The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)
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triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com
The entire idea of "primarily for appearance of status and strength, actual military qualities not as important as one might think" is basically today's SUV vs actual off-road. And with that premise "staircase winding direction selected for defense" can very much be both true and a fantasy: it would have been mostly a fantasy already back at the time it was built, but not untrue either. Just like the zombie apocalypse qualities of SUVs that are never used for anything more adventurous than a grocery ruin.
A very on-topic typo. One that has me wondering what this would look like. A crumbling, mediaeval tower to store harvest, maybe?
Yet it was an effective military tool: visiting potentates would see an overwhelmingly expensive palace that sent the message “we are so rich and so powerful that we don’t even need to defend our central palace, so don’t even try to attack us”
It all depends on context - medieval castles lost their meanings as defenses 500 years ago. In modern times they are useless as defences - sometimes not even against squatters...
But upon having a closer look, things become complicated quickely: "Schloss" ist typically used for unfortified residencies starting in Late Middle Ages/Renaissance. But there existed unfortified residencies since the Early Middle Ages inside towns. The term for the early imperial or royal palaces is "Pfalz", which has the same Latin root as "palace": "palatium". Sometimes the term was also used for the residency of a bishop.
Then there are castles that were both, strong fortresses but very representative. Nuremberg castle, Trifels and the Wartburg are examples of these, or from a later period Heidelberg. Sometimes a castle was later converted into a sort of palace by tearing down walls.
The terminology varies in such cases. The "Heidelberger Schloss" (a strong but also very representative fortress) is called "Heidelberg castle" in English, "Schloss Mespelbrunn" (a converted castle) is called "Mespelbrunn castle".
There is also a rarely used standing expression "Veste" ("fortress") used as a title for some specific castles (for example "Veste Coburg").
I agree with the parent that the “theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige“ is a bit oversimplified. But we need to keep in mind that the function of a castle is typically very complex. And the "theatrical backdrops" is an important one. That their defensive value was quite limited could be seen during the German/Austrian passant revolt in 1525 when thousands of castles had been destroyed in a couple of months, while the aristocrates nevertheless won the war in the field. Typically the castles had only a handful of defenders and quickely surrendered, or the aristocrates just fled and did not even try to defend their castles. Only some strong, well-manned fortifications hold out, often just barely like fortress Marienberg in Würzburg.
Oh. Okay then … that’s a pity. Kind of pointless advancing a contrarian position unless you’re going to back it up …
> That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on
Ah.
How mediaeval :-)
Sir, this is HN. We are not amused.
Couldn't this minority be explained by engineers either doing it wrong, being given bad requirements or being overruled by misguided management? I.e., the clockwise turn was indeed for military purposes and as much as 70% of projects were done correctly but in 30% of projects one or more project management issues led to the staircases being built wrong.
> 4. The direction of a spiral staircase was an architectural decision, not a military one.
Perhaps different stakeholders had different priorities and the military advantage was one of many considerations.
It is entirely possible that the trope is true, but only for a small minority of castles where they expected such fighting, and in the vast majority it is false because they didn't expect it.
If it is true, you would expect other evidence that in the design that they expected the walls to be breached and thus have to fight in such a way, and also that it wasn't a hopeless idea to fight on. This does seem unlikely based on what I know of historical war, but I'll freely admit what I know is minimal. Any real historians care to comment?
Just because something is a security best practice definitely does not guarantee that it will be followed universally by architects.
Not all the castle builders were up to speed on CVE-1271-53 “left-handed spiral staircases enable swordsman overflow attacks”, and more importantly their clients didn’t know how to evaluate a competent castle architect either. Maybe they should have had some sort of certification scheme. But even then, once a pen tester gets in and tells you your staircases were built backwards, what are you going to do? They’re made of stone and built into structural walls in a tall building.
Should spiral staircases always turn to the right? (1879 points. Locked. Comments on this question have been disabled)
I'm a journeyman castle engineer to a FAANG house, and my master stonemason insists that spiral staircases should always turn to the right. He says they're more secure. But our accessibility team say that a left turn is preferable for carrying heavy loads up the stairs. The designer wants the staircase to have open wooden treads every fifth step. Does that negate the security concerns? Who's right?
