many others which dot the landscape at intervals so frequent as to tell an eloquent story. It is difficult to comprehend, in these days of equality before the law, the state of society which existed in medieval times, when an absolute monarchy was set up here in every little district, with a baronial castle for a centre; but one is amazingly helped toward such comprehension by roaming about from one ruin to another, and discovering that it is actually possible to visit several within the limits of a single day. It is the statement of a romantic historical fact to say that the border bristled with these feudal vulture's nests; but it makes the matter practical to a degree that is positively sensational - like a realistic stage effect - to set out on a tramp over this storied land of the border barons, and find that your first five miles brings you to Caldicot Castle, your second to Chepstow Castle, your third to Tintern Abbey (eloquent of the same tale the castles tell, though in a different way), whence nine miles carry you to Monouth, and seven more to Raglan, and that you have passed en route, and without pausing to look at them, the ruins of Penhow, Pencoed, Magor, Dinham, Striguil, St. Briavels, and nameless others. In the small border county of Monmouthshire, which is not so large as Oneida County in New York (a centre of the Welsh in America), there are no fewer than twenty-five ruined castles, besides many priories and abbeys, each with its tale of battles, sieges, fortunes during the centuries that stretch between the Norman Conquest and the days of Oliver Cromwell. Of the least of these ruins many interesting pages may be written. Magor and Pencoed stand within two miles of each other. Any where else but in Wales each would be a tourist's lion. which enthusiastic travellers would journey far to see.

From these numerous castles it was the pleasant wont of the Norman lords marchers to sally with their steel-clad warriors into the interior of Wales, and when they could catch the Welshmen - which was not always, for these wary people had an exasperating trick of fleeing into mountain fastnesses, and of hiding in marshy lands which the mounted knights dared not attempt to cross - to use them in bloody, ferocious, and cruel sort Old writers tell how the Normans tore the quivering flesh from their enemies with iron talons; how they burned them, chopped off their head, cut their bodies into small pieces, and committed other atrocities which may not be described. In return for these attentions the Welsh made inroads into the border districts of England, where they burned towns and slew people, and whence they bore home into Wales loads of spoil. Throughout many generations an almost perpetual warfare was waged, and small was the mercy shown on either side in the hour of victory.

But the Norman border barons, except when they sallied forth in armies accoutred for fighting, kept themselves pretty closely shut up within the walls they had erected; to quit them, save in force, was to be pounced upon by their watchful, restless, and ruthless foes. Their lives would have been little worth the living, so dull and quiet must have been the routine thereof, had not they inclosed vast spaces of ground, with great halls and courts, kitchens, parlors, chapels, stables, out-houses and lawns, wherein to make merry with wine and wassail in the intervals between fights.

Near Caldicot stand two interesting villages, one on either hand - Caerwent, a decayed Roman city, whose story is similar to that of Caerleon; and Portskewitt, where Harold before he was king had a palace, in which he entertained Edward the Confessor with great splendour.


Sudbrook Chapel Older remains than those of Harold's palace are discernible at Portskewitt - those of a Roman camp, on the top of the cliff looking on the Severn. It was erected here for the protection of vessels lying in the river under it. On the very brink of this cliff is an old ruin called Sudbrook Chapel, very picturesque to see, and which will probably not be seen much longer, for the sandstone of the cliff is here very soft, and the water year by year washes it away. In the day when the chapel was built it stood far from the edge of the cliff; but the tooth of time gnaws never so greedily as when it moistens its repast with water, and the day must be near when it moistens its repast with water, and the day must be near when the ruin will topple over into the Severn. The structure was originally the chapel of a Norman mansion whose stones were thus swallowed up as the river encroached on the land.

Portskewitt is near to that crossing of the Severn which bears the name of New Passage - a memorable point in the history o the Welsh border. In 1645 the unfortunate King Charles I. was pursued by his foes hither, and was ferried over the river, which is here two or three miles wide. Hot on his heels came Cromwell's Puritans to the number of sixty, and forced the ferrymen to take them over too. The mariners complied sorely against their will, but instead of conveying the soldiers to the English shore, left them on a reef of rocks, called the "English Stones," which stood high and dry, it being low tide. But before the soldiers could get from the rocks to the main-land,
 
they were surrounded by the rising tide, the so-called river Severn being here really an estuary of the ocean, with a broad rocky beach, up and down which the tide creeps many rods, at its ebb leaving dry land where at its flood rolls a deep sea. The soldiers were al drowned, and Cromwell abolished the ferry, which remained unused for nearly a hundred years thereafter. A large black rock which is seen here is asserted to be the precise spot where Julius Frontius landed with his Romans in the reign of Vespasian, on his expedition against the fierce Silures.

