Names and terms of a medieval CASTLE's parts

greetings I'm shad and welcome to my video on the names and terminology of the components and parts of castles now I love castles so I've a lot to share with you and I hope you're going to enjoy and ready goes I have a present for you tada this is honor guard and this has been a passion project of mine for quite a while now and it's not done yet but the outside is finished enough for the purposes of this video it has been a very big project and I've been doing it all for you guys not really been doing it for me because I have castle so even if I wasn't doing this video it would have made this model anyway because it's awesome castles are awesome but the YouTube videos that I have been intending to make on castles have certainly been a motivator in me getting this model done and of course I'll be showing you some real-world examples of each individual castle part that I will be defining for you it's just that having this 3d model helps me out immensely because I can really show you the specifics of each of the other castles components okay to kick us off what is a castle now addressing that question could be a whole video in and of itself so let's summarize and understand it that it is a fortified medieval structure alright but more than just fortified it needs to be of a particular size for it to be classed at a castle and it also needs to have very specific defensive features but once you have those defensive features you could rightly say that you have a castle and that's all the term you really need to define or identify this structure let's go to the castle or get in the castle because there's only one main structure it's fully fortified okay it's all made of stone really sold and everything like that when you say get to the castle people know what you're talking about and that's the term you need to identify this one structure and this is kind of the beginning part of a castle now there's been some confusion as to what defines like this Civic definition of a castle is it a fortified stone structure or does it have to have a wall around it for it then to be a castle because generally this fortified stone structure people would say no this is a keep it's not a castle it's only a castle when you put a wall around it I actually kind of disagree with that the term castle has evolved if it ever was that specific it's evolved and we identify any fortified medieval stone structure to be a castle specifically if it has those identifying defensive features that castles have and so yes I would very much call a defensive structure that has all these features even without a wall a castle but when you add a wall to that structure well when you refer to the castle you're referring to that single structure and the wall around it as well you're referring to the whole thing and so when you say get to the castle you're just really saying get behind the walls now you're not saying get inside the main defensive building or of the whole castle and so you need a new term to define the main defensive building the main habitable place where people sleeping everything separate to the walls and so when that happens you would now call this main building part they keep separate to the walls and so out of necessity you need a different term so now you could say get inside they keep pointing to a castle that has a wall and someone would know specifically what you're saying when you're referring to the castle if you say get inside the cars we just mean get behind the walls so a castle is essentially a keep but you only need to define it as a keep separate to a castle when it has a wall around it and so this is the first term that you need to understand in regards to the names and terminology of the components and parts of a castle but there's a couple of other parts of the castle that need terms to identify what they are for instance the area within the walls that is not they keep okay this is the walking area the open area inside the walls this is called the Bailey it has also been called the ward but Bailey is the more common term but if you hear Ward or Bailey Bailey's award an award is a Bailey there are people who try and be a bit more specific that no no no there's something it defines a difference between a ward and a Bailey they really the same you see because you can actually have more than one Bailey if a castle has internal walls separating parts of the castle from another then you would have say are the East Bailey or the West Bailey if there is a full secondary wall out so their Castle has two walls and the one there is a full secondary ring and generally this the furthest out wall will be lower than the internal one the walking area that is between the two walls the external and the internal wall that would generally be called the Lower Bailey and the open area inside the internal walls will be called the upper Bailey or inner Bailey and really it's just a simple descriptive term and several ones have been used a quick thing to also point out is that castles also had other structures within themselves separate to what you would consider the castle for instance they would sometimes have a separate blacksmith within the Bailey and this blacksmith could actually be a stone structure that's built as a connection officer to the walls or the keep and stuff like that they would have a stables and barracks as just a whole number of other kind of buildings that can be included in the castle and really the more of these buildings that you have the more fully functional a castle you would be out and maintained I'm not really going to define what those are because those are optional they weren't always included like for instance a chapel there's another one what this video is mainly going to do is defining the terms of the more common castle components because remember a castle doesn't have to have a wall it can just be a defensive structure by itself and in that sense it won't have a stables or a chapel or a blacksmith or any of those things now the best place for a castle is always on a hill okay the higher upper castle the better defensive advantage it has and it also grants a much greater field of view to be able to look for possible attackers or invaders that are marching in on your lands now if a nice big hill wasn't available and you need to make the castle on flat ground the next best thing that you can add to a castle to improve its defensive capability is a moat a moat is not better than Hill okay it's the second best option you would always pick a hill over a moat but if you can't get a hill that's when you need a moat and you don't necessarily need it but a moat really helps and the moat is of course a deep broad ditch that is dug around the castle and it doesn't have to be filled with water but it