A point about siege ladders

today in this video which has been sponsored by the great courses plus but more of that later i want to introduce you to a new word escalade it's a completely unnecessary word you don't really need it in your life uh you don't really need to know for instance that an alternative to the word ambush is ambuscade but an escalade is a type of attack and it's a type of attack where you go over a wall or a fortification or so so imagine that there's a wall here outside a castle or a fortified city in the ancient world and you could tunnel underneath it you could tunnel underneath it a little bit in order to undermine it and cause it to collapse uh you could throw big things at it and hope to smash it down and create a breach and then go through the breach there are loads of ways you can get into a fortified place you could perhaps go around the corner to the gate and just ask really nicely or or bribe someone to let you in um but an escalade is specifically an attack where you try to go up over the wall you escalate you go up over the wall and escalate there you go you've worked out now the derivation of the term and uh this video is largely about ladders which are of course the principal tool of the escalade um now ladders uh do have a limitation in that you have to have a piece of wood that uh that is continuous and strong and you have to be able to uh carry and get into position uh this ladder and it must be too bendy and there there is a sort of a limit to how long a single ladder can be and it's it's in the region of 30 to 35 feet that's a 10 uh french nephro if you're into that sort of thing um and that's about the limit of of an effective ladder in the ancient world anyway uh before they had modern materials now you may think that's a tremendous limitation so um escalades using ladders are only effective against fortifications that are under that sort of uh height but in fact that's actually almost all fortifications the ancient walls of rome which is a famously well fortified city about 30 feet uh which again about 10 um byzantium a lot of those walls were lower even the very highest walls of byzantium are the most fortified places on earth ever about 12 meters just a little bit taller cracked chevalier and one of the biggest ever castles built yeah about 30 feet so in fact uh the ladder is a viable tool for trying to get into most fortified places of the ancient and medieval worlds um and we know that uh uh escalades were attempted a fair number of times for one thing they get pictured an awful lot they're very great a number of particularly medieval drawings of of knights climbing up ladders of the outside of castles um so it strikes me that if they were reasonably common then they must also have been reasonably effective i think that's a logical leap to to to make um now one of the the vital things in a successful escalade is having ladders of the correct height it'd be terribly embarrassing if you got through all the the archery uh shooting of the enemy losing a load of men and rushed up to the walls you filled up perhaps the the moat with lots of uh bundles of sticks called fascines and then you managed to get to the wall and against uh the the the bombardments of rocks and arrows of the enemy you managed to get your ladders into play and they're all too short can you imagine how embarrassing that would be that's just bad planning because if you don't you know if you fail to plan you're planning to fail frankly um so they wanted an accurate uh estimate of the height of the wall um now how could you do this well one way uh would be to get someone close to the wall and the classic thing of twanging an arrow with a little bit of thread attached to it and then pulling it tight and then marking that bit of the thread and pulling it back and finding out that way uh how tall the wall is the old thread technique i suppose if you didn't get your thread back you could also before you went to the wall know how long the total thread was so you could just snip off the back and count what you've got left and subtract it from what you knew you started with another one was to observe how long the shadow of the wall was at certain times of day and then compare this with the shadow of something of known height 10-foot pole perhaps and then do some calculations and work out the height of the the wall that way but one that turns up in the story is certainly from the ancient world a number of times is counting courses of stone or brick um for instance uh marcellus during the second punic war uh he's a very successful roman commander one of the best and he is involved in the siege of syracuse on sicily and according to book 25 no yeah book 25 chapter 20 something of livy um it was by counting courses of stone that the romans were able to estimate uh how high a particular section of war was and so they could then make ladders of the appropriate height uh but even then when they attacked they they chose to do so uh because um they'd heard that there was a particularly drunken festival that was likely to be happening and they thought that would be a good time to give this a go and and it worked honestly the romans they're they're cats i i bet julius caesar when he invaded britain attacked at t time on the weekend just romans anyway um now if you read your thucydides as i have because and you should frankly because two cities if you read one ancient history read through cities uh here's history of the peloponnesian war because it's just basically ace um or the d-days as they call him in modern greece uh now he talks about the siege of platya now it was archidemus the second of sparta who was in command of the spartans besieging platya platya was an ally of the athenians during the war and the blatants held out against early attempts by various cunning means which i won't uh talk about now because i've got nothing to do with escalades um and so uh archenemies thought right we didn't take it that way we'll just besiege the town we'll just throw a wall all the way around and just wall them in and then see how they like that but he was worried that the relieving army sent by the athenians might attack from behind so he built a double wall a tremendous amount of labor involved so there was a wall uh keeping the plateaus in the their city and then another wall a little bit further out a second circuit um keeping other relieving armies out and so the spartan troops had to live between these walls in a sort of ring around the city and this they did for quite some while and the patients are getting pretty worried and uh a plan was hatched okay we're gonna break out and scale the walls and get out um and uh to this end i thought well we'll probably need some ladders yeah but