Chepstow enjoys the special distinction, in a land where mere historical honors are easy, of sharing alone with Caerphilly in the poetic glory of "The Norman Horseshoe," Sir Walter Scott's rendering of a war-song of the men of Glamorgan, "Cadlef Gwyr Morganwg."

"From Chepstow's walls at dawn of morn
Was heard afar the bugle-horn,
And forth in banded pomp and pride
Stout Clare and fiery Nevill ride:
They swore their banners broad should gleam
In crimson light on Rhymney's stream;
They vowed Caerphilly's sod should feel
The Norman charger's spurning heel.
Chepstow's brides may curse the toil
That armed stout Clare for Cambrian broil;
Their orphans long the art may rue
That for Nevill's war-horse forged the shoe."

The Clares held Chepstow through several generations. The special Clare referred to in the song was that lord marcher who was otherwise called Gilbert de Strongbow. The Clares first became owners of these estates after the death of Roger de Britolio, who seems to have been an exceedingly high-tempered knight. The king, having thrown him into prison for disloyalty, this
 
Chepstow Castle from the Bridge
obstreperous Roger let his tongue wag in a most offensive manner, and refused to eat humble pie of any man's baking. It pleased the king at Easter, however, to send the imprisoned Roger his royal robes, "as was then usual." This was no doubt a great condescension on the king's part, but Roger was not mollified by it; on the contrary, he "so disdained the favor that he forthwith caused a great fire to be made, and the mantle, the inner surcoat of silk, and the upper garment, lined with precious furs, to be suddenly burned, which being made known to the king, he was not a little displeased;" and by way of expressing his displeasure, observed, "Certainly he is a very proud man who has thus abused me, but, by the brightness of God, he shall never come out of prison as long as I live." And he never did, but died there.

The first object we notice on approaching Chepstow is a goodly portion of the old town wall, a long distance away from the castle. The ruins of the feudal fortress stand on a high perpendicular limestone precipice, whose base is washed by the waters of the Wye. The castle was so built on the edge of this cliff that the ponderous walls of the ruin seem to blend with the rock on which they stand. A peculiarity of many of these enormous Welsh castles is that, viewed from one point, they appear to spread out with great spaces between their various towers and halls, while from another they seem to be one solid pile of masonry. From across the river, Chepstow castle displays long reaches of green ivied walls, which seem almost on a level with the ground, they are so hidden underneath their wealth of verdure; but seen from the bridge which spans the Wye just below, the ruins wheel together in a solid and imposing mass. The approach to the castle is on this side, up a gentle hill covered with velvety green sward.

The grand entrance is guarded by two lofty towers, with massive iron-plated doors of curious and beautiful workmanship, the plate half fallen off now, through the crumbling of the oak beneath it oak no doubt as old as the castle itself, which was begun directly after the Norman conquest.

Seizing the four-pound cannon-ball which, hanging by a chain, serves as a knocker, we bang at it with a racket which wakes the echoes like the knocking you may have heard at Booth's Theatre in the play Macbeth.

Huge walnut trees are growing within the court, and beneath the deep shade of their spreading branches stand rustic tables and settees. The walls on every side are so richly and deeply hung with ivy that they seem great banks of green leaves against the blue sky. Turning to the right, we pass through several empty rooms once used for domestic purposes, and by the door of the warden's residence in one of the towers. Thence we go down a long, chilly flight of stone stairs to a chamber which is hallowed by a terrible story of blood.
 
Chepstow Castle Gate Door


It was in the last hours of the castle's history, two hundred and thirty years ago. Cromwell in person had come to besiege this stronghold, but was repulsed by a gallant knight, Sir Nicholas Kemeys by name, who held the castle with a handful of men. Cromwell retired, but left one of his officers in command of the besieging army, with instructions to starve the royalists out. The little garrison fought stubbornly for many days, but at last their provisions were exhausted.


