T. S. Eliot, the early 20th century poet and writer, said of an artist's lifestyle that, "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (Miles 87). Nothing personifies this spirit of sacrificing the one for the good of the whole more than a medieval castle. The castle was a microcosm in wartime and peacetime that focused on only the noble of the castle and his family. During peacetime it was a place to bargain, trade goods, sell your harvest, feast if there was a celebration going on, or be entertained by everything from jugglers to dancing bears. All this activity was directly related to the well-being of the lord, because when wartime came around, all these luxuries paid for themselves. The happier thepeasants, the better the harvests were, the more tools they turned out and the more people were attracted to the lord's estates. With these extra provisions and people the tasks that needed doing during a siege were done more efficiently, and the lord and the people in the castle would stay alive longer with the extra provisions. The peasant laborers would toil day in and day out to make sure the lord and his family were safe, or else they might not have a castle to run to when their lands were invaded. This symbiosis worked fine most of the time, but if things got hairy, then it could be replaced by martial law in a second to keep the lord and his family safe. This idea of a leader/people relationship instead of a master/slave relationship set the stage for democracy. But, the medieval castle was not the first instance of the symbiosis. Classical castle life influenced medieval castle life through it's failures, as medieval castle life influenced the Renaissance through its failures.
In the Classical Age of the Greeks, the scenario was a little bit different. The people focused on pleasing their gods as opposed to a castle's noble. Everyone lived to serve the gods (master/slave). Daily life revolved around the fact that you could be struck down at any second by the gods, or fate if you want to call them that. People would spend much of their time praying and offering sacrifices. The sacrificial rituals were often complex, entailing processes like slitting the throat of a black lamb, one summer old, from the island of Crete two inches below the ear. They had certain types of rituals for certain blessings, such as successful marriages or endeavours, lasting treaties, rainstorms, and most of all doing well in battle. They were also polytheistic, which meant even more complications.
Another facet of classical life was war. It was the basis of many of the Greeks' timeless myths and one of the subjects they dealt with daily. The rival countries, and even rival towns within Greece, would always be fighting each other for one reason or another. Most of the time it was for land, or because one place had insulted another. These wars tended to be long and bloody like the Trojan (possibly just myth) and Peloponesian Wars. The only time the Greeks weren't fighting was during the Olympics. These were the Olympics that were revived in 1896 by a Frenchman. It ancient Greece only men competed and they were all stark naked, which makes me glad the Frech guy didn't copy it exactly. They competed for the coveted olive wreath crown, given to the winner of each event. Some of the events were javelin, discus, running, and pentathlon. The Olympics' purpose was to determine which area in Greece had the best athletes in a peaceful manner.
The Greeks were also great scholars. With names like Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, you can't go wrong. They discovered a wealth of knowledge about math, science, and philosophy among other things. Their discoveries were unfortuneately squandered and ignored in the Dark Ages.
Their way of castle life was quite different than the Medieval way, but before you learn about them, you should note that their castles are better referred to as fortresses because the term "castle" wasn't used until the Middle Ages. Their fortresses were different in many ways. First off, they separated their towns and military buildings. They put up their fortresses on the border and kept the cities inland. Only the biggest cities had military buildings, and that was to maintain the garrison stationed there. The enemy armies weren't as close to the towns as in medieval times, so they feared attack less, and thus had no need to build fortresses there. The life inside the fortress was not nearly as complex, since there were only soldiers there. They trained, ate, slept, and were bored most of the time. After a tour of duty in a foreign land, a war, or a long time in a fortress that didn't have much action, they would be relieved for weeks or even months at a time to visit relatives and friends back home. It was hard to gauge which country had the biggest army back then, but Greece was definitely one of the biggest. They also had the largest navy, and were considered the top dogs in the Mediterranean Sea. One of their failures was that when the opposing army did break through the outlying fortresses, they could pillage the land with relative ease. Another was that they rarely used espionage and underhanded tactics in the conquering of their enemies. Occasionaly there was poison in the king's drink, but there wasn't much diplomatic spying. Also, they tended to build castles in non-strategic areas, like in an open plain where it could be attacked from all sides. These faults influenced the medieval nobles to improve their castles.