we need ladders of exactly the right height so how are we gonna do this then and uh there's a lovely uh use of of the the hive mind here rather than uh get one guy to count the layers of brickwork from a distance i reckon there are 114 or however many it was um uh which was possible because uh as thucydides um writes one part of the wall had not been properly either whitewashed or plastered depending on how you translate the greek um so they're able to see uh the um which just shows you how finished this job was that there was just one little bit where they could uh count the courses of bricks um and this was a high wall with lots of towers all the way around um the spartans were very thorough um anyway so they uh rather than do that they got loads and loads of people uh he doesn't say precisely how many but a very large number of people all to count uh the courses of bricks and then uh they got everyone's uh results and averaged them and they go we're yeah this is probably pretty accurate then this is probably pretty and it seems that they were right uh but um most of the city became rather faint of heart and only in the end about 220 i think it was men uh went for it and tried to break out leaving most of the city women and children uh behind and even then they picked a dark and stormy night to do it and lovely little detail he recalls is that they went out with one barefoot and one foot shod uh to give them uh a sort of mediocre grip on all surfaces uh anyway so they they stall out by stealth and uh went over a bit of the wall between two towers believing correctly as it turned out that most of the spartans would be sheltering in the towers which had roofs built on them they were quite comfy and that's where the spartans were living um and uh yes when it was a stormy night they would be inside and perhaps uh not so vigilant about what was happening to the walls oh that was good no i was gonna try to break out not on a night like this oh what's that noise uh anyway this the plateaus were successful and they were able to get over the wall and then over the second wall and then escape into the countryside unfortunately uh the rest of the teams um were very considerably less lucky in the long term so there you go sometimes fortune favors the brave um so um yeah you have to prepare uh and and you're not gonna just if you think you're gonna need three ladders you're not going to take three ladders are you going to take a very large number of ladders when uh in 1453 when the turks were besieging what was uh no longer byzantium was now constantinople um they took 2 000 ladders with them you know just to make sure that ought to be enough um and in siege jerusalem we know that the standard allotment of ladders was uh two nights and their immediate retinue uh one ladder so two nights and their retinue will be in command of one ladder and of course there are an awful lot of knights so an awful lot of ladders in besieging jerusalem and there are a lot of possible preparations that we we just have to um you have to try to make a judgment is this a real is this a real thing for instance there's a an anonymous unfortunately 10th century byzantine uh writer who talks about this amazing invention of a siege ladder which is made out of leather it's hollow and it's attached to a pair of bellows it's an inflatable siege ladder so you just pump like this and up it goes um my suspicion is that this was never used it was just possibly one prototype might have been made and people looked at it and thought um do you know what now um the pressure you would need uh from the bellows pumping in to make the ladder actually stiff would be um a lot and i would have thought made it unfeasible but i can see maybe it doesn't actually have to keep itself stiff enough to support the weight of men climbing up it maybe it only has to be stiff enough to support its own weight and then maybe had hooks at the top and then it's hooked on and then you can stop working the bellows and now it's just a sort of like a rope ladder hanging from the wall uh maybe the rungs were made out of something stiff like wood and it was just the the sides that did the inflating uh that's a bit more feasible i think although it's pure conjecture for me um my guess is that that one never actually um entered service um uh apollo apollodorus there are lots of apollodoruses polar doris of damascus is the one you can look him up um living about second century a.d uh he writes of this wonderful modular system that he came up with with ladders of different widths and the widest ones were missing their top two rungs and all the others were missing the top two and the the bottom one except possibly the narrowest um and the idea was that you would have a a wide section at the bottom and then a slightly narrower section would slot in and then the top two rungs of the bottom of the bottom section and the bottom two rungs of the top section would then be slotted in making them common to both ladders and these were made out of iron perhaps for uh greater strength and the tops and bottoms of the ladders would be iron shot and there'd be perhaps little pins or clamps or something to stop the pins um falling out and then you would join two sections the sections were about 12 foot long he has a little picture although we don't have the original but we have a copyright uh of a just a single soldier uh carrying one of the sections so presumably this is it to emphasize that they were quite light it's a 12 foot section and so he claims you could get up to about 40 foot ladder in in these sections overlapping uh yeah possibly uh but he pushes it he over exit and a lot of people start thinking well you know we don't trust this guy some of the other things he says are a little bit far-fetched and he he tries to uh boast about the the potential of his system uh with with uh linking loads of ladders into into towers into into you know three-dimensional towers and and so forth yeah maybe not um but possibly um so uh there you go so that you can have uh modular clip together ladders that uh at least some of which uh did exist now if you look at this thing a lot of people say what about these these things this one is a reconstruction of a chinese example but we have some reason to believe uh that these existed in the west as well uh this is going this is pushing it i'm talking mainly in this video about ladders um but yes i suppose you could use one of these in an escalade but you can see that a big vehicle like that is going to be confounded by rocky terrain by the fact that an awful lot of uh fortified places are built on rocky outcrops or immediately next to rivers or they have a moat or ditch or something around them it's going to be difficult but not impossible