Castle Diary

by Richard Platt

  December 25th, Christmas Day

  There was dancing and jollity in the Chapel after Mass this day, which again made Chaplain mutter about pagans, but he would not (or could not) stop it. High and low danced together and those who came to wish us well this day joined in the revelry, too. Even Chaplain tapped his foot when he forgot he should not. Then all the castle folk gathered in the Hall — from the Constable to the lowliest stable-lad. To each my aunt made a gift, and all thanked her kindly. I received an inkwell with a silver lid, and a tiny knife to cut goose quills into pens.

  December 26th, Saint Stephen’s Day

  Dinner in the Hall today was a grand feast in honor of the saint. To celebrate Saint Stephen they do many things here of which we know nothing at home. Today, I learned, is a day for rewarding the castle horses. They are given a special feed and do no work at all, though not even Chaplain could explain why this was. Then the other pages and I went out to “hunt the wren,” which is yet another old custom that is followed here. But though we took crumbs of bread and spent much time hiding in bushes, we could not capture so much as a feather to show for our pains. Had a grand snow battle, though, at which Mark and I were clearly the victors!

  December 27th, Thursday

  This day my father arrived, leading a second horse for me. I had been looking out for him from high up in the watchtower, and as he neared I hastened out to greet him.

  My father says we shall leave for home early on the morrow, so I spent what was left of the day in making my farewells to my cousins and the many other friends that I have made here. Mark and I looked for David in the village, but though the fire in his house was still warm, we found him not, so Mark will tell him I am gone.

  December 28th, Friday

  Father woke me before dawn. We dressed and ate so quickly I scarce had time to hug my aunt and uncle but we were away. It is a long ride to Saltington, and my father desired to use every moment of daylight for travel, though the moon would light our way should we not reach home by nightfall.

  When we had gone some way off, I heard the drumming of hoofs behind us. It was Simon hastening after us. “Ho, Toby!” he hailed, and when we had halted gave me a long, slim parcel wrapped in cloth.

  “Remember thine archery, Cousin,” he said. “No bird is safe on the wing so long as thou practice at the butts.” With this he slapped me on the back so hard I near fell in a dyke. We said one last goodbye, and he was gone again. Though I did not open my gift until we reached home, I guessed what was inside it.

  As Simon left us I turned to look back at Strandborough. New-fallen snow dusted the tall towers, and on the highest I could see the watchman stamp his feet and blow on his hands to keep warm. ’Tis but a twelvemonth since I first saw that sight — yet somehow I fancied I returned home far more than a year grown.

  TOBY’S DIARY IS A STORY, but boys like Toby really did leave their families to work as pages in castles, and would have played the games his diary describes, and met people similar to those who appear in its pages. But although Toby wouldn’t have known it, his uncle’s castle was nearing the end of its useful life. Castles were built to withstand attack and in 1285, Europe was at peace. When wars began again, some fifty years later, new weapons and ways of fighting gradually made castles less important.

  High and Low

  As the Baron of Strandborough, Toby’s uncle would have been part of the most powerful group of noblemen in his country — second only to a king or queen.

  These noble lords controlled vast areas of land and the castles that went with them. In return, they pledged their loyalty to the king and promised to fight in his wars and to bring an army of knights and foot soldiers with them. They also had to pay the king part of the wealth their lands brought them, as taxes.

  Knights were noblemen who were also professional warriors. Each lord gave some of his lands and manor houses to his knights to use, to support themselves and their families. In return, the knights promised to fight for that lord and for the king.

  All these noblemen had total control over the lands they were given, including the peasants — villeins and freemen — who lived and worked on their estates.

  Villeins had to stay on the estate on which they were born, and could be punished for leaving it. They farmed plots of land and had to give their labor and part of their crops to the nobleman who owned the land.

  Freemen had more rights. They could move to another estate, and laws limited how much labor they had to do on their lord’s land. Both villeins and freemen had to fight in their lord’s army, though, and provide their own weapons.

  Aside from the lords and their knights, the only other people of importance were high-ranking officials of the Church, such as bishops and the abbots of monasteries. These people might also be given land, but their only duty was to pray for the lord who gave it to them.

  In western Europe, this way of organizing people according to their birth and the amount of land they controlled was called feudalism. However, by 1285, knights had begun to pay money to their lord instead of fighting in his army. And eventually, money payments replaced all of the feudal duties.

  Younger Sons

  In Toby’s time, when a nobleman died, his title and lands usually passed to his oldest son. And if he was wealthy enough, his other children might receive a “living,” such as a manor house with some farmland.

  As the younger son of a lord, someone like Toby’s father might train as a knight but not be able to afford the expensive warhorse and armor that knights used in battle. Instead, he could join the Church or choose simply to live off his manor by farming his lands.

  For noblewomen, the only choices were to marry, to seek service with a wealthier noble-woman, or to become a nun.

