Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
fakehistoryhunter.net
fakehistoryhunter.net
> Yeah, that’s unlikely to work out.
> Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle is probably already lost.
This argument directly contradicts the instructions of Vegetius, whose De Re Militari was *the* definitive military manual of the Middle Ages. Specifically, in book 4, he writes,
> Innumerable instances are to be met with where the enemy were entirely cut in pieces, even after they had penetrated the body of the place: this certainly will happen, if the besieged continue in possession of the ramparts, towers, and highest parts of the city... The sole resource after a place is forced, either by day or night, is however to secure the ramparts, towers, and all the highest places, and to dispute every inch of ground with the enemy as they advance through the streets.
It's hard to overstate how important Vegetius was to Medieval strategists, who treated his work practically as gospel and would generally try to follow its recommendations to the letter. So I seriously doubt any medieval strategist would have viewed the only conduit to the critical and decisive high ground positions as tactically irrelevant.
Either is was very obvious to the authors (so not included), or not thought to be an important factor.
When you are inside such a narrow stairway this fact becomes very obvious.
Once you use it to crush all enemies, you rebuild the castle around the new position of the stone
Medival stairways were built this way because people going upstairs won't have the space to swing if they are righthanders. Meanwhile people going downstairs have a good amount of space to do precisely that.
The assumption of course is that you as the defender are the one fleeing upstairs, while the attacker is trying to get to you.
Source: grew up around medival european castles and have been on a few tours. When you are inside such a stairway this becomes very obvious.
The author seems to be claiming that beyond the outer walls castles don't have defensive elements as they are pointless once the walls have been breached. This claim is false.
> Sieges often didn’t involve much fighting at all, as simply waiting outside the castle till the people inside ran out of water and food was a much easier and less bloody way to win. In many cases simply realising the enemy was going to sit outside and wait was enough to surrender.
This part for example is just straight up false. While many more sieges were won by surrender than successful assault, sieges were very violent and full of fighting. Sallies and even open field combat between groups of warriors wanting to make a name for themselves were a daily occurrence. The vast majority of cities and castles under siege had plentiful water supplies and could hold up to a years supply of food under rationing, especially if they had any time to prepare for the siege (which they almost always did because moving big armies is hard to do discretely). That preparation also stripped the surrounding area of forage for the armies, giving them hard time limits on how long they could siege before morale cratered. The attackers were just as likely to starve unless they had a constant supply line which the defenders constantly tried to disrupt.
In order to overcome that disadvantage the sieging army had to really do a lot of damage and scare the besieged into surrender. Constant volleys from siege equipment into and over the walls, attempted escalades, towers and projectiles, and soldiers with pickaxes batter the walls. At the siege of Lisbon in 1147, two shifts of 100 men each shot thousands of stones a day using two trebuchets.
Major assaults would even be planned out in the open to drive fear into the defenders and try to get them to surrender before a large wave of violence.
Source: see the Soldiers’ Lives Through History - The Middle Ages chapter 4: Sieges. Lots of primary sources like the St Omer Chronicle in the notes.
I do remember that the first phase of the Punic Wars was basically Sparta chasing all the Athenians inside the city where they brought in supplies by boat and waited the Spartans out, rinse and repeat for a decade. Obviously that’s a different period and the Athenians suffered a horrible outbreak of some sort of plague possibly due to the overcrowding.
That comes down to the location and type of castle, nothing to do with period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caernarfon_Castle
has town walls, water on three sides, multiple independant keeps separated by curtain walls, etc. Once attackers "gained entry" they were faced with being in an enclosed space, surrounded by high archers, and tasked with as much work again to advance further ... only to be faced with the same again.
It was damn near impossible to siege as restocking from the sea and|or river was almost always an option at the time.
It was also a castle with decades of resources and cash thrown its way, other castles of the same period didn't fare nearly as well.