to wheel that up to the the wall but um in the main it was just plain simple ladders that were used um so uh you might then say well what are the defenders doing all this time because there you are climbing up these ladders and and being a tremendous threat to them there must be some counter to this well obviously uh the the most uh desirable thing is they stop you getting in and near enough to the walls in the first place to use those ladders so they they twang arrows at you and and and shoot bolts and all the rest of it and try to keep you at a distance but maybe you do rush up to the walls uh in which case uh they're gonna have to um think of something a little bit better so um well the obvious thing is uh continue shooting arrows at you and drop stuff on you now the arrows thing is a big problem because um the battlement at the top must of course have a decent amount of thickness to it for it to be strong enough to do its job so uh battlement is very likely to be that's that thick something like that so you've got that depth of wall between the merlin so there you are as an archer um once someone's got close to the wall and close enough to put a ladder in place how are you going to get him you're going to have to have to get up between two merlons and then hold me foot hold my foot hold my foot and then you're going to have to expose yourself horribly to get a decent shot in and then it's still going to be very awkward to shoot your bow um so the guys on the wall itself who are armed with bows can't do a lot once you've got really close so that means that all the uh the onus of the task falls onto the guys in the towers either side now not every position of a wall would be covered by a projecting tower and indeed not all fortifications even had projecting towers but many did so imagine you've got a wall like that and you've got a tower which is sticking forwards of the wall so the guys on the top of the towers can then shoot down the the front of the wall and what military people call an inflating position at the people on the ladders but these towers didn't project very far you might have say uh two archers uh between three merlins those are the bits that stick up on on on a battlement um shooting that way and then uh from the other side of the of the uh the the next tower shooting the opposition so maybe you have just four arches and if you've got dozens of ladders going up and hundreds of men rushing up those ladders four archers are going to have a pretty tough time stopping them and of course those men are likely to have armor and shields and the like and they're presenting moving targets and so and you of course may be being shot at yourself because when uh an escalade goes in uh it's not just the guys at the front who are busy they will have their missile support behind there will be crossbowmen archers uh missile throwers of all the time any artillery that they um that they've got will be helping out perhaps and so you will be being shot at and so you don't you're not shooting under ideal circumstances and you've got too much work really for just four archers to cope with so um that is unlikely to stop a really determined on rush of an escalade with a very large number of people um so what we've got now we've got dropping stuff um now uh you've watched the movies haven't you you know that boiling oil is the thing they used except they almost never did oil's expensive it's really difficult to to handle and if it's oil that you could cook and eat well if you're being besieged you don't want every morsel of food uh you've got available to and it's expensive stuff and you know what there's much cheaper stuff available like sand and water so if you're gonna drop something really hot on someone why not just sand or water yes boiling oil will be slightly nastier but only slightly but neither of these i think is really that impressive if you're climbing up a ladder and you've got a shield above you and we know from pictures that this is quite quite commonly done um then uh even if you're the guy right at the top if you're not the guy at the top and the water's going to hit the guy above you and you're just going to get a few droplets on you you'll be fine but even if you are the guy right at the top and you get the brunt of it um the shield's going to keep most of it off you and maybe some of it comes down here how oh that really skulls but you're not going to go ah and fall to your death are you you're just going to go how wow that really wangs and you're going to keep going perhaps redoubling your effort because oh i'm going to get that swine who dropped boiling water on me the rotter sand of course hot sand could get in your arm and be really irritating but yeah be really irritating but you're not going to go ah and fall off to your death off a ladder are you um so you're going to keep going lime is another thing which they could drop and that's yeah that could be really nasty because if you get lime uh powdered lime in your eyes then that can blind you okay so the rest of your body's still working fine but you're you're temporarily or possibly even permanently blinded now are you going to carry on i think if you were blind at the top of a ladder you would say guys guys behind me stop pushing at the back stoppage let me down let me down guys because i i can't see you i can't see that i can see might stop someone and lime is a feasible weapon because it's one of the uh main ingredients of of mortar and white wash and so in a city that's being besieged there's probably a fair number of building sites it's probably a fair supply of line not enough to douse the entire invading army throughout all around the entire circuit of the fortifications but enough for some uh poor unfortunate to get uh some lime dropped on them here and there so yes i think lime is a bit more of a uh an effective chemical weapon that might drop beehives is another one you may have read off um well yes of course people in the ancient medieval worlds did keep bees uh and because it was a supply of honey and and they didn't have uh the access to sugar as we do today so honey was a much more important uh product in in the days of yours so yes beehives but again you know if somebody if you're towards the top of a ladder and someone drops a beehive in on you it's not it's very unlikely to stick beehive bounces off you and watch out below beehive it's probably about as bad as it's going to be for you uh you might get a couple of angry bees buzzing around but it's not going to stop you attacking you're not going to go ah i've been stung by a bee and throw yourself off the ladder to your death are you you're going to carry on and just being stunned by a bee now and the guys at the bottom maybe they've