Arched Chamber under the Castle They were now promised quarter if they would surrender; but they had a boat lying in the river, just under this chamber, by which in the dead of night they intended to escape. One of Cromwell's soldiers, taking a knife between his teeth, swam across the river, and cut the rope by which the boat was fastened, and took it away. Still the proud Sir Nicholas refused to surrender. So the besiegers assaulted the half-starved garrison, forced the castle, and slew the knight and forty men, who fought to the last. In this chamber the last fierce struggle took place, and here the stubborn Sir Nicholas was cut down. The chamber is overarched with rafters of cemented stones to support the rocky roof, but it was evidently hewn out of the face of the limestone precipice. The only door is at the foot of the dark stairway by which we entered, and there is no other outlet except the window, which looks directly down upon the river. The huge iron ring to which the boat was fastened is still there in the stone floor.
 


Across the court stands the ruined keep, known in these days by the name of "Marten's Tower," because here was confined the famous regicide Henry Marten, and here he died in 1680, after twenty years' imprisonment. Marten was one of Cromwell's staunchest supporters, and signed the death-warrant of Charles I. On the restoration of monarchy he was condemned to death; but as he was one of the nineteen regicides who surrendered under Charles II.'s proclamation of mercy, the sturdy Roundhead pleaded that he had never obeyed any proclamation before this, and hoped he should not be hanged for taking the king's word now. So he was let out of his cell in the Tower of London, and sent here under sentence of imprisonment for life. We climb about in the solemn old tower by the stone stairs which wind up in one corner, and pause on the various
 
Marten's Tower
landings to look down into the great hollow shell. The floors have all tumbled down long ago, so that the view is unobstructed from cellar to battlements. Ridges in the wall show where the floors hung. Birds twitter and fly about the empty space, and the rich luxuriance of ivy from without flows in at the deep windows like a green snow-bank. There are fire-places visible in the walls, and in that one up yonder where the doves are billing and cooing once burned the fire warmed the old Puritan's chamber. Southey, standing here in sentimental mood, wrote of Marten thus:


Fireplace in the Keep "Often have these walls
Echoed his footsteps as with even tread
He paced around his prison. Not to him
Did Nature's fair varieties exist;
He never saw the sun's delightful beams,
Save when through yon high bars he poured a sad
And broken spendor."

Better authority than the poet, however tells us that the old regicide was not shut up in a cell, nor left lonely, but had his wife and daughters with him, and not only the range of the whole castle, but freedom to visit in the neighbourhood. No doubt Marten led a happier and pleasanter life during his twenty years' residence at Chepstow than he did in his earlier and freer days.
 

The view from the castle walls on this side shows the river Wye where it winds to the broad bosom of the Severn, through a fair hedge-rowed land. The serpentine course of this river has been supposed to be the origin of its name; wye is a Welsh termination constantly employed in naming the rivers of Wales, as Towy, the spreading river; Llugwy, the dusky river; Elwy, the sonorous river, etc. Like all the rivers which empty into this estuary, it shares some distance from its mouth the restless heavings of the sea, rising and falling, with a variation of fifty or sixty feet, under the influence of the spring-tides.

From the tower of Marten we walk out through a caseless doorway in the third story, or what was once the third story, on to the top of the castle wall, which has a sunken pathway below the battlements, now overgrown with ivy and with grass.

Carved in the stone of the threshold we observe the letters D. B., which are the monogram of his grace Henry Charles Fitzroy Somerset, Duke of Beaufort, Knight of the Garter, Lord of Raglan, Chepstow and Gower. This worthy knight is the owner of ruins enough to break the heart of a poor man, for ruins however grand and picturesque, are utterly unprofitable; and not only that, they must be kept in order in these days of reverence for antiquities, or their proprietor will not receive popular approbation. The Duke of Beaufort not only owns Chepstow, but he owns Usk and Raglan and Oystermouth and Monmouth and I know not how many castles more, and Tintern Abbey besides. All these he props and mends constantly, so that they fall to no further decay, during his life at least.
 
