What did wooden castles look like and how were they built?

this episode of Chen diversity is brought to you by my stupendous awesome supporters on patreon if you'd like to support China versity on patreon visit patreon.com forward slash shadow versity [Music] greetings I'm shad and if you didn't know many of the castles that were built during the medieval period were actually made out of wood this often surprises people who don't know much about castles and I've dedicated a whole video on to this subject explaining how this could have come about I also get to speculate in that video how effective they would have been in the economic kind of social reasons as to why you need to build a wooden castle instead of a stone one so all that information is in that video and suffice to say for now one of the biggest reasons why many people don't know this fact is that wooden castles don't really survive the stone once had and of course if you are more wealthy you would build a stone castle over a wooden one because stirring of course is a much stronger building material one of the interesting mysteries about wooden castles because none have survived is what did they look like and how were they built and I'm not talking about the early modern bailey castles because we actually have a little bit more information on those ones i'm talking about the wooden castles that were built during the same time in which stone castles were also very prominent what did those castles look like and how were they built well that is the very subject of this video now ultimately I don't know and I don't think anyone knows but we can speculate try and backwards engineer this logic based on what we know of medieval technology and the type of construction you would naturally be pushed towards when building something out of wood in fact many people have tried to figure this out and have build some really cool and interesting looking wooden castles to show what they might have looked like and when I first learnt about wooden castles in depth my radars always kind of been on the lookout for images of wooden castles and I've actually developed a decent size of reference stockpile of images and with these images in my own background in architecture in the building industry because I actually worked in the building industry for it I'm there I've put a lot of thought into how these wooden castles might have been built and honor share some of my thoughts and conclusions with you because as I've thought about it I've actually come to a conclusion that's kind of different to many of the experimental wooden castles that have been built in the modern day I'm going to be analyzing how you would want to build each part of the castle from the walls to the towers ending with the key finishing off this video by combining everything together and showing you what a truly grand and glorious wooden castle could have looked like according to my own opinion and study in the medieval period so to begin with it's going to be a balance of the amount of work you need to put in to make this wooden castle balanced against how strong and effective the building will be and in its finished product and so no matter what you need to get the wood which is chopping it down getting off the branch is a sufferer now you have a workable log if you can do something with this log and achieve the same effect as you would have achieved if you squared it up and made a beam out of it there's no point in making a beam out of it you can just use it as a log saves your time yet into regards to how strong it will be in the building that hasn't changed the only real difference that happens if you were to square up this log is in appearance now appearance is important but I've actually come across the way in which the medieval people would have been now to make their a wooden castles look amazing without needing to square up their logs for a very significant reason and I'll explain what this reason is a bit later on the video because without it yes squared up dressed logs look much better than just raw round ones but if you are just after the pure utility and function of a castle actually feel most of the timber components of a castle would have been made out of round logs not necessarily square beams when you need a square beam of course or didn't squared up and used like that but a lot of the type of timber we see being used in these modern wooden castle constructions is it's all with squared up timber I'm not saying that's impossible I just feel it have been a lot of work for not really as much of a benefit and I'll explain this a little bit more further on in the video but to start off with let's explore how round logs can be you used in building castle walls there are two main methodologies that you can employ in this regard and that is laying the logs horizontally flat or putting them in vertically for a wall putting logs in horizontally is kind of a problem because how do you get them to stay on top of one another securely early way that I could see you could really get away with this is if you were to put the logs in between two braces of some kind the most effective type would be vertical logs on either side and these horizontal logs just kind of sandwiched in between and then held in place the problem with this style of construction is that it wouldn't be as secure compared to if you just stood up the logs vertically if an enemy really wanted to take down a timber wall and it was made in the previous way that I had shown horizontal logs held in by vertical beams on either side these vertical upright logs are weak points in the wall and all the enemy has to do is focus on those points and you could take down a fairly sizable chunk of the wall in contrast to this timber logs placed in vertically when one of these logs are taken out only that log is removed from the wall that doesn't take out a whole section the other advantage to logs being placed vertically is that it is much easier to incorporate crenellations at the top in regards to ramparts you could add ramparts to horizontal or vertical ones just as easy as the other but the crenellations so much easier all you have to do is alternate the height of the timber logs at the top and here we have a very effective crenelated timber wall with a rampart behind this in my mind is one of the most effective styles of construction but there is a kind of an issue how strong would this wall be well it's certainly strong enough to prevent people from getting through inside the castle with any amount of ease but if someone was really committed and they had enough protection whether by shields or other types of cover they could get up to the wall and with the big axe they could essentially