Medieval castle SIEGES in depth

[Music] greetings i'm chad and this is going to be an in-depth video on medieval castle sieges and it needs to be in depth because this is a very sophisticated and also complex kind of topic that many people honestly misunderstand there are elements that are over emphasized sometimes underemphasized and it's such an interesting diverse thing so i'm going to do my best all right i might miss one or two things but i'm kind of pooling all the research and knowledge that i've gained over the years into this single topic okay and the first thing i'd like to address is that castles they're not invincible as heartbreaking as that is to say uh every castle is vulnerable to one main fatal weakness and that is simply starving them out okay you can have a castle that is near invulnerable you know impregnable to an assault okay because of many very clever design parameters and stuff it's location all these things come into play but even then there are ways that this castle can be undermined and i should really say there are a couple of weaknesses that every castle can fall prey to on top of just starving about but starving that is kind of the main one when you have a large enough force who is committed enough and uh they're willing to go to some pretty you know inventive lengths to take this castle they're ultimately going to take it unless the castle gets some external help so in this sense the main function of a castle is kind of like a delaying tactic and don't underestimate that okay time is one of the most valuable resources that any you know army or side would want to gain in a battle okay and it can also be a detrimental thing but for a defender time can be very beneficial and castles always serve that purpose the simple fact that they are very good at their job defending the occupants okay and it's evident by so many historical examples as to the lengths in which the attackers needed to go to to take the castles as to how effective these castles were they were not easy to take but of course that doesn't mean they were wholly invincible or impregnable give me ten good men and some climbing spikes i'll impregnate them now of course there are some castles that never fell historically but that doesn't mean they couldn't fall but there are many reasons why and one of their reasons is like it was too difficult okay because like i said the lengths in which people have gone to historically to take castles are like wow and i'll be sharing them a bit later on the video and in some instances it's just too difficult or who wants to bother stuff like that but when you have the commitment and you have the resources you can always take a castle i'm going to be sharing some of the ways in which it can be done and if you're kind of thinking of this in role playing or your own writing endeavors and stuff like that separate to just learning the historical context of sieges which is also really interesting stuff it's good to bear in mind these things okay and the fundamental things castles are not easy to take unless you use certain you know tricky tactics and stuff like that like i said i'll get to them and i'm going to start with some of the more obvious ways that people think about when taking a castle besieging first and foremost is the most costly and most likely to fail is a full-blown assault okay now there are certain tools that can be employed to help an assault be far more effective but the most basic tools starting from facing and will go to more complex are using ladders running at a wall putting up ladders against the wall climbing up you want to shield stuff like that while the defenders are throwing heaps of things down upon you and just throwing enough men at them to overcome the defenders because like the defenders are gonna be able to repel quite a lot of attackers this way knocking down the ladders and throwing things down people always think well they can throw down boiling oil just so you know boiling oil is a valuable resource i really like i haven't heard of any account where they actually did this what they did throw down was boiling water okay hot sand and so put a sand in like a big cooking pot and get it and they probably can't melt it to get at that point but get a scolding hot and casting that down and even quick lime and just let you know quick lime is a type of acid all right so all these things are painful and far more accessible and cheaper than oil and so these are things defenders can do to knock away aside these ladder ashes they're very costly but if you can just overwhelm the defenders get more men are climbing up these walls the point where they can't defend you know every section of the wall and overwhelm some of the defenders that are trying to protect them you will get men on top of those walls and there are many cases where a castle is simply overrun they're costly and the other thing about this they might even fail okay this is where castles really come into our own this is what they were made to do and all their defensive elements their designs their layouts this is the thing that castles are made to do defend repel you know assaults like this and the losses can pile up really high on the attacker's side and so one of the ways that you can try and mitigate some of these losses is employ tools to help you out one of these tools a more famous one is the classic siege tower now you have to understand siege towers are not effective in every situation because you need room okay to roll this siege tower up to the walls that you're trying to take and this is why castles like to be put up on high elevations because putting it up on a really big hill mitigates okay cancels out you know the ability to employ siege towers completely but not every castle had that luxury some castles were put in