Rivers Wye and Severn from Chepstow Castle Walls


Chepstow is a pleasant old town, once a more considerable place than now. The streets are quaint and hilly, and wind about in strange fashion. There is an old church which was founded in the reign of King Stephen, and was a cell to the abbey of Corneille, in Normandy. The ashes of Marten the regicide lie under a stone in one od the aisles. The old Roundhead was buried in the chancel originally, but a bigoted vicar, whose name was Chest, caused the remains to be removed further off. On this personage an epitaph was written by his son-in-law in these somewhat irreverent words:

"Here lies at rest, I do protest,
One Chest within another;
The chest of wood was very good -
Who says so of the other?"

Upon the stone which covers Marten's grave is an inscription, in the shape of an acrostic, written by the regicide himself, which some have criticised as not being poetry of a high order. But then I never heard that Marten laid claim to be considered a poet at all.

 
The Wynd Cliff
 Two miles from Chepstow you pass the quaint old church of St. Arven's, where you may rest, if you are tired, at a cozy road-side inn, kept, to all outward appearance, solely by a woman and a little girl. And standing in the grave-yard of St. Arven's, with the perfection of beautiful cultivated and hedge-rowed fields all about you, yonder in the distance looms before you a scene whose grandeur is almost worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the Yosemite Valley. Indeed, as I look upon it I can almost believe myself standing once more on that rugged precipice which over looks the mighty valley in the Sierras at whose bottom winds the silver stream of the Merced. It is the Wynd Cliff! "What a cathedral is among churches," wrote the antiquary Fosbroke, many years ago, "the Wynd Cliff is among prospects." But the cathedral will still possess the stronger charm for the lover of antiquity, though its hoary walls are youthful in comparison with the everlasting hills.
 


The region round the Wynd Cliff is thick with the haunts of legend. There is a story for almost every rock in the whole five miles that lie between Chepstow and Tintern Abbey. Some of these are of the battles which have been fought along this border, as the legend of Wyntour's Leap - a precipice on which was fought one of the fiercest struggles of the civil war, and over which Sir John Wyntour was forced on horseback into the river below. But the preponderance of local story shows plainly the influence of the grand old abbey whose splendid ruins we are approaching - Tintern - where the white-robed Cistercian monks bore the cross of life throughout four centuries. About half-way between the Wynd Cliff and Tintern there is a jutting crag overhung by gloomy branches of the yew, called the Devil's Pulpit. His Satanic eminence used in other and wickeder days to preach atrocious morals, or immorals, to the white-robed brethren (who must have taken no little trouble to come so far to hear him) from this rocky pulpit. The story would not be creditable to the monks if it stopped here, so of course it continues. One day the devil grew bold, and taking his tail under his arm in an easy and dègagée manner, hobnobbed familiarly with the monks, and finally proposed, just for a lark, that he should preach them a nice red-hot sermon from the rood-loft of the abbey. To this the monks agreed, and the devil came to church in high glee. But fancy his profane perturbation (I had nearly written holy horror) when the treacherous Cistercians proceeded to shower him with holy water. The devil clapped his tail between his legs and scampered off howling, and never stopped till he got to Llandogo, where he leaped across the river into England, leaving the prints of his talons on a stone; and if you doubt the story, there is Llandogo on the map before you to prove it.

The Cistercian monks arose in 1098, but were not introduced in Britain until thirty years later. One of the wealthiest edifices occupied by them was Tintern Abbey, which the Norman family of Clares, living in Chepstow Castle, founded on the spot where the Welsh king Theodoric of Glamorgan was slain by pagan Saxons in 600, while fighting for the Cross. This king had a palace hard by. There was also a temple on this spot in the Druidical days. At first the Cistercians were ascetics of the sternest sort, vowed to poverty, humility, toil, privation, and life in solitudes far from the haunts of men. But as time went on they grew rich, and with riches came luxury, good living, and bad practices. The community at Tintern was only 150 years old when they built the magnificent abbey whose ruins now stand in lonely splendor here on the Welsh bank of the Wye. In this abbey they lived in princely style, dispensing the most sumptuous hospitalities, and more than once entertaining kings at their table. Their glories began to decline in the fifteenth century, and when the Reformation came, and Henry VIII. dissolved the monasteries throughout Great Britain, there were but thirteen of the brotherhood remaining in Tintern. The ruins are now the property of the much-enduring Duke of Beaufort, and being his, are kept in the tidiest possible trim by a custodian who lives most comfortably in one of the corners of the old pile.
 
