The step from such rude Titanic works as these to the Norman fortress is great—and perhaps a word or two on other forms of places of strength may be suitable, as showing distinctly that the feudal castles were the combination of the rude strength of the primitive fortress with domiciliary comfort—that they brought the defensive strength, supposed to reside only in inaccessible mountain regions or swamps, into the midst of rich agriculture and smiling abundance—that they no longer rendered necessary a retreat to the place of strength, as one may suppose the whole community of a district to have retreated to a hill-fort, but were themselves alike the abode of luxurious ease in time of peace, and of resistance and fierce contest in time of war. Perhaps we may best comprehend how original was the idea of the union of fortress and house or palace in one, by observing how few are the vestiges of such a combination having existed elsewhere before the establishment of the feudal system. Towns undoubtedly seem to have been fortified from the beginning of town life; and of the extent to which the system was carried, let us take once for all the account which honest old Herodotus gives of Babylon, with its walls two hundred cubits high, on which a chariot could be driven with four horses abreast, and its hundred gates of brass. But, of anything of the nature of a domestic fortress in which people lived in their ordinary manner during peace, and defended themselves in war, we remember but few vestiges.