locations for important strategic you know things if they're like an intersection of trade routes or other things like that and they couldn't be put up high so the other way that you can try and mitigate you know people using siege towers is a moat okay a big old huge ditch in front of the walls that is also really effective at preventing ladder rushes and stuff like that so both you know up high or remote very effective and important for castles but not every castle had them and not every location that employed castle defenses had that luxury either and why do i say locations because in this consideration of sieges we also need to look at the besieging of large towns and even cities okay because they had very classic castle defenses in regards to like cities even small town stuff like it seems like the bigger you go the more areas that you can actually employ siege towers against because the more areas you might find that have flat enough ground near the walls to employ an actual siege tower and it's far more difficult to dig a moat around a city than it is a castle one of the best historical examples of siege towers being used effectively in a siege is the siege of jerusalem during the first crusade the crusaders they took the city by building two massive siege towers and rolling them up to the city walls the thing is of course you can defend against siege towers one of the best ways to defend it is setting them on fire and this is exactly what the defenders did they are able to set a light one of these siege towers and take it out of the battle completely but not the second one the second one gets to the wall and then just throw enough men okay onto those walls they now have direct access to the walls and they were able to take the city and do what they want and this is kind of where we come into the next element that i want to address about siege house and that's the matter of looting everyone thinks the medieval period was horribly brutal and you know war was just savage which in some instances it of course was but not in every instance and this is a myth i want to debunk here some you know castles and towns and everything when they were taken the losers okay the defenders that were overcome were actually treated quite amicably and fairly okay they were released and lands weren't taken off and like in the matter of a castle the defenders were they were small defenders they were not taken captive and they were released and their lands were kept and stuff like that and they were able to keep their titles all those things but in some instances yeah they were in prison lance confiscated and some just full-blown executed and then you get the bloodbaths as well which [Music] it depends on so many situations it depends on the leader okay he was leading the army like just an interesting point here about it's not just a full mindset of the entire army sometimes the army can be far more merciful and it's the leader that demands more brutal action in the siege of chateau gillard and we're going to be coming back to chateau gallard because there are so many instructive things that we can learn from this seed is really cool now chateau gallard or gallard castle was built by richard the lionheart overlooking the river cien in normandy after king richard's death his brother john takes the throne and is a rubbish king okay and he doesn't really look to his holdings in france normandy of france very well at all and in fact he becomes a vassal of king philip of france and in one in his interesting stipulation here john thought he would get to hold all his holdings but if one of your vassals misbehaves the lord of that vassal has the right to confiscate certain lands again jon being a rubbish king misbehaved in the eyes of king philip but i'm not sure this was philip thinking you are a terrible person i'm going to take it's more like i'm waiting for any opportunity to take these lands back anyway he finds the opportunity and so he goes to take normandy and he comes to chateau gillard which is kind of the linchpin point for being able to take the rest of normandy it's so interesting that the castle plays such a tactical role in these kind of invasions battles and stuff like that and so they need to take the castle and of course they surround the land and the populace the the village nearby they retreat to chateau gillard and gallardo of course they take them in but that makes a huge strain on their resources they don't have enough mouse to feed is like estimates between one and two thousand people comes to the castle if a refuge and so they can't support them all and it gets to a point where the you know the castilian of the castle which is basically the commander of the castle at that time he needs to evict certain members so he fixed about 400 and guess what happens the attacking you know frenchmen they let them go these you know civilians are leaving and they let them go without any harm at all this happens a second time and they let them go again but guess what happens king philip he learns of this and he's like no you are making a massive tactical mistake i'm not sure i put in these words but he knows the more food that he gets this castle to use the quicker it will fall in starving it out and so he orders his troops to fire upon the civilians as they are being evicted from the castle and so the civilians have to run back to the castle but guess what that castle doesn't let them in and so they actually have to camp at the walls of the castle all right the castle won't fire on them but they're not letting them in they have to stay out of fire of the french troops and most of them end up starving it's a horrifying situation and this is the brutal kind of situations of war but what i want to point out here is that this was an order from a single individual