  A Page’s Life

  The sons of noblemen were often sent to live as pages in the household of a more important lord — usually by the time they were seven or eight years old. Here they were taught to hunt, to handle weapons, and to play games of skill, such as chess. They also learned how to be useful to their masters, and how to behave in noble society.

  At the age of fifteen or sixteen, a page became a squire. He acted as a personal servant to his master and rode into battle with him, often taking part in the fighting.

  After about five years, a squire could become a knight. Any knight could award him this honor, although it was usually done by his master or by the king.

  For hundreds of years, warfare was used throughout Europe as a means of gaining power, wealth, and land. And castles played a vital part in warfare.

  A castle was a secure place from which to launch an attack, and a stronghold to retreat to after a defeat.

  Castles were often built in a commanding position — to control a road or a river-crossing, or the land and people around them. And they provided safe homes, where their owners could live off the produce of their estates without fear of attack.

  Like most European castles, a castle such as Strandborough would have changed over time.

  New buildings and other structures would have been added to it as each generation of castle builders discovered ways of strengthening and improving its defenses.

  At the beginning of the 11th century, most European castles amounted to little more than a wooden tower, surrounded by a fence and perched on top of a mound of earth called a Motte. The owner, his family, and his warrior-guards lived in the tower. Below the Motte, a second fence and a ditch enclosed a Bailey — an open space which could be used to protect local people and their livestock in times of war.

  Strongholds of Stone

  Motte-and-Bailey castles were quick and cheap to build, but castles of stone were stronger and provided better protection against attack by fire. Gradually, stone towers called Keeps began to replace the wood and earth fortresses, and a strong stone wall called a “curtain” wall was put around the Bailey.

  Keeps varied, but most had living accommodations on upper floors, with storage rooms below. A raised doorway, reached
by a staircase, allowed entrance to the Keep and was easier to defend than a door at ground level.

  The weakest part of a castle wall was its gate, so this had to be especially strong. Often the gateway was part of a solidly built tower called the gatehouse.

  By raising the drawbridge that spanned the ditch or moat outside the walls, the gateway could be closed off with a solid wall of wood. Behind this, a wooden grille, called a portcullis, could be lowered so that entry was difficult even when the drawbridge was down.

  Next, defensive towers were added to the curtain wall. Because the towers stuck out from the wall, archers on the top could fire down on anyone at the wall’s foot.

  Battlements, too, were another cunning defense. These gap-toothed wall tops allowed archers to stand safely on the wall-walk behind the raised sections while firing through the gaps in between.

  By 1285, European castles had seen almost four hundred years of improvement. They had become immensely strong and almost impossible to defeat. In fact, the only reliable way to capture a castle was to surround it with a hostile army and try to starve the people inside into surrendering. This was known as putting a castle under siege.

  Under Attack

  By surrounding the castle, the attackers could stop food and other supplies from reaching it. Unless a supporting army could drive the attackers off, hunger would eventually force the castle to surrender.The attackers didn’t just sit around and wait, though. They looked for cracks in the castle’s defenses — and if there weren’t any, they did their best to make some, mostly by using enormous weapons called siege engines.

  Siege Weapons

  1 MANGONEL: A large catapult powered by tightly twisted ropes, like a toy slingshot with a stretched rubber band.

  2 BATTERING RAM: A heavy log swung from a wooden frame. It was used to smash through the gateway of a castle or to chip away at the walls. To protect the soldiers wielding it, the ram had a wooden roof built over it.

  3 PAVISES: Large wooden shields protected the attacking archers from the defenders’ arrows.

  4 TREBUCHET: A giant catapult with a heavy weight at one end. Troops pulled the other end to the ground to load it with rock. When it was released, the weight crashed down and hurled the rock against the castle wall. Rocks weren’t the only missiles that were thrown, though. Trebuchets catapulted beehives, rotting animal carcasses, even human heads.

  5 SPRINGALD: A huge crossbow that hurled iron spears.

  6 FIRE: Flaming arrows and pots filled with burning tar were fired at wooden doors and roofs.

  7 SCALING LADDERS: These were used to try to climb over the walls.

  8 SIEGE TOWER: A safer way to get inside was to use a wooden siege tower. A bridge could be lowered from the top of the tower to reach the battlements. Wet hides protected it from the defenders’ fire, and earned it the nickname “the bear.” Filling the moat with logs and rubble allowed the attackers to roll both the ram and the bear right up to the walls.

  The soldiers defending the castle did everything they could to hold out against the siege. Stocks of food and drink kept in the castle storerooms were carefully rationed. (Every castle had its own well inside the Bailey or the Keep, but even this could run dry, or the attackers might find a way to poison it.)

  Protective wooden covers called hoardings were built over the battlements. These jutted out from the wall and gave the archers inside them a better view of the enemy. Also, holes in the hoarding floor allowed defenders to drop rocks onto anyone who tried to scale the walls.

  Wooden roofs were built over tower tops, too, and covered with soaking-wet animal hides to resist fire.