A great many of the Irish castles of the Ulster plantation and onwards fell to undermining - Irish sappers dug tunnels and propped the undersides of the walls .. only to later burn out all the props and collapse the walls.
There were only so many castles that had water access, multiple layered defences and granite foundations all about that resisted tunnelling.
Fred Dibnah included it in his programme on castles and how they were built. He also goes over its defensive and offensive features in detail.
Here it is on YT:
It was tight. I didn't have much trouble climbing it, but I'm not sure I could have navigated it at all wearing armor. Falling down the stairs was not an issue because you'd just fall against the curved wall. Passing by other people? Hahaha. Maybe if you were trying to play Medieval Twister.
The defender advantage argument was viscerally satisfying, because you could so easily imagine how impossible it would be to do anything with the inward hand. Which is probably mostly evidence for why the myth persists, whether it is true or false. Though that itself could have applied to the builders or customers of times past. You can build them one way or the other, and here's a satisfying explanation for one even if it pertains to a situation that never happens, so... why not go with clockwise?
Then again, if I were to speculate, I would wonder why the fixation on sieges? If the defensibility argument were true, couldn't it apply to other situations like an attack by the populace or staff? The lord's personal guard might still appreciate the edge.
I can't help but think that carrying beer, torches, or chamber pots ought to be a bigger part of the justification, though.
That’s another myth. Wearing a reasonable form of plate mail is sort of heavy, but doesn’t really restrict your movement as much as people seem to think.
Now, the difference is that I'm probably bigger than your average footman or knight who might have been trying to go up those stairs. But they definitely wouldn't be passing anyone on the stairs, and they definitely would have had trouble hacking on someone who was above them on the staircase.
The one key fact that puts the idea to rest is all the staircases I've seen that spiral clockwise in one part of the building, and counter-clockwise in the other. Everything else being equal, both sets of stairs could be used to go either up or down, and you could choose which set to use. At Köln Cathedral, they tell you which ones are for up and which ones are for down, but if you're an invading attacker, you don't pay attention to the rules of the house you're invading.
Smart! One staircase to defend from attackers coming up from the ground and another to defend from attackers coming from the roof.
Probably there was. It might have also had nothing to do with making it easier to defend the staircase during combat. Maybe they just found that carry stuff up if the stairs go clockwise is easier. Maybe counterclockwise works better for those climbing down. But in most places you don’t really have enough space for two staircases so you just chose which (up/down) is more important to you
I imagine 5-10cm is enough, at least to the point you can wrangle yourself up the stairs, but you wouldn’t be fighting there in the first place with that amount of space.
Your arm and the end of your sword can more easily reach the feet and lower legs of something above you.
Whereas coming down the stairs, you have a harder time getting your sword to reach someone coming up because your range is reduced due to the height of your body.
Perhaps a closer look at the numbers would show a very clear default direction plus a strong priority for symmetry where applicable?
The problem with a phalanx is that it's hard to turn, not that attacking from short range is somehow better than attacking from long range.
I did. It's right there in my comment.
I'm supporting the idea that a spear is superior in any defensive position by pointing out that the problem with an offensive block of spears is the need to move, which doesn't apply to defense.
Except when you are going to die, even if the extra odds seems pointless, you do it. much like WW2 tankers putting sand bags on their tank.
That’s why you surrender after you realize the situation is hopeless (which is hopefully long before anyone starts climbing up the stairs).
Even if you’re willing to fight to the death/don’t have a choice which was pretty rare and are just stuck at the top what incentives do the attackers have to risk their lives by rushing up the stairs when they can just start a fire at the bottom and/or wait you out?
Wouldn’t you need the relevant event to not be extremely rare for that to matter?
I mean a sieges were once in a several decades or even once in 100-200 years events on average. Actual direct assaults with combat occurring on the stairs were significantly less frequent than that. The defender being able to turn the tide at that point? Even less.
I see what you did there.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain...
