History of the place.
The castle. ground between the sluggish streams of Nen and Welland, was preeminently a hunting-seat; but it was not merely a hunting-seat; it was also a fortress. As in so many cases, the Norman, in this case the Conqueror himself, had seized and adapted to his own use the home and the works of the Englishman. On a height just within the borders of Northamptonshire, looking forth across the valley of the Welland over the Danish land to the north, the Englishman Bofig had in King Eadward's days held sac and soc in his lordship of Rockingham. His dwelling-place, like those of other English thegns, crowned a mound on a site strong by nature, and which the skill of Norman engineers was to change into a site strong by art. In the havoc which fell upon Northampton, borough and shire, when William went forth to subdue the Mercian land,[1] the home of Bofig had become waste; and on that waste spot the King ordered a castle to be built.[2] At Rockingham, as almost everywhere else, we find works earlier and later than the time of our story, but nothing that we can positively assign to the days of either William. There is no keep, as at Bridgenorth and at Oxford, which we can assign to any of the known actors in our tale. The mound of Bofig is yoked on to a series of buildings of various dates, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. But we can still trace the line of the walls and ditches which the Conqueror or his successors added as new defences to the primitive mound and its primitive ditch. Art and nature together have made the site almost peninsular; but a considerable space, occupied by the parish church
