All Things Medieval

In the earlier Norman castles, the key building was the Keep or Donjon. It was an all-purpose tower with living quarters and defenses built right in, usually with the chapel on the top floor to permit more windows. But as the castle design came to depend more on rings of walls and ferocious gatehouses, the inner buildings had less need to be so well-guarded.

Harlech Castle’s Inner Ward was not large, and instead of a tower in the center, it had a grassy courtyard. The living quarters and chapel were built into the wall, with windows facing the courtyard. This way, they could get light without sacrificing safety.

Harlech had two halls, a Great Hall and a smaller one. It’s not clear to me where the residential quarters were; they may have been above the smaller hall. I’m guessing this because the Great Hall was for administrative uses like hearing court cases or gathering the local barons for meetings. The second hall may have acted as family quarters and a hub for the sewing that women were always carrying on.

Harlech’s chapel was about as larger as the smaller hall and stood right across from it, one on either side of the barbican (the gatehouse). Next to each hall or chapel was a functional working space connected to food. There was a kitchen, and separately, a bakery. The kitchen had a pantry built against it, while the bakery’s granary was across the courtyard, attached to the smaller hall. Food storage was more important than living quarters, because in a siege, starving people don’t care where they sleep. This castle, of course, had a special water-gate road to get to their private dock for supplies during a siege.

How were upper floors built in stone castles? The builders inserted timber beams into holes or onto ledges, then they built the wooden floor on that base. I don’t think any of the original floors still exist, but we can see the beam supports in the stone walls.

[image source: www.castlewales.com]

In the hall pictured here, stones stuck out as ledges; probably large timbers were laid on them, and then the joists tied to those. You can also see in the picture how the fireplace was angled into the wall. There appears to be a floor below the one we’re looking at, whether it was a cellar or a ground floor. The wall shows no sign of holes or ledges for timber, so I don’t know how they made the floor there.

Sieges were never anything but miserable, but a siege in Harlech’s Inner Ward would be a lot more comfortable than a siege in Rochester Castle’s donjon. At least you could go for a walk outside!

Even in castles made mostly of fieldstone, dressed stone had to be used for anything structural. We can see it in the interior connecting doors that often have arches, but they’re even more key in the places where thick stone walls needed specialized hollow places.

Holes in the outside walls were a vulnerability, so they were made as narrow as possible. At the outside face, dressed stone surrounded a one-inch slit for archers; as time passed, these slits were often improved with cross-slits to allow archers to aim left or right, or with rounded holes at top and bottom. But they were never wider than absolutely necessary. However, on the inside, they had to open up immediately into space large enough for a man to sit. A four-foot wall’s outside stone contained the slit and was angled away from the slit, on the interior side. The next foot of stone had to be made wider still, and so on. Sometimes these stone were cut at angles so that the archer faced into a smooth, narrowing funnel, while in other castles, the stones opened out in steps. There was usually a stone bench for an archer to sit on, and of course the whole thing had to be tall enough to accommodate his bow.

The dark interior hallways needed as much daylight as possible, but that wasn’t much. Castle windows were usually about four inches wide, that is, narrow enough to present a difficult target for attacking archers who weren’t Luke Skywalker. As with archery slits, they had to start opening up on the interior, to take in as many hours of the moving sun as possible. One way to maximize the incoming light while minimizing the target size was to place two four-inch window slits in one window niche. (Image below is an illustration from Castles: Their Construction and History, by Sidney Toy.)

In a few castles, the mason architects planned the stonework that framed the window niche to let light shine down through an angled shaft. Nobody could peek out those windows, but if an arrow came in the slit, it hit the stone shaft and dropped harmlessly to the floor below.

Both of these holes in the wall were simple compared to chimney flues. Once chimney technology came into use, castles could be much better heated, but they required serious planning. Thick walls had to be built up in layers with the flue hole carried at an angle upward. In simple situations, it went up to the roof, but sometimes the fireplaces had to go up several stories, meeting other flues along the way. Both fireplaces and chimney flue were larger than we picture; a medieval fireplace was like a modern breakfast nook, and flues often had iron bars to act as ladder rungs. That’s how chimneys could be cleaned and maintained.

We’ve all seen sketches of long lines of Egyptian slaves pulling huge blocks of stone on rollers, or up ramps, to form the pyramids. For me, and perhaps for many of my readers, that’s the dominant image when I try to picture how anyone built with stone in the past. I know that sometimes, stone was carried by boat across the English Channel or farther, in the Middle Ages, and I automatically picture huge blocks like that. But no, that’s not how it was. Some videos by an American stone mason who visited a few castles helped me get it really straight in my imagination.

Medieval castles used two kinds of stone: field stones of various kinds, picked up locally in the fields, and quarry stone that may have been transported a little distance. The cut/dressed stones brought from a quarry were clearly more expensive than local field stone, so they were used sparingly for specific tasks. Quarry stones were usually limestone, which was soft enough to carve fairly easily. A lot of limestone was shipped from Caen, in Normandy. The field stones, on the other hand, might be difficult to carve, so they probably weren’t cut.

Mike Haduck, the American stone mason, demonstrates how stones might have been sorted by natural shape in this video. Stones with a natural flat face went into one pile, while those with natural right angles went into another. Irregular and irredeemably round stones went into a third. Stones could then be shaped a bit and improved with hammer and chisel, so that the builder had a supply of flat-faced, roughly square blocks and rounded or irregular ones.

Flat-faced stones became facing-stones, the ones we see on the surface of the wall. A castle’s wall might be six feet thick. Each wall of flat-faced stones could only account for maybe 12 inches on each side, leaving four feet to fill in with irregular and round stones. Medieval masons used lime, sand, and water to make mortar. When the outer facing walls were a few blocks high, they started making layers of stones and mortar to fill in the middle section. The walls slowly rose like this, facing walls first, then fill. The facing stones were not usually all the same size, so their rows are only approximate.

Basically, if you wanted your facing stones to be all the same size, you were looking at thousands of quarry-cut stones, and the expense was much higher. If you wanted facing stones to be rectangular but it was okay if the masons used various sizes to level up their rows, it was a bit less expensive. If you didn’t mind using plain fieldstone for the walls, all pebbly and irregular, the cost was lowest.

King Edward I built seven castles in Wales at the same time, so some of them show cost-cutting stonework. At Harlech, you can see that squared-off facing stones cover the barbican towers, but the ordinary castle walls are pebbly fieldstone. It’s local stone, mostly sandstone. Even in the towers, the facing stones aren’t very regular. In a word, it was a cut-costs castle. We see the same fieldstone walls at Conwy Castle, built at the same time. By contrast, the royal castle at Caernarvon had fairly regular facing blocks in its ordinary walls.

Did kings cheap out? You bet. Next, let’s look at how they built holes into stone walls: arrow slits and windows.