CHAPTER CVII

Caerfili Castle--Sir Charles--The Waiter--Inkerman.

I slept well during the night. In the morning after breakfast I went to
see the castle, over which I was conducted by a woman who was intrusted
with its care. It stands on the eastern side of the little town, and is
a truly enormous structure, which brought to my recollection a saying of
our great Johnson, to be found in the account of his journey to the
Western Islands, namely "that for all the castles which he had seen
beyond the Tweed the ruins yet remaining of some one of those which the
English built in Wales would find materials." The original founder was
one John De Bryse, a powerful Norman who married the daughter of
Llewellyn Ap Jorwerth, the son-in-law of King John, and the most war-like
of all the Welsh princes, whose exploits, and particularly a victory
which he obtained over his father-in-law, with whom he was always at war,
have been immortalized by the great war-bard, Dafydd Benfras. It was one
of the strongholds which belonged to the Spencers, and served for a short
time as a retreat to the unfortunate Edward the Second. It was ruined by
Cromwell, the grand foe of the baronial castles of Britain, but not in so
thorough and sweeping a manner as to leave it a mere heap of stones.
There is a noble entrance porch fronting the west--a spacious courtyard,
a grand banqueting room, a corridor of vast length, several lofty towers,
a chapel, a sally-port, a guard-room and a strange underground vaulted
place called the mint, in which Caerfili's barons once coined money, and
in which the furnaces still exist which were used for melting metal. The
name Caerfili is said to signify the Castle of Haste, and to have been
bestowed on the pile because it was built in a hurry. Caerfili, however,
was never built in a hurry, as the remains show. Moreover, the Welsh
word for haste is not fil but ffrwst. Fil means a scudding or darting
through the air, which can have nothing to do with the building of a
castle. Caerfili signifies Philip's City, and was called so after one
Philip a saint. It no more means the castle of haste than Tintagel in
Cornwall signifies the castle of guile, as the learned have said it does,
for Tintagel simply means the house in the gill of the hill, a term
admirably descriptive of the situation of the building.

I started from Caerfili at eleven for Newport, distant about seventeen
miles. Passing through a toll-gat