got a lot more angry bees to uh to deal with but again no one's going to say call off the attack there are some bees now i can imagine that yes because towns would have kept bees because people wanted the honey uh it also strikes me by the way um sorry i should finish that sentence uh therefore there would be some bee hives in a typical town to use especially to say even a castle might have a number of bee hives in it so it would be a thing that they would have some of to throw they would again they wouldn't be able to just have bees swarming everyone throughout the entire circuit but yes i can imagine that some people might have had a beehive thrown at them but one of the reasons that i think this probably happened is that on top of a tower is a very obvious place to have a beehive uh if you are a watchman and you're on duty standing on top of a tower all night oh it's boring but you could have a hobby beekeeping for instance and it's a very sensible place to have the beehives because it's you know up in the open air they can fly out to the countryside directly from the tower harvest all the nectar and pollen and stuff and then bring it back to the hive at night and they don't have to go buzzing around the town bothering people where there are no flowers anyway uh so yes a perfectly sensible place to have it would be uh on the top of a tower in the fortifications and though of course you wouldn't throw your beehive because you've spent so many hours and you know that the harvest is nearly there but during an attack if one of your colleagues was at the top and he said oh we're being attacked loads of people there coming up towards us there you go i mean yeah he might just throw a beehive off but this isn't to say that towns were defended by beehives or that you know one of the things they used to do was defend out or they prepare beehives in order to see off attack no i just think that it's quite likely that it's from something that might occasionally come to hand there you go throw a beehive down um so that that's that's the level of of beehivery i think was actually used uh in defense i don't think they ever bred bees specifically as a as a detective don't try to besiege our city because we've got loads of beehives i don't think that was ever a boast i've never read in any of the sources i think i've said enough about bees um but really the biggie is just heavy stuff you know a big block of stone um if a big block of stone drops on you even if you've got armor and a shield that's gonna be pretty nasty thing uh but of course uh they can't drop absolutely colossal blocks of stone because whatever stone is dropped it's got to be a stone that someone can actually pick up and move at the top so that limits the size of a block but yes if one hit you smack on the head from the top yeah that would that would knock you senseless and then you'd fall uh limp from the ladder that would be the end of you so just dropping heavy blocks of stuff on people uh that was a major uh way of doing it now the the um macho collation as i've always said uh but i understand that there's a there's a bit of controversy here um sorry should you say what the mac equalization is right okay i'm actively it's one of these these are on newcastle uh this is the castle at newcastle uh our newcastle um and uh you can see the sort of thing so the defenders at the top have got a gap at the bottom of the battlement that they can drop things down very very close to the outer wall and these particular ones are above the the main gate a pretty obvious place to put some methicalations now i've always said mechicalations but apparently the young folk these days are saying matriculations um but you know with words derived from from ancient sources uh ch is almost always k uh if it's greek uh ch comes out as curse so this this monster this is this isn't a shimmer this is a chimera and even when a word goes into latin and we get it from the latin if it's a ch in latin it's almost always a word that's borrowed from the greek anyway so we study chemistry not chemistry and on the 25th of december we celebrate christmas not christmas um so ch almost always goes to k uh however so runs the argument it could be that since this word um immaculation start around the time of the crusades uh and uh around the time of the crusades of course a lot of the nobility was speaking french or rather a language similar to what we today think of as french so it could be that during the time of the crusades some latin derived uh language was our route to getting this word and don't forget some of you i i've told you some some of you who watch my channel a lot before that in 1880 only 20 of the population of what we today call france spoke french in gascony they spoke gascon um there were lots of other uh corrupt versions of latin that uh the speaker people spoke all over europe and and these have become catalan and spanish and portuguese and the several versions of italian and romanian and so forth and so through one of those we could have got it so it could have been one of them which tended to chur their chs so okay that was a long tangent wasn't it i suppose what i'm saying is that if you want to say matriculations uh go ahead be my guess but i'm just warning you that it does make you sound a little bit french so dropping stuff uh heavy that's right ladders let's get back to the so they're dropping heavy stuff on people it's the main is the main way of um of dealing with you now you could uh do a few other things one um uh favorite one that the people talk about is sometimes called the crow or how i haven't actually found any in-period document calling it that but anyway a big lifting arm thing this sort of idea so you've got a big counterweight and a big arm with a hook grabber on one end and a fulcrum and a big stalk holding up high and you manipulate the uh the the heavy end and you grab someone and you drag them off the ladder and ah and then you imagine this would look quite good in the movie um but i don't think they were ever very common uh they don't get pictured or talked about much um things you'd have to build it in exactly the right place because they're tall uh the enemy would almost definitely see oh look they've got one there right yeah um don't build a ladder there don't put a ladder there there you're fine there you find too close there a little bit too far away there just don't put it there uh but that could be useful maybe uh you've you've looked at the defenses around your your castle or or um fortified town and you thought we're completely covered or apart from just there if someone put the ladder just there in that blind spot oh then we might be scuppered i know we'll build a big lifting arm thing that's in just the