Cistercian Monk



Tintern Abbey from the Hill The first sight of Tintern Abbey from the hill on the Chepstow road almost warrants the claim which has been made for this ruin that it is the most picturesque in Britain. Yet the claim is made less on account of the exterior than of the interior. It stands in a secluded and romantic valley, close to the banks of the Wye, surrounded by cultivated hills and embowering trees. On drawing nearer you find that its immediate inclosure is a level, grassy lawn surrounded by stone walls, and with a wooden gate opening off the smooth highway which runs in front of its western façade. Here at a glance we are able to comprehend the ruin in its entirety; nothing is hidden, nothing covered up or left unexplored. The bright free sunshine bathes the ruin in one broad lake of pure golden light. No trees intercept the vision. There were trees in the grounds near the road a short time ago, but they so shut off the view that they have been cut down. The façade nearest us is the main entrance to the church, which is the part of the abbey now most complete, or rather
 
least destroyed. On the other side are the ruins of the cloisters, parlors, dining-hall, kitchen, chapter-house, etc., much fallen to decay. The limb of the cross which juts out with its tall peak on our right is the south transept. The great window which occupies so large a part of the principal façade is and exquisite specimen of rich Gothic ornamentation. It is not, however, until we have passed into the church that the really sublime effect of this grand ruin bursts upon us. The gaze sweeps down the entire length of the vast nave to the marvellously light and elegant window which lifts its graceful stone mullion at the opposite end of the church. Along the sides of the perspective stands a range of fine Gothic pillars, some rising completely to the arches, others quite crumbled to their base. Overhead the only roof is the high blue sky. Along the summit of the ruined walls we see a wealth of ivy, and paths where people, visitors like ourselves, are walking securely about.

Passing to the right, we stand in the south aisle, the entrance to which from without is now walled up. The view here is hardly less impressive and majestic than the other - a vista of crowding arches, walls, and windows, among which the ivy riots luxuriantly.
 
Tintern Abbey from the Road


West Window Here within a railed space is a collection of encaustic tiles, relics of former elegance, bearing various designs, as flowers, animals, and the arms of the abbey donors. Half-way down this aisle we come to the south transept, where stands the mutilated statue of Roger de Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who built the church - a strange, ghastly, broken figure, of gigantic proportions, with its head and members lopped off, as if it had been through some hitherto undreamed-of refinement of inquisitorial torture, in which it had been literally broken all to pieces. It came to this lamentable state, however, through the freak of a drunken Welsh sailor. who, passing this way in the course of a spree he was occupied in conducting, mistook the effigy for a person on pugilistic purposes intent, and so proceeded to knock its head off its shoulders. It is needless to say this was a great many years ago, when the ruin was open to the incursions of any vagabond strolling by. The effigy is now propped up in a grim sort of fashion against the branches of a giant ivy. It is, perhaps, the most interesting relic in the abbey. It represents the doughty De Bigod in his chain-armor, with a short sword and shield; and the probability is, it would have gone hard with his drunken assailant if the knight had been as much alive as the mariner took him to be.
 

Tintern Abbey has always been a favourite sojourning-place with artists as well as with poets. Wordsworth was a frequent visitor to the neighborhood, to which he was constantly returning in his poems when prevented from returning in the flesh; and many other poets have made Tintern their theme. It is sufficiently remote from any railway station to avoid the common fate in our day of certain abbeys more accessible to London, of being overrrun by the excursionizing rabble; and even its striking beauty fails to lure to it the cockney whose taste, time, and money are all three somewhat limited. So the soft note of the soda-water bottle is not heard within its hoary walls, and the smell of the vulgar but convenient sandwich pollutes not the purity of its hallowed atmosphere.
 
Effigy of de Bigod
 

To visit the well-preserved ruins of one such castle as Raglan is to realize in the plainest manner, and as can be realized nowhere, perhaps out of Wales, the very form and manner of the life led by the barons of medieval times.

