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Updated: June 5, 2025
Tillières, Tegulense castrum, bears a name cognate with the Kerameikos of Athens and with the Tuilleries of Paris. It was first fortified by Duke Richard the Good, the Duke who would have none but gentlemen about him, and in whose days the peasants arose against their masters.
We wish that the home of Richer was in the same case as the head of the Oximenses, where the gardens in the ditch do comparatively little harm. Or rather we cherish a hope that the vieux château may not be the true castrum de Aquila. We cannot say that we saw any other castle anywhere else at Laigle; but we saw one or two sites higher up the hill where a castle might have stood very fittingly.
Then there is Glosmont Castle, the fortified residence of the Earl of Lancaster; Skenfrith Castle, White Castle, the Album Castrum of the Latin records, the Landreilo of the Welsh, with its six towers, portcullis and drawbridge flanked by massive towers, barbican, and other outworks; and Raglan Castle with its splendid gateway, its Elizabethan banqueting-hall ornamented with rich stone tracery, its bowling-green, garden terraces, and spacious courts an ideal place for knightly tournaments.
Everybody knows, of course, that up and down over the face of England a whole crop of places may be found with such terminations as Lancaster, Doncaster, Manchester, Leicester, Gloucester, or Exeter; and everybody also knows that these words are various corruptions or alterations of the Latin castra, or perhaps we ought rather to say of the singular form, castrum.
Thus I possess a dog's skull from the Roman colony of the neighbouring Heddersheim, 'Castrum Hadrianum', which is in no way distinguishable from the fossil bones from the Frankish caves; it presents the same colour, and adheres to the tongue just as they do; so that this character also, which, at a former meeting of German naturalists at Bonn, gave rise to amusing scenes between Buckland and Schmerling, is no longer of any value.
Leaving the sanctuary of the Christian Deity, the heathen temple of Terpsichore, and the effigy of the renowned soldier, thus grouped together, we traverse the fine road, and pause for a moment to look at a severe but elegant structure, erected, we are told, in exact imitation of a Roman castrum, or fortress, and therefore eminently in character with the purpose for which it is intended.
But it may confound the rash adopters of the more obvious etymological derivations, to learn that the couch-grass or dog-grass, or, to speak scientifically, the Triticum repens of Linnaeus, does not grow within a quarter of a mile of this castrum or hill-fort, whose ramparts are uniformly clothed with short verdant turf; and that we must seek a bog or palus at a still greater distance, the nearest being that of Gird-the-mear, a full half-mile distant.
The ending caster of so many names in the north of England, and chester in the Midlands, xeter in the west of England, and caer in Wales, all come from the same Latin word, castrum, which means a military camp or fortified place.
These were Pyrgi, Ostia, Antium, Tarracina, Minturnae, Sinuessa Sena Gallica, and Castrum Novum. This view is, no doubt, inconsistent with the Greek accounts, which assert that Alexander the Great and Demetrius Poliorcetes lodged complaints at Rome regarding Antiate pirates.
Item a Damasco haud remote distat castrum satis munitum, et firmum, quod Derces est nominatum.
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