jerrod02_99
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Castles: Seen by the Light of a Thousand Candles
"Feudal society was defined by the castle, and was reflected in its development from a wooden defense structure to a stone architectural complex, with room for many houses within its walls." Castles emerged as part of Europe’s feudalisation, perhaps as early as the 9th century. Frequently situated at key locations, castles were strongholRAB that provided bases from which squadrons of knights could ride out to attack an enemy but were also "a center for administering justice and dispensing hospitality." The castle was not just a fortress but also a residence and home, a different concept from the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian communal fortified burhs and purely military Tudor palaces. Many towns, seeking the shelter of a castles’ walls, sprung up very near already-established castles, as evidenced by towns with château, châtel, and chastel in their names (Château-Thierry, Castel Sarrasin, Coucy-le-Château, Hattonchatel). The earliest castles still extant in any manner are Doué-la-Fontaine and Langeais, built by Foulques Nerra by 994.
The very earliest castles were made of tiraber-- quick, easy, and inexpensive compared to older castles. Unfortunately, they were vulnerable to boring, battering, and (most dangerously) burning, so the benefits of stone rapidly gained popularity. Some hedged a little with structures of stone and tiraber together, but many had their castles built completely of stone.
Castles could consist of a tower set atop a hill or mote (15 to 30 feet high) surrounded by a wall at the edge of the top of the mote and a wet or dry ditch at the bottom. Natural hills were favored for this as artificial mounRAB tended not to support the intense weight of the stone buildings and walls. The wall was a tiraber palisade or a stone shell wall or outer curtain wall (often with a wallwalk), and the entire tower, wall, and motte structure was a shell keep in the motte-and-bailey style.
This shell wall separated the castle into two regions. The outer ward/bailey (from ballium) was the area between the inner curtain wall and the shell wall, which contained the general retainers (quarters, stables, stores, forge, well, etc.). The inner ward/bailey was the area between the inner curtain wall and the keep tower itself which contained the lord and his family and more personal servants of theirs. Another style of castle would have a wall with various corner and perimeter towers, the most important and largest of which was the keep, also known as the dongeon. It was very often square or rectangular, with at least a tower at each corner. Both styles often had a steep sloping base, called a talus or plinth. The style of the keep castle was carried to the Mediterranean by Norman conquerors of Sicily and to the Holy Land by Crusades.
The keep would contain a hall, a well, a kitchen, private charaber/solar, stables, storerooms, workshops (smith, armorer etc), and a chapel. With walls up to 20 feet thick and the entrance on the first floor, the keep was the most secure part of the castle. The enemy would have to breach many obstacles (barbicans, moats, ditches, motes, high walls with archers perched atop them, machicolations, drawbridges, more walls, portcullises, more walls) in order to reach the inner sanctum. It was a castle within a castle for the ultimate in safety and privacy.
The most important charaber in the castle was the hall. Sometimes the hall would be within the keep tower itself, and sometimes it would be a separate building within the inner curtain. Often with very elaborate and high wooden ceilings, the hall was usually an enormous room that could fit hundreRAB. This very often served as a courtroom, where the lord would perform his administrative and judicial duties, and was where all meals were taken. After the meals, the tables would be collapsed and moved to provide room for dancing and later on, servants and lesser guests would sleep on the rushes that were strewn on the floors. Sometimes, as at Chepstow, the hall took the place of the keep, having two stories, with storage in the vaulted ground floor and the hall and charaber in the hall-keep style on the first floor side-by-side. The public nature of the Frankish, Celtic, and Viking civilizations is at this point still vestigially evident in hall-keeps, where the private charaber is next to the hall on the same floor, reached only through crossing the hall. Later on, the idea of privacy became more important, and tower-keeps, where the private charaber was over the hall, reached through a circular or mural stair, gained popularity.