Whoever has to step to the spine side would probably want a hand on the spine, palm making contact from the uphill side no matter wether facing up or down. So for someone uphill, the spine contact would be made with the outside hand (arm crossing in front), for someone downhill with the inside hand. On a clockwise staircase, this would leave the right hand comfortably idle for candle, tool or whatever the person deferring to (presumably higher ranking?) oncoming traffic on the wall side is carrying.
Currently reading Plutarch. Twice already he's mentioned sieges where the attackers waited for the besieged to run out of water. The grueling wait is compressed in history.
That's a wall around a wall around a wall. Like a frickin' onion.
They slowly stopped laughing as they realized the Macedonians were filling in the shore front to make a kilometer long 200m wide causeway to march across.
It did not end well for the island City of Tyre and its inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre_(332_BC)#The_sie...
That's happening now in Gaza. Israel has cut off water.
claim: "Medieval staircases were built going clockwise for the defender's advantage"
counterclaim: "no they were not; medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage"... it was for a different reason, or even, they weren't even built that way.
clarifying original claim: "Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage, they were built counterclockwise."
confused? me too. and the site is called "fakehistory..."?
The title should be, "Exploring whether medieval staircases were built with chirality to benefit right handed defenders."
Like if you go through the bottom/top door, it's more natural to walk straight forwards and then curve, rather than walk in, turn 90°, and then walk upwards.
Obviously this wouldn't matter if the door were located facing precisely the middle of the spiral, but it certainly does if it more naturally opens on one side of the spiral.
I can't draw anything here, but imagine the staircase is the width of two doors. So the door could be on either side (closer to either edge).
If the door is on the left, you want the staircase to curve upwards to the right. And vice-versa.
There could be a window there but not in the alternative location.
Not "left" or "right", which is different on roomside and stairside, but inside or outside of the spiral.
'Just in case pillagers come up the stairs, and I'll throw in a Zweihänder for half the price too, in case your attacker steps out of reach of your regular sword!'.
The reality is that most of the time most castles were not involved in violence at all (outside of rough methods of keeping order I guess). Even if staircase fighting never ever happened, the imagination of heroically fending off invaders who made it that far in person could have easily been a clever pose, a tool of the trade for architects to give the impression of really knowing all the tricks. Claiming better defensibility would have made an even bigger impression on the future inhabitant than on tourists hundreds of years later. Because, assuming that the article is not wrong in this, the customer has just as little experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes.
Medieval snake-oil, claiming that it never happened should require better evidence than "you really would not want to ever let invaders get that far".
If it's a 30/70 distribution chances are that almost half of those 70 are just as random or motivated by more pressing concerns than the "wrong direction" 30, and of the remaining 40 that make up the imbalance, a certain amount will be habitual copies of conscious decisions for the snake-oil winding.
Yeah, whenever a tour guide brings up the defensive advantage story, chances are that this particular staircase wasn't really designed as defense-optimized but random/some other reason/habitual. But unless someone proposes a better explanation for the imbalance (I don't know, some pseudoreligious thing perhaps? Some echo from whatever way Romans preferred? Oncoming traffic etiquette, like climbing side steps toward the steep side, taking a break grabbing the stair's spine while the descending side slides past at the outer wall, and they'd both rather have their dominant hand wall-side?), it's a rather bold claim to call it a victorian era fabrication.
The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the Victorian Era, but was later. Cook was not a historian, but a sports writer and art critic. The book was _Spirals in Nature and Art_. And this hypothesis is a half-paragraph aside, with words like "would" and "probable", given with zero supporting evidence, and clearly one (as xe wrote "I think") that Cook originated.
The burden of proof is to prove that that is true, not to blithely assume that it is true and demand that there be evidence to prove it false.
Especially since Theodore Andrea Cook held that "right-handed spirals are more common in staircases". By "right-handed spiral", Cook actually meant anti-clockwise staircases (as can be seen from figure 29 in the book). Not even Cook believed the premise that has given rise to this 120-year-old myth. Cook wrote that anti-clockwise staircases were "more common" despite the fact that clockwise ones would have been better for this reason, a reason that xe invented from whole cloth without any support from how helical staircases even featured in any siege of any castle in history.
