150 DUFFIELD CASTLE. 



repair of the works, almost always of timber, a material which the 

 Saxons, like other German nations, appear usually to have pre- 

 ferred for building purposes to stone, though some of their towns 

 were walled, as Colchester and Exeter, and Domesday records 

 the custom of repairing the walls of Oxford, Cambridge, and 

 Chester. 



" In these English, as before them in the British works, the 

 ditches were sometimes used to contain and protect the ap- 

 proaches. This is well seen at Clun and Kilpeck. At Tutbury 

 the main approach enters between two exterior platforms, and 

 skirts the outer edge of the ditch, until it reaches the inner 

 entrance. The object was to place the approach under the eyes 

 and command of the garrison." 



The chroniclers of the ninth and tenth centuries afford 

 abundant proof of the number and extent of the earthworks that 

 were then thrown up during the fiercest part of the Danish in- 

 cursions. We doubt not that this Duffield hillock was held for 

 some time in comparative peace by successive Duffield lords in 

 earlier Anglo-Saxon days, and that they altered and combined the 

 previous earthworks and Roman ramparts to suit their convenience 

 and needs. Leaving the now shallow foss of Roman origin on the 

 north west much as it was, they seem to have deepened materially 

 the foss on the south west. Modern interferences with the sur- 

 roundings of the site on other sides prevent us tracing their work 

 all round, but it would certainly appear that they raised a circular 

 mound at the eastern side of the enclosure, which nature had 

 already partly constructed for them, for the rock juts out on the 

 northern side of the Norman keep, as will be noticed later on. 

 The mound would also at that time be many feet higher. The 

 small trenches cut at D, E, and F, as marked on the plan, in 

 each instance exposed, some two feet below the surface, charred 

 wood and black ash. This seems to point to the fact of a stock- 

 ade having been burnt on that line. The more domestic nature 

 of the burh and its defences on this site, of the earlier days, 

 would probably be much changed in the later period, as the con- 

 flicts with the Danes in this district thickened in frequency and 



