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Castle Architecture, Part 2
The twelfth century seems to be a good time for castles. There were a lot of English people killing each other, and also killing Welsh people. I don’t care so much about the killing, but it seems that a lot of castles were built quickly during various campaigns. Here are some things I’ve learned…
The monumental architecture I studied in school was developed by cultures situated along the Silk Road. These palaces and temples were large compounds of bureaucratic offices, and the subjects of a particular domain were expected to show their fealty by expending resources to travel to the “castle” (by which I mean “seat of government,” which might not necessarily be a fortified structure). This castle was more or less a permanent residence, as it was supported by the resources of a city.
After the Roman Empire collapsed, there wasn’t a market economy in most of Western Europe, which means that castles had to store food procured from a relatively small population of tenant farmers. Because the space and technology for food storage was limited, the longest a domain lord could stay at a castle was about three months. In medieval Europe, then, a lord would have multiple castles across his domain, and he would travel from one to the other every few months.
This limited the size of the lord’s retinue, and this also meant that he directly participated in battles. It was entirely likely that he could be killed, especially after Europeans started getting their hands on crossbows, which allowed an arbalist (the technician who operated the crossbow) to snipe his target from a long distance. These limitations on the power and life of a lord meant that there were a lot of smaller lords, as well as a lot of castles. Some of these castles were little more than waystations built to house traveling lords or to serve as a temporary encampment during a military campaign.
Speaking of military campaigns, it seems that castles weren’t actually all that great for sieges. If the defending army holed up in the castle managed to hold out for an inconvenient length of time, what the attacking army would do was to build a mine under the castle, fill the tunnels with rudimentary explosives (made of tallow instead of gunpowder, which they didn’t have in Europe yet), and then set everything on fire.
If you were building a castle for pure military effectiveness, then, you didn’t want to build it on a mountain or hilltop or other “defensible” landmass. Instead, you would build it next to a river. You could get your supplies shipped directly to your back door, and nobody was going to try to dig tunnels under a river.
What really surprised me was the scale of the earthworks these medieval lords commissioned. Workmen would massively divert the courses of rivers or create landfill in order to give the castle a “water defense,” and they could complete these projects in less than six months. Workmen were paid daily rates in cash, but they were also supervised by soldiers so that they didn’t get fed up with the dangerous working conditions and run off. These large-scale earthworks sound really cool, but also: guillotine.
Anyway, as a result of all the military conflicts in the twelfth century, people started surrounding castles with natural or artificial moats, and being able to ship building materials directly to the construction site meant that it was possible to build larger castles. By the end of the thirteenth century, constructing a castle was such a massive undertaking that people had to start keeping records. I’m looking forward to digging into materials that summarize these records, because maybe I’ll finally get some answers about the more practical and material aspects of how castles were built.
The monumental architecture I studied in school was developed by cultures situated along the Silk Road. These palaces and temples were large compounds of bureaucratic offices, and the subjects of a particular domain were expected to show their fealty by expending resources to travel to the “castle” (by which I mean “seat of government,” which might not necessarily be a fortified structure). This castle was more or less a permanent residence, as it was supported by the resources of a city.
After the Roman Empire collapsed, there wasn’t a market economy in most of Western Europe, which means that castles had to store food procured from a relatively small population of tenant farmers. Because the space and technology for food storage was limited, the longest a domain lord could stay at a castle was about three months. In medieval Europe, then, a lord would have multiple castles across his domain, and he would travel from one to the other every few months.
This limited the size of the lord’s retinue, and this also meant that he directly participated in battles. It was entirely likely that he could be killed, especially after Europeans started getting their hands on crossbows, which allowed an arbalist (the technician who operated the crossbow) to snipe his target from a long distance. These limitations on the power and life of a lord meant that there were a lot of smaller lords, as well as a lot of castles. Some of these castles were little more than waystations built to house traveling lords or to serve as a temporary encampment during a military campaign.
Speaking of military campaigns, it seems that castles weren’t actually all that great for sieges. If the defending army holed up in the castle managed to hold out for an inconvenient length of time, what the attacking army would do was to build a mine under the castle, fill the tunnels with rudimentary explosives (made of tallow instead of gunpowder, which they didn’t have in Europe yet), and then set everything on fire.
If you were building a castle for pure military effectiveness, then, you didn’t want to build it on a mountain or hilltop or other “defensible” landmass. Instead, you would build it next to a river. You could get your supplies shipped directly to your back door, and nobody was going to try to dig tunnels under a river.
What really surprised me was the scale of the earthworks these medieval lords commissioned. Workmen would massively divert the courses of rivers or create landfill in order to give the castle a “water defense,” and they could complete these projects in less than six months. Workmen were paid daily rates in cash, but they were also supervised by soldiers so that they didn’t get fed up with the dangerous working conditions and run off. These large-scale earthworks sound really cool, but also: guillotine.
Anyway, as a result of all the military conflicts in the twelfth century, people started surrounding castles with natural or artificial moats, and being able to ship building materials directly to the construction site meant that it was possible to build larger castles. By the end of the thirteenth century, constructing a castle was such a massive undertaking that people had to start keeping records. I’m looking forward to digging into materials that summarize these records, because maybe I’ll finally get some answers about the more practical and material aspects of how castles were built.
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I wonder if Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which is a really cornerstone text about the 14th century, might have some of what you're looking for. I do own that book but haven't read it yet because even in paperback that thing is a straight-up bludgeoning weapon.
(Not about castles, but deeply fascinating: Joelle Rollo-Koster's Avignon and its Papacy, about how the dual-pope situation/problem really centralized the administrative state of the Catholic Church, building on some of the things that Henry II of England started.)
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This is exactly what I need for another project. I downloaded PDFs of the other sources, but this book I am going to order in paper. Seriously, thank you!
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Yes, exactly!!
Some people who work on straight-up nonfiction history are extremely engaging and compelling writers, but a lot of people aren't. Which is fine, of course! Still, as I gradually tear myself away from the cult of academia, I've been trying to keep in mind that research (and nonfiction reading in general) should be a treat, not a chore.
It took me a while to figure this out, and I was so happy once I did.
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