"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.
You're asking to a disprove a purely(?) speculative claim, though.
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.