120 years of uncritical out of context repetition and augmentation later, here we are; with people demanding that the burden of proof lies with those who challenge something that was never proven in the first place, not expertly held, and not even held true by its own originator.
> While sapping (tunneling under and collapsing fortifications) remained in use, apart from filling in ditches, the mole-and-ramp style assaults of the ancient world are far less common, precisely because most armies (due to the aforementioned fragmentation combined with the increasing importance in warfare of a fairly small mounted elite) lacked both the organizational capacity and the raw numbers to do them.
Overall, medieval armies just didn't have the resources to siege for as long and as intensely as the Romans and other ancient armies did. Until the early modern period and gunpowder artillery, defenders in castles had a much bigger advantage over attackers so often attackers just didn't bother. They were more common than actual pitched battles though and most ended through surrender rather than successful assault.
The book Devereaux mentions Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages is a great resource for further reading - there's a whole chapter on sieges. It starts out describing how much worse the life for siegers often was compared to the besieged.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...
The very first thing that begs to be done is to plot this imbalance on a time axis to see was it kept constant over time, or maybe people made clockwise stairs at first and switched to counter-clockwise later.
But it is not the only possible correlation you can measure before assessing the hypothesis space. Does direction of a stair correlates with geography? With a number of times a castle changed his owner? With a size of a castle? ...
I'm pretty sure you can get some idea of it all by studying historical sources. But I see no evidence someone bothered to do it. All I see people speculate a lot.
In this situation, I believe the most reasonable will be to file the question as having no answer and to forget it as having no importance.
You’re talking about a customer who most likely received a rigorous sword fight training, and probably participated in numerous knight tourneys. And spent his life living in castles, walking up and down those stairs. And who most likely knew someone who had personally engaged in castle offense or defense (the world was a lot smaller back then). Somehow I think this customer would know a thing or two about defending castles.
You could be right about the sales tactics, but comparing a medieval castle owner and a 21st century tourist is a bit much.
Do you see those tankers saying 'well, if we took a shell there, we already lost'
https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-my...
To paraphrase: We know how sieges ended and castles fell. We have written histories to consult. None of them ended with swordfights on staircases like Errol Flynn movies.
It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly not proven to be false.
> It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
But you didn't.
> Your second is a non-sequitur.
How?
There is no evidence of the myth being true. There are no sources in history suggesting it.
It might be true. But there is no evidence that it is.
Proving it false is another matter.
> Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage
and
> it’s not true.
Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative evidence to support them.
In fairness, their conclusion is more measured:
> So in conclusion: there’s no evidence for this claim and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But that's not the headline they went with.
see also: Russell's teapot
Then, since we agree that the claim has no evidence to support it, we assume it is false.
Therefore, we conclude, "it is true that staircases were built clockwise to advantage the defender".
I agree that the burden of proof lies upon the person that makes the claim. But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
So, a more correct statement would be: "In the absence of evidence of why the staircases were constructed, we do not know why they were constructed".
To say the absence of evidence proves the opposite of the claim is wrong.
> But that doesn't mean we assume the opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It means we assume ignorance.
Regardless of the wording, the gist is the same: we /don't/ assume ignorance, we treat the claim, like Russell's teapot [0], or any other unsupported claim, as false until such evidence arises, since there are an infinite number of unfalsifiable premises, and we neither want to, nor do, in practice, treat them all as maybe true, maybe not, forever.
tl;dr: As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, yes, there is a default, and that is that a thing is false unless sufficient evidence exists to believe otherwise. No, we don't treat all unfalsified (and unfalsifiable) hypotheses as unknown and assume ignorance.
We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a thousand more.