Ruined Raglan stands on a hill called by the Welsh Twyn y Ciros, by the English the Cherry Tump. Its outward walls were surrounded by an exterior moat, now filled up and overgrown with grass. Of the draw-bridge by which it was crossed there remains no sign, nor of the gate of entrance there. The second gate is the present entrance to the grounds. Two ivy-overgrown square towers stand sentinel at this great gate, and a tree is growing on the top of one of them, behind the beautiful open-work parapet.

The great stone bay-window which juts out into the court near by is probably one of the finest specimens of its kind to be seen any where in Wales. It is so massive in its proportions that the effect of its heavy stone frame-work is light and elegant, and with its rich festooning of ivy it is a beautiful picture. Opposite to this great window, within the banqueting hall it lighted, the baron's table stood; over his head the arms of his house sculptured on the wall. The carved escutcheon is still plainly visible, though its motto is nearly obliterated, for the hall is roofless now and open to all weathers. A beautiful geometrical roof of Irish oak once covered it, with a cupola in the centre, rich with stained glass; and you may see up there the stone corbel heads, with grim carved faces, on which it rested for twenty years after the castle surrendered to Cromwell. Where once hung the gallery of the musicians, now yawns, high up in the wall, the doorway through which long ago they all passed into the shades.

Mounting the grand staircase, whose broad entrance invites me (and whose like I know of in no other Welsh castle), I quickly reach the open air at the top of the ivy-covered wall. From this height we look abroad upon a lovely landscape reaching away to the mountains beyond Abergavenny, and including villages, fields, forests, churches, repeated again and again over miles of fair distance.


In the Moat of Raglan Castle A moat with water in it is not a thing to be passed lightly by. I descend from the top of the donjon keep, cross the modern rustic bridge which spans the moat, and seating myself on a stone against the ivied wall there, linger long in reflection in this weird, romantic, beautiful spot. Nobody comes here to disturb my reveries; the silence remains utterly unbroken; the merry-makers of the féte are gathered on the green far from here, and not a sound of its brass-band is able to penetrate to me through the half dozen or more solid walls whose accumulated feet make a barrier that would muffle the noise of the Boston Jubilee were it next door. I am really in the moat now, though the waters of the moat lie far below me in a still deeper fosse. A broad sunken walk runs almost completely around the donjon keep. Behind me, perhaps a dozen feet above my head, rises a stone wall thickly overgrown with ivy. At the top of the wall is the level lawn of the terrace in front of the grand portal.
 

Below me sleep the waters of the moat, with great lily leaves afloat on their bosom. A flight of stone stairs (broken in places, and protected with a stout wooden hand-rail) leads out of the moat up into the pitched stone court we first entered. At its foot is a dark archway leading to a range of vaults under the gate towers. To my left runs the sunken promenade in which I am sitting, shadowed by its high wall; and at frequent intervals I observe deep niches in this wall, ten feet high, which are empty and moss-grown now, but in the days of the castle's glory they were occupied by the effigies of Roman emperors that stared stonily down upon the water throughout many centuries.

Richard Strongbow, in the twelfth century, gave the domain and castle of Raglan to Sir Walter Bloet, in consideration of soldiers, money, and arms furnished by Bloet for Strongbow's expedition into Ireland. The story of most of Raglan's lords is a story of bloodshed and death by violence. Sir William ap Thomas, who owned the castle in Henry V.'s time, had two lusty sons, one of whom was the gigantic knight, Sir William Herbert, whose monument we have seen in Abergavenny Church, and who did such prodigious slaughter with his poleaxe at Banbury battle. The other son, who dwelt here under Henry VI., also espoused the cause of Edward IV., and also lost his head at Banbury. The next inheritor of Raglan was made justice of South Wales by Richard III; and the next, who got Raglan through marriage, was beheaded at Hexham. And so these old knights, went on fighting, marrying, and being beheaded with tiresome frequency, until the day of Earl Edward, Master of the Horse under King James I., who "died, rich, and in peaceful old age - a fate that befell not many of the rest; for they expired like lights blown out, not commendably extinguished, but with the snuff very offensive to the standers-by."

Then came the reign in Raglan of the noble Marquis of Worcester, which period surpasses in interest all the preceding centuries of this stronghold's history rolled together; for not only is it the record of long and hard fighting throughout the Cromwellian wars, but it includes the story of the invention of the steam-engine by the son of Raglan's lord.

