10.
The term castle is actually very confusing in the English language.
In defining what a castle is other languages do better.
In French the word Chateau means castle but when referring to a properly fortified castle
it would be called a chateau fort (pronounced “for”).
The German language defines a fortified castle as a Burg while a structure that looks castle
like but lacks practical fortifications, such as a manor house, would be a schloss, such
as Schloss Neuschwanstein (pronounced ‘noi-svhaan-styn’).
In English the historical use of the word castle has been used to refer to fortresses,
citadels, manor houses, and palaces even though these structures can be very distinct from
one another.
The modern usage of the world castle essentially refers to any building with medieval style
battlements, regardless if they are functional or aesthetic.
But if we want to be more accurate to what castles were in the medieval period we should
try and use the word castle to refer to a building that would have been considered a
castle in that time.
This means a real castle is building with functional medieval battlements that could
properly protect the occupants inside and provide multiple ways for those occupants
to repel attackers.
All other castle like structures should have a prefix to their description such as converted-castle,
Japanese-castle, house-castle, fantasy-castle, or fake-castle.
9.
It was through conquering the local castle that land was taken from another ruler in
medieval times.
The feudal system had no state run military.
Instead the military force of the medieval period was fielded by local lords who had
sworn fealty to greater lords who in turn also had their own soldiers.
These soldiers were a mix of both men at arms and Knights.
A king could command his lords to rally for war but generally the individual soldier obeyed
his lord before the king, as demonstrated by the many rebellions and uprising by local
lords against their kings throughout the medieval period.
This would have been impossible if the state, or King, controlled the whole military.
Yet even though this military was fragmented into different locations under different commanders
they still needed a place to train, maintain themselves and their arms, rest, resupply,
and to do all this in a place that was secure.
This place was of course the castle or the fortified cities of the time (which often
had castles within them called citadels) and they served as the medieval soldier’s military
base.
Any army that had access to such a base near a point of conflict held a profound advantage
over an attacking force because they could strike out in skirmishes against a mostly
vulnerable aggressor.
Once the skirmish was complete they could retreat back to a very secure location that
couldn’t be attacked in return with such ease.
The attacking army could ransack the surrounding land but that didn’t deal with the defending
army which would be striking at their flanks as much as possible.
Land was the most valuable resource that an attacking army could take and land couldn’t
be permanently taken until the defending army in that land was dealt with, which meant dealing
with the castle.
8.
The most significant defensible feature a castle could receive was through location
and not design.
Of course design was important and castles were most useful in strategically important
locations but if placed on an advantageously steep, high or secluded hill the castle could
become nearly impregnable through sheer inaccessibility.
This is especially true in respect to things like siege towers and trebuchets as they simply
couldn’t be used if they couldn’t get close enough.
There are many historical castles that were placed in such commanding positions that they
were never taken by direct assault.
7.
Contrary to what many people think, it is the gatehouse and not the central keep that
was the most important and defended part of a castle’s structures.
As much as castle design is focused on preventing people from getting in, they still need a
primary entrance.
This entrance was the weakest part of a castle because it was much easier to get through
an entrance that was already there than going to the trouble of forcibly making a new one.
This entrance would be as big as needed, for carts and wagons, and as small as possible,
to bottleneck any attackers trying to get through.
This means those massive gates we see on many fantasy castles are very impractical and unrealistic.
The larger the gate the harder it is to defend.
A gatehouse would usually have overhanging battlements or flanking towers at its front
and a portcullis over the entrance which is a large wooden grate that could be raised
and lowered when needed.
Yet these features only frame the bare basics of what could have been added to a medieval
gatehouse because many were as heavily fortified as possible.
Heavily fortified gatehouses often had drawbridges, multiple portcullises to trap the enemy inside
and murder holes and arrow slits to attack any attacker passing through.
6.
The internal walls of castles were not bare stone.
The idea that medieval people went around covered in dirt with everything muted in browns
and grays couldn’t be further from the truth.
Medieval people loved colour and the more colour you could display in dress and in your
home, especially those colours that were hard to fabricate through dyes, the greater wealth
implied.
The image that castle interiors were all stone brick is very inaccurate and the reason people
assume this is because the lime painted whitewashed plaster that covered these walls have worn
away over time, leaving bare stone.
The people who lived in castles were rich and they wanted to be seen as rich.
One way they did this was to paint the plastered walls and roofs of their living spaces with
colourful patterns and murals, often very garishly to modern standards.
Seriously, historical castles were a veritable riot of colours.
5.
As a general rule Castles didn’t have large windows.
The purpose of a castle was not only to keep people out but to aggressively repel them
and any hole on the outside of a castle that was large enough for a man to fit through
would be a very big problem.
This meant that most outwards facing castle windows were arrow loops or at the least very
thin.
