passage of the river at the Pons Aelii. The poor little Saxon village
of Monkchester was then its neighbour. But the castle occupying a fine
strategic position soon attracted townsfolk, who built their houses
'neath its shadow. The town of Richmond owes its existence to the
lordly castle which Alain Rufus, a cousin of the Duke of Brittany,
erected on land granted to him by the Conqueror. An old rhyme tells
how he

Came out of Brittany
With his wife Tiffany,
And his maid Manfras,
And his dog Hardigras.

He built his walls of stone. We must not imagine, however, that an
early Norman castle was always a vast keep of stone. That came later.
The Normans called their earliest strongholds _mottes_, which
consisted of a mound with stockades and a deep ditch and a
bailey-court also defended by a ditch and stockades. Instead of the
great stone keep of later days, "foursquare to every wind that blew,"
there was a wooden tower for the shelter of the garrison. You can see
in the Bayeux tapestry the followers of William the Conqueror in the
act of erecting some such tower of defence. Such structures were
somewhat easily erected, and did not require a long period for their
construction. Hence they were very useful for the holding of a
conquered country. Sometimes advantage was taken of the works that the
Romans had left. The Normans made use of the old stone walls built by
the earliest conquerors of Britain. Thus we find at Pevensey a Norman
fortress born within the ancient fortress reared by the Romans to
protect that portion of the southern coast from the attacks of the
northern pirates. Porchester Keep rose in the time of the first Henry