  But for every clever defense that could be found to strengthen a stronghold’s weak points, there was always an equally clever method of attack.

  Into Battle

  A siege was a costly and time consuming way to wage war. If a castle was well stocked, and its defenders determined not to give up, a siege could last for months or even years. And once the attackers had used up whatever crops or livestock they could find in the surrounding countryside, they had to bring in regular supplies of food from elsewhere, or they too would starve.

  A swifter way to victory was on the battlefield. But this had its problems too. Feudal knights only had to fight for their lord for a few weeks each year. And when their duty was done they could just pack up and go home.

  By Toby’s time, however, lords had begun to hire knights who would continue to fight for as long as they were paid.

  Battles often began with the enemy armies lined up opposite one another. Then the mounted knights charged, each aiming to knock their opponents from the saddle. Once on the ground, knights were hampered by the weight of their armor and were more easily killed or captured by the foot soldiers who followed the knights into battle.

  Hand Weapons

  Knights fought with swords and lances, but foot soldiers used many weapons, including swords, daggers, and pole arms — long wooden poles fitted with axes, knives, or spikes.

  Pikes, for example, were like long spears. With the pole end held firmly against the ground and the point facing forward, a row of soldiers with pikes made a deadly defense against charging knights.

  Another favorite pole arm was the halberd. This had both a sharp spike and an axe blade, and could be used to hook or trip an enemy as well as stab and chop at him. Armed with a halberd, a foot soldier could hack at a knight’s armor or at his horse, yet stay safely out of sword range.

  From the 13th century on, archers too became increasingly important on the battlefield. They used both longbows and crossbows. Longbows required more skill (to shoot accurately, archers had to train from childhood), but an expert archer could fire six arrows a minute and hit a target 100 yards away. Some could fire twice this many if their aim did not have to be accurate. A massed body of archers could make arrows fall like rain on their terrified enemy.

  The crossbow had a power and range similar to a longbow, but drawing the bow (pulling back the string) and loading a bolt (a small arrow) was slow. Crossbow archers could aim and fire only one arrow a minute, but they needed very little training.

  Armor

  Just as castles needed strong walls, so soldiers needed strong clothing to protect them from enemy weapons. In Toby’s day, the commonest form of body armor was chain mail.

  Armorers made mail by linking tiny wire loops to form a kind of heavy metal fabric. A hauberk or coat of mail alone might contain 30,000 rings, each joined by hand.

  A full suit of armor could weigh as much as 66 pounds. It was stuffy and hot to wear, but because the weight was spread evenly around the knight’s body, he could wear it all day without becoming tired.

  The cost of a full suit of armor and a trained warhorse was very high and only the richest knights could afford them. Poorer knights often made do with bits of armor picked up from the battlefield or handed down to them from their fathers.

  Foot soldiers wore far less armor than knights. They had to provide their own and few could afford to do this. Many had only a metal helmet to protect them, although a better equipped soldier might also wear a short-sleeved hauberk and a coif — a mail headcovering worn beneath the helmet.

  Friend or Foe?

  At the tournament or on the battlefield, colorful patterns called arms shone from shields and fluttered on flags. The use of arms began in the first half of the 12th century, as a way of helping knights to tell friend from foe on the battlefield when helmets hid their faces.

  Each noble family had its own unique design, and at first these were made up of simple shapes, such as stripes or crosses. The designs soon became more elaborate, though, including real or imaginary animals (such as the ravens on Toby’s uncle’s arms) or objects like castles or swords.

  The design was held within the shape of a shield, and when noble men and women married, they joined the shields of their families together to make a new one. Usually they did this by painting the husband’s arms on one half of the shield and his w
ife’s on the other. And when their children married, they divided the shield yet again, into quarters. So the arms of each generation became more and more complicated.

  Keeping track of all these designs was the job of heralds, and eventually this work, and the knowledge of how each design was constructed and what each part of it meant, became known as heraldry. Heralds had other tasks as well, though. They organized tournaments and other ceremonies, and acted as messengers on the battlefield, carrying instructions to troops.

  As Toby was writing his diary, knowledge of a terrible new weapon was spreading across Europe. Over the centuries that followed, cannons would transform warfare — and in particular the role of castles.

  Cannons were small and limited in range at first. But as they became more powerful, they were used with increasing success for destroying castle walls.

  Thicker walls gave castles added protection, but by the 15th century, cannons had become so effective that no wall could withstand their pounding.

  Cannons, then, made castles useless, but other events had already begun their decline.

  During the 14th century, the plague known as the Black Death killed more than a third of Europe’s people. Skilled workers were in short supply, and those who had survived demanded better wages. This added to the already high cost of building a castle, so fewer and fewer new ones were constructed.

  Feudalism was changing, too, and the kings and queens of Europe were helping to destroy it. They knew that a bold lord who held many lands and castles could build up a strong army around him and could challenge their power — and some did. So they discouraged castle building, and banned lords from keeping private armies. In their place marched loyal knights who obeyed only royal commands.