that caused this brutality where most of the troops they were frenchmen and you know the connection between normandy and france are they separate i think has been exchanged ownership normandy for quite a few times i mean look at 100 years war right but anyway perhaps the attacking frenchman saw these civilians as their countrymen in a sense and they didn't want to you know kill them so it's a complex thing when you try and address the brutality of war it was not brutal or 100 all the time and not every single soldier was a bloodthirsty maniac wanting to slaughter pillage and rape okay it's a complex situation and you need to try and understand all the signs and this situation about the civilians in the siege of chateau gillard is very instructive in that regard another instructive point about the concept of looting okay when you hear a village or town or city was looted you think it was completely pillaged and raised to the ground not not actually the case the siege of the port city of hafler by king henry v this was during 100 years war i believe the latter ended the 100 years war in the siege of the port city of half-law led by king henry v at the latter end of the hundred years war they eventually take the city again we can learn some really instructive things about this it takes time in fact it takes far longer for henry to take that city than he initially anticipated and the people the defenders inside the city were expecting a large army from the french to come and relieve them so they were holding out for reinforcements but the french they actually wanted to take that time that the siege of half law was giving them remember one of the big tactical advantages out of castle or even any strong defender point gives you his time they wanted to use that time to build a much larger army to repel the invading english and that essentially worked okay the army that the french was able to amass was huge so much so that henry didn't even want to fight them he was trying to retreat but they surrounded him and forced the battle of agincourt but we you know if you know anything about history it didn't really go well for the french okay there were many technical things that happened but if those tactical you know things weren't against the french those situations it was looking to be a bloodbath because the french army was huge and they were able to master the hugh jam because of the siege of haflor and the time it took to take the city there's an account of an englishman who is a part of this siege after they take city and they go in and loot and so he goes into you know a home in the city and this is what he lose he takes some food he's a bit hungry a blanket and a silver cross and that's it he doesn't rape anyone he doesn't burn anything to the ground okay he just takes blanket food silver cross silver cross probably worth a pretty penny the person probably feels a bit hard done by getting that stolen from them but it could have been far worse and it wasn't and one of the things you need to consider is that the army was still on the move and so the soldiers can only take what they can carry with them all right it's not like they can get massive chests of booty and stuff like that and i'm rich now it's a bit more complex than that but if they weren't moving on maybe they could have taken more so you know there's this interesting thing to try and consider so as we were able to find from the account of chateau gillard one of the most important resources for any siege is food and resources okay because more often than not it's going to be stretched out if the attackers aren't forced to attack well they don't need to but time is always an interesting thing because if you wait too long to take this castle well perhaps you could run into winter and you don't want to wage war through winter especially in the medieval period unless you have shelter if you have shelter okay you can survive it or force your troops to get through it but there are so many issues because like with so many men staying in one place oftentimes infection and disease can break out dysentery is quite a common thing that happened to medieval armies in fact it also happened to modern armies my great-grandfather in world war one suffered from dysentery and he hated it and like all the memoirs that he wrote about it was how crappy the dysentery was and how bad the food was that's kind of it although he did something fairly heroic but anyway i'm getting off topic the thing that stood out for him was the crappy food and dysentery anyway there's an opportunity for a meme what is dysentery you think explosive diary at times 100. so sometimes the attacking force don't have the luxury of just starving out the castle and they their hand is forced in that sense and they have to do an assault another crucial thing about time if the castle's holding out they can be relieved by their allies okay you know whoever is in the land that doesn't want the land taken can send troops in to attack the army and if it's larger troops well then they can't take that castle so sometimes the attacker's here and might has is forced because uh you know another army approaching winter on the way and all these things and that forces their hand to do something far more risky and aggressive and that honestly might be an assault but assaults can be repelled so sometimes they have to think of really kind of tricky inventive ways to take the castle in a faster way but you know far less detrimental to their own forces and we'll come to that but i want to talk about some other things first and that is the issue of bombardment everyone thinks that you know you want to take a castle that's easy just make a couple of trebuchets and just level it no right look there are some instances where castles were leveled okay and you know