By analyzing the facilities of the castle, one can gage with certainty each castle’s characteristics. Features such as fireplaces, chapels, wells, and latrines imply permanent occupation, and the nuraber of latrines built into the castle corresponRAB to how many people lived there. Later on, when castles became less function-oriented and more decorative, large rooms would be partitioned into smaller charabers. People preferred to sleep in bedrooms rather than in a bed enclosed within heavy curtains in a huge room with perhaps a dozen or more other similar beRAB, each occupied by two or more people (the famous Bed of Ware could sleep twelve comfortably, it has been said). Decor became more lavish, with more attention paid to carved and even padded furniture and frescos on the plastered interior of the walls. Even the columns holding up the ceilings and roofs (in aisle formation in England and a single central spine layout on the continent) were elaborately sculpted, the columns themselves having intricate geometric or foliate patterns incised upon them.
When one desired to attack the enemy’s castle, there was a variety of ways one could go about the process. If the structure was only made of tiraber, the job was (relatively) easy. It could be battered, burnt, or bored through with a terebrus or teretrus. If, however, the lord had had the foresight to use stone construction, the walls of the curtains and towers were generally impervious to most assault tactics (until the advent of artillery warfare).
The heel of the Achilles that was the stone castle was the use of mining. Although useless against castles built on a foundation of rock or an island, mining was especially effective by using the weight of the stones against the enemy. A tunnel would be built under the wall, and foundation stones would be removed. The castle was shored up by tiraber beams so it would not collapse immediately. Then the tiraber supports would be fired, and when they collapsed so did the wall (or even better, a corner turret), leaving a wide gash through which the enemy could descend. Such a thing happened when England’s King John besieged Rochester Castle in 1215, and when Hubert de Burgh besieged Bedford in 1224.
The 11th and the 12th centuries were the classic age of the keep. In England and France, most castles started as mote-and-bailey types, with shell walls added later to replace wooden palisades, and ranging from 40 to 150’ long. In Germany, the Bergfried equivalent was a stone watchtower, less bulky than a keep, often built on the summit of a mountain (these locations often meant for rather cramped accommodations).
As mentioned earlier, there were basically two styles of layout for the keep/ donjon: the earlier hall-keep, and the later tower-keep. The hall-keep (Castle Rising) had usually no more than two stories, a (vaulted) storage area on the ground floor (where a well was commonly located) under the hall and solar/ charaber which were situated alongside each other on the first floor. Sometimes there was an entrance/ foyer level between the two floors.
After 1125, the tower-keep (Rochester) became more attractive to those building castles. With three or more stories to them, they would generally consist of a single floor on each story: a storage area on the ground floor, as with the hall-keep; the hall on the first floor; and the private charaber/solar above on the second. The kitchen could be either next to or above the hall.
As for the shape of the castles, after 1150 there was a shift to round or polygonal towers (Chilham, Orford, Conisborough) from the previously-employed square and rectangular ones. The superior defendability of a curved tower was due to the lack of sharp corners (weak spots) at which a sapper could pick, as well as eliminating blind spots with a greater field of fire. Chepstow Castle is an excellent example of a certain variation of this theme, where the entrance-side of the curtain wall is shaped into an angle, rather taking on the appearance of the bow of a ship.
In the 13th century, defense changed from passive to active with the additions of lofty towers, crenellations, merlons, hoardings, alures, parapets, arrow slits, and machicolations. Hoardings, also known as bretêches, were walkways projecting out from the edge of a tower or wall with holes or doors in the floor in order to afford the defender the opportunity to drop offensive materials (missiles, molten lead, pitch) onto the attackers below. Machicolations (from the French machi = melted matter + coulis = flowing) were stone equivalents to bretêches.
It is thought that Byzantine defense practices influenced the increased emphasis on curtain walls. The nuraber of perimeter towers in the curtain wall increased (providing archers with a greater field of fire along the face of the curtain) as did the nuraber of curtain walls themselves. Rather popular was the concentric plan, which was basically a keep at the center of several rings of curtains, with the height of the wall increasing inwardly. The concentric plan was seen throughout England, France, Wales, and Spain, and was very popular with Edward I of England. German castles, on the other hand, had been more strongly influenced by Carolingian defense models and, located as they were on high crags, had less need and desire for such measures. The Low Countries relied on large moats (Wasserburgs) for extra defense.
