Siege of the Castle. 



217 



fruitless, for the besieged were neither injured by his machines, nor 

 at all daunted by his blockade, though it was long and strict. The 

 barons therefore who were present at the siege, some wearied out 

 by its being long protracted, and others who were their false and 

 treacherous comrades, united in apprehensions that the Earl of 

 Gloucester would collect all his forces and suddenly attack them. 

 The king therefore consulting his friends, retired to London to 

 rally his strength, and then advance when fortune summoned him 

 to some safer enterprise. He left however in the castle at Devizes, 

 for the annoyance of Trowbridge to which it was near, a chosen 

 and disciplined body of soldiers, and the two parties alternately by 

 their hostile incursions reduced all the neighbouring country to a 

 desolate solitude." 1 



But a question of much interest now arises. "Where was the site 

 of the castle ? and what was the probable, extent and direction of 

 its fortifications ? 



Leland's brief notes concerning its condition in 1540 — 42, when 

 he visited the town, imply that it must have been a fortress of 

 considerable strength. He says — The castelle stoode on the south 

 side of the toune. It is now clene down. Ther was in it a seven 

 gret toures, whereof poaces of two yet stande. The river rennith 

 hard by the castelle." Wiltshire Magazine, i., 151. Bodman, who at 

 the time when he wrote (1814) was advancing in years himself, tells 

 us he had known men who remembered having seen fragments of no 

 less than four of the towers standing, about 1660 or 1670. 2 He adds 

 moreover that there were two draw- bridges across the moat which sur- 

 rounded the castle walls, one to the west, close by the old bridge which 

 ran some twenty or thirty feet to the southward of the present one, and 

 in a more direct line with Stallard Street ; and the other towards the 

 east, at that break in Fore Street, where there is an entrance into Court 

 Lane. An attempt has been made, by means of enquiry from persons 

 long acquainted with the locality, as well as by personal inspection 

 of the site itself, to form a probable conjecture as to the line of the 



1 See " Acta Stephani " (Anno 1189). 

 2 Aubrey in his " Miscellanies" (p. 14), writing in 1670, speaks of it as "a 

 ruinated castle of the House of Lancaster." 



