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It’s the middle of the 15th century, and the country of England is riven by war.
Two dynasties are fighting for supreme power, to be crowned what each side says is the righteous
ruler. It’s a time of bloody turmoil, of mad kings and crafty kingmakers. Battles are won and lost.
Armies are crushed, and towns are burned to the ground. Rebellions pervade the streets and fields,
and heads are lost on the chopping block. It’s also a time of great change.
Castles are no longer the impregnable fortress they have been for centuries. The times of great
fortresses protecting the land has passed. Something new is taking its place. Nowhere
is this more evident than at the castle of Bamburgh in the northeast of England.
This is where our story begins. The legend goes that Bamburgh
castle was once the home of one of King Arthur’s greatest knights, Sir Lancelot.
It was previously protected by the Copper Knight, and Lancelot had to win many ferocious
fights to take it. He beat twenty knights in total, including the Copper Knight. Just bear
in mind that it wasn’t easy at all. Lancelot made the fortress his home,
but as he was sometimes prone to do, he got messed up by his emotions. He had an affair
with King Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, after which she was condemned to die at the
stake. But as always seemed to happen in those centuries-old stories, her knight in shining
armor, Lancelot, came to rescue her. In the 15th Century story, “Le Morte
d'Arthur,” penned by Thomas Malory, the castle is actually called Joyous Garde, but some historians
think Malory based it on Bamburgh castle. Why would he have done that, you might ask?
It was hard to beat in terms of outstanding fortresses in England.
It was a foreboding-looking place that sat on a large crag of volcanic rock. Just looking at
it would have made you shudder had you lived in the past and thought about breaching its walls.
It wasn’t the kind of place you’d ever want to try to attack. Lancelot must have been out of his
mind thinking he could take it for himself. In the 5th century, in real life, it was a
stronghold for Celtic Britons. They made a fort there that they called “Din Guarie.” It then
fell into the hands of the Anglo-Saxons, the folks that had settled in Britain and
were made up of Germanic tribes and indigenous Britons. The great “Ida the Flamebearer” was the
one who laid the first foundations of the fort. The Anglo-Saxons fought like hell with the Britons
over this fort, and they came out on top. This was a special bit of land. They called it the “cradle
of Christianity” and built an important monastery there. Centuries later, the Vikings sailed there
during the so-called Age of Terror and looted the place, taking off large parts of the skulls of the
monks that tried to defend it. In return, captured Vikings had their skins flayed and nailed to
church doors. We’ll call this period castle mania. After the Norman invasion of 1066, the Normans
built more of a stronghold there, and later, it became the property of English
monarchs. Many kings stayed there, but it was Henry III who really did up the place.
Parts of it became fit for a king while prisoners languished in its dungeons. Its thick,
stone walls looked like they touched the sky. It was about as safe a place as you could get and a
good spot to be if those irksome Scots from the north started any trouble. Kings Edward I, II,
and III all used the castle during their campaigns against the Scots.
It also hosted grand events for the English hierarchy, who didn’t need to worry about anyone
interrupting their sumptuous banquets. This was the high point in the age of castles. The Normans
had built over 1,000 of them in England and Wales, but many more came in the centuries after.
Such massive stone enclosures were almost impossible to breach. Castles ruled the
roost. If you could afford one and the monarch allowed you to construct one, you were pretty
much invincible to raiders and small armies. Perhaps the best enemies of the occupants could
hope for was staging a siege and ensuring the castles’ occupants slowly starved. But
Bamburgh withstood centuries of attacks and sieges. The people that stayed there always
kept fortifying it. As you might have seen in fictional content such as Game of Thrones,
gatehouses can be vulnerable, but all builders did was make the gatehouses castles unto themselves.
They put loopholes in the ramparts from where men would fire their longbows or crossbows.
They extended parts of the walls so missiles could be thrown down below. They made sure that even if
someone got inside, they would meet more inner walls. They built moats, often just dry holes,
rather than filled with water. They were still usually effective. As time passed,
the castles got bigger and better and were better at defending things like a trebuchet.
Bamburgh itself was indeed impenetrable, as many castles were. It was a symbol of
English strength. It was a warning to anyone who might test that strength,
so it’s not surprising that the writers of English legends would allude to it in their stories.
Now back to the start. As we told you, in the 15th century,
England became profoundly divided. The place was awash with blood. This is because, in 1463,
the “War of the Roses” started. This was a series of civil wars that went
on for 32 years, 3 weeks, and 4 days. We’re not going to give you a history
lesson on everything that happened during that time. It would be extremely complicated,
so all you need to know for the purpose of today’s show is that the two sides
were the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Each of them had various badges,
and one included a rose. A white rose for the Yorkists, and a red rose for the Lancastrians.
Even today, the Yorkshire football team of Leeds United plays with a white home strip,
and when we think about Manchester United,
we think about a red strip. These are the two biggest cities in those respective counties.
Their mutual hostility is legendary, which is why you might hear their fans calling
each other “scum.” It all goes back to the War of the Roses, but there’s more
to the deep-seated animosity nowadays. Back to the war. It claimed over 100,000
lives, and over those decades, you could say that things were somewhat unstable
in England. Both sides claimed the right to the throne, and both were willing to
start revolts and rebellions and perform God knows how many executions to get to sit on it.
This was a pretty good time to be the owner of a place like Bamburgh castle. For a while,
it was in Lancastrian hands. King Henry VI lived there with his wife.
He was said to be very shy, and he hated violence of any kind. It seems he was born into the wrong
life. He had a bunch of mental breakdowns, so just about everyone said he was not fit to
rule anything, never mind a country. Henry saw many battles around him,
including the Battle of Towton in 1461, said to be the bloodiest battle ever on English
soil. His side, the red side, lost. Times weren’t safe, so he went to hide in Scotland.