That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief
To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in statistics, A = "this staircase explanation has sufficient evidence to say it is true", not-A = "this staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence to conclude it is true". Not-A here is example of what is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null hypothesis is the default.
It's an argument against believing without evidence, not for believing without evidence.
I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern staircases are built in a particular direction?
If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows would work - for example.
If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc
The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme
There are so many things that could bias this result. Maybe it's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps, north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
There was an article here on HN a while ago talking about how the stupidly designed staircases were responsible for the Victorian trope of "falling down a staircase to your death."--the ones for servants were especially poorly designed.
I am willing to bet $10000, that the number of sieges won or lost due to a staircase fight between knights is 0.
Also I wonder what led to this hypothesis being created in the first place? That's a much more interesting question to me. Was it some eccentric historian just inventing it?
This is written by someone without experience in hand to hand combat as many weapons were blunt (like a mace or club) and a rondel dagger in an unarmored spot is far more difficult to parry than a sword. Speaking of which, a rondel dagger was specifically intended for grappling situations. Thrusting weapons were in many cases preferred for tight quarters combat although there are slashing weapons specifically designed for tight quarters combat as well. Sword variants like longer greatswords specifically designed vs. halbred or pike formations were not ideal for close quarters, but there were several short sword types
Even in more ancient times, weapons such as the Sica, from which we get the word sicario, were well known as a tool used in gladiatorial combat, and in the Judean wars. Additionally, the gladius wielded with the large shield, the scutum, was only an 18 inch short sword. Short because it was ideal for close quarters fighting via a thrust against other heavy infantry.
An explanation that I would have found plausible: building stairs clockwise is cheaper somehow.
Xe was a sports writer and art critic, not a historian, moreover.
It's a half-paragraph aside in a book entitled _Spirals in Nature and Art_, using words like "would" and "probable". And after 120 years of uncritical repetition and amplification, here we are.
First the claim that stairs would not be optimized for combat because fighting on stairs was undesirable holds no weight. Castles were designed with many layers of defense - it was entirely expected that large sections of a castle would be lost and the defenders would continue to hold out in other sections, bitterly holding chokepoints. From murder holes to machicolations, every inch of castles were optimized defense. Even if in practice defenders would prefer not to fight on a stairway, if all else were equal (and it's hard to think of something more arbitrary than which way the stones are flipped), why wouldn't they go with the option that potentially could be helpful instead of potentially aiding an attacker?
Next, the argument that "not all castles had clockwise staircases" seems to be an own-goal. During the time periods when having to defend a castle was likely, staircases were overwhelmingly clockwise. It is only in the late middle ages when defense became much less of a priority that anticlockwise stair cases start gaining popularity, and the later it gets the more common anticlockwise stairs become. If there were some non-military utilitarian reason for the choice, such as making it easier for someone to steady themselves or carry lanterns, presumably that need would remain. If the choice were non-utilitarian from the beginning, why the initial disparity? No doubt the designers of these buildings had multiple competing concerns, including aesthetics and convenience, but clearly the balance shifted. Examples of anticlockwise stairways were common in structures not intended for defense in earlier structures, which means the shift was not technological and further makes non-military utilitarian requirements unlikely.
Obviously it would be nice if we had more surviving sources from the time period, but it's hard to imagine any other theory fitting the data so well.
For the same reason why there are still a lot of tower blocks being built with combustible cladding or why we still find many houses not being built earth quake proof in prone countries: idiots and bunglers.
> The Tower of London, one of the most important castles in England, where royalty live(d) has counter-clockwise stairs!
That's a bad example. It was built in 1066 (the first part) by Norse people who occupied England and not the English. I wouldn't be surprised if the workmanship of building stone castles hugely differed between those two peoples at that time.
> If you’ve already breached all the outer walls and defeated all the soldiers there and have reached so far into the castle that you’re at the foot of stairs, you’re very close to victory and who would want to risk their life crawling up some stairs where the defenders are waiting for you?