chop through the wall so you could try and fix this by making it thicker many layers of timber logs or you could place dirt behind it and this is where I think one of the other more prominent styles of timber castle constructions would have been employed now you could use the front wooden wall as kind of like a retaining wall to a raised bit of Earth behind and this does seem to be the that used in many early kind of hill forts having dirt behind the wall makes it far more defensible than it was before in fact it could even defend quite well against bombardment it would still be a fairly big weakness in regards to everything made out of timber in the medieval period and that's in regards to rotting if timber sits in water for extended periods of time and will eventually rot away with proper care and maintenance it could still last a fairly good while fifty maybe even a hundred or so years but if it's not cared for and the timber is left in thick moisture it can actually rot after a couple of years quite quickly but then you'll just need to replace the rotted timber with new ones and so you could still keep your wooden castle in a fairly good situation with continued maintenance but what if you didn't have a raised bit of Earth or for a good hill to be encased in a wooden kind of barrier on the outside well another method is having two retaining walls made out of vertically standing timber logs sandwiching dirt in between this would give you a very effective thick wall that's fully defensible and quite effective at resisting bombardment and if I was to build a castle out of timber this style of wall would be the one that I personally would choose of course if the noble water who was building this castle in the medieval period didn't want to vote the time in an effort of digging up essentially a dirt wall with wood on either side you could still do an effective timber wall made out of vertically standing logs with a rampart at the top and crenellations and maybe you might want to even double up the layers of wood to make it even more difficult for someone to try and chop through and let me just say that I don't think chopping through a wall like this would be particularly easy it would make a lot of noise so whoever's in the castle would be alerted to you know you attacking the wall and they would easily be at a throw down large rocks and shoot at you from above and I'm not sure how many shields you need to protect yourself adequately you to eventually chop through the wall you probably could if you were motivated enough and had enough protection and had enough men assaulting the castle in this way but it's not a clear-cut easy thing so this is one way in which a wooden castle wall might look but I do think we're missing something rather significant and this is the same thing that I think is missing from many of the experimental wooden castles that have been built in the modern day what am I talking about well it's mildly associated with one of the kind of obvious weaknesses of having something built out of wood and it's the fact that wood burns now you can't actually fireproof wood the way you make it fire resistant is by adding a fire resistant material on top of this so you could lacquer it or you could give it a full rendered coating and this could be some type of plaster or even mortar because guess what people did in the medieval period - even their stone castles they rendered the outside and then whitewashed them making these really impressive beautiful shining white castles I made a whole video explaining why people in the medieval period whitewashed their castles on the outside and that whitewash was a type of rendered coating and so if you wanted to know why they did that with stone please go check out this video as to why you would want to render a timber castle in the same method that you could render a stone castle well some of the benefits are quite obvious it would of course act as a fire proofing layer it would protect the timber from water damage helping it preserve and last much longer and another thing that's also equally important to consider is the medieval aesthetic of the time they prefer a clean smooth faces on their castles and for wood you could even understand this even more so because when something is just raw timber it does have kind of a cheaper look to it and if you're a noble I mean you're rich enough to build a wooden castle that's far more wealthy than any of the peasants living around you and so when we look at this timber wall adding a render overtop actually makes a lot of sense what does this render made out of well it could be medieval mortar which is just a mixture of sand quicklime and water but it would have more likely have been dog which is a mixture of dirts foreign dung and was used in very large quantities in medieval architecture this is how they filled in the walls in between the main wooden frame of most medieval style homes and again I have a whole video on this subject explaining why they did this and just wait until I show you what some of these wooden towers look like when they are rendered and there's a big difference in their appearance they look great but we're gonna get there cuz next I want to explore the different methods of construction that could have been employed in making the towers of a wooden castle now towers are interesting because you'd have the defensive towers that would be a part of the outer walls but then you would also have they keep and they keep depending on when in the medieval period you're looking at was oftentimes just a tower in and of itself and so in looking at the possible construction methods in how these towers were built it's gonna be mostly the same between the outer defensive towers and the primary keep the only real difference being in size or footprint of the main key or great tower and so in looking at this once again the cheapest type of timber that we could get our hands on would be just round logs and the other consideration once again horizontally or vertically and this is where we run into a different kind of situation trying to make a tall tower out of vertically standing logs is actually more difficult than if they were laid horizontally there are far more limitations one you're limited in height by the height of the tree that the log came from and as soon as you reach the full height of those logs you're gonna need to do some kind of connecting embracing method heaven add more logs on top of it or you could just lay them horizontally in kind of a log cabin form and these are very complementary for a square shape because trees grow in straight lines generally and then you can actually build them much higher than if they were placed vertically now there