Accepted answer (4471 votes)
Why are you using a spiral staircase? A straight staircase is easier to maintain.
(Closed by moderator. Not siege related.)
As a lefty who is pretty clumsy on the right, there are many implicit design decisions that favor whatever right handed people do for the simple reason that most people are right handed.
There was accommodations for lefty’s in some ancient battle formations, so while it may be a myth, it may be one with a kernel of truth as conventions for things like castle construction are probably ancient and lost to modern people.
That people carrying things up these staircases would be using their right hand to carry the item(s), and so would use their left hand to steady themselves on the wall (or the rope/rail/etc affixed to the wall).
So that theory doesn't sound right either.
It is just way easier the way we are built, kids learn climbing stairs (and other things) way before they can safely walk stairs downwards. The smarter ones go backwards.
Standing on a step and stepping down is just ... complicated ... and requires considerably more body control.
The risk of toppling forwards and falling down the stairs (or the couch) is considerably higher than "stumbling the stairs upwards".
A few hypotheses come to mind:
1. Walking on your toes vs. on your heels
2. What happens if you slip
3. Lean
If you're facing into the stairs, your toes are gripping the next step. Maybe the extra degree of freedom from your ankle makes it easier to get a steady foothold. Whereas if you're facing away, on narrow steps, your toe may be off the step. If you try to balance on level ground on the balls of your feet vs. on your heels, you can tell heels are harder.
If you're going up and you slip, your moving foot just slides onto the same step as your static foot. If you're going down and you slip, your feet are now separated by 2 steps instead of just 1.
All things that move across ground move best if they lean into the direction they're walking. If you're walking down stairs, leaning forward means leaning away from the stairs. Going up, you're just leaning into the stairs as if you're rock climbing. Also it's likely our bodies are just better at leaning forward safely than backwards.
I heard a quote somewhere that "If you go down facing it, it's a ladder. If you go down facing away, it's stairs." Some narrow stairs might be better treated as just strange ladders. 2 of the possible causes would be mitigated.
When you are going up, if you slip, your momentum will carry you into the slope. If you are going down and slip, your momentum will carry you into space. Then gravity will take over.
1. "Castles were built for prestige not fortification".
Regardless of actual use as fortification (frequency of battles), it's pretty self-evident that the intent of much of a castles design is fortification. Even if moats, arrow slits and parapets are just for show, they would still be to show off your defensive capabilities, in which case (at least apparent) defense would still be the primary concern of the architect.
2. "Some turn anti-clockwise"
Wherein the author assumes that all wisdom is automatically universally shared and all architects/planners/builders are universally competent. A fact as true today as it ever was.
3. is pretty much the same argument as (2) repeated.
4. An argument against how practical they would be in reality (already superceded by their first point that they were probably just for show).
There's very little of substance in this article. Hopefully the book does a better job.
Surely the best rebuttal of this particular point is: Some people are left-handed.
And as far as I know right-handed people have always been more common than lefties, so having more clockwise than anti-clockwise staircases is counterintuitive to me.
Or do you mean "if the mason who planned the castle was left-handed, he would have built anti-clockwise stairs"?
I think we can all agree -- without a trace of irony -- that toilet technology is way more important and has a greater impact on society than warfare.
I mean I can offer the same argument in reverse: if 70% of these staircases wound clockwise, they clearly favoured this orientation. How come we don't have contemporary documentation of the reason?
People were not stupid; if there was an actual technical benefit, it would have been known and shared, the same way that people knew and shared other castle construction techniques amongst craftsmen.
Tangibly, the absence of evidence for something can’t be magicked away by the “but what if they didn’t record it for a reason because it was a secret!?”.
If there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence. You can ponder all day, but it still boils down to, bluntly: there is no evidence that conjecture is correct.
If the swordsman theory were correct, it ought to be higher. Either it is really important that you can defeat invaders on stairs, and handedness matters for this, or it's not that big a deal and we can let some other consideration decide, for instance the descending stairs hypothesis.
So if was a big deal you'd think everyone would insist on having the stairs the right way, nearly 100%. If not there might be another weaker reason that leads to 70%.
