Castle Architecture, Part 1

[rynling]

I have been doing my best to read books about castles, but it's difficult. Every single one of these books is about the Great Deeds of Great Men. If you think White Woman Podcasters have a bizarre obsession with mass murderers, I have some bad news for you about White Man Authors. Anyway, scattered in bits and pieces throughout the various celebrations of Glorious Mass Murder, I have managed to find actual information about castles. It's not a lot, but like I said, I am doing my best. Here goes:

Prior to the eleventh century, castles in Western Europe were large-scale earthworks that could be constructed in about seven to ten days. In England at least, these earthworks were called "motte and bailey" castles. What the builders would do is dig a circular ditch and pile all of the loose dirt into a hill at one edge of the inner circle. This artificial hill is the "motte." You would then surround the circle inside the ditch with a palisade fence, and this inner courtyard is the "bailey."

Apparently the remains of these sorts of earthworks are just kind of hanging out all over Europe, which is why authors don't really explain what they are. I guess they assume the reader is used to seeing them on the way to Tesco or Aldi or whatever. I, a stupid American, was very confused until I finally gave up and googled it.

I guess I should also explain that a "palisade" is a high fence made of tall, round wooden stakes with the top ends carved into points. Apparently palisade fences are quick and easy to construct, since you basically just use tree trunks with minimal processing.

Anyway, on top of the motte is the castle "keep," which is a small (generally two-story) wooden tower. While the barracks and stables were low buildings surrounding the central courtyard of the bailey, the keep is where the living quarters of the military commanders were located.

Starting around the time of the Norman conquest in the middle of the eleventh century, castle keeps began to be built with stone, and they grew from two stories to about three and a half stories. The first floor was the entryway. The top floor, or "solar," was where the residences were. The second floor was the lord's audience chamber. This audience chamber was the largest space in the keep, and it would generally have an upper gallery half-floor supported by the outer wall.

The keep was still little more than a defensive tower, so the "great hall" would be a separate building in the bailey. Because the great hall was where everyone ate, it needed to be at ground level so that it was close to the kitchens, the wells, etc.

There were private toilets called "garderobes" inside the castle keep, which is one of the reasons why the keep needed to be built at the edge of the bailey instead of at its center. Regardless, it wasn't common practice to eat or bathe in the keep, which didn't have a kitchen or a well.

And this is almost all of the concrete information I managed to get from about three hundred pages of reading over the past few days. I guess it's so basic that it's not considered important? But I am learning things, slowly.

Comments

[lassarina]

Ah, castles. One of the things that's also rarely mentioned because somehow you Just Know is that the bailey (and keep) are meant to hold the village in the event of an attack; bring all the animals and people inside and wait for the enemy to get bored and leave.

[rynling]

Oddly enough, I can now tell you a whole lot of about sieges in the 1100s and 1200s, but I still have a lot of basic questions about castles that have gone unanswered. For example, once people started making castles out of stone, who were the craftsmen who built these castles? Where did they get the technology, and what tools did they use? How did they cut and bind the stone? Where did the raw materials come from, and how were they transported? How big were the rooms? How were the ceilings supported? How were the staircases supported? What did the craftsmen do when they weren't building castles? Was there any overlap between castle architecture and religious architecture? Etc etc etc etc.

I have been googling and searching libraries and combing JSTOR, but Western scholars truly seem to be obsessed with The Exploits Of Great Men in a way that isn't useful or interesting to me. This is especially frustrating given that English-language scholarship on East Asian monumental architecture is more than happy to talk about practical and material concerns. Could it be that Western scholars just, like, don't know the answers to these questions? Perhaps because this information hasn't been preserved in the way that it's been in East Asia, where living architects and artisans still use the same ancient technologies to maintain still-extant structures?

But there are still inhabited castles in Europe, so that can't be the case... right?

Anyway, I don't want to put you on the spot if you don't have anything on hand, but I'd be thrilled if you could direct me to any useful resources you might know about. Maybe something like Krista Ball's What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank, but for architecture, if such a thing exists.

[lassarina]

belatedly, because I bookmarked this to come back to later and then happened to notice something in my chaos of "things for writing" - there is a dictionary of French architecture from 11c to 16c!

https://archive.org/details/dictionnairerais09violuoft/page/n5/mode/2up

there's also, according to the Twitter thread where I found this originally, an edition in English of Castles and Warfare in the Middle Ages by Viollet -le-Duc ISBN 9780486440200

And a German book about Neogothic architecture: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ungewitter1896/0028

(the thread was about making shit for D&D games, which is a noble pursuit that I endorse, lol.)