can be so it can either be dry or filled but it is specifically defined as a deep broad ditch dug around the castle this of course made it extremely more difficult for attackers to approach the castle and of course restricted the ability to move siege equipment all the way up to the walls of a castle now regardless if a castle was built on a hill or it had a moat dug around it you always want to make it extremely difficult for attackers to get through the weak point in the castle and one of the weakest points of the castle is the door because you need people to get going be able to go in and out of a castle so of course it's going to have an entrance point and that is always going to be the weak point of the castle so you want to make it that part most difficult to get to and this is where the drawbridge comes in the drawbridge was a bridge that could be raised and lowered in front of the entry of a castle now there are two more common types of draw bridges that were made as a part of castles the first is a windless drawbridge and this is a drawbridge that has a rope or a chain connected to a windlass which is basically a fixed winch and you bait and you raise the drawbridge by turning the windlass the other common type of drawbridge is a counterweight drawbridge now a counterweight drawbridge was a drawbridge which had its ends connected to beams that extended out of the castle and the other end of the beam acted as a counterbalance and indeed weights could be added to the other end of the beam to increase the counter balancing effect and this made raising and lowering the drawbridge much easier and that's actually the feature and advantage of a counterweight drawbridge over a windless drawbridge is that they can be raised and lowered at a much quicker rate the problem with them is that you need rooms for those beams to be out of tilt in and out if you don't have enough room for them while a windlass takes up less room you just need a place to be able to put the winch basically after the drawbridge what you will often find in front of the main castle entry point is either a wood or steel kind of grater more often wood but heavy wood sometimes brace with steel and there is the occasion that they'll made out of metal and it would be more like iron in that case but there would be March every if I made out of steel but anyway this grate is called the portcullis able to be raised and lowered in front of the main castle entrance or really any part any entry point of the castle okay one of the other big kind of structures that you will generally see on castles it's a very one of them what main common ones and really any castle that has a wall it needs this structure and that is the gatehouse the gatehouse is a very important part of a castle because it is essentially one of the weak points of a castle okay because it's much easier to get through the entrance of a castle than to knock down a wall and people need to get in and out of castles so there has to be an opening somewhere so fortifying the gatehouse becomes very very important first of all a castle can have more than one gatehouse and if it has more than one gatehouse generally the more fortified gatehouse will be called the Barbican now Barbican is an interesting term in regards to castles because it can also refer to something that isn't a gatehouse okay if there is an extended defensive kind of part on the key or if the castle doesn't have a wall okay and it has an extension kind of fortified area where the entrances that would also be called the Barbican so it is an elaborate more fortified section to a a castles entrance whether that is the entrance to the keep or the entrance to the whole castle itself if it has a wall around it and that would be at where the gatehouse is so a gatehouse can be a Barbican and it cannot be but the terms are kind of interchangeable and so you don't need to get too specific between the differences but if you did want even a little bit of clarity well there's more precedent to call a gatehouse a Barbican if there's more than one gatehouse and you would call the outer most or more fortified gatehouse the Barbican now GateHouse's were often complemented by inbuilt towers and so you wouldn't call the tower parts of a gate house separately because when you're through to the gate house you're also referring to everything that's built in onto the gate house but if the tower seems more separate and you needed to call something different you call that a tower separate to the gate house but you'll define it more on a case-by-case basis all right now let's look at the walls first of all every single thing that is part of or connected to the walls which includes the towers everything that the walls themselves and the towers these are all called the battlements okay so when you say get to the battlements you could be referring to just get on top of the wall or get to a tower these are all the battlements and the battlements really are the most iconic features of a castle you could really say it is the battlements that make a castle a castle because you can also have battlements on a keep you don't have to have walls to have battlements and if you just had a castle without a wall and you say get to the battlements you'll be saying get to the top of the castles or any area that is on the castle in which you can fire arrows and defend it from but it is those features that really define a castle to be a castle so the battlements are very very important so let's define what they are now yes you have the walls the walls are part of the battlements so we're going to look at the walls specifically and one of the main parts of the walls is the areas which you can walk to and fro on okay these what the walkable areas of walls it is the rampart or the ramparts and that's fairly straightforward but let's look at the one of the coolest and most sexy parts of the battlements and this is the crenellations that run along the wall that face the outside and yes that's what they call they're called the crenellations crenellations are awesome defensive features okay it provides cover for people who are shooting arrows from the castle and also a place where you can lean out and then shoot down and so that's the big feature of crenellations if it offers full protection or half protection and so it even offers half protection when you're attacking back thanks to their design now the crenellations are made up of two two objects that are placed one next to the other in a repeating pattern okay the larger part the larger stone that provides full cover when you stand behind it is called the Merlin Merlin Merlin again sorry for my accent and the lower part in between the Merlin's is called the Crennel so I'll just repeat that okay so the tooth of the crenellations the part that Iike gives