I think 70% definitely tells you what kind of staircase was preferred assuming there are enough staircases (and assuming that that clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise staircases had equal probability of surviving and being counted).
Assume there are 40 staircases, and that 70% (28) are CW. The binomial distribution tells us that the probability of there being more than 27 staircases that run CW is less than 0.83% if staircase direction is chosen at random.
Thus, the binomial distribution suggests that it is highly unlikely (<1%) that staircase direction was determined at random.
If you want to play around with the binomial distribution: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+...
The proper comparison is not a 50% cointoss, which is how you might think about some elections, it's a 100% world where every castle maker would tell their apprentices about this important CW swordfighting idea, and people who forget this are castigated for building an obvious weakness into their design.
The only reason it would be somewhat lopsided, but not decisively, is if there was some mild reason why people preferred one over the other, which is what your numbers actually suggest. Something like the "easier to walk down" hypothesis might make sense here, where for instance the CCW staircases are accounted for by aesthetic considerations like symmetry.
If 70% of surviving staircases are clockwise and they were built in similar numbers then there is clearly an advantage to the clockwise orientation. If they were not built in similar numbers, then its on the author to find a specific reason rather than simply reject the conventional wisdom on the subject.
You don't disprove something like this by pointing to a lack of evidence. You do it by finding compelling evidence for an alternative.
Archeology of 21st century man definitely states that 70% of adults used to eat burgers, then there is clearly an advantage to putting a piece of meat between two slices of bread. The bread must br protecting meat from rain and wildlife. People who put meat on top of bread have clearly died out in the evolutionary game. Even the few surviving specimen of men that put meat on top of bread, always cover it with cheese to confuse predators.
I mean, there is! It's easier to eat while holding. Meat tends to be a little wet, but bread is dry, so by putting meat in bread, you don't need utensils.
Romans built spiral staircases as well - did they favor a particular direction? What about other cultures unrelated to European castle building traditions?
Honestly, though, if you’ve ever worked on a construction project you would know: even if you had a record of a papal decree mandating that all staircases must turn to the right, multiple books documenting how to build staircases with a right turn and warning against left-turning designs, and original castle drawings showing the architect marked explicitly that the staircase must turn right, it would not be surprising to find that 30% of staircases turn left just because the contractor installed it backwards.
"This is my contractor John Mason, who likes to build right handed stairs." "And this is his son Mason Johnson, who hates his dad so he builds left handed stairs"
Are there many surviving documents outlining the reasoning surrounding each design choice?
I mean, you're lucky when you go looking in version control on a software project from the last couple of years if the documentation surrounding a reason for a design choice is anything more than 'fixed bug'. Expecting more detailed change control documentation from mediaeval castlebuilders seems optimistic.
The author is making an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" error.
He isn't making that kind of error. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim. Otherwise any sort of weakly plausible reason for choosing the staircase direction would be true because there is "only" absence of evidence.
Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either.
Right, so calling it a "myth", as in the headline, is incorrect. That would imply that you know it to be false. The author is taking the lack of evidence to mean that it can't be true.
And as for the burden of proof, as with any hypothesis, anyone is welcome to try to falsify it. I just don't believe that the evidence here has done that.
We think of monks as the only literate people in the past, but that was far from true. The common person might not have known how to read (I've seen good arguments they did a little, but I'm not qualified to evaluate them) but the rich did, and they hired scholars who could read to study things that were important to them. Any rich person who didn't have scholars studying military matters wouldn't last long in war as many seemingly obvious ideas don't work in real battles.
Quite the opposite, the theory he's questioning has no evidence, merely a good story justifying it. In the absence of actual evidence of the motives behind these designs, you should be agnostic, which is what the author is doing.
The fact that fights rarely occurred in practice in these staircases is moot: if we assume that the choice of orientation is mostly arbitrary and clockwise stairs offer a theoretical advantage in an unlikely scenario, why not go for it? You don't lose anything by building it that way.
The driver sits on the left in the U.S. And, lacking widespread public transit, most driving hours are commuting... alone.
