When I am down in the country, I am sometimes taken to see castles, and I want to make a confession about them. I look about their walls, I mark portcullis and moat, newel stair and keep, I enter into the central court, a green space surrounded by walls half-whole, half-broken — and I cannot form the faintest conception of what these great places were like when they were inhabited; for, it must be remembered, what we see when we admire a ruined castle is a house without a roof, generally without floors or ceilings, always without woodwork of any kind or sort. Take the roof off Smith’s villa at Surbiton. Burn every beam in the house, break in all the windows, make the kitchen and back garden a heap of confused stones overgrown with grass and weeds. Knock down every door and every party wall, blow up the stairs, smash the floors, make Smith’s potting-shed and his fowl-house in the back garden into beautiful green mounds, turf-covered; and then bring along your post-historic New Zealander, and ask him to tell you what Laburnum Villa was like in the days of its pride, and what manner of life the Smiths led there. I don’t believe the New Zealander would make much of the job; and so I make very little of the job when I pass into a twelfth century castle. I can see that those high outer walls, sloping outward to the ground (“battered”) for greater strength, were meant to keep people out; I conjecture that those windows, a narrow slit outside, a broad splay within, were handy for shooting without much chance of being shot; I have been told that the keep, or central tower, with walls six, eight, ten feet thick, was the last refuge of the De Somethings when a breach had been made in the outer defence; and that is about all. “The great hall,” says somebody, pointing to a large space, where an inner wall half-stands, half-falls. It may be so; but it may be the chapel, or the great kitchen; all is so broken, so uncertain. And then: “Secret passage, communicating with the Abbey, five miles away,” and “The black dungeon under the keep, where the objects of feudal oppression pined away.” It may be so, or it may be the mere apparatus of drainage.

And as to how the De Somethings lived, where they slept, at what time they had their meals, what they ate at their meals, how they spent their days when the foe were not battering at the outer bailey, I have hardly the faintest notion. I except a few items of the castle bill of fare: a great deal of salt cod, a great deal of salt beef, a great deal of salt herring, venison pies, roast game, peacock and swan occasionally, buttered eggs, richly spiced dishes from the east, dishes in which meat, raisins, and currants were mingled — the mince-pie is the only modern survivor of this school of cookery — pike and other fish from the castle pond; abundance of strong, thick ale — there were no clarifying hops then — and liberal Gascon wine; we may make out a fairly satisfactory bill for the table of our great lord. But that is about all, so far as I am concerned. Indeed, I once asked a man deeply learned in antiquity, a famous herald, to tell me what it was like, generally speaking, to pay a visit to a thirteenth century lord at his castle. “For example,” I said, “when a Barry of Manorbier went to stay for a few weeks with a Bohun of Caldicot, how did the castle party begin the day? Was the Barry called for breakfast?”

He considered the question, and finally declared that in his opinion there was no formal beginning of the day: “I believe they all woke up like animals, and shook themselves.” It may be: but I would rather incline to think that a bell at six o’clock in the morning roused everybody for Mass in the chapel, and that afterwards people strolled to the buttery-hatch and broke their fast, lunching-in the proper sense of the word “lunch”— on hunks of bread and chunks of salt beef or pasty, with quarts of ale for the simple and quarts of red wine for the gentle. And then to the stables, quite in the manner of a modern country house in the hunting shires, and a long discussion there as to the horses. And then, perhaps, a little tennis, the court being t............