Castles may look strong, but everything has a weakness. To capture a castle, attackers had 4 of different methods, they were, tunneling, bombarding, scaling,and a siege.
- Tunneling - Siege engineers mined a tunnel under the castle’s walls and propped wooden blocks to hold the wall up. Then the engineer set fire to the block and the castle wall collapsed with it.
- During bombarding - trebuchets, and mangonels were used to hurled stone balls at walls hoping to blow part of it up. Also, if this did not work, attackers hurled corpses of captured prisoners over the walls to disease, and frighten defenders into surrender.
- Scaling - was a long and laboring process, especially if there was a ditch, but was broadly used. To do this attackers would fill the ditch up with dirt, drive a siege tower next to the, and have soldiers to scale the walls.
- Siege - This was the most hated process by any king. It involved surrounding a castle and starving the people inside until they surrendered. These sieges could take up to 7 years and more
Attacking Castles
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For every threat there was a defense. To stop tunneling, castle builders chose a place with hard rock for a castle.
- Walls - were 6.5 feet thick at the base to protect against ramming, trebuchets, and mangonels.
- Gatehouse - If any enemies happened to get through the drawbridge, defenders could trap enemies between two portcullises in the gatehouse and kill them through the murder holes.
- 4 Defenses - To make sure nothing got into the city easily, there were usually four barriers to stop attackers from entering though the gatehouse. The four were, a drawbridge, then two portcullises, and a heavy wooden door barred from the inside
- Archers - An advantage of defending was that, archers on the castle could shoot farther, shoot through arrow loops and almost never get hit
- Towers - During this period, every castle tower had its staircase moving clockwise, and since every knight was right-handed in combat and held the shield with the left. When enemy soldiers attacking up the staircases had the tower obstructing their swinging space, while defenders had nothing obstructing.
- Advantages - Firing arrows through arrow slits provided much cover for archers inside, plus the arrows went farther as they had higher elevation
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The reason for a castle was not only to protect against barbaric tribes but in strategic spots, either on a hilltop, or near a river crossing to oversee land
- Foundation - If possible a castle was always built on a solid rock foundation as to protect against undermining.
- Stone - Quarry workers used iron wedges to extract stone out of the ground
- Skills - Stone masons had to know how to build walls, machicolations, spiral staircase, rounded towers, and arrow loops.
- Tools - To do all this, mason’s used tools called, a crowbar, stone chisel, trowel, claw chisel, and plumb lines.
Attacking Castles
Defending Castles
Building Castles
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