The exceptions to this was if the window was high enough that it would be extremely difficult
or suicidal for an attacker to reach it or if the windows faced the internal ward of
a castle bacuse they couldn’t be directly assaulted by external attackers.
It should be noted that the historical castles you can find that have large windows on the
outside and near ground level were retrofitted on the castles in later restorations, such
as the low windows on the chateau fort de roquetaillade (pronounced roc’toyahd).
These windows were added in the recent past to make castles more livable.
4.
Castles did have secret entrances or back doors.
This back door called the Postern or Sally Port wasn’t so much secret as it was small
and very easily defended.
The postern could be hidden but it wasn’t a big problem if an enemy knew where it was.
Unlike the main entrance, the postern didn’t need to be large enough for wagons and therefore
could have sharp internal corners nullifying access for battering rams or be securely blocked
off with metal grates.
The postern would usually sit at the base of a castle wall and was therefore protected
by the battlements above.
This meant that these back doors would seriously bottleneck any army trying to assault them
which explains why it was rarely ever done, but they could still be a castle’s downfall.
Several times in history have infiltrators or spies opened the postern to the enemy,
such as what happened at the final siege of Corfe Castle in 1645.
3.
Properly designed Castles are much better at their job than many people realize or what
is depicted in movies.
Films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ironclad and Kingdom of heaven show that defeating
a castle or castle like defences was a simple matter of storming the walls and that trebuchets
could destroy castles within a short bombardment.
In reality taking a castle was far from a simple matter.
Committing to an all out assault was the most extreme and unlikely option when trying to
take a castle as that option put most of the attacker’s men at risk with high chances
of getting them all killed.
Rather most sieges were slow and considered affairs.
Those in the castles weren’t going anywhere and if there was no sign of immediate reinforcements
the attackers could take their time in building barricades, sometimes fully encircling the
defending castle with a wooden wall.
The size of the trebuchet and the size of the castle wall mattered.
If the trebuchet was too small and the castle wall too thick, the bombardment would do negligible
damage.
But if the trebuchet was big it could do far more damage.
The largest historical trebuchet was called Warwolf and could throw a 90kg projectile
over 300 meters.
What we need to remember though is that Warwolf was an exception, taking fifty four men three
months to build, and doesn’t represent the standard size or effectiveness of most medieval
trebuchets.
It would take many hits from a trebuchet to destroy a castle wall as they were very, very
thick.
This process could take days to weeks, especially considering that several hits would be deflected
due to the round design of castle towers.
Then, even if there was a breach in the castle wall, this was far from a guarantee the castle
would fall.
In 1408 English forces under the command of the future king Henry V laid siege to Harlech
castle and bombarded it with cannons.
Historians deduce this destroyed the south and east parts of the outer walls (which were
later rebuilt) yet even with the damage from cannon fire (and remember that cannons are
far more powerful than trebuchets), Harlech only fell when it ran out of supplies and
many of it’s defenders had died of starvation in February of 1409.
Against greater numbers, cannons and even having parts of the castle destroyed, the
defenders of Harlech Castle held off the aggressors for nearly a year and only surrendered when
they ran out of supplies.
So clearly, breaching a castle wall didn’t mean the fight was over.
This is not to say that castles couldn’t be taken or destroyed because historically
many were, only that it is much harder to do than what many people realize.
2.
The most historically effective way to take a castle was by starving it out.
Most castles would have a cistern that would collect rainwater or a well and depending
on how much food was stored starving a castle wasn’t always viable.
An approaching army allied to the castle would also have made a lengthy siege impractical
and force the besiegers to be more aggressive, resorting to bombardments and assaults in
an attempt to take the castle before the other army arrived.
Still, if the besieging army could get away with it they would simply choose to starve
the castle out as this was a proven strategy with very little risk.
An all out assault on the other hand always carried the chance of complete failure and
the loss of one’s army.
1.
Castles required far fewer people to defend than people think.
An example of this is Harleck castle’s standard garrison which was comprised of only 36 men.
Considering that castle would get besieged by armies numbering in the hundreds to thousands,
36 is a big contrast.
Likewise when Corfe castle was besieged in 1645 it had only five soldiers and a few servants
to defend it yet they held out against an army of 300 hundred before being reinforced.
Castles were built to enable those inside them to effectively repel attackers and when
properly designed they did their job amazingly well.
While it’s true that the more soldiers the defenders had the more likely they would be
able to repel an assault, additional men weren’t completely necessary.
Castle assaults didn’t happen right away or very frequently during a siege.
Like I’ve said, sieges were slow and considered affairs that could last months to even years
and therefore the more people in a castle meant the more recourses they would consume.
This meant that any none essential resident or servant in the castle would be sent away,
if a siege was imminent and it was practical to do so, and the castle would only keep those
soldiers that it could sustain for an extended period of time.