The Medieval Age was full of the Christian Church. It controlled Europe with an iron fist. It persuaded kings and queens to do as it wished. It could cause a revolution anywhere at any time. Whoever was Pope during the Dark Ages was one of the most powerful men in the world. One way to show it's ability to control was the Crusades. The Crusades started in 1095 when Pope Urban II gave a speech saying that the Turks were moving into the heart of Eastern Christendom and gaining a chokehold on Jerusalem. "Pope Urban II was a powerful speaker; all our sources indicate that the speech he delivered that day was moving and memorable" (Crusades Council of Clarmont, 2). The first army of more than 20,000 peasants left within a year and were successful in regaining their European land, but were promptly routed when they entered Turkey. This started a war which would last 150 years, get all the way to Egypt, have seven major crusades, and even include a crusade of children. That was how powerful the Church was. With one speech it could set off a holy war. They thought it would just be a war for the knights and nobles to sweep down and destroy the Turks, but most of the fighting force were peasants who knew nothing of war and were slaughtered by the trained Muslim and Islamic armies.
Another ocurrence in everyday life was war. The European countries were not unlike tribes. They had very few alliances and their culture was based on feudalism, so whenever a noble or king got ticked off, he'd go attack his enemy. The way they waged war was different in that there was probably even less espionage than in classical wars because the Greeks couldn't seem to get it right. The attacking army in the Middle Ages usually just tried to sneak a spy into the castle. Another difference is that there were more castles, and towns popped up around them. These made for a different kind of castle life.
The medieval castle was the work of a noble who funded it, a master craftsman who undertook it's construction, and the many laborers and skilled workers who built it. It was a work of art, but a very imposing one. "Although never completed to their planned height, Beaumaris' large exterior towers are impressive, their formidability enhanced by handsome patterns of stone in shades of dark gray to white, adorning the exterior walls and towers" (Castlewales 1). This was said of Beaumaris Castle in Wales by someone in 1995. Just think how it looked to an invading army in 1295 who had never seen skyscrapers.
The castle was a very complex thing not only in who lived in it, but also how it was built. It took years to construct. They needed to find a good place to put it, with enough natural resources and natural defenses. Then they needed to hire the right workers to build it - wood workers, blacksmiths, laborers, thatchers, masons, carpenters, and engineers. They built a residence that could deter all but the most intense attacks.
The castle had a general plan that lords improvised on as they felt. The castle had one main entrance - the gatehouse - the most heavily defended area in the castle. It had an outer wall connected to the gatehouse and with towers along it. It had a keep inside where the lord lived which was the tallest part of the castle. The keep was the last defense and was therefore heavily armored. Often the castle was surrounded by a moat on the weak part(s) of it. Inside the castle was the bailey where all the activity took place. All the craftsmen's buildings were built in the castle when it became open to prospective residents.
For dimensions the outer castle walls were more than 8 feet thick and up to 50 feet tall with taller towers along them. The keep was up to 100 feet tall. The walls went underground and fanned out too, to support their immense weight and to try to stop tunnelers. The gate house had a drawbridge, a portcullis, grappling hooks and pads to stop battering rams, holes to fire crossbows and drop rocks from, huge vats of boiling water and even a big trap door. They also had hoardings, or walkways, set up around the outside of the wall walks to drop things and shoot from. On the bottom floor they employed soldiers to detect tunnelers with buckets of water that rippled from the vibrations. To ensure they had plenty of time to get ready, the land was cleared for about a mile around so they could see the enemy coming, and the farmers warned them if they saw an army coming. They also hired mercenaries to beef up the castle guard.
The attackers also had some effective weapons too. Their siege tools included battering rams, the belfry, the mangonel, the trebuchet, the tortise, tunnelers, and ladders. The battering ram was used to bash in the gatehouse's gate. It rarely worked because the defenders shot flaming arrows down on the protective covering. The attackers then used soaked animal hides to put out the flames, only to be rejected again by pads and grappling hooks. If they did knock in the door, then they were trapped as they ran in by the porticullis in front of them. Then they either got picked off one by one, or had boiling something or other dropped on their heads. The belfry could look a hoarding defender in the eye. It was used to enter the castle at the top. It was a building-sized tower that rolled to the wall, lowered it's drawbridge, and spewed out attackers. One was so big that 200 archers and 10 catapults operated from a single tower. The mangonel, or catapult, was used to launch objects at the wall from 1300 feet away. The trebuchet was used to launch objects over the wall from around 900 feet away and into the bailey. Such fun items as rocks, dung, human heads, and partially-skinned large game were launched into the castle to destroy things and spread disease. The tortise, which looked like a covered bridge, moved across the moat on a man-made bridge. It started on the side opposite the castle and people walked through it and dumped junk out the other side. The moat began filling up, and split logs made a road on top of the piled junk, and then the tortise moved forward. It was really slow-going, hence the name tortise. The bridges were used for the belfry too. Tunnelers crossed to the castle side of the moat by going beneath it and then tried to dig under the foundation. If successful they propped the tunnel with beams, then loaded it with flammable stuff, like pigs, and set fire to it. If it worked the castle wall came crashing down and the castle was practically theirs. The miners, or sappers, had one of the most risky jobs. Ladders were a last ditch effort. They were easily pushed off the wall and the men were defenseless as they climbed the swaying poles. One of the most effective weapons was the sharpshooter. They could send a crossbow bolt through the narrow opening of an arrow loop and kill the person using it. The final ditch effort was to climb the latrine shaft. The risk was getting stuck in there, but it worked in 1204 in France.