right place to lift someone off a ladder if you were just at that height just there uh and then they wouldn't put a ladder there and so even though the thing is never used and nobody never kills anyone um it does put them off putting a ladder just there in which case it's sort of done its job i suppose is one possible use for that sort of weapon but um not not not a major weapon the the crow if it is called a crow um one that i've read about is nets big nets with lots of hooks on them made out of linen for some reason uh and you would throw these nets over off the wall down onto the uh the escalating attackers and then drag the net loads of men boiling pulling and this net would catch some of them uh in the hooks and in the in the the well in the net itself and you would drag them upwards and then they will arrive on the wall all ready trust up in the net until you stab stab and bash bash and deal with them and then repeat um again i have no reason to believe that that was ever a common weapon it doesn't get mentioned much but uh that's another defense that you could use um now another thing that people talk about is is a sort of sideways ram if you like so you get some big heavy weight perhaps um a few logs lashed together so there you go and on this end there's a rope going that way and a rope going that way and so that one goes to that tower that one goes to that tower and they go okay heave and so so all the guys in that tower and perhaps the rip goes over and down through a hatch uh in the tower down to other guys on the stairs helping and they all shout to to me and the guys in that tower what did they say what did they say was it was to me what to me oh no no no no to you to you to meet you right so let's imagine they got it brilliantly well organized so they say to me and they say to you and they then let out the rope and these guys pull in the rope and the weight will then swing across the front of the wall and perhaps knock one of the ladders sideways how did you get this thing in position in the first place well presumably those guys on the battlements just somehow were chatting away with enough people enough levers and all the rest to get this big weight over the uh but everyone in the towers have been ready to take the strain okay so then you can heave it this way and he but you can see that you'll be very slow and really not very efficient be very difficult to to actually knock someone with any any powerful swing if you wanted to to swing the thing a lot you'd have to have it suspended from a single point on the battlement um but then if it's if it's low uh then it'll yeah possibly generate an awful lot of swing but that's going to be very difficult because you'd have to get over the merlin slide it along this way that would build up momentum but if it's low and it's ever reasonably still then guys near the bottom could just grab it and pin it down and that wouldn't get very far uh and if it's very high it's not going to swing very much and won't have much won't sweep much of the wall so again not a stupendously effective weapon in general uh but it's something you could try uh to to keep yourself safe there's another thing which is turned up in a few books i've read called the metalla um but i've i'm not i haven't actually come across any prime source talking about these but it's it turns up in textbooks um and it's a sort of booby trap that you can put so imagine you've got a merlin here sticking up and you've got the merlin here and so here's the gap you would imagine someone coming off a ladder is going to try to go through between two merlins at the top and uh being able to predict where he's likely to go means that you could put maybe a wooden pressure plate or a rope trip wire or something which is attached to a basket full of rubble uh which then tips on him as uh as soon as he tries that um obviously doing a major assault that's unlikely to be tremendously useful it might get the first guy up uh if he's not paying attention but uh i suppose if you are expecting uh assault at some point one of these days and you don't have enough people to put uh to patrol all the walls all the time you could use it as an automated defense a little booby trap for attackers the metalla i don't have an illustration for it anyway i've been talking quite some while now so i suppose it's possibly uh time for me to talk to you instead about my sponsor the great courses plus now if you're interested in uh you know sieges for instance which is extremely likely given that you're watching this video and you've come this far then you might be thinking to yourself you know i don't really understand greek and roman technology as much as i i feel i ought in which case a trip to the great 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as you're flipping will like well as long as you keep paying anyway so that's um www dot plus stroke lindy page there you go um right end of sponsor's message and now back to meet our video so i've been talking so far about um what an escalade is and how you might go about it getting the ladders the right length and how people might defend against it but i haven't actually come to a sort of central point because this video you may have noticed is is titled a bit like my videos of old a point about well i do have a central point that i want to make and i'm going to start making it now but it is quite a big point and i thought a decent amount of preamble wouldn't be too uh it wouldn't make me too much a figure of hate so my argument is this you've all seen the movies haven't you and in the movies an escalade is shown as suicidally dangerous um you know what happens the guys go up the ladders and then a guy at the top of the wall pushes the ladder away and the guy on top of the ladder goes ah like that and then he falls to his doom and this happens a lot because um film producers and directors have got this i believe completely mistaken idea that having large numbers of people die rapidly and unnecessarily that is action and that the public will love it personally i think that it's far more suspenseful showing large numbers of people trying not to die and contending in a rational way and it could go either way and et cetera but i there you go it seems that most filmmaking minds are against me on this so one of my arguments is that they couldn't have been that flipping dangerous because it was such a popular way of attacking if it were incredibly dangerous and they tried it loads of times it would normally fail it would normally involve vast amounts of death in which case it would be really really difficult to persuade anyone to give it a go oh come on yeah we failed 25 times but i reckon this 26th attack is is gonna be the winner because everything's