Having the gas cap on the left both makes it easier to pull up to the fueling station without being too far or bumping into it, and - having done so - prevents the driver from having to walk around the vehicle.
I probably prefer left but don't have a strong opinion.
In truth cars are designed for the entire world. Designers will switch the steering wheel side for the country, but they will avoid having to make changes to something far away there that doesn't need to change.
The bottom line is that there are weak preferences, weak arguments for right vs. left (or clockwise vs. counterclockwise), and generally weak design asymmetries/constraints for a given situation and you end up with a majority (but by no means universal) choice.
Not saying that's the case related to the OP, but it seems reasonable absent specific evidence to the contrary.
What are the arguments for the theory?
If they breach the walls and actually enter the interior of the castle, they have already lost and no staircase design can save them.
Castles weren't single layer defenses that stopped at the walls, they were definitely designed to continue the fight and protect the nobles even if the enemy did get through the walls. Given that it's not so out of line to think the interior architecture might have been designed to increase defender's advantages.
If there were no help from outside, next would be keep wall, or most probably lack of food and water for defenders.
Also I'll admit the first couple arguments in TFA felt weak. I wouldn't be surprised if that colored peoples readings of the rest, or if they jumped to come comment before finishing the rest.
That's assuming that the castle has fallen by assault. If the attacker was an assassin who had gained access to the castle through subterfuge or a disgruntled worker then interior defences may have conceivably been useful.
Like others, I think the fact that this myth appears to be novel and recent is a much better sign that we shouldn't take this very seriously. And I totally agree with his point about "frequency of its repetition by parents to children". There is so much "Pluto is so a planet" thinking in the world. It's really hard to critically examine beliefs we take on as children.
If some one told you "oh yeah, this 20th century fencer who was obsessed with spirals said that the reason castles were built this way was obviously the sword fighting implications" you'd probably be less likely to believe it.
> castle specialists have proposed that these buildings were primarily structures intended to be impressive theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige.
You know when the Marines do their rifle drill involving twirling and complex maneuvers with their rifles? That's a complex display of prestige too, but:
a) rifles aren't made for show (although the rifles the Marines use for drill have been permanently disabled)
b) the drill sends a very clear message: "our guys really know how to handle a rifle".
So even if a castle was primarily used for ceremony, it wasn't built as a merely ceremonial device. And the ceremony sends a message: our king is rich, and our defenses are pretty fucking strong. Think twice before laying siege to us.
Why not both? A US Supercarrier is both prestige and fortification.
Maginot line was also both: it was a great fortification + provided a prestige / morale factor to the troops. (No more dingy trenches! You'll have fresh water and a place to sleep).
Just because something is built as a fortification doesn't mean it won't be avoided (ex: Maginot line worked where it laid. But the Germans just ran around the line through Belgium). Similarly, just because a castle was built for fortification doesn't mean it was a _good_ fortification. There probably are lots of "bad" castles as well as "good" ones.
2. What author meant was that 30% of them who were anti-clockwise clearly does not mean that those other 70% were projected by people who thought of using stairs as battle scene.
3. I've mostly visited early medieval castles, that had anti-clockwise stairs, so meh... it looks like a cultural thing. I even doubt that these were used when carrying sword, because those had not much space to have it there, so it looked like something to be used for practical everyday usage - not battles.
4. If a person was wearing armor in medieval times, he was like a tank. If there was a discussion among nobles and one of them got pissed and decided to wear an armor and return to continue discussion... well, pretty much the discussion was over for rest of party, regardless of presence of swords. Though, despite the trope used in cinema, I can't imagine swordfighting in medieval setting between armored opponents on stairs. If the one on top of stairs slipped, the opponent below would be disabled from the weight of opponent above him. They would also not be able to step on those stairs... and if it all comes to that, swordfight is not requirement to rat out enemy - for that was used fire and smoke. Pretty much it is what author was mentioning - if there is a breach, it is game over for defenders and no real reason to continue defending anymore. The only thing they can try is fleeing.
Fighting, that involves swords and no armor is very late invention, where fortification defenses were useless and could be blown up by a powder and all the "strategical" stairs would be turned into a rubble.