In peacetime castle life was bustling. It had to be self-supporting, and it was. There were seamstresses, wool-spinners, plumbers, tailors, cooks, brewers, a carpenter, an atilliator (crossbow maker), potters, a doctor whose main cures were prayer and bloodletting, knights "If a man act in honorable wise when he gains thereby glory, repute, of the love of a fair lady, none may know if he is in truth an honorable man. When he chooses between honor on the one hand and all that he desires on the other, then may his honor be known" ( pbm.com knighthood), an almoner who gave leftover food to beggars and lepers, servants, thiefs, a chaplain "The garter toss is one the oldest surviving wedding traditions. Back in medieval times it was customary for friends, relatives, guests to accompany the bridal couple to the marriage bed. As time went on, this became rowdier and rowdier to the point that some guests were all too eager to help the bride out of her wedding clothes" (spu.edu wedding), a torturer, a jester (who was sometimes mentally ill), a food taster, musicians, fishermen, entertainers, heralds, pages, a beekeeper, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. This ensured everything you could want was probably attainable. They even had foods like dolphins, a boar's head, peacocks, and sculptures of sugar.
Around the castle was a town that was also protected by a small wall. This was where the castle's livestock and wheat, corn, etc... were from. The villagers had to pay a tax, but got to go to all the castle events and see all the entertainment. They also got protection inside the castle during war. It was a great beginning to our modern democracy. This way of castle life influenced the Renaissance castle builders to take a different approach.
The Renaissance was called the Age of Humanism for a good reason - people started to like each other more. This rendered castles quite obsolete because less people were at war. It started off with the Reformation - caused by Martin Luther's need to improve the Catholic Church. He formed a new religion, Protestantism, and that triggered all sorts of changes. All the other countries, and the other parts of his native Germany, thought if he can affect the church's chokehold on our lives, then so can we. They all began letting their great thinkers speak out with new ideas and visions. Some overnments, like the one in France, were overthrown by the masses, and a new type of government was put in place. Some of the minds of the time were Voltaire, DaVinci, and Bach. They helped revolutionize the way people thought about the world and themselves. They introduced new ideas, types of music, and inventions that all made the world a better place to live in. The church did eventually lose it's grip and reformed a little, if not as much as Martin would liked. During this time many great plays were written, works of art made, and the humanities advanced infinitely more than they did during the Dark Ages.
Castle life was on the downfall because everyone wanted to go the great centers of learning - the cities. They wanted to escape small town life and go to where the action was, not stay in their niche and do the same thing day after day. It was a time when few castles were built, and most of the deserted ones were used for supplies to build fences for farms or the like. The golden age of castles was over, and anyone who still lived in one did so because they wanted to keep the memory or because they were scared of the outside world, not for protection against invading armies. There weren't many wars, so the castles left standing were never besieged. Most kings and nobles built manor houses or palaces with big gardens and sprawling spaces and gave up on the ramped castle walls. The Renaissance brought about the downfall the most glorious age of castles, but they are still remembered and always will be.
The castle advanced the humanities by ushering in the idea of a symbiosis between leader and people. During the Classical Age there was more of a master/slave relationship among the upper and lower classes. In a castle there were no slaves, only servants. This means the noble had to earn the respect of his people to get them to do his bidding. If he had to earn it by brute force, then no one would come to his city and he would grow poor and die, having wasted most of his money on the immense task of building a castle. That relationship also helped to influence many Rennaisance thinkers, like Hobbes and Keates. Their ideas were the basis for our Declaration of Independence. Many people today look at a castle and say, "What a barbaric cesspool of filth", but I say, "What a magnificent microcosm that helped us get to where we are today."
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