gonna be different this time because now actually we're just going to put ladders against the uh wall and they're going to push us and we're going to go and follow our desks now it's not like so that could have happened and now you've watched the movies they put the ladder up against the wall and the guy at the top pushes the ladder and it goes slowly and the guy on the top what'd he do what'd he do he's possibly going to die soon he goes because that's what the director told him to do um but i don't think people generally go ah like that when the they're just about to die and there are things that they might do to perhaps prevent them dying so for instance i i might try uh doing that and to angle the ladder so the ladder's going that way if i can angle it that way a little bit maybe that'll carry me back but maybe it won't or maybe i'll throw my body weight forwards and hope that that will carry the ladder back to uh to safety but maybe that won't work i mean obviously there's a newtonian thing going on here equal and opposite and all the rest of it so maybe as i throw my body weight forwards i'll just pull the ladder towards me and it'll cancel out uh but of course this in ancient world was a long time before newton so maybe physics worked differently that way so maybe it would work anyway i would try it like that i would do something like that to get to get back but that's not what we see the stunt man oops i called him a stunt man no he's not a stunt man the the real knight um who's trying to climb into the castle and doing an escalade in the movie it's a real night not a stunt man that's not what we see them do we see them go ah instead i would scream louder but i just lost my voice so that's as much as i can do and then they lose their grip what causes them to lose grip they're they're doing this and or that's not enough to make you lose your grip and yet they do don't they and they lose it spectacularly they don't just lose it like that or like that they lose it like this their hands go up and they go and they always go sideways and they lose the grip with both feet as well it's almost as if they jump off and they they fall they fall and they land on their backs but we don't see them land on the backs of course they fall just out of sight onto their backs but it's clear that they're doomed and they're going to die now why would anyone who's being who's got the the opportunity to just drop off the ladder as he chooses why would he throw himself sideways to land on his back if there's a hard landing down there just hard ground or even rock that might be the base of a lot of walls if you land on your back you're going to smack the back of your head incredibly hard against the hard ground and very likely kill yourself now if you wanted to stay alive you'd land on your feet wouldn't you i mean obviously not stiff leg you'd bend your knees and use your legs as shock absorbers try to roll with it and try to protect your head and make sure that that was the last thing that hit the ground you wouldn't go and throw your head towards the ground as these stunt men do it's almost as though these stuntmen are not landing on a hard surface at all they're laughing landing on a very very big soft thing like a big airbag yeah that could be it because if you land on something soft with your feet you're very likely to turn an ankle and sprain it or even break it so you don't want to land on a soft thing with your feet you want to land pump on your back spread the load and back of your head getting smashed is not a risk so yeah but why sideways ah yeah of course because uh they want the the ladder to fall like that bunk and that's that's in shot uh so if they put the airbag here so he falls backwards onto it then the ladder will go boom against it and then the front of the ladder this bit of the ladder will actually start rising up and the people will see that that ladder didn't fall properly what's going on here there's an airbag there isn't there the audience might think and of course if they put the airbag behind then if the uh stunt man falls off a little bit early then he's going to hit the near edge of the airbag and that's a bit dangerous if he falls a little bit late then he's going to hit the far edge of the airbag and that's not good he wants to land in the middle so he has to land it perfectly timed and then of course the ladder falls on him so no he's gonna fall sideways so the guy goes ah and jumps off sideways landing in a completely bizarre way and falling off in a completely bizarre way yeah so that that's probably why that happens um but uh there are other options available to someone who's been pushed away from a castle wall uh he could for instance i mean if he's really intelligent i mean if he's just someone who just make einstein feel jealous uh he could come up with the plan like climb down the ladder yeah i mean obviously uh you can climb down the ladder pretty quickly if you think that your life's on the line i think you could climb down the ladder very quickly in fact um if it's a smoothly uh produced ladder well made you could just put your hands on the side whoops and then down the ladder really quickly i mean when you got to the bottom you wouldn't be at all dead though granted you might have a splinter um so yeah i think you'd probably climb down the ladder rather than just go ah to your death um so that's that's one reason why i think the movies have got it wrong but there's a little bit there's a lot more to it there now um i talked about uh how a ladder it was very important to get the ladder the right length and i talked about the embarrassment if you imagine that all the ladders were too short you couldn't reach yeah but one just make them long really remind us on the long side well no you don't want to er on the long side either because if this is the wall here you don't want the ladder to do that because then you've got all this bit sticking up here which the the enemy can then use to push the ladder away much better that the ladder is actually there a little bit below the level of the top of the wall so that then the guys here they can climb up the ladder stand on the last run climb over they're fine if it's a little bit too short then climbing over the wall is going to be really really difficult if it's a little a little bit too long then uh the defenders will be able to reach it and push it away or possibly possibly push it sideways so you have to get it just the right length now you could of course uh adjust the length using the angle you could say oh well the ladders were a little bit short so we put the the bases of the ladder closer to the wall to get a bit more height yeah but then you're you're at such an angle and now it's really easy to push