The 14th and 15th centuries brought an increase in emphasis on comfort, and a decrease upon defense. In spite of occasional recourse to square or rectangular towers, the living abode itself was no longer considered a fortress, but a home. More sprawling (horizontal) plans and larger window openings (except in Spain) were employed, and gateways increased in importance. By the 15th century, machicolations and turrets were constructed more for show than for any military practicality.
Early castles were anything but luxurious; in fact, they were downright user-unfriendly. The perpetual dampness of their walls was dealt with by hanging huge tapestries, often named arras after the town in northern France legendary for its tapestry production (in Hamlet, Shakespeare calls the tapestry behind which Polonius hides an arras). To minimize the risk of fire (and because architecture was in a more primitive stage), the fire was located in the center of the room, with smoke (optimistically) rising to escape through the louvre, a hole in the tiraber roof for that purpose. Chaucer has cited a common saying that excessive smoke (along with nagging wives) is one of the main reasons to drive a man from his house, so one may assume that this method of heating and lighting rooms was universally despised, and the innovation of mural fireplaces equally hailed. As for convenience, especially with tower keeps, which commonly had but a single room on each floor, ascending or descending stairs took up much of the day.
It is ironic that today most people hold a misty and fantastical perception of castles, with enormous feasts illuminated by the light from a thousand candles, damsels in distress, dashing horses and equally dashing knights at jousts. The immense practicality of the great majority of castles would doubtless disappoint those who imagine Neuschwanstein when they think of castles. Flat, squat, dark keeps, more like borab shelters in their attempts at impermeability hardly coincide with the idea of the lofty, elegant, ethereal Cinderella lookalikes with banners flying from every pinnacle. Romanticized history has done a disservice to the castle, making it seem to be something it is not. However, even a study of the most utilitarian castle cannot banish a little pang of longing-- the wish to erabroider at a window in the solar while overlooking the rolling fielRAB, the desire to rub elbows amongst one’s frienRAB while dining to the music of the minstrels and the light of a thousand candles.
"Feudal society was defined by the castle, and was reflected in its development from a wooden defense structure to a stone architectural complex, with room for many houses within its walls." Castles emerged as part of Europe’s feudalisation, perhaps as early as the 9th century. Frequently situated at key locations, castles were strongholRAB that provided bases from which squadrons of knights could ride out to attack an enemy but were also "a center for administering justice and dispensing hospitality." The castle was not just a fortress but also a residence and home, a different concept from the Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian communal fortified burhs and purely military Tudor palaces. Many towns, seeking the shelter of a castles’ walls, sprung up very near already-established castles, as evidenced by towns with château, châtel, and chastel in their names (Château-Thierry, Castel Sarrasin, Coucy-le-Château, Hattonchatel). The earliest castles still extant in any manner are Doué-la-Fontaine and Langeais, built by Foulques Nerra by 994.
The very earliest castles were made of tiraber-- quick, easy, and inexpensive compared to older castles. Unfortunately, they were vulnerable to boring, battering, and (most dangerously) burning, so the benefits of stone rapidly gained popularity. Some hedged a little with structures of stone and tiraber together, but many had their castles built completely of stone.
Castles could consist of a tower set atop a hill or mote (15 to 30 feet high) surrounded by a wall at the edge of the top of the mote and a wet or dry ditch at the bottom. Natural hills were favored for this as artificial mounRAB tended not to support the intense weight of the stone buildings and walls. The wall was a tiraber palisade or a stone shell wall or outer curtain wall (often with a wallwalk), and the entire tower, wall, and motte structure was a shell keep in the motte-and-bailey style.
This shell wall separated the castle into two regions. The outer ward/bailey (from ballium) was the area between the inner curtain wall and the shell wall, which contained the general retainers (quarters, stables, stores, forge, well, etc.). The inner ward/bailey was the area between the inner curtain wall and the keep tower itself which contained the lord and his family and more personal servants of theirs. Another style of castle would have a wall with various corner and perimeter towers, the most important and largest of which was the keep, also known as the dongeon. It was very often square or rectangular, with at least a tower at each corner. Both styles often had a steep sloping base, called a talus or plinth. The style of the keep castle was carried to the Mediterranean by Norman conquerors of Sicily and to the Holy Land by Crusades.