That assumes that every castle was huge and wars were fought between hundreds of soldiers. Sure when you have 200 soldiers inside your castle having defeated everyone except a handful of people up the tower then this would be pointless, but that is not what happened in reality. It's a Hollywood imagination of the battles fought. Many castles were tiny and the army was in the dozens, not hundreds. Raiders and other small groups of enemies would come in a couple dozens and not in hundreds. All of a sudden those stairs make A LOT of sense.
Officers simply retain their handguns when they get promoted into rear line positions; no special accommodation is required.
I would expect that depends on the design of the spiral staircase.
In a spiral staircase, you want to go up about 3 meters in a 360° turn because you need a bit over 2m of headroom and some space for the stair itself.
That means that, 1m away from the center of the staircase, the slope will be about 50%. The ideal staircase has more or less “step width + twice the step height = 63cm” [1], so that would give a good step width of 31cm and a step height of 16cm.
However, 2m away from the center, that same stair would have a slope of about 25%, and the ideal step would be 41cm wide and 11cm high or thereabouts.
3m from the center you’d have a 16% slope, and the ideal step would be 45 cm wide, 8cm high, etc.
Now, in ‘standard’ designs [2], step height can’t change with distance to the center, so the designer has to pick one, and thus has control over the distance from the center where it’s easiest to step.
[1] https://www.practicalarchitecture.com/blog/the-geometry-of-a.... Of course, that’s a heuristic, and the ideal will be different for different persons, but what’s important is that simply scaling up a staircase in order to get wider steps is not a good idea.
[2] very wide stairs can and sometimes do have steps that are sloping upwards. I don’t think these are non-standard, but can’t think of a better word now.
They can get wide. Try climbing the lower part of the dome of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, for example (https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/view-of-a-yo...)
Also, in the context of “it just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the inside as possible”, I think spiral staircases that are less than a meter wide aren’t relevant. On them, the only option is to walk in the middle of the stairs.
Being right-footed, I can do cross-over turns while ice-skating in one direction MUCH easier than the other.
However, not sure whether that translates to clockwise or counter-clockwise stairs being easier without trying it.
maybe it would be counter-clockwise? Right foot travels further?
The forward distance travelled is also trivial in terms of effort compared to the height displacement upward. Most people can walk for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat, but way fewer would feel fine walking up stairs for 10 minutes.
Not to mention, you can simply have a convention that the downward walker on a spiral staircase favour whichever side is best.
I see we're dealing with a castle siege expert over here. As I have visited many castles in Europe (I also live in bicycle driving distance of at least 5 medieval castles) and have heard this explanation many times, I was wondering about the authors counter arguments. Unfortunately there weren't any. I cannot tell for sure since part of the article is missing after "Of course if the enemy ". Now I will never now this another obvious fact.
Reminds me of moon landing denier arguments: "Of course we didn't land on the moon. Duh! It doesn't make any sense AT ALL. Pfff!"
You need more space under your foot while descending, you only use the ball of your foot while going up.
The stairs are thicker on the outside, so if that is on the right as you descend, the staircase will be counter clockwise.
As a right-handed person, when I've built spiral towers in games they have been clockwise because when building from the bottom up, clockwise just seems "right".
Is it saying that the idea stairs are built clockwise for a defense advantage is a myth? eg: "Medieval staircases were not (built going clockwise for the defender's advantage)"
Or that stairs were were purposely built NOT clockwise (or rather anti/counter clockwise), so that defenders would have an advantage? eg: "Medieval staircases were (not built going clockwise) for the defender's advantage"
English is weird.
Applying Okkam's razor I'd conclude that most medieval staircases were probably build clockwise simply because most staircases were already built clockwise.
Also, such straicases are used not only in medieval castles. A modern Russian 19th century cathedral also has a staircase of such type. Probably, because cathedrals must be built using traditional architecture?