the ladder away uh oh okay all right we'll go the other way and we'll have the ladders uh far too long we'll put them at that sort of angle okay now you've got a very bouncy ladder that can't take the weight of many men because it'll snap in the middle you've got a bouncy ladder that's actually quite difficult to climb up because it's so flipping bouncy and now it's almost impossible for you to shield yourself and climb on a horizontal line if you're going up a ladder at a decent steep angle you can have you only need one one hand on on the rungs and the other hand could be using for a shield but if it's really really down this sort of angle that's really difficult you're going to need your arms to to support yourself it's gonna be very awkward for you to shield yourself as well and you're on this great bouncy ladder so that's not much fun either uh and don't forget of course that immediately next to a wall it's quite likely to be a ditch or something else which complicates matters as to where the bottom of the ladder will be so yeah it really is pretty vital to get the length of leather bang on if imagine if there's a if there's a ditch like that before the wall and you have you've calculated it so you have to get the top of the ladder there and the bottom of the ladder at some point in the ditch you're gonna have to get you're gonna have to get your calculations bang on if this is gonna work okay so uh you've calculated uh the length of the ladder and you've also then got to train your men to install the ladder correctly and polybius gives us a clue here he gives us a formula he says that the distance from the bottom of the wall to the bottom of the ladder should be half the distance of the length of the ladder so to make that clearer so you've got the wall there there's the ladder and that distance should be half l half the length of the ladder so that he reckoned oblivious that was the ideal uh angle so it's steep enough to be easy to climb and strong uh but it's shallow enough to be really difficult for any defender to push away from the wall um in the movies the ones that do the slow tipping uh or at this sort of angle but put at that that sort of angle the weight of a few men on now even if you did it even if it were sticking up over the top of the wall and you were a defender you could get something to push against easily that's going to be really difficult about angle and how you mean you've only got the length of your arm at first so how how is that going to go come straight back again yeah you try pushing that ladder down a properly installed ladder is not as vulnerable as we get shown in the movies over and over again uh so thank you polybius um now um uh we have i suppose i should say something a little bit about the uh the the the quality of the pictures we have to go on uh it's not always great if you look at medieval pictures um i don't think the people were actually that big uh i don't think the perspective is right i don't think the scales are right here i don't think we can take see in this picture uh the bottom of the ladder appears to be half a mile from the city i mean look at the perspective look where that river or moat is and look where the walls are and it's on this do you think no um a lot of artistic like in this picture here we appear to have a horse uh having a go climbing the ladder as well and i'm not convinced uh by these uh assyrians besieging a city that that's actually the way they climbed the ladder it's that'd be impressive piece of you know acrobatics if that's that's the the pose they adopted whilst going up ladder so obviously we have to try to interpret a lot but occasionally we get a little nugget now the the seed of this video i saw a picture uh i found it and i thought oh that's brilliant and that was the inspiration for me to make this video i thought okay right that that that says exactly what i what i'm thinking okay and why am i not showing you this picture now because well i have spent hours and hours scouring every hard drive on all my computers doing every search i can think of and scouring the internet to try with every search term i've tried new medieval siege knight soldier uh battlement hammer wedge peg uh ladder besieged every combination and i've goodness knows how many thousand pictures i've looked through and no i haven't been able to find the picture but i did find a picture that was a little bit similar and but it's not anything like as good but here it is and you can see if you look very carefully that there is a soldier of some sort who's banging in a wedge at the bottom of the ladder uh but it doesn't really show you a huge amount now this other one i remember as soon as i saw it i thought yeah exactly that's what you do that would really work um i think it and here my memory is not perfectly reliable okay so don't take this as as definitely true but i think it might be something like this a wedge going in like that so you can see it would not just stop the the bottom of the the ladder sliding away from the wall but it would also stop the ladder uh tipping away from the wall from the top um and by the way i should give you the the angles polybius so if you put those numbers into your your sine and cosine and tangent all the rest of it uh you get 30 degrees at the top 60 degrees at the bottom should have mentioned that before now um so uh he's wedging it um and this i think carries me too if anything might the main point i'm gonna make when the first guys go in that's the danger point right it's when the first guys are climbing off the ladder trying to get into the into the the castle the fortified place uh that's when everything is super perilous and the guys at the top of the ladders they're in a great amount of danger okay what's at the bottom of the ladder at that point yeah lots of other people and they're helping if you look at medieval pictures the very often they they show other guys at the bottom of the ladding holding on and helping in some way and and i've seen a picture which i haven't been able to find um of a guy doing the wrist alright imagine so there's a ladder like that going up to the wall up there and there's one guy climbing up and another guy who's come underneath the ladder and he's holding on to the runs like this okay so now if anyone tries to push that ladder away in any direction he's gonna resist it isn't he and if a lot of resistance are needed because my goodness they're giving it some amazing push with a great big machine at the top well um there's enough room on a rung for for four hands so another guy can come alongside him two guys on one rung they can put their whole body weight into it that's not enough another two guys on the next rung down you could have eight ten guys just