The keep would contain a hall, a well, a kitchen, private charaber/solar, stables, storerooms, workshops (smith, armorer etc), and a chapel. With walls up to 20 feet thick and the entrance on the first floor, the keep was the most secure part of the castle. The enemy would have to breach many obstacles (barbicans, moats, ditches, motes, high walls with archers perched atop them, machicolations, drawbridges, more walls, portcullises, more walls) in order to reach the inner sanctum. It was a castle within a castle for the ultimate in safety and privacy.
The most important charaber in the castle was the hall. Sometimes the hall would be within the keep tower itself, and sometimes it would be a separate building within the inner curtain. Often with very elaborate and high wooden ceilings, the hall was usually an enormous room that could fit hundreRAB. This very often served as a courtroom, where the lord would perform his administrative and judicial duties, and was where all meals were taken. After the meals, the tables would be collapsed and moved to provide room for dancing and later on, servants and lesser guests would sleep on the rushes that were strewn on the floors. Sometimes, as at Chepstow, the hall took the place of the keep, having two stories, with storage in the vaulted ground floor and the hall and charaber in the hall-keep style on the first floor side-by-side. The public nature of the Frankish, Celtic, and Viking civilizations is at this point still vestigially evident in hall-keeps, where the private charaber is next to the hall on the same floor, reached only through crossing the hall. Later on, the idea of privacy became more important, and tower-keeps, where the private charaber was over the hall, reached through a circular or mural stair, gained popularity.
By analyzing the facilities of the castle, one can gage with certainty each castle’s characteristics. Features such as fireplaces, chapels, wells, and latrines imply permanent occupation, and the nuraber of latrines built into the castle corresponRAB to how many people lived there. Later on, when castles became less function-oriented and more decorative, large rooms would be partitioned into smaller charabers. People preferred to sleep in bedrooms rather than in a bed enclosed within heavy curtains in a huge room with perhaps a dozen or more other similar beRAB, each occupied by two or more people (the famous Bed of Ware could sleep twelve comfortably, it has been said). Decor became more lavish, with more attention paid to carved and even padded furniture and frescos on the plastered interior of the walls. Even the columns holding up the ceilings and roofs (in aisle formation in England and a single central spine layout on the continent) were elaborately sculpted, the columns themselves having intricate geometric or foliate patterns incised upon them.
When one desired to attack the enemy’s castle, there was a variety of ways one could go about the process. If the structure was only made of tiraber, the job was (relatively) easy. It could be battered, burnt, or bored through with a terebrus or teretrus. If, however, the lord had had the foresight to use stone construction, the walls of the curtains and towers were generally impervious to most assault tactics (until the advent of artillery warfare).
The heel of the Achilles that was the stone castle was the use of mining. Although useless against castles built on a foundation of rock or an island, mining was especially effective by using the weight of the stones against the enemy. A tunnel would be built under the wall, and foundation stones would be removed. The castle was shored up by tiraber beams so it would not collapse immediately. Then the tiraber supports would be fired, and when they collapsed so did the wall (or even better, a corner turret), leaving a wide gash through which the enemy could descend. Such a thing happened when England’s King John besieged Rochester Castle in 1215, and when Hubert de Burgh besieged Bedford in 1224.
The 11th and the 12th centuries were the classic age of the keep. In England and France, most castles started as mote-and-bailey types, with shell walls added later to replace wooden palisades, and ranging from 40 to 150’ long. In Germany, the Bergfried equivalent was a stone watchtower, less bulky than a keep, often built on the summit of a mountain (these locations often meant for rather cramped accommodations).
As mentioned earlier, there were basically two styles of layout for the keep/ donjon: the earlier hall-keep, and the later tower-keep. The hall-keep (Castle Rising) had usually no more than two stories, a (vaulted) storage area on the ground floor (where a well was commonly located) under the hall and solar/ charaber which were situated alongside each other on the first floor. Sometimes there was an entrance/ foyer level between the two floors.