you full cover that is the Merlin and the app section that dips down that is the Crennel and this makes up the crenellations that are a part of the a castles battlements now sometimes there can be a vertical kind of opening in a Merlin and this is called an arrow loop or arrow slit and as you might be able to guess its to shoot arrows through but our own loops or arrow slits I just put on Merlin's okay they can be put on any area on a castle and in fact the more generally the better but you put them where they're needed and these create the ability to shoot arrows upon the enemy while giving basically complete protection on the soldier that is trying to defend the castle or some stuff now the next thing that is a part of that a castles battlements is something called the hoarding or the hoardings okay now the hoardings were a wooden structure most often temporary that protruded out from walls and towers to allow projectiles to be dropped or shot down on attackers while offering full cover in front of the soldiers that are defending the castle so full cover in front of them and above them now if this wooden structure was built atop a tower it would be called a horde or the Horde and if this wooden structure was built to run atop the length of a castle wall it would be called the hoardings now hoardings could be left on castles permanently though it seems that they were more often only added during or before sieges and oftentimes castles will be built with provision for hoardings to be added now this is a really interesting thing because the offensive features of hoarding was okay so the things that hoardings provided remember be extending further out from the also he could shoot down on enemies attacking the castle okay these features were eventually architectural II combined with the design of castle walls and towers and when this was done these offensive features weren't called hoardings anymore they were called Michiko lations and yeah it's a really weird word but that's it a Michiko Latian or Michiko lessons and so a Michiko Latian was an opening due to an extension of the upper part of the wall which allowed the soldiers that defenders of the castle to shoot through and down upon enemies attacking it now to get a magician first you need what are called core balls now a core ball was is basically a stone support that extends out from the wall of a castle or the flat of a castle wall to support the crenellations above it and so what happened to castle walls the crenellations were then extended further out from the top of the wall to allow an opening between the crenellations and the ramparts and those were the Michiko lations now it's funny because this is a very very specific offensive feature but it ends up creating such a beautiful architectural style that has become one of the main design features and styles of castles in general but they weren't ever added just to look cool they were added for a very functional offensive purpose and it just ended up looking awesome as well and so when castles included the offensive features at hoardings provided there was no need for the hoardings themselves anymore except for having cover from above and the way to fix that is just to add a roof on top of the castle walls and so when that happened hoardings became obsolete they were no longer needed but there is still precedence to call the upper parts of castle towers and walls that have the crenellations extended out to provide Michiko lations and having Roose atop of them there is a precedent to call that type of design element of castles even when they're permanently built out of stone there's a precedence to still call them the hoardings or the Horde if it's a top and so all these things that I've been talking about can be applied to castle walls and castle towers as well so you have the ramparts the creme elations which are comprised of Merlin's and Crenn ELLs and then you have hoardings which defensive features were eventually combined into castle walls and towers as matriculation z' which was supported by corbels sorry if I'm butchering the pronunciation but this is why I'm demonstrating the words as I say them so you can read them and try and figure it out for yourself how they're pronounced matriculation should not be confused with murder holes murder holes are actually something completely different so then what is a murder hole it is an opening above an area which would trap an enemy within so if an enemy is trying to get into a castle wherever a3 and you know generally it'll be through whatever entry point is in the castle so this would be on the gatehouse but murder halls can also be found within the main castle body itself like the keep or a really any structure any point which causes the enemy to stop at an area that's where you want to murder a hole and a murder hole is an opening in the ceiling above whatever area this happens to be that will stop or make an enemy pause and then their name really describes themself because you can just rain down death upon the enemy if they get funneled into one of these areas and so that can be with boiling hot oil with massive big rocks or just arrows you just rain down death upon those enemies hence murder whole sorry in most castle entry points like even into the keep itself or to any important area the first room you enter into would usually be a stop-gap of some kind meaning you just finally burst through the front door to the key and then you enter into a room that really has nothing in it apart from another door and this could be called the entry hall or many other things and one of the common things in these rooms are murder holes right above now this of course wasn't the case with every Castle but it is most certainly a very effective defensive feature to have so the example that I have here on honor guard is at main gate house which is the Barbican because once they are able to force lower the drawbridge and then get open that portcullis they run in and then guess what there's another portcullis that they have to deal with and they're track they're stuck okay so while they're trying to deal with that second portcullis guess what's above them murder holes so that's what a murder hole is not a mature collation they kind of fill the same purpose but it's in location that defines the difference a matriculation is an opening thanks to an extension of the castles crenellations which allows things to be dropped down from the castle wall directly upon enemies assaulting the walls where a murder hole is not on walls it is in ceilings now another big feature of castles is of course the castle towers and we've really covered all the features of castle towers in regards to the battlements that are put on them because they're the same as the type of battlements that are put on walls now