All you really need to know is that in 1462, Henry and his wife had returned
from hiding out in Scotland and had made Bamburgh their home. As you know,
they thought it was impenetrable. Everyone did.
Not quite everyone. King Edward IV, the Yorkist king, had some tricks up his sleeve. That year,
he marched with his army into Northumberland, where the castle was situated. At his side was
the military commander and kingmaker, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick.
In case you didn’t know, a kingmaker is someone or some people that have the
influence or power to dictate royal succession. The king and the kingmaker said it was time to
lay waste to some of those structures that had heretofore been invincible. They not only brought
down the walls of Bamburgh castle, but they also did a number on Dunstaburgh castle. This was
pretty much the first time anyone in England had shown they could get past castle walls.
They easily blasted down parts of a place that had stood for years and was thought to
be unconquerable. It was home to both Yorkists and Lancastrians a few times during the war,
and all that fighting took its toll on the place. It fell into decay after that.
Anyway, the Yorkists won in Northumberland and won on the whole. Henry went to the Tower
of London. He died there, probably at the hands of the king, and anyway, it was all
a pointless exercise in wholesale murder, as wars tend to be because, in 1486, the houses
were united under the Tudor king, Henry VII. As you know, a lot more heads would soon role…
We missed out a hell of a lot of history there, but all you need to know is that
this war left a lot of castles in ruins or close to ruins. It was the turning point in
England when castles no longer seemed to do the job. It was the same outside of England, too.
Why? Well, his name begins with
a C. Can you guess? The answer is the cannon. You can call it the ruins-maker. If castles
were conscious, they’d tell you canons are the devil incarnate. Gunpowder, that’s just a demon.
Now we need to talk about China. The ever industrious and creative
Chinese had been using gunpowder for a long time before the Europeans started messing with it. If
you know your Chinese history, you’ll know it was a country that felt it was literally at the
center of the world. Early Imperial China did have a very flourishing civilization
for many centuries. Europe was a backwater in comparison, at least during the European Dark Age.
During the early Middle Ages in Europe, the Chinese used to refer to Europeans as savages,
dumb, violent savages. China did, after all, have many things the Europeans didn’t.
But those Europeans caught up. They had a Renaissance. During the age of exploration, China
made the rash decision to cut itself off from the world while Europeans were building better
ships and doing business all over the world. Ok, so that’s a very abridged version of events,
but it follows a general truth. But for a time, while Europeans
were firing arrows, the Chinese were making explosive devices. Some had really cool names,
translated into English as “flying incendiary club for subjugating demons” and “ten-thousand
fire flying sand magic bomb and the best one, “burning heaven fierce fire unstoppable bomb.”
Imagine going up against that! In the 13th century, they had hand cannons, too.
Then in the 13th century, certain Chinese inventions traveled along the Silk Road to the
Middle East, and from there, they made it back to Europe. Europeans had already traveled to China,
but it was a difficult journey, and the Chinese bigwigs were rarely impressed with what their
pale-faced counterparts had to offer as gifts. Still, gunpowder, guns, and hand cannons started
appearing in Europe. Word on the street, a very short street, mind you, as people didn’t usually
travel so far, was that bows and arrows were about to be supplanted. This didn’t happen overnight,
of course. Bow and arrow makers and castle occupants were ok for now.
In the 14th century, early iterations of the cannon were used when the English fought
with the French at the Battle of Crécy. These were really heavy things and not anywhere near
as useful as they would become. Longbows were still rocking the European world at
that point, but it was a sign of things to come. Cannons were heavy as hell and hard to move about.
But as the English might have said, if they said things like this back then, the bigger they come,
the harder those French dudes fall. The French had their own cannons, of course.
In 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. At his side was a cannon on wheels.
He was soon blasting Italian castle walls to smithereens while Italian
soldiers stood around watching and repeating the word “gatso!” We made the last bit up.
Charles’ army invaded Monte San Giovanni's kingdom in the city of Naples. They blasted
down its city walls like they were made of papier-mâché. They committed bloody massacres
of people who’d wrongly thought their walls would keep them safe. The canon was a beast!
So, when people started seeing just how easily castles could be bashed to pieces,
they had no choice but to admit that their centuries-old love affair with
castles had probably better stop. Castles still looked beautiful, but as canons and
cannon balls were getting bigger, they were becoming outstandingly useless. Some of the
most eye-catching and once-safe places were just abandoned and left to fall into decay.
Regular castles were like sitting ducks, so soon,
some clever people started coming up with structures that would be easier to defend
and harder to hit. That’s when we got the things called star forts.
It’s funny, because forts had once been old hat, and now, they were making a comeback. Sure,
a 20,000-pound (9,100 kg) cannon could still cause a lot of damage,
but nothing like could be done to one of those old,
fat castles. The new edifices were built with canons in mind. The old ones hadn’t.
As time went on, cannons became more advanced, but so did the structures they were trying to
hit. Still, the cannon was a stayer. It was one of the main weapons used by
the USA in the 1899 Battle of Manila during the Philippine–American War.
The cannons they used in that war were still tame in relation to what we have now,
which is guided missiles and whatnot, but they could have made a castle look like a plate of
chopped spaghetti and sausage in the 15th century. As for castles vs. modern-day artillery, well,
that would be like pitting your new Shih Tzu puppy against an angry and very hungry Bengal tiger.
To conclude, in the 15th century, when castles went out of fashion. European kings were being
told something along the lines of: “For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled The battle outside raging”
Times they were a changing. The good news is they were such sturdy structures that
you can go to Europe today and pay a part of your arm and leg to walk around the ruins.
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Now you need to watch “Why The Pope Murdered The Knights Templar.” Or,
look to the weird future in “The End of Civilization (Century by Century).”