one of the most famous examples is of course warwolf the largest historical trebuchet ever built but the thing that people fail to realize is that warwolf was the exception okay there is one account of a trebuchet being that large and being you know so destructive like you know there are accounts of you know some of the defenders seeing war wolf and they're just surrendering all right like not where west after like we surrender okay and warwolf was able to level entire sections of castles but just because a part of a castle actually was leveled doesn't mean the castle has fallen i'll talk a bit more about this a little later but first i want to emphasize and explain the larger more common context of bombardment and trebuchets okay one of the most common types of trebuchets was something far smaller called attraction trebuchet and these were like only four meters high and instead of having a huge massive counterweight the counterweight was provided by men people those ropes hanging down on the opposite end these guys were holding the ropes yank and launch this these boulders now when people think bold is a boulder like this big no the most common type of projectile for these trebuchets something about this big and a projectile this big isn't going to level the wall not at all these types of trebuchets could be used as a kind of demoralizing force maybe knock down a few crenellations and luckily you might hit a couple of defenders and that could kill them again boulder that big get in your head you're dead right but it's not large enough to destroy sections of a castle wall castle walls were made to withstand these types of attacks and then when you get to okay the classic trebuchet with a counterweight it's not often times half the size and thus once again we find it's a more complex situation where yes there are instances where a trebuchet was able to demolish parts of a castle and then there are other instances where trebuchets were basically useless and had no effect remember one of the best ways to defend against a trebuchet is have a castle on such an elevation that they're out of range okay trebuchets have limited range and if they can't get close enough it's not going to work and the other thing people always assume that trebuchets are used by the aggressing force the defenders can employ trebuchets as well and this causes a big issue because if the defenders have you know bombardment capacity from inside their walls they are far more safe and secure than the aggressing force and if the aggressing force only has like wooden pallets and stuff to defend themselves that's not going to defend themselves against boulders and so therefore getting their own bombardment devices trebuchet stuff close enough to the castle that puts them in range of the you know defenders run and they can just be wiped out so these things need to be taken into consideration and just on a side note catapults were rarely used in medieval times all right i've made a whole video on this there were man canals but they're half the size that people think and stuff like there's a complex thing made a whole video truth about the catapult uh you're safer to just basically don't even put you know catapults in medieval warfare if you're role-playing if you want to be accurate okay you're fantasy i have leeway but historically far more rare than people realize there are a lot of issues regarding catapults so yeah watch my video you'll get the facts the next thing that we need to address is the fact that even if you demolish a section of the castle it doesn't mean the castle's you know is destroyed and they'll surrender and stuff there's a huge amount of rubble in the way there go still a barrier between the attackers and defenders and the defenders can employ this barrier in defense very effectively so it doesn't mean because there are many examples of historical sieges where sections of the castle were destroyed and the defenders still held out for months one of the best examples of trebuchets not being able to take down the walls of a castle is the siege of rochester by king john after bombarding his castle for ages basically gives up they're not working okay and these are trebuchets they don't penetrate the castles yet rochester a whole kind of quarter of the castle did fall but it wasn't from bombardment it was actually from another very common and honestly effective but long-term kind of strategy in you know making a castle fall and that is the tactic of sapping sapping simply means like undermining digging underneath a section of the castle setting a big fire undermining the foundations and the castle will import an ollie piper fall in essentially and that is what king john did against rochester interesting thing the defenders still held out for a couple of days afterwards of course i have to mention one of the best examples of a castle holding out against you know an attacking force even after sections of the castle was demolished was the siege of castle van berg you know that has to be one of the most epic sieges of all time where you have all these kind of foot soldiers just going out of the castle at intermediate times attacking and then retreating back to castle but one main defender one leader really holding the walls against these attackers whenever this leader came out all the aggressors just piled on the leader but he held his ground and a foot soldiers ultimately giving a noble sacrifice and it lasted so long okay even with sections of castle destroyed that the attackers they just had gave up all right i was taking too long and they just retreated and the castle stood now in regards to sapping or undermining the best historical example i can give is the siege of chateau gillard same one that i was mentioning before you know with the peasants and being ejected