The fame of the water-works of Raglan in the seventeenth century was spread throughout the kingdom. Not only were there wondrous great fountains on the bowling-green and in the fountain court, where stood a statue of a white horse and other figures, from which spurted fantastic streams of water, but in the moat there were amazing engines which threw a glittering spray clear to the top of the great donjon keep. At all fétes within the castle walls these water-works were set in motion, to the delight and wonder of the knights and ladies, who looked on them as the vision of some fairy tale.

It is night when we enter Monmouth, a town renowned in history, but more renowned on account of its historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, perhaps the most delightful old liar who ever wove historical lore out of his inner consciousness. Henry V. was also born in this town, but Henry of Monmouth, by that name, is less famed over the world than Geoffrey of Monmouth.

That quaint old chronicler, Speed, in 1610, in his Historie of the Kingdom, wrote thus of Monmouth Castle: "But as all things find their fatall periods, neither may any more lament the losse of glorie then Monmouth's Castle, which Captive like doth yield to conquering Time. Her downe-cast stones from those lofty Turretts doe shew what beautie once it bare, standing mounted round in compasse, and within her walles another mount, whereon a Towre of great height and strength is built, which was the birthplace of our conquering Henry the great triumpher over France, but now decayed, and from a Princely Castle, is become no better then a regardlesse Cottage."

There are no vestiges of this tower now remaining. It was pulled down by Cromwell's soldiers. One Sunday, when the people were at church, some months after the place had been taken by the Roundheads, they were startled by the noise of a crash in the castle grounds: the tower had fallen, after long undermining. The stones were carried away to mend the roads. But the oaken cradle in which the hero of Agincourt was rocked when a baby is still in existence, carefully preserved by descendants of a personage who held the responsible office of rocker to the prince. It is wider at one end than at the other, and there are holes at the bottom for cordage to pass through, on which was supported the royal baby's bed - a mattress of rushes, the best the land afforded.
 
Henry V.'s Cradle

Monmouth Castle, of which the ruins are uninteresting by comparison with those of Chepstow and Raglan formed one of the range of fortresses erected by William the Norman immediately after the Conquest, and was held through five centuries by various Norman lords of the border.

I should not have lacked for amusement in Monmouth had I arrived in the town a hundred years earlier. Not only had they theatres in the last century, but they had other entertainments, which are now obsolete. They had badger-baiting, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting galore; and while the severe moralists condemned "the baiting of the bear and cock-fighting" as "no meet recreations," they held that "the baiting of the bull hath its use, and therefore it is commended by the civil authority." They had still other recreations, which put to shame that lonely, solemn billiard-table. They gathered every evening to play at quoits, fives, tennis, bowls, and archery. When Lord Nelson was here in the summer of 1802, the hero of Trafalgar did not go to bed at ten; on the contrary, he met a merry party at the bowling-green, and passed the evening till a late hour in great jollity.


Stoup found at Monmouth Among the ancient relics of Monmouth there is one which was supposed to be the font at which the illustrious Harry was christened. It is a stoup which was dug up in a garden on that side of the castle nearest the church, and its surface is decorated with shields, which would seem to indicate that it was a vessel of some dignity. But the wisest antiquarians think it was the mortar use in the castle kitchen to pound up the mustard. Salt beef and bacon were the common food of the medieval masses, and mustard the universal condiment eaten therewith. The stoup weighs fifty-six pounds, and is of a common gritstone peculiar to the Forest of Dean, the same which is used for corner-stones in the castle. I am perfectly willing to concede that it is not the baptismal font of the royal Harry, so long as I am left in the undisturbed belief that it was the mustard mortar of his cook; but I am determined to set my face as a flint against this modern crop of sharp-nosed wiseacres who, with cold, glittering, remorseless spectacles, peer into the sweet heart of every pleasant belief, and tear that heart deliberately out, under pretense that they are getting at the truth. A murrain on the truth, when it dares to tell an unhappy world there was no William Tell, that Joan of Arc died in her bed an old woman, that Charlotte Corday was not handsome nor pure, and that Benedict Arnold led a comfortable and contented life in a foreign land after he had betrayed his own

 
 

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