leaving on it you're not gonna move this ladder another thing you can do is peg the ladder in into position you could have a a rope that's already attached to the ladder ready and some pegs that are already attached ready all you do is bang them in here and here yeah now push that flipping ladder away from the wall and with a lot of people sticking into the up up against the wall and they're reasonably rehearsed you could have um guys either side holding the ropes and pulling on them and we have illustrations of guys holding on ropes and and pulling ladders uh to keep them in position notice that these ones have got hooks on the top so some message letters had a hook on the top and if you pull downwards of course um then the the guys at the top can't lift it off or push it away um the same sort of idea anyway but they're also rope ladders you see sometimes rope ladders uh used same sort of idea pulling anyway and so you can have guys pulling on those ropes whilst other guys are busy pegging it in so there isn't even a moment uh where you could push it away and no one's holding it as soon as the ladder is in position it's already braced in position by loads of guys pulling and then those guys get uh replaced by pegs and then you're not gonna shift that ladder they're also rigid uh designs not the greatest pictures aren't me it's just a model but you see the idea um you have two rigid supports a bit like those guy ropes i just showed you and they're holding the ladder up and of course those supports can have spikes on it can be driven into the ground and pegged into place wedged into place so again that's a design of ladder that's going nowhere and it strikes me as possible that you wouldn't actually with a ladder like that rested the top of it against the wall you might actually have it self-supported and a little bit away so that the the defenders have to have to really reach out into space before they can um start pushing at that ladder um so uh other people uh are helping and the ladder's not at the stupid angles and it's actually quite difficult to knock someone off a ladder and if they got a shield which people in the ancient world generally did in the medieval world too we have plenty of pictures of people in the medieval world going up ladders with with uh shields so yeah um it's not suicidal going up uh a ladder and people weren't just dying in droves however of course it could be that the attack uh was uh stoutly defended and the defenders put up such a good show that the attack gets called off not that many people die but it doesn't the attack doesn't go in that could happen um and i'm not saying that it was safe because i definitely wouldn't want to be one of the first guys uh off the ladders and into the into the defended place um obviously you wouldn't want to have one ladder on its own first you would wait until you have quite a few ladders in place so that several guys so there isn't one guy who was the first in there will be several guys who are the first in but even so um they they would be uh brave chaps uh taking a tremendous risk that's for certain um but it's generally the case that if you are attacking a place then you also outnumber the defenders so you will rush the walls maybe in several places and there will be more of you quickly uh in one place all going well um but of course things could go he just hideously hideously wrong in a way that you might defend um a a a castle or a fortified city this is a way that i just i just thought up this morning um but i think it's perfectly feasible you could have just a few guys on on the the area of the bit of wall section of all that you think the enemy is going to attack um and their orders are to put up just a show of defending whilst guys come to the wall and then to get out of there perhaps climbing down ladders and then pulling away the ladders so that the attackers can't uh follow them and then with the towers either side you have lots of guys in those towers whose orders are to shoot anyone that comes onto the wall from the sides um and then the doors off the battlement into those towers are really thoroughly blocked up they're not just locked um please no entry sign put up or anything oh no no they've piled a load of rubble on the inside of them those doors are going nowhere and anyone who tries really hard to break through that wall is just giving the defenders in the towers an awfully long time to drop a block of stock of stone on his head meanwhile uh on the ground inside the city there are 300 archers whose orders are to shoot anyone who comes onto that wall so you climb off the ladder and onto the undefended battlement you've got the stone battlements here uh but now there's just a wooden rail with a couple of banisters that's not much cover and oh 300 you are now a human pincushion down you go um and then the guy behind you he comes over he becomes a human pin cushion meanwhile the commanders watching the attack go in uh from their side of things go oh wow that's really this is really good i can see there are guys in the towers either side having a go at defending but they don't seem to be doing a huge amount it looks like we've swept all the defenders off the battlements and our guys are just pouring in this is terrific this is terrific okay let's reinforce this success here let's have loads of guys go over the wall at this point call off that attack over there that's not going well and yeah keep that one up for show but this is clearly our our successful entry into the city we've effectively got a breach here let's just put up more ladders here this is going really well until the guys at the top um start noticing that the pile of pin cushions uh has come up to uh the height of the merlins and they do oh something's wrong here no guys stop pushing in the back seriously guys stop pushing at the back stop anyway that could be a a nasty um way to defend a uh a castle of course it's about one that um uh there's a certain amount of risk involved for the defenders there so um right i've talked at you for quite a while so what i'm saying is getting uh getting up a ladder isn't anything like a suicidal as as they show in the movies but yeah you'd still you'd you'd still have to be a very brave guy and you still be in a very perilous position if you're one of the first guys up at least when you get into the city right there you go escalade

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 1,020,476

Keywords: ladder, siege, seige, castle, fort, fortification, fortress, besiege, climb, escalade, knights, medieval, attack, assault, siegecraft, wall, ancient, city, town, ladders, rope, knight, soldiers

Id: S5oDKhqka8Y

Length: 52min 1sec (3121 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020