My working theory is that progress was really slow until the written word, incremental improvements but still slow until the printing press, and pretty quick thereafter (until computers, and then the wheels came off). But…I would love to read a history from someone who actually studied it, and said “look at the pace of discovery from 1000BC-200AD, 200AD-1200AD, 1200-1600, etc.”
> If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-clockwise staircases?
AKA it's almost surely just a builder's preference probably stemming from their handedness.
so, maybe they just adopted the rules of the road, and the legends that come from it.
What if they built right-handed defenders AND left-handed defenders towers?
This is getting silly :P
.
.
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(An earlier version of my comment ended with "... ever laid duck eggs.", evidencing both my deep ignorance of medieval warfare and the biology of egg laying!)
> Se accede al interior por unas escaleras de caracol. Para evitar el mareo, los 4 primeros tramos se hacen en el sentido de las agujas del reloj y los dos últimos tramos en sentido contrario.
[1] https://rutasparatodaslasedades.blogspot.com/2019/07/el-cast...
-vikings with horns on their helmets
-highlanders all wearing tartan
-knights in plate armour not being able to get up if they fell over?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veks%C3%B8_Helmets (from scandinavia, but a couple thousand years before the Vikings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age )
> The person below you has the advantage of jabbing at your legs
Weren't virtually all fighters in those times men?
To quote James Wright, who is an archaeologist:
> we know a fair bit about how sieges were ended, and it was never the desperate violent rout on the staircases that is so beloved of Hollywood films.
https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-my...
As since men are people, I'd argue it's not an abuse of language.
> I was certainly able to imagine that on my first tour of a fort when I was young.
Most people visiting medieval castles probably significantly overestimate the frequency of hand to hand combat that might had taken place there (almost never as far as we know).
And speaking of, let's start another myth. Swedes always dance around the christmas tree or maypole sunwise because it's an ancient dance to evoke the sun after months of darkness.
> probably from Middle Low German weddersinnes, literally "against the way"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/widdershins#etymonline_v_799...
Basically, this is NOT the way.
Thou art thyself, though not "clockwise".
What's "clockwise"? It is nor hand, nor pen-
dulum, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a clock. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So "Widdershins" would, were it not "Widdershins" call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Widdershins, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all my turns.
To put things in modern parlance: A meme, invented from whole cloth by Daily Telegraph writer Theodore Andrea Cook 120 years ago because he liked fencing, was still going strong on Twitter in 2022; and people are still falling prey to believing its assumptions.
One has to appreciate the additional irony of the Twitter account actually being named "history in memes".
"My German is pre-industrial, and mostly religious."
I'm sure it has been an issue forever but online especially it seems painful how much of that information there is.
"People asked me if this tribe was originally from this area or if they migrated here.
I always say: clearly they were from here. The weather is so bad around these parts, who would choose to move here from somewhere else?"
- German historian
A castle staircase takes a lot of time and effort to build. Choosing to build the staircase in one direction or the other has negligible cost. If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one direction then it would make sense to build it that way.
Defense in depth.
Saying that castle sieges didn't tend to involve stairway fights doesn't imply that stairways wouldn't have had defensive measures built in. That is post-hoc rationalization.
If it's true that the battle at this point is lost for the defenders -- and known history indicates this is so -- then why would the builders choose directions based on this extremely unlikely scenario, instead of on just about any other consideration (aesthetic, practical, or even random)?
Having a knife might be useful in various situations even outside combat as far as I know.
I'll take a stab at guessing (mind you, this is blind guessing, happy to be corrected!): the USMC still issue bayonets because of both tradition, which is important to the military, and also because they are actually useful in close quarters battle, which still occurs on occasion, such as in urban warfare and house-to-house combat clearing, etc. The likelihood of having to use a bayonet/knife in modern CQB is probably significantly higher than the likelihood of medieval defenders recovering from an enemy army that has stormed their castle.