As for castles in UK - these aparently are representative castles and not really only fortifications. Even the smallests castles in UK were mainly used for something that was manor estate of a local royal family.
I don't know how to articulate it, but there's a lot to unpack there about symbolic force, ritual, and male expression.
Mcluhan, baudrillard, hegel, wittgenstein.
Building castles reminds me of building muscle in the gym. The underwriting philosophy is violent, but it requires uninterrupted peaceful effort. Built for an imagined "us vs them" conflict that, in reality, ends up as an "us vs us" status contest.
We know castles had secret passages and other means of evading assassination etc so that could make sense.
Here, quite a few large 18th & 19th century houses were built with separate, discrete, servants staircases and passageways.
There areplenty of doors (more or less visible) that are used to split the public and private activities (and a way for servants to better navigate the castle).
The doors are not always hidden - they clearly separate these two worlds, and may also led to very nice places that are just not public.
Incidentally, if you're not aware of it, a 1 inch difference in stair height will almost certainly make you trip up. I did myself when I was climbing them at first.
Also the notion that once attackers were in a castle it's all over is not true. Late medieval castles were designed to be modular, layered and flexibly defensible. The enemy might get into one part, but you could retreat to another part and defend that. Might give you enough time to be relieved by an external force. Have a look at Caerphilly castle as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_Castle
Finally, it seems that no real explanation is given to the bias towards building clockwise staircases. Why would this be the case? Doesn't it just mean that wherever possible they would build the staircase clockwise because there was some inherent advantage?
However, there is a hole in logic - what roof has any strategical advantage? Perhaps, one person will trip - rest of 99 out of 100, that are chasing you would eventually go through. Were there any further routes from the roof? Death from falling is my guess...
The reason why there would be higher step for roof, might have more something to do with dampness and to prevent wearing of that step, or to prevent leakage from the roof, that would stream down the stairs. SAeriously, who is making those stories, that makes no sense and who are so gullible to believe them? Are there any of those stairs seen on money? Drunks from my native town were telling stories about oak(which is recently planted - no more than 50 years), ythat they claimed were pictured on money... usually they wanted to claim that money after a story, if someone wanted to disprove it and brought their vallet out...
Your mental model of what can happen in a castle is also not complete. It's not just sieges, there are any number of reasons someone could be chasing you. It could just be one assailant.
Finally, perhaps I didn't describe the step well enough. The step is not the top one, it is the second one down, and the face of it is around 2cm higher than all the other steps. It wouldn't make any difference to the drainage. Don't get angry that there are features of castles that are not adequately explained, and some people try to explain them.
Wouldn't it be equally as likely that while running away in panic, you'd trip on the top stair yourself?
In my opinion, a more realistic explanation is that on plan the stairs were all the same height. But when the builders reached the top, they realised that the roof was an inch higher than planned and just made the final step a bit taller to make the difference?
It's not the final step, it's the penultimate step. Also everything else in the castle is straight and true, which would imply they knew how to measure things accurately enough. It's also in more than one castle.
The only good point is that it wasn't mentioned by contemporary sources, but I don't think this proves anything unless you can show that other defensive features on castles were mentioned. Otherwise maybe we just have bad sources about castle design. But if you can show me some documents about why eg. moats are designed they way they are, then I think you have a point.
The book is about why it's actually a myth. This article is about how stories get started and passed down with no basis in fact, and is really promotional material for the book.
And here we are in 2021, and people are defending a story invented in 1902 about design decisions made more than 500 years prior, and it's unclear how many of them had even heard the original myth before reading this article!
The gnosticism is very strong today.
Even the 70/30 split mentioned in the article is telling. If it truly did not matter then you would expect a 50/50 split, so there is a thumb on the scale somewhere. Maybe some early famous castles had them and the feature was replicated in newer castles? But what if the original castles had them for defensive purposes? The newer castles could have been built with defensive features they didn't fully understand.
It's fun though? And a great learning opportunity - you can teach a kid the fun factoid, plus something about how hard it is to find out if a commonly-held belief is true.
Security through obscurity is prudent in addition to other measures, so would this. (Regardless of wheather this actually was a thing or not).
