WALLED TOWNS BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM LITT.D., LL.D. [Illustration] BOSTON MARSHALL JONES COMPANY M D CCCC XX COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY MARSHALL JONES COMPANY _All rights reserved_ First Printing, September, 1919 Second Printing, February, 1920 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. WALLED TOWNS PROLOGUE The stone-flagged path on the top of the high walls winds along within the battlemented parapet, broken here and there by round turrets, steeple-crowned barriers of big timbers and, at wider intervals, great towers, round or square or many-sided, where bright banners blow in the unsullied air. From one side you may look down on and into the dim city jostling the ramparts with crowding walls and dizzy roofs, from the other the granite scarp drops sheer to the green fields and vari-coloured gardens and shadowy orchards full forty feet below. Within, the city opens up in kaleidoscopic vistas as you walk slowly around the walls: here are the steep roofs of tall houses with delicate dormers, fantastic chimney stacks, turret cupolas with swinging weather vanes; here the closed gardens of rich burgesses, full of arbours, flowers, pleached alleys of roses, _espaliers_ of pear and nectarine; here a convent or guild chapel, newly worked of yellow stone and all embroidered with the garniture of niches, balustrades, pinnacles. Here, under one of the city gates, opens a main street, narrow and winding but walled with high-gabled houses, each story jutting beyond the lower, carved from pavement to ridge like an Indian jewel casket, and all bedecked with flaming colour and burnished gold-leaf. Below is the stream and eddy of human life; craftsmen in the red and blue and yellow of their guild liveries, slow-pacing merchants and burghers in furred gowns of cramoisy and Flemish wool and gold-woven Eastern silks; scholars in tippet and gown, youths in slashed doublets and gay hose, grey friars and black and brown, with a tonsured monk or two, and perhaps a purple prelate, attended, and made way for with deep reverence. Threading the narrow road rides a great lady on a gaily caparisoned palfrey, with an officious squire in attendance, or perhaps a knight in silver armour, crested wonderfully, his emblazoned shield hanging at his saddle-bow,--living colour mixing and changing between leaning walls of still colour and red gold.