All Things Medieval

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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When the Norman, French and German Crusaders began to explore the existing fortifications in the Middle East, they found things they had never seen before. The Byzantine Empire had built forts that the Saracens now held. Although they were not residential castles of the type the Normans were now creating, their construction methods gave the Normans many new ideas once they had made themselves masters of these strongholds. Let’s look at one by way of example: what were Byzantine masons able to build in that period?

The Black Tower is in one of the forts facing the Bosporus Strait. Rumeli Hissar is on the European side, Anadoli Hissar on the Asian side. The Black Tower, part of Rumeli Hissar, was built around 1100. It is completely round but designed with Byzantine complexity. Its key feature was its “oubliette,” a genuine dungeon in which prisoners could be forgotten.

EDIT, 11/2024: I think Rumeli Hissar was not originally Byzantine, but Anadolu Hissar may have been. The following information may actually describe a tower built much later.

The Black Tower’s main door was on the ground floor, unlike the Norman keeps with their second-story doors. The ground floor, like upper floors, had a central round room. It was much smaller than the outer size of the tower, because the tower’s walls were so thick. On the first floor, and on some of the upper floors, the round room had square room extensions, probably curtained, in which private business could be handled. They got a little bit of daylight, by means of a long window shaft through the thick stone. Latrine chutes were built into the walls in a few places, and upper floors had fireplaces with simple chimneys.

One spiral stair connected all of the floors. At the sixth level above ground, there was a “secret” doorway. It led into a deep hole built into the thick wall, which extended down to the next floor level. When a prisoner was pushed into the doorway, he fell thirteen feet to the bottom of a completely dark hole. The oubliette wasn’t the only dark room, it was simply the worst. The Tower always functioned as a prison as well as a fort, so many of the lower rooms had no windows. (Note: History of Fortification from 3000 BC to 1700 AD points out that it’s not always clear what structures like this were for. The oubliette could also have been a reservoir for water storage.)

The Black Tower’s ground floor entrance could be protected from high above, because another set of shafts were built into the wall here. They allowed soldiers on the upper floor to drop boiling oil or rocks onto attackers. Machicolations, as these holes became known, were eventually built into all serious castles in Europe, but these were probably the first such that the Crusaders had ever seen.

Byzantine masonry skill was far beyond anything the Northern Europeans had dreamed of yet. Their builders did not have the skill to plan a tower with so many shafts of different sizes and angles. We can imagine that it wasn’t long until the Crusader kingdoms were hiring Byzantine masons if at all possible. Masons who traveled along to help build walls were able to learn a great deal.

Early castles were designed to withstand short sieges, with the understanding that help from a more powerful overlord would be on its way. They were not designed to handle the type of physical assaults that later castles suffered. In this period, they were all basically designed as motte-and-bailey layouts, but some had leveled off the motte, replaced by a stone keep. The bailey was still an integral part of the defense.

An attack on this kind of castle began with the attempt to break through the outer wall. This wall was far enough from the keep itself that fighting at the wall did not directly threaten life inside the keep. Where the bailey wall came near to the keep, there were usually natural features like cliffs or rivers to make it harder to attack at that place.

Although the main farmland was outside the bailey, the large area (possibly several acres) enclosed by the wall had enough garden and stabling land that people could get by for a period of time. In a siege, many of the farmers outside the bailey would bring their produce in a wagon and camp inside the bailey yard with their families, assuming they had warning of the attack. The bailey housed many horses as well as food-producing farm animals. Doubtless, it also had a number of wooden outbuildings, workshops and cottages, that could be destroyed if sieges broke through.

If it looked like the siege was going to break through the walls, storage and people moved into the cramped tower keep. It was often designed with no ground-floor entrance, which must have made it difficult to haul in large casks or sacks. A wooden stair ran up the side of the keep to a door opening on the second floor. Below this level, there were no windows or doors. When a siege moved inside the bailey walls, the wooden stair was set on fire so that nobody could go in or out.

There were windows at the second-floor level, but they tended to be few, narrow and designed for defense. The one exception might be windows looking into the Great Hall, where most daytime business was carried out. They needed daylight, but at the same time, while glass was still scarce, large windows were also a cold-weather liability.

The top floor had the most windows, since it was unlikely that attackers could make ladders that tall. The roof of a tower keep was always flat and formed a walking surface. Early towers had turrets around the top, so that defenders could hide while shooting through the gap. The corners often had taller towers for better visibility.

More elaborate defensive mechanisms were not yet in use, because the basic idea of defense was to hold out long enough for the regional duke or king to come with a larger army. Just making the house difficult to attack, by having a guarded wall and no ground-floor entrances, was enough to discourage less deliberate attacks. Most castles were never attacked; just being a castle was enough to maintain them as safe seats of regional government.

The rooms inside, especially on the upper levels, were often furnished as nicely as the people could manage. They painted the inside walls, often with murals or flower designs. But most of the rooms were inescapably cold in winter, since fireplaces and chimneys had not yet been invented. The Great Hall was on the second floor, which meant it was supported by timbers. Fire pits for its use had to be built carefully so that the floor didn’t weaken or catch fire. Smoky air was a constant problem.

Latrine chutes were built into the outer walls. Sometimes the latrines hung out over the wall by a little bit, allow waste to drop directly to the ground. One of the dangers of enclosed latrine chutes was that a determined enemy might find a way to climb the wall inside the chute, where guards could not see the attackers until it was too late.

The castle’s aristocratic family probably spent only a few months per year actually living in the castle. They usually had more than one castle and needed to rotate among them to take care of regional government. Manor houses on farms were undeniably more comfortable than these early castles, so they probably included some houses in their annual rotation.