If the intruders are at the bottom of your stairs, you've probably already lost, no?
I don't see why you would fight on the stairs though, as opposed to running to the top where you can close a door behind you, or fight from a flat floor.
Worst case scenario as an attacker, you could just wait out people on the upper levels, they have limited supplies and you presumably control the gates and ground level.
I have seen castles that had only military living in them. Like, they were military outposts build around the time of Turk attacks. They tend to be high on mountain, not comfortably next to city.
> If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise.
Should they? I don't want to question the history here, but the logic of this does not follow to me.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle :
> A castle is a type of fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by military orders. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for royalty or nobility;
Remember much of English is actually Norman French. After the conquest and all.
According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both 'castle' and 'chateau' are modern variants of the older Latin 'castellum'.
The author of essay is in the UK, and the mentioned castles are all homes for royals, nobility, or bishops, or at least meant to be.
Arundel Castle, West Sussex - that's where the Earl of Arundel has lived (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundel_Castle)
Newark Castle (Nottinghamshire) - for the Bishop of Lincoln (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark_Castle%2C_Nottinghamshi...)
Norwich - "Norwich Castle was designed to be a royal palace rather than a fortification. However, no Norman kings ever lived in it" (https://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/norwich-castle/whats-here...)
Tower of London - I can't tell if William the Conqueror lived there, but the Wikipedia entry says that by 1135 "The castle, which had not been used as a royal residence for some time", implying it was a royal residence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_London)
Caerphilly - given "the castle's luxurious accommodation", I assume Gilbert de Clare lived there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_Castle
Conwy - "best preserved suite of medieval private royal chambers in England and Wales" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conwy_Castle)
This is too boring, so I'll let someone else look up Beaumaris, Caernarfon, and Colchester Castle.
I thought it was still a pretty cool castle.
Therefore, given that the majority of people are right-handed (and lefties are often taught to fight right-handed anyway), and the idea that if an attacker manages to enter a castle they will then be fighting their way up the stairs against defenders above, clockwise staircases give an advantage to the people tasked with defending them.
Here's my guess. Falling down a staircase is way worse than falling up it. If it's clockwise, then if you hug the outer wall (with the less steep steps) as you go down then your dominant hand can hold the wall (and any handrail).
“it was easier and more natural for a right-handed architect to draw plans for a staircase with a right-handed spiral”
There’s also the claim that 30% of staircases are anti-clockwise. That’s a lot for any statement of always or mostly clockwise.
I wonder how survivorship bias would affect this argument (pro or against). Neat article.
I don't know if it is true or not, but your explanation doesn't seem to hold up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfe_Castle#Post-medieval
https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/
No need to get messy on the actual stairs.
This would only be a problem if you didn’t bring any lefties.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bramante...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_...
I would have argued the contrary, the vast majority of European castles were uninhabited or manned by a skeleton crew the majority of the time, and only inhabited when threats demanded it.
There certainly were castles that served as primary residences (like the mentioned Arundel Castle), but this mostly became the fashion after the medieval time, when the transition from the fortified castle to the beautiful and nice-to-live in chateaus happened, with fortification elements that were more symbolic than practical (English lacks a clear distinction in name here, but at least German and French draw a clear line here).
Even if the direction was chosen to give downward fighting defenders an advantage, I don't think that would be the specific advantage given.
Consider a person standing on the staircase. Whichever direction they are facing, the wall side is more impeded as far as swinging a sword goes than the newel side. Proof: imagine you are standing on the center of your step facing forward, with identical swords in each hand, holding them in mirrored positions. As you move the swords around in mirrored motion any time the newel side sword hits the newel the wall side sword will be hitting the wall. But there will be many positions where the wall side sword hits the wall but the mirrored newel side sword does not.
The advantage the newel post side has is that the person going up can can lean the top of their body a little ways over the edge, partly shielding behind the newel post from the point of view of someone going down.
If the newel post is on the same side as their sword then when they take advantage of their shielding they make it harder to use their sword (unless they can lean far enough over to attack around the post). If their sword is on the wall side, then they get the newel post shielding for free.
If you were worried about castle defense when designing your staircase, I'd guess that it is this shielding considering that would lead to clockwise.