towers should not be confused with turrets a turret is a much smaller structure and a turret is again another way to protrude a platform further out from the castle wall or tower or keep where a soldier can stand and defend firing things down upon attackers another name for turrets is AB artisan now in regards to towers there are a lot of different kind of names to define the different types of towers on a castle and you would use the names depending on the type of Castle so again these terms would be applied on a more case-by-case basis there isn't blanket terms that this is always this type of Castle it's more and where this caliph sits in regards to how close it is to the gatehouse or they keep on this specific type of castle for instance they're two nearest towers to the gatehouse can sometimes be called the flanking towers the watchtower would generally be the tallest tower and indeed another term for a very tall tower is the donjon that can be confusing because the donjon is not actually that the whole tower itself it is actually more referring to the highest room in the tower but if the donjon happens to be within a tower that tower sometimes been referred to as the donjon holy as well the thing about the donjon it doesn't have to be in a tower the donjon is a name that refers to the highest useable a livable room of the castle so the donjon could be in in the keep if the highest most livable room of the castle happens to be in the keeper not the towers then the donjon would be in the keep but if the tower is higher or then the donjon would be in the tower because the donjon is specifically the highest room of the castle and because the highest room of the castle has the best view it is generally been considered to have a bit more prestige it is one of the nicer rooms of a castle but at the same token it is also one of the most protected rooms of a castle because it is the hardest room to get to you need to go through all the other levels of the castle to get to the donjon and at the same token it is therefore the hardest room to escape from so what happened often is that either the Lords of the castle would take the donjon for themselves whatever they could that asleep in it or it could be one of their fancy sitting rooms or the Salar or whatever because of the nice view you was a really nice room but then if they didn't want to have the hassle of climbing all the stairs to get to the donjon or not they would pick a more convenient room for them to live in and they'll use the donjon for something else and what that would generally be is as a prison they would throw captives in the dungeon because it was the hardest room to escape from and this is where the word dungeon comes from because the term donjon started to be associated with the place where you throw captives and then as castle design started to evolve a bit and they started to get deeper under Crofts then it became even more practical to throw the prisoners in the deep dark parts of the castle because they became just as difficult to escape from as the dungeon edit changed from being the highest point in the castle to the deepest lowest point in the castle and that's where dungeon comes from and finally we have the postin now the postern is basically the back door you always wanted kind back up you know entry and escape point to a castle because if one area was completely blocked off and you know besieged there was always good to have a backup now these posters were usually very very small and because I was smart so small they are much easier to defend you could put in a really thick metal grate or whatever to lock it in place and stuff like that and so the postern could be as difficult to breach as the gatehouse itself and even if it was breached it would be incredibly easy to defend because it was just a single door passageway more generally and so you could just have one guy defend it quite effectively because you'll only have to defend er it against one attacker because only one person could fit through at a time and there you go this is the terminology the names for the components and part of castles now I actually haven't covered everything because you could go into extreme specific detail to every kind of minut thing in regards to the external features in a castle but these are the main ones or at least I hope I've covered the main features if you feel I've missed something please please let me know in the comments I really hope you've enjoyed and if you have enjoyed this video well guess what I'll be making more because I love castles what you can look forward to in the future is a video on proper castle design okay what design features make a castle a better castle and that's going to be a lot of fun I'll also be doing a video on the names and terminology of the internal layout of a castle so the internal rooms and other things like that and this will also kind of combine a bit into proper castle design because the layer internal layout of a castle is also important to consider in regards to just designing it properly I'll also be making a video on on the making of the 3d model that I have had the joy of using throughout this video because it's been a really long process making this thing and I think you would find it really interesting the thought processes that I needed to go through in putting this design together because this is 100% my design every single thing ok I'll also be putting up some high resolution images of this castle on my deviantART page so please keep an eye on my deviantART page to see those images when they come up I already have some castle images up from a previous castle that I have modded and this castle is called Keystone so there's some good fun castle stuff there if you're interested to check it out and of course if there's any other things about castles that you would like me to talk about please request them in the comments because I love castles and I have no objection making more videos on castles because I love castles as much as swords and you can really see how much I love swords based on the videos about swords that I've already made so so yeah castles just love them thank you very much for watching I truly appreciate your attention I wish you all the best and until next time farewell

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 357,372

Rating: 4.9534059 out of 5

Keywords: castle, fantasy, history, historical, fortress, stronghold, battlement, battlements, bailey, ward, castle's, gatehouse, barbican, bartizan, drawbridge, portcullis, murder hole, machicolation, machicolations, crenellations, merlon, crenel, arrow, slit, loop, don jon, dungeon, medieval, middle ages, shad, shadmbrooks, shad brooks, SketchUp, 3d, model, 3d model, modelling

Id: ZBn7f3H-eqM

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2016