is of course a way to make a tower out of vertically standing logs and of course one of the advantages of this is that you can alternate the item the top of those logs to give us crenellations but still it would need to be made in sections due to the limitation of the height of the logs and then they most definitely have to be braced because as soon as you get to the second section there is nothing anchoring those logs in place like they were on the ground level because you can just sink him into the ground and then they have a very stable foundation but the second section not so much so what's holding them in place you have to have bracing and you'll need to make it section by section until you get to the top and this is one way in which you could build a wooden Tower with vertically standing logs I personally think this style of construction would result in a tower that would be far weaker than if you were to lay the logs Hori honestly the logs would be held in place in a fairly secure manner by an interlocking overlaying method that we see in log cabins there would be a weakness in horizontal movement the taller that this building gets but the way that you fix that is by adding vertical logs which will act as a type of bracing to the horizontal movement of the logs at a lake horizontally and another advantage of this horizontal method is that it is very very easy to add in intermediate floors you just stick the timber berries in between one of the horizontal layers that simple of course once we get to the top adding in crenellations is gonna be a little bit weird and tricky easiest method that I could come up with is to have the outer wall stand up a little bit above the final floor or ceiling and so this would make a kind of barrier in which you can place vertically standing logs at a group together to make the individual lines and there we have defensive crenellations atop this wooden Tower now it's interesting this timber tower does look a little rough around the edges it's just a raw wooden Tower made out of logs but now check out what this would look like if you were to give it a full coating with a sand and quick climb based render suddenly this tower looks pretty darn impressive and like I mentioned at the beginning of this video squared up worked timber of course look nice but when you're putting a render over top that doesn't matter anymore you can have this castle look just as nice even if you built it out of rough round logs and then you'd only need to use work Timbers in those sections that truly require it and another massive advantage to rendering the whole outside of this wooden Tower is that attackers wouldn't be out at all right away if it's wood or not because stone castles were also rendered and whitewashed and so from the outside this looks like a fully fortified defended stone tailor it's a castle and so once again I think the great missing piece to us trying to figure out and backwards engineer wooden castles is rendering on the outside I have not seen it done once in any of these experimental towers and castles that have been built in many different places around the world give them a render on the outside now of course one of the weaknesses of this wooden tower is that your field of fire standing behind these crenellations are limited when attackers get adjacent to the at its base you guys know how he fix this if you watch my channel you know exactly what it is come on say it with me people modulation ah of course how do we add machicolations onto a wooden tower well I mean it's not too difficult you just need wooden supports which would act exactly like the stone corbelling that we see on stone castles which of course then support the battlements on top of it which has been extended and moved up and over outwards from the line of the wall beneath and then the gaps in between yes we have our magic you lations and with these battlements actually feel you'd almost need to make them out of squared up more kind of finished Timbers and now check out this wooden tower with the more impressive matriculated Battlement that is sitting off the line of the wall beneath rendered look at this thing it looks awesome and easily as impressive if not functionally as impressive but just visually impressive as a stone tower would look like being remnant and another point to consider in this discussion about modern castles is why didn't wooden castles appear in medieval our work nearly as prominently as we see regular castles appearing it could be to the artists of course only paint the castles of the rich but what if some of these castles that are appearing in medieval artwork are actually wood but you can't tell because they've been rendered and whitewashed on the surface take a look at this medieval artwork depicting a castle and a fortified city behind and if you're wondering yes this is a castle it's got a half bridge leading out to a raised drawbridge with a full dry moat surrounding it have a look at the supports to the upper portion of this castle those are not stone cobbles those wooden beams wooden beams are insufficient to support a stone wall therefore we can deduce that at least the upper path of this building is actually wood and not stone but does it look like wood no it doesn't look like what it doesn't even look like stone either because it has a render on the surface this is evidence that the wooden portions of castles were indeed rendered and whitewashed and if the upper half was built this way it is possible that the bottom half was built as well now there are many cases which castles actually half-and-half where the bottom was stone in the upper portion especially the portion that sits over the edge of the bottom half that can commonly be made out of wood but the significant part about this is that is upper half wooden sections when they are depicted in modern visualizations of castles they are left as raw wood where this artwork indicates quite strongly in my opinion that these upper sections were rendered and that then therefore sets a precedent that wooden castles were rendered and whitewashed on the surface now regards this image there's no real way to tell if the bottom half of this castle is actually made out of wood it could be made out of stone but that's actually kind of the point of rendering it could actually be wood bad anyone attacking it might assume that it's stone and therefore not take advantage of some of the inherent weaknesses that wood has and at the very least this image is evidence that wooden castles were rendered that's pretty cool we're discovering something here and so now let's look at the construction of a king now they keep it's not gonna be too much different from the construction of a tower