PS those staircases are ideal places to just barricade and set fire and let defenders to die from smoke. People in medieval times were not such morons to fight there...
Instead, the author argues from almost first principles and bulk observations, which seems to be unconvincing logic in establishing historical intent.
I think the fact that there are no primary historical source documents that say "hey, we're building this castle this way just in case it's breached and we have to have a sword fight on the stairs" is one of his main points.
It would be easy to disprove the article author by finding such historical documents. Do they exist?
0: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...
From my POV since most people are right handed, an anti-clockwise staircase would feel more natural for going up, since you can make the first step with your right foot and use your dominant hand for the handrail. But for getting down a clockwise staircase would feel more natural.
There are some geometrical limits that will make the stair start and land on the same or opposite side, both "top" vs. "bottom" and "left" vs. "right".
Usually (but not always) you want the stair to start and land on the same (bottom vs. top) side and this - generally speaking - implies having a 180° turning of the stair, which itself implies that if you start left, you land right or - viceversa - if you start right you land left.
How much is the height you have to cover?
How large is the staircase diameter?
A typical height of around 3 meters will give you, with steps between 15 (very "plain") and 25 cm (rather steep) anything between 4 and 5 (max 6) steps per meter of height.
If you have a 2 m diameter staircase and a central hub of - say - 40 cm diameter, each step will be 80 cm wide.
On the outer side it will be anything between 25 and 35 cm.
So, let's test what happens with 15 cm high steps and outer side 30 cm.
The perimeter of the staircase is Pix2.00=6.28, with 30 cm on the outside it will give you around 6.28/0.30=~21 steps for a 360° rotation, and 21x15=3.15 height, but you want actually 180° or 540° as you would want to have the stair land on the same side (top vs. bottom), for 180° you have only 10/11 steps, and you cannot make 27/30 cm high steps.
So you either enlarge the staircase (to increment its perimeter) or reduce the max size of the step (but remember that when you decrease the size of the step on the outer size, the size near the hub will also become smaller).
Let's try again with the same 2 m diameter staircase and 25 cm outer step, 180° 3.14/0.25=12,56->13 steps 3.00/13=0.23 cm, steep but doable.
In a "lower left corner" (what you can imagine as a letter "L") it makes sense (to minimize area needed) to have the first step, at the lower level, on the left (but you will land on the right).
In practice you have to decide whether you want around 1 meter space between the outer (left) wall and the step on either the lower or the higher level, it depends, but you want the extra 1 m space at the level where you can possibly put some piece of furniture (a closet, a library, whatever).
There is no particular ergonomical reason (AFAIK) why one would prefere a clockwise or anticlockwise staircase, as you noted if one might feel more comfortable going up, it will feel less so going down or viceversa.
Here is a simple guide on designing:
For the person facing down, their opponent is to their left, which is open. They would need to reach down and across their body to the left, unobstructed.
I can't find anything specific about the theory, except quotes like "Simpson notes the presence of spiral stairs throughout this work, though sadly, when describing Colchester Castle, Essex, he falls into the old trap of claiming that the spiral clockwise spiral stair aids the defender" and a reference to a different 1854 source mentioning it.
You can see hundreds of architectural decisions that were made with military aims -- some of them didn't work, and some of them weren't used.
But, whether staircases were made with the righthanded swordsman in mind is irrelevant. They were created with right-handedness in mind. Because of the placement of railings.
Nah, I don't buy it. Random chance or individual preference seems a bit more likely.
I've heard this myth a few times and even repeated it myself without question. It's an obviously fanciful idea now I think about it some more.
Straight staircases running against defensive castle walls have intentional design rule where those going up have right hand against the wall. Right handed defender can hack downward freely. They can also have intentionally uneven step length that makes running the stairs difficult.
Similar rule is not as useful inside the castle or tower but, it might have been still used from time to time.
In medieval times, the thinking could well have been "we have to favor the right-handed because the left hand is the tool of the devil."
Missed an opportunity to use 'widdershins'.
> Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.
Well then. Bye.
Seriously, why even write a blog post like this if you’re not going to put the necessary information in it to make your point.
