The site of Richmond was fixed as the new centre of power, and the name,
with its apparently obvious meaning, may date from that time, unless the
suggested Anglo-Saxon derivation which gives it as Rice-munt--the hill
of rule--is correct. After this Gilling must soon have ceased to be of
any account. There can be little doubt that the castle was at once
planned to occupy the whole area enclosed by the walls as they exist
to-day, although the full strength of the place was not realized until
the time of the fifth Earl, who, as we have seen, was most probably the
builder of the keep in its final form, as well as other parts of the
castle. Richmond must then have been considered almost impregnable, and
this may account for the fact that it appears to have never been
besieged. In 1174, when William the Lion of Scotland was invading
England, we are told in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle that Henry II.,
anxious for the safety of the honour of Richmond, and perhaps of its
custodian as well, asked: ‘Randulf de Glanvile est-il en Richemunt?’ The
King was in France, his possessions were threatened from several
quarters, and it would doubtless be a relief to him to know that a
stronghold of such importance was under the personal command of so able
a man as Glanville. In July of that year the danger from the Scots was
averted by a victory at Alnwick, in which fight Glanville was one of the
chief commanders of the English, and he probably led the men of
Richmondshire.
It is a strange thing that Richmond Castle, despite its great
pre-eminence, should have been allowed to become a ruin in the reign of
Edward III.--a time when castles had obviously lost none of the
advantages to the barons which they had possessed in Norman times. The
only explanation must have been the divided interests of the owners,
for, as Dukes of Brittany, as well as Earls of Richmond, their English
possessions were frequently endangered when France and England were at
war. And so it came about that when a Duke of Brittany gave his support
to the King of France in a quarrel with the English, his possessions
north of the Channel became Crown property. How such a condition of
affairs could have continued for so long is difficult to understand, but
the final severing came at last, when the unhappy Richard II. was on the
throne of England. The honour of Richmond then passed to Ralph Neville,
the first Earl of Westmoreland, but the title was given to Edmund Tudor,
whose mother was Queen Catherine, the widow of Henry V. Edmund Tudor, as
all know, married Margaret Beaufort, the heiress of John of Gaunt, and
died about two months before his wife--then scarcely fourteen years
old--gave birth to his only son, who succeeded to the throne of England
as Henry VII. He was Earl of Richmond from his birth, and it was he who
carried the name to the Thames by giving it to his splendid palace which
he built at Shene. Even the ballad of ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’ is
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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