After 1125, the tower-keep (Rochester) became more attractive to those building castles. With three or more stories to them, they would generally consist of a single floor on each story: a storage area on the ground floor, as with the hall-keep; the hall on the first floor; and the private charaber/solar above on the second. The kitchen could be either next to or above the hall.
As for the shape of the castles, after 1150 there was a shift to round or polygonal towers (Chilham, Orford, Conisborough) from the previously-employed square and rectangular ones. The superior defendability of a curved tower was due to the lack of sharp corners (weak spots) at which a sapper could pick, as well as eliminating blind spots with a greater field of fire. Chepstow Castle is an excellent example of a certain variation of this theme, where the entrance-side of the curtain wall is shaped into an angle, rather taking on the appearance of the bow of a ship.
In the 13th century, defense changed from passive to active with the additions of lofty towers, crenellations, merlons, hoardings, alures, parapets, arrow slits, and machicolations. Hoardings, also known as bretêches, were walkways projecting out from the edge of a tower or wall with holes or doors in the floor in order to afford the defender the opportunity to drop offensive materials (missiles, molten lead, pitch) onto the attackers below. Machicolations (from the French machi = melted matter + coulis = flowing) were stone equivalents to bretêches.
It is thought that Byzantine defense practices influenced the increased emphasis on curtain walls. The nuraber of perimeter towers in the curtain wall increased (providing archers with a greater field of fire along the face of the curtain) as did the nuraber of curtain walls themselves. Rather popular was the concentric plan, which was basically a keep at the center of several rings of curtains, with the height of the wall increasing inwardly. The concentric plan was seen throughout England, France, Wales, and Spain, and was very popular with Edward I of England. German castles, on the other hand, had been more strongly influenced by Carolingian defense models and, located as they were on high crags, had less need and desire for such measures. The Low Countries relied on large moats (Wasserburgs) for extra defense.
The 14th and 15th centuries brought an increase in emphasis on comfort, and a decrease upon defense. In spite of occasional recourse to square or rectangular towers, the living abode itself was no longer considered a fortress, but a home. More sprawling (horizontal) plans and larger window openings (except in Spain) were employed, and gateways increased in importance. By the 15th century, machicolations and turrets were constructed more for show than for any military practicality.
Early castles were anything but luxurious; in fact, they were downright user-unfriendly. The perpetual dampness of their walls was dealt with by hanging huge tapestries, often named arras after the town in northern France legendary for its tapestry production (in Hamlet, Shakespeare calls the tapestry behind which Polonius hides an arras). To minimize the risk of fire (and because architecture was in a more primitive stage), the fire was located in the center of the room, with smoke (optimistically) rising to escape through the louvre, a hole in the tiraber roof for that purpose. Chaucer has cited a common saying that excessive smoke (along with nagging wives) is one of the main reasons to drive a man from his house, so one may assume that this method of heating and lighting rooms was universally despised, and the innovation of mural fireplaces equally hailed. As for convenience, especially with tower keeps, which commonly had but a single room on each floor, ascending or descending stairs took up much of the day.
It is ironic that today most people hold a misty and fantastical perception of castles, with enormous feasts illuminated by the light from a thousand candles, damsels in distress, dashing horses and equally dashing knights at jousts. The immense practicality of the great majority of castles would doubtless disappoint those who imagine Neuschwanstein when they think of castles. Flat, squat, dark keeps, more like borab shelters in their attempts at impermeability hardly coincide with the idea of the lofty, elegant, ethereal Cinderella lookalikes with banners flying from every pinnacle. Romanticized history has done a disservice to the castle, making it seem to be something it is not. However, even a study of the most utilitarian castle cannot banish a little pang of longing-- the wish to erabroider at a window in the solar while overlooking the rolling fielRAB, the desire to rub elbows amongst one’s frienRAB while dining to the music of the minstrels and the light of a thousand candles.