The very next sentence explains why. Did you really not read past the line you quoted?
> That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on
The blogpost is a teaser for an upcoming book: that's pretty common.
on the staircases most of the steps on the stairs are a constant(ish) height except one or two
the story is if that someone is running fast up or down the stairs (presumingly they're chasing someone who lives/ works in the castle) and this odd step will trip the attackers up - assuming they're not familiar with the odd height of one of the steps
> Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk) and it may be that this familial link creates a strong bond between the myth and its proponents.
>[EDIT: Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.]
It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution.
> pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys
Like really, kids of both genders when being in castle and looking at knight armor are going to listen to you talking about knights fighting. They will be way more biased when picking souvenir toys, there they will follow gender. But the whispered "this turns right because this or that" does not have that large bias of interest.
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If the author is wrong about this trivia being explained only to buys, then the author is making sexist assumption about dads. Which is possible actually.
I'm not denying the possible 'societal interest distribution', I simply felt it was an irrelevant strawman that's virtually impossible to argue against without instantly being called-out as a sexist "gent", and had no place in what purported to be a historical discussion about stairways.
If a particular myth has a particular following in any identifiable subset of the society, that's interesting to me. In particular, just before the passage you question, the author states
> One reason for [resilience of this myth] might be the frequency of its repetition by parents to children.
so a casual observation about it being more of a father-and-son thing is permissibly relevant in the context of a blog. And it sounds like this guy spends a fair amount of time around castles. You might disagree with it, you might argue it is due to biases involved in raising children, or other things too, but sexism it is most certainly not.
> Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk)
Like common, the "proudly imparting" is there to achieve emotional response on the reader and make dad sounds like funny figure. If you want to keep it factual and objective, most parents (both dads and moms) don't disseminate this sort of trivia "proudly". There is whole range of emotions involved from bored to interested. Sometimes they use funny voice to get kid interested.
And as someone who likes to visit castles, you don't actually overhear it so super often. Nor do you hear it targeted at children as much. Moreover, "little boys", even when interested in fight and swords, they don't really care about technical details of either. They certainly don't care about left turning vs right turning staircase. This is beyond what little kids care about.
It's fine to say that we don't have enough information to say anything definite about the subject.
It's useful to dig into beliefs and try and find their basis, and it appears that in this case it's not forthcoming. Of course, this doesn't rule out that in the future some academic finds a 12th century french scroll on how to defend staircases that talks about this!
1. "The swordsman theory is predicated upon the belief that castles were intrinsically designed as military structures" => "just because most were; there are a lot of castle like fortress that were actively used as defense sitations.
2. If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. => No, opposite, since not all were used military it might not have been a priority for all, and also not all builders might have been aware of this strategy.
etc...
I look forward to his next article where he debunks the myth that doors are for keeping people out. After all, not all doors have locks, and if the author can't find any texts from the 15th century that discuss keeping people out with doors then surely his hypothesis is proven, right?
It'd be the same if people were dead convinced that doors were made to open a certain way to keep the right hand free for attacking people behind the door. There may actually be some doors somewhere made that way for those reasons, but that would be a silly belief to hold for all doors, wouldn't it?
Why would you say that's obvious? You don't offer any evidence, either. I would say that if you're going to propose that something has been done for a particular reason, you should back that up. It seems like this is a just-so story: people say they're clockwise for defenders because people say they're clockwise for defenders. It's one of those cool "a-ha"-type ideas that sounds plausible, so people assume it's been studied and researched and then repeat it.
They could be clockwise simply because right-handed people tend to think that clockwise is the "right" direction. It could be done for architectural reasons specific to the particular castle (e.g. the stairs wouldn't face or line up properly if it were anti-clockwise). There are many, simpler reasons why 70% of the castles we see today have clockwise staircases. And if the defender theory is true, why do the other 30% have anti-clockwise staircases?
EDIT: I'm being downvoted for asking a genuine question? Shame on you. This place is turning into another Redit.
I wish he would delve into things more but it seems reasonable to me to first establish where the defense theory first came from.
Sometimes stairs are just used as a stairs and there are no other functions for them, than just walk those steps up and down, up and down - every day.