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.

As the European castle evolved from the motte-and-bailey structure, to the bailey-and-keep, to the fully developed castle of the later Middle Ages, certain structure took on a life of their own. Chief among them, the gatehouse.

By the late 1200s, the gatehouse was its own small castle. It was always built into the wall that was coming to be known as the “ward,” the guarding wall. Whether the largest gatehouse was built into the inner or outer wall depended on the site. Natural defenses like water and cliffs drove the design. Harlech Castle’s huge gatehouse was just inside a much smaller gate in the Outer Ward, but itself guarded the Inner Ward. It was as large as the square keeps of the previous century.

The gatehouse must do several things. First, it must lift defenders up high enough to see out pretty far and be well above attackers, because high ground is always an advantage in a fight. If you are at a higher level, gravity is on your side. So gatehouses always had a second story with battlements and connecting walks, and sometimes they had three stories.

The gatehouse then made the entrance narrow and surrounded by strength. Towers at a gatehouse were always round because that was the strongest shape (and very good for winding stairs). A pair of towers, connected by upper passages, were called the barbican. The barbican might project out into the middle or outer bailey twenty or thirty feet. Harlech Castle’s barbican featured smaller round towers jutting out from the larger ones, allowing a few defenders to sit even more forward, looming right over the path upward to the door. These smaller towers did not reach to the ground; they were supported by arches. This design is called a corbel.

The door itself, then, had strong guards. Obviously, it was made of thick wood with very strong hinges, and all reinforced with beams and bolts. It was set into the notch between the towers, while slits and holes around and above it permitted defenders to kill anyone attempting to stand near and assault the door. Doors usually had gaps in the road, perhaps over a water moat, or perhaps just allowing attackers to fall down into pits; these were covered by bridges and walkways in times of peace. Doors usually also had their own doors: a portcullis, the iron grate that only fell into place in times of war. When the door was fully guarded, it was nearly impossible to get through. Anyone who breached it suffered many deaths for each step.

Once inside the door, an ideal gatehouse did not yet open into the Inner Ward. Some gatehouses forced those entering to make a right-angle turn, or perhaps two. This hallway was also overshadowed by defensive positions, so that after a door was breached, there were more chances to kill attackers. Harlech Castle didn’t have a turn built in, but the door was only halfway through the gatehouse.

A good gatehouse needed two smaller doors that were placed where attackers might not see them easily. The postern gate allowed a quick escape exit, while a sally port was designed to let a counter-attacking party make a surprise attack. Here, geography was everything because gatehouses usually stood on high ground, perhaps with cliffs on some sides. Harlech’s special exit was a walled road that led very near the water, where a gate led to a pier.

When you look at these early 12th century square (or rounded-off) keeps with modern eyes, you find it hard to believe that it could serve as a family’s home. Most of the space was used for storage, since the keep was designed as a siege refuge. And the rest of the space was devoted to two big rooms: the hall and the chapel. Where did they live?

The answer lies back in Beowulf’s time, when a typical Germanic tribal settlement consisted of one large (barn-like) wooden hall and a number of cottages around it. In order to survive, a tribe needed a central ruler and his council, the ones who would make high-stakes fight/flight decisions. They had to be men, since that’s who hefted the spears, although women were a significant part of hall defense, in addition to doing all of the support work and bearing the next generation. Germanic communities never treated women in a demeaning way; for their time, they were noted for feminism. But the king and his council, and his closest band of warriors, needed to live and think as a family.

So the king was expected to maintain a hall large enough to be his own family’s home and also meeting space and communal living for as many men as possible. In peacetime, many of them split their time between the hall and their family’s cottage. When they stayed over in the hall, they didn’t expect a guest room. The king and his wife had a private chamber, usually right behind his chair (no need to call it a throne, it was the only chair in the room). Their children slept with them or in small anterooms with servants.

Everyone else slept in the hall, wherever they wanted to bunk down. In Beowulf, there’s a line where the servants open chests along the walls and get out pillows and blankets. The benches and cleaner sections of floor became beds for the resident guard troop (and in that case, the visiting Geats).

That had been the standard for centuries, so it was natural for them to design castles around one large hall. The baron still had a private chamber, still usually right behind his official chair, sometimes merely curtained off, sometimes with a separate room. In larger keeps, there were big upper rooms where we should imagine a large number of people sleeping on the floor or on straw mats. But in smaller, simpler designs, the knights who stayed over at the keep just slept in the hall. They were usually unmarried, so had no family home. Servants lived outside in the village or slept in the kitchen or storage rooms. Nobody expected privacy, and nobody got it. (If privacy mattered oh so much to someone of this time, the monastic life was always an option.)

It also felt perfectly natural to castle-designers to take some of that precious floor space and devote it to a chapel. All other group meetings, from holiday drama to court proceedings, took place in the hall. In some ways, the barrier between civilized men and barbarians was to devote some space to purely spiritual times. Life was hand-to-mouth otherwise, and it was often violent. The difference between men and animals was that men cared enough about their invisible souls to set aside a symbolic space where nothing else could be done, only meditation, song and rituals for the soul.

Chapels were smaller than halls, but they were sometimes more grandly decorated. Both rooms were the beneficiaries of each new improvement in architectural methods: they were the first to get vaulted ceilings, glass windows and chimneys.

The Crusades sponsored a constant flow of people between northern Europe and the Middle East. By 1150, the keeps and towers built in Europe were influenced by what knights and masons had seen in the Levant.

Byzantine towers, like the Black Tower of the Bosporus, were generally round. Byzantium had been involved in serious imperial wars for many centuries, and they knew the importance of a round wall. Round towers don’t provide corners to hide behind; they have good visibility from the top to everywhere. Square corners, by contrast, not only provide some defensive wall, but also create vulnerable places where sappers can dig under the corner and collapse it with fire. Even before gunpowder gave Europe real explosives, they were good at weakening stone buildings with extremely hot fires fueled by extra fat. (At least one castle was sapped with freshly-killed pigs placed into the tunnel next to the wood.) Round towers presented no obvious places to dig.

But round towers were much harder to plan as family residences. Byzantium built them only as forts and prisons; European lords intended to live there with wives and children. Square rooms are much easier to build, decorate and live in. You can put square rooms into a round tower, but it’s not easy, and it weakens the wall.

The Tour César in Provins, northern France, is a good example of how Europeans started to modify square keeps. It’s built on an octagonal base, so it wasn’t quite round, but neither was it presenting square corners. Where corners would have been, the flat octagonal walls had round towers. Round corner towers were often added to square buildings this way, since round towers were easy to design, always good for winding staircases.

They still built entrances well off the ground. Tour César now has a ground entrance, but in its day, it was reached 20 feet up by a wooden drawbridge. Additionally, it was built on a mound like earlier towers. Inside, it had two stories, both devoted to large vaulted halls. The upper one held dinners and feasts and was lit with a skylight, the lower was used for storage and other business. A side passage led to a nearby stair that ran down to a well. The whole keep was surrounded by a stone wall, called the curtain.

Other mid-12th century keeps were rounded off on all four corners so that all the outer walls were round, but inside the plan was still basically a square. When defense mattered more than livability, increasingly they went over to round towers. By 1200, most new towers were basically round.

During this time, the outer wall, the bailey, hadn’t changed much. A tower keep might have an inner wall, the curtain. This was the beginning of making it all more complicated. It was in the following centuries that things really got going.

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