from the castle all that stuff chateau gillard has to be one of my all-time favorite castles now i mean it is just beautiful now it's in ruins but there are a couple of artist recreations attempting trying to show what this castle might have looked like in the medieval period and they're a little different to each other so if we look at them all we can kind of get a baseline an idea of what chateau gillard might have looked like now one of the things i want to point out about chatter glad i know you know just tangentially on this thing is have a look at the keep okay see these sections all right you know what they are but the thing about this is that these have to be the largest ones i've ever seen in a historic castle no wonder it's probably my favorite you know what they are and you know how i have to say it mashiku laishu actually some of the biggest matriculations i've ever seen on any castle it's awesome and then you have three separate baileys okay three full pack positions for this castle and so the attackers led by king phillip had to take each one one step at a time it was difficult to take this castle all right and what and one of the things i had to do first this is just amazing and so this is when we go into the kind of thinking outside the box way of taking a castle where you had to resort to some pretty darn tricky and sophisticated way to say castle because castles were good at what they did and so the first issue is that the actual main castle is on such a high elevation that the only access point is this separate bailey in front of it where a drawbridge leads to just beautiful castle design now this most outer bailey there are a couple of historical terms that you can call it you know the outer ward or the barbican there all these you know terms are correct but to get access to the main castle you need to take this outer section and it's completely separated from the main castle even if it falls they still have a lot of work ahead of them but to take this section okay that in and of itself is still on a fairly raised elevation and there's a big ditch in front of it so what philip did okay he built a wooden kind of protective you know shelter barrier on top of a road that he made right up to the edge of the ditch so it's like a wood tunnel all right to protect the attackers from all the arrow fire and things that defenders can throw down upon them and this enabled to get his troops to get close enough to fill in a section of the ditch and they filled it in with you know branches and dirt and things like that and then built the you know protective barrier over to get and this was just to get to the castle wall all right and once they get to the castle wall they start to mine underneath it they dig down get down to the foundations as deep as they can even a bit under the foundations and set a big fire just let that thing burn and they succeed they cause a whole section of the castle wall to collapse and fall and then after that it's a big just assault but they have a protective you know walkway right up to the walls that they can send their troops and just overwhelm this opening and they take this section of the castle so this is a great historical example of sapping or undermining against a castle but the issue is it takes time this is a very long-term kind of strategy and if you are restricted in time as an attacker if there is a defending force coming to relieve the siege and to help the defenders and stuff like that you won't have the time to do this you can't do it so you know this is a difficult thing to do but it can be employed when you have that time and you need to take the castle and you just can't starve him out because i don't take too long and so now philip he's got the barbican section of the castle but they have two more baileys to take over the interesting thing about this john you know lousy john added a section to the castle like a chapel part to the castle that was connected to the walls that had a vulnerability a window low enough for you know the attackers to climb in and through now this is speculation but this is what they most likely think the the more common account is that the uh french climbed in through a privy okay but the actual fact that people you know who have studied this say that the preview account was more likely a false account of how they took this section of the bailly because they didn't want to be seen as defiling a holy place to take the castle which is most likely what happened we climbed in through this window on the chapel sneaking in lowering the drawbridge and opening the front gates there might have been some fighting to get there but by opening the gates while the french they're right outside they have the barbicans on the other side and with that gate lowered they run in and they can take that section and then they have the last bayley and then to take the inner bayley of the castle they bombarded it according to the accounts that i've been out to find uh enough to actually collapse in a section of this castle and as soon as they collapse they rushed in as fast they can before the defenders could properly retreat to the keep and then the castle was finally taken enabling the full conquering of normandy afterwards so there is a really intriguing stuff i can learn it from this account and it's just such an interesting one about the difficulty in taking a castle and i want to point out how they are able to take the second ward or bailey of the castle through sneaking in because this is the other kind of main way you'd want to take a castle and honestly the most effective and efficient way if you can get away with it and it's subterfuge okay opening up the doors from the inside because castles are made with big walls to just stop that but if you can undermine that fundamental