But leaving, for the present, Mr. Clark's views, to which I shall return below, I take my stand without hesitation on certain features in this keep. It is not needful to visit Arques—I have myself never done so—to appreciate their true significance and their bearing on the question of the date. The first of these is the forebuilding. Mr. Clark tells us that Arques possesses "the usual square appendage or forebuilding common in these keeps" (_M. M. A._, i. 198). But this unscientific treatment of the forebuilding, ignoring so completely its origin and development, cannot too strongly be resisted. Restricting ourselves to the case before us, we at once observe the peculiarity of an external staircase, not only leading up to a forebuilding, through which the keep is entered, but actually carried, through a massive buttress, round an angle of the keep.[1005] Rochester being believed to be the work of Gundulf, in the days when M. Deville wrote, it was natural that he should have supposed "cette savante combinaison" to have been familiar to Gundulf (p. 299). But now that, on these points, we are better informed, let us ask where can Mr. Clark produce an instance of this elaborate and striking device as old even as the days of Gundulf, to say nothing of those of Count William (1039-1043)? Where we do find it is in such keeps as Dover, the work of Henry II., or Rochester, where the resemblance is even more remarkable. Now, Rochester, as we know, was actually built within a few years of the date given by Robert du Mont, and upheld by me, as that of the construction of Arques. Oddly enough, it is Mr. Clark himself who thus points out another resemblance:— "In the basement of the forebuilding ... was a vaulted chamber, opening into the basement of the keep, _as at Rochester_, either a store or prison" (_M. M. A._, p. 188). Lastly, both at Arques and at Rochester, we find on the first floor, near the entrance, the very peculiar feature of a smaller doorway communicating with the rampart of the curtain.[1006] This parallel, which is not alluded to by Mr. Clark, is the more remarkable, as such a device is foreign to the earlier rectangular keeps, and also implies that the keep must have been built certainly no earlier, and possibly later, than the curtain, which curtain, Mr. Clark, as we shall find, admits, cannot be so old as the days of Count William. No one, in short, unbiassed by supposed documentary evidence, could study this keep, with its "petites galeries avec d'autres petites chambres ou prisons pratiquées dans l'épaisseur des murs"[1007] (as at Rochester), with the elaborate defences of its entrance, and with those other special features which made even Mr. Clark uneasy, without rejecting as incredible the accepted view that it was built by Count William of Arques (1039-1043). And this being so, there is, admittedly, no alternative left but to assign it to Henry I. (1123), the date specifically given by Robert du Mont himself.