just a little bit bigger and of course the top because for a keep you're gonna want a roof on it not necessarily a crenelated Battlement maybe you want both but the way to get the best of both worlds is to actually have defences and a roof combine together and so the main supporting walls of this keep in my opinion would be made out of horizontally laid Timbers and then extending dapple floor is a simple matter of having the top four logs just be much longer than the ones underneath and then you just add more in line from one another and we have our extended kind of upper floor to make this upper floor sit as stable as possible on these extended kind of bearers I do think you would want to make it out of squared Timbers in this regard the internal vertically standing logs are acting as kind of bracing for a wooden wall around it can easily sit above that wall and they would stand there as the main supports for the roof which gives us a very iconic and historical medieval style roof on a regular building the main supports of the roof are the external walls but you do not want the weight of a roof sitting on these walls that have been extended because what's holding them up well it's the timber bracing underneath that's not nearly as stable as something that probably anchored into the ground itself and so instead the roof is sitting on these main supports and then the window surrounding the supple four also function as the kind of the intermediate battlements or merlyn's if this was a crenellated battlements and look what we have inside these walls as well we have our much' collations put a roof over top and the tiles could be made out of wooden shingles or even ceramic tiles doesn't really matter and we have the primary key of this wooden castle this actually does look pretty cool even though it's raw timber yet still check out what this looks like when we render it even just the bottom half and so this castle looks pretty awesome just with the rendered walls underneath but now check it out with it being fully rendered it looks pretty darn cool so much more impressive than the raw timber by itself I really think this would have been done for most wooden castles of the medieval period now let's add all these components together the walls towers and primarykey even without a layer of render covering the surfaces this is what I think a wooden castle would at least look like based on the construction methods you would need to use in making a castle out of wood can I say definitively that this is exactly what they would have looked like of course not none have survived like I said at the beginning of this video ultimately all of this is speculation but it's based on logic extrapolating the most cost-effective building techniques balanced with how strong and defensible the final castle will be as a results but this is what it would look like if it was covered in Orenda on all its primary surfaces look how impressive this is and from a cursory glance at this castle from its surface you wouldn't be able to tell if it was made out of stone or wood and that is a big bonus for the Lord who owns this castle for people just looking at it it doesn't look nearly as cheaper Falls just it's raw timber and the appearance of wealth and power is important to a lord and then of course that the attackers can't tell if it's timber or wood that means the attackers might not necessarily take advantage of the inherent weaknesses that exist in wooden buildings and of course it's more fire resistant as a result so it's like win-win-win in all these situations there are other ways in which a wooden castle might have being built as well as to which ones are more prominent I tend to think the one that I've just shown you prob it was the most common type for the reasons I've already mentioned but in grads two other types of wooden castles well there is the idea of the fortified manor house which is basically a building that is not built with any techniques differently to how they built the houses at a time so these are the square framed half-timbered wattle and daub homes buts built in a more defensible kind of way smaller windows indeed arrow slits and battlements at the top and so this is a fortified manor house that i've designed you know thrown together just to give you at least one idea of how a fortified manor house might look you've got one section which functions as a Great Hall and all the various uses in which great halls were put to a main kitchens and the primary living quarters you're kind of surprised as to the scarcity of rooms within this what's walls supposed to be a manor house you know it has three main rooms well you might want to watch my video on what type of rooms you could expect to find within a historical medieval castle I explained in detail the reasons as to why you would find so few rooms within a medieval castle and under what conditions in which you would find more and then from the outside this is what this building would look like wattle and daub walls in between timber frames certainly enough to keep people out it wouldn't really stand against heavy bombardment in anyway a full timber castle would be more effective in that regard but for the lesser Lord who just needs to secure residence to protect against banded tree and the like a fortified home like this is perfectly adequate and this is just one representation in how they might have looked yet still it does have exposed Timbers and so this is what all look like being fully rendered and look at this this looks like a more traditional style castle now doesn't it Barb's there we go this is what the medieval wooden castles might have actually looked like thank you very much for watching guys I hope you have enjoyed and of course I hope to see you again there are so many other castle videos on this channel for you to enjoy if you haven't already seen might I recommend what rooms are inside medieval castles or why were castles white which goes into detail some of the subjects that I was only able to touch on briefly in this video so I hope to see you there or at the very least I hope to see in my next video thank you once again for watching [Music]

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 444,066

Rating: 4.9105825 out of 5

Keywords: castle, castles, medieval, middle ages, knight, knight's, architecture, fortress, stone, wood, timber, wooden, build, built, crenelations, crenulations, machicolations, keep, fort, sword, swords, bailey, game of thrones, lord of the rings, skyrm, top 10, top ten, hema, historical european martial arts, wall, tower, dnd, dungeons and dragons, d&d, rpg, roleplaying, game, video, outlaw king

Id: tuDbUg-FOMY

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018