Castles
Castles! The very word conjures up romantic images of the medieval times with knights and their ladies fair.
Yet the story behind them is far from romantic, speaking to hard times when people either feared their neighbors or sought to control them. But castles were not only highly technical in their day, they were also a huge investment that could be the towns last, best hope for safety.
Home and country
For essentially as long as people have been around it has been the case that some groups have attacked other groups.
So, you live in a quiet, peaceful village surrounded by nasty types who want to attack your village, steal all they can, and carry off the women and children into slavery. Naturally, you don't share this world-view and so want to stop them.
But how?
One way is to raise an army yourself to defend hearth and home. Good idea, but there are difficulties.
If your army loses then the bad guys still attack the village and you're no better off.
The bad guys might come by surprise. Same outcome.
Even if your army does win, some of your people will be killed. While one can't always prevent this in war, you certainly want to cut down your losses as much as possible.
You need some way to make it very hard (OK, impossible really.) for the bad guys to sneak up on
Keeping the bad men away
The first defenses, in England at least, consisted of putting forts at the top of a large, steep hill. Along the sides of the steep hill are wall rings made of earth or wood.
Oswestry Hillfort, Oswestry Borderland Tourism*
Over time these hill forts developed into the castles we know and love. The cherry on top comes as a result of the crusades. Returning crusaders brought back ideas to improve the design.
So, let's explore some parts of a castle.
Walls
OK, we know about this; the business part of a castle. But there is more to this than simply throwing up a wall. Castle walls could be 30 feet high and have a width that can range between 7 to 20 feet thick. The interior of some walls was made of rubble or soft material to help it withstand attack better.
Some of the more fancy castles even had more than one wall around the castle. This way, if an attacker gets through one wall, they have to do it all over again with the next.
Towers
Towers created a safe haven for defends in the walls. Also, they extend the area they could shoot arrows at the enemy.
Windows were usually narrow slits to make it difficult for arrows to be shot into it.
Moat
Talk about a castle moat and, usually, images of a body of water surrounding a castle, ofttimes with alligators, comes to mind. But in general, a moat was any ditch, with or without water, that surrounded a castle.
Again, the idea is to never give an attacking army an even break.
Gatehouse or Castle gate
A castle, like any building, must have a door; there must be a hole in the strong wall for it to go.
Trouble is, this hole makes a weak spot in the castle defense. Defending this part of the castle is the job of the gatehouse. If there is a moat, the gatehouse could have a drawbridge to be pulled up in times of attack.
But that is not all. Later on, some castles had more than one gate in the gatehouse. An attacking army that gets through the first must batter their way through the second.
Ah, but here lies a trap.
In the walls and roof of the space between the gates are holes; holes that were given the grim, but a most descriptive, name of "murder holes."
Castle gate by Jonathan Oldenbuck**
Through these holes, the trapped attackers could be shot at with arrows or have stones or boiling oil poured on them.
Yes, a good castle was a hard nut to crack!
Breaking in
Now, what about those with the unenviable task of trying to go on the attack?
Theirs was not a happy lot. They could still attack the castle with the aid of siege engines, none of which were stealthy or very effective.
Often the only strategy then was to surround the castle and quite literally starve the city into submission. On the other hand, if a city was well stocked with food and had a source of water, even this is not a good idea.
So for a long time, the power of the castle reigned supreme.
A falling star
The upper hand changes when gunpowder and the cannon enter the scene in the 1200s. With a cannon one can shoot heavy cannonballs at a castle, focusing on a single spot until a hole big enough for your soldiers to get in is blasted out.
Not only this, but cannons exposed a weakness in castle design that would have remained undetected for thousands of years. Between the towers, there are triangle-shaped blind-spot regions, regions where the towers on either side cannot defend.
Should an attacker get a cannon into one of your blind spots, they could then blow your castle wall to bits and there wasn't anything you could do about it.
Castles were no longer secure. One by one the castles either were overpowered by cannon fire or were simply abandoned.
But in a sense, castles did not die away, only the classic style did. Now castles were replaced by star forts – forts that fill in the blind spots. One such example is the Fort McHenry of Star Spangled Banner fame.
Star forts were practical in battle, and even beautiful to look at. But they cannot replace the romanticized image growing up around castles.
This image, at least, is something that can never be destroyed by cannon fire.
On the web
History's Mysteries - England's Lost Castles
This documentary from the History channel shows the history of English castles from the early hill forts to their ending.
This web page highlights in more detail the different aspects of a castle.
Castle videos by Shadiversity
The three videos below give a greater discussion on the design and making of castles:
What Was Life Like? Episode 6: Castles
Here two young girls, Felicity and Olivia, learn about life as a lady living in a castle.
Siege Weapons - instruments of Castle Breaching
This video introduces the different types of siege engines used against castles.
*License for Oswestry Hillfort through creative commons 2.0.
**License for Castle gate through creative commons 3.0.
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