DUFFIELD CASTLE. 119 



Nay, it may be almost positively asserted that it was a condition of 

 the De Ferrers' tenure from his sovereign that a strong fortress 

 should be erected and maintained ; for he was the most powerful 

 Baron in Mercia, and the king absolutely trusted to his loyalty. 

 It has been assumed that such a centre for his government was 

 established at Tutbury;* but Tutbury was on the verge of his 

 possessions rather than in the centre. Moreover, although Henry 

 de Ferrers did rebuild the ruined Saxon fortress of Tutbury, and 

 also founded a Priory hard by, still the remains of that which is 

 Norman about the old castle of Tutbury, as compared with the 

 recently uncovered remains of the castle of Duffield, show that 

 the former was almost insignificant in defensive proportions when 

 compared with the Derbyshire stronghold. 



Duffield formed a fairly convenient centre for obtaining access 

 to all his Derbyshire, nay all his Mercian, manors. It was but a 

 little distance from that great main thoroughfare of England, the 

 Rykneld Street, with which it was connected by a well-used cross- 

 road. Duffield commanded a ford over the Denvent, whence 

 started the road that led from the south to the invaluable lead 

 mines of Wirksworth, and thence to the upper, or High Peak 

 district. A knoll, partly natural and partly artificial, that had 

 been occupied by the Romans throughout the centuries of their 

 sojourn here, and subsequently utilised by the Saxons as a centre 

 of colonization and as a strategically important place for an en- 

 trenched fortress, was the very site that would at once suggest itself 

 to the practical mind of Henry de Ferrers for the erection of an 

 imposing castle. Not only would such a site be invaluable 

 to him and to the cause of the conquerors, both from a 

 military and commercial point of view, but the moral effect in the 

 neighbourhood, of the holding by one of these fierce Normans of 

 the very spot whence, as a burh, justice had been administered, 

 and whereon some of the last victorious struggles of the Anglo- 

 Saxons against the Danes had taken place, cannot be over-esti- 

 mated. The weighty immensity of the great square stone tower, 



* History of Tutbury ; by Sir Oswald Mosley, 1832, p. 5. 