function the castle is going to fall without too much difficulty so this subterfuge thing happens a lot for instance the siege of quarf castle just a phenomenal historical account where the lady of the castle was defending it with servants and i was like her and 40 servants defending against the forces like 200 and they held out for you know they were doing it they were doing it to the point where they were actually bolstered by the addition of a hundred troops into the castle but the thing is there was someone amongst those hundred troops that were not supposed to be there they were allied with the aggressors the attackers and they got you know accepted into the castle through the sally port so what did they do during the night they opened up the sally port which is the back door of the castle to the enemy and they were able to come in and take the castle and just another the interesting thing about you know the whole looting thing like that the lady was released okay kept her land kept her titles no harm done to her and defenders because the attackers were so impressed by the bravery of the defenders even though the attackers had lost heaps of men in trying to keep take this castle they were so impressed that they let her go free with a good good good on you good fight kind of thing so as we can see from looking at historical accounts and such the a castle siege was never a standard thing where it always went the way it was expected i mean of course in some situation it might have been a simple matter of just you know the attackers starving the defenders out and they surrender and the castle is taken stuff like that but even then there is a lot more complexity to what is going on through the defenders minds okay they are they're trying to resist for a certain amount of time but are they getting short on food is a sin amongst the ranks do they don't think they're gonna get relief from an ally coming to help them out and stuff like that and so all this would be going through their minds before they're surrendering and what kind of conditions of surrender okay because there'll be negotiation happening and one of the things that the attackers will be saying if you surrender and not force us to attack and lose our men we will give you uh we'll treat you better okay we'll let you go free but if you force us to take you with the castle by force and sacrifice our men well then no quarter we're going to slaughter everyone inside which did happen in certain circumstances but that was kind of as a retaliation in forcing the attackers to commit their men and lose lives and if their defenders just surrendered that wouldn't have happened and then if they don't actually you know follow through with their threat that means next time they attack a castle their threats aren't going to be taken seriously and so they're really then kind of forced and obligated to slaughter everyone like they said they would so hopefully next time they won't have to commit so many men and lose in the sea stuff like so it's this beautiful sophisticated complex thing and i hope i've done you know an adequate enough job trying to cover the complexities and the sophistication of what medieval sieges were like and how effective castles really were because in all these situations you know the common running theme it was never easy okay unless they really got lucky where they snuck someone in they opened it up and stuff like that but most sieges are long affairs that are take time take lies and stuff like that and it's difficult castles are amazing they did their job that's why they were built because they were effective in every situation almost a castle is fulfilling its job it is delaying the attacking force because they can't just roll over the land take everything no they've got to deal with this castle because if they don't or there's a defending force there they can send out skirmish against us snip it out hills and stuff like that get reinforcements hunker down they can survive the winter ease and stuff like that and so it is so essential just to take this castle if you want more information on how castles really filled their role like why were they built well i've made a whole video on it why were castles built okay and i cover their tactical utility in that video and so i hope you have enjoyed and of course i hope to see you again so until that time [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 1,400,584

Keywords: castle, castles, siege, sieging, sieges, bombardment, sapping, tunelling, trebuchet, catapult, tower, architecture, history, historical, medieval, knight, longsword, sword, swords, crenelations, crenilations, crenulations, machicolations, keep, donjon, game of thrones, lord of the rings, skyrim, rpg, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, roleplaying, role playing, game, video, top 10, top ten, how were, gatehouse, middle ages, warfare, knight's

Id: Bc2o9mknM-Y

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DrStatisk]

I have the book How to read Castles, which is a small treasure trove of how castles were planned and built through different areas of the world from the 10th to the 16th century. Recommended!

[u/fang_xianfu]

One thing I find weird about the YouTube talking-about-stuff format is how much better it is if you bump the speed up to 1.5-2x. If you turn it back down, they sound comically slow, like they're doing an Eeyore impersonation.

Shad usually only gets turned up to 1.25x or 1.5x, so deserves props for that.

Matt doesn't really need turning up at all ;)

[u/linuxphoney]

Shad is a super smart guy. I love his stuff.

[u/Laranna]

Shad is great :) doesn’t play much Dnd but i think he and Matt could have some interesting conversations given enough time. Hell id love to see them just need out over books they’ve both read