So in other words, just because the staircases take a lot of time and effort to build, simply means that having the staircase itself is important, not necessarily that its chirality is important. It has to have a chirality but it may well not matter which one, just like roads.
If there were evidence that driving on the right side or left side of the road slightly reduces car accidents and a country with previously no roads or cars began planning to automotize the country, then, all things considered, it would make sense to have people drive in the lane with a slightly reduced fatality rate.
If there are two choices where one presents a slight advantage but no additional cost then a rational actor will go with that choice.
For perspective, Norman keeps were often built with a large internal cross wall, so even if troops made it through the stair door and swarmed into the room they'd still have to fight their way into the other half of the floor. By the stage these expensive and space consuming walls were defensively relevant, defenders would have already lost outer walls, viable long-term food and water supplies and much of the garrison defending it... and any real chance of holding out. But an invading army would still lose more men storming it; so it functioned as a deterrent.
I've heard this "it's a myth" argument before, but 70% of staircases is quite a large proportion of staircases spiralling in a particular direction which would offer the defender a marginal advantage to be pure coincidence. Particularly when the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise staircases in Norman castles was about 20:1; it was later generations of castle of builders who added many more anticlockwise stairwells, in an era when individual tower defence was less importance, and builders may have simply forgotten or come to doubt arguments about the defensive advantages of clockwise spirals (the blog's arguments for why spiral staircase defence is rubbish work here of course!). Contemporary cathedrals which were not at all defensible tended to build clockwise and anticlockwise spiral staircases as matching pairs, so it wasn't like there was some other sort of massive aversion to stairs in a particular direction.
Going by that logic, the president's bunker under the pentagon would've been built without a lock. After all, people don't usually have to physically drag a country's leader out of their locked bunker, right? By the time anyone's knocking on that door, usually the war is lost and the country has surrendered.
And yet, if you're designing for defense, why NOT take such a cheap and easy countermeasure as putting a lock on the door or choosing the more defensible way to spiral your staircase? You might want to buy a few more minutes to negotiate in a desperate situation; you might want at least the option of taking that futile last stand; you might be facing not an invading army but a single lunatic with a sword who snuck past the outer guards.
As is the nearly-exactly comment in TFA:
> Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle is probably already lost.
It's conjecture all the way down.
Just like the entire staircase argument?
Except that we actually know that:
> Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle is probably already lost.
Was true in almost all cases.
If you are the attacking army, just wait it out. You've won the siege, and any defenders up the stairs will have to either come down or starve to death. Why risk attacking up the stairs?
Basically the entire job of a historian is to determine the credibility of old sources, so they can interpret all the data and come to the most accurate conclusion about what happened.
Unsubstantiated conjecture by Victorian historians shouldn't really be treated as a "source" in the first place by actual historians.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't a historian. Xe was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, amongst other things, who wrote about sports such as fencing and rowing; and who was also an art critic.
Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't writing in the Victorian Era. _Spirals in Nature and Art_ was a 20th century work, in the Edwardian Era. _The Curves of Life_ was from the subsequent Georgian Era.
Theodore Andrea Cook is the earliest person found espousing this hypothesis. This is, as far as anyone has determined, Theodore Andrea Cook's own original hypothesis, based upon zero evidence. That is certainly what the text of _Spirals_ implies.
I'll throw my idea in: most spiral staircases turn counter-clockwise, because they were notoriously dark / badly lit, so one had to hold a torch or a lamp while traversing them. Since majority of people are right-handed, stands to reason a person would be holding the source of light in their right hand, and hold on to the hand-rail (or wall) with their left. You'd naturally want to lean on the outside wall of the staircase, as the stair treads there are wider than near the centre of the spiral.
QED!
(let me know if you spot the flaw in my logic)
I would counter argue that one may prefer to hold the ramp in one's strong hand...
Also, much staircases I know are clockwise. Which is also my theory for this myth, most staircases were build clockwise simply because most were already build clockwise. It fits Okkam's razor.