Hacker News Reader

Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

There is a pretty significant flaw in this article in that it assumes castles mostly defended against war. When you read history books, and actually visit real castles, you learn the main threats were insurection, rebellion, and disease. Most royalty who were killed were killed by people within the castle walls, so the argument 'well you'd just give up' simply doesn't apply. You don't 'just give up' if your brother is trying to kill you or there is a peasant rebellian. Neither of those situations typically involve unbreakable seiges.... The idea that castles are not built for internal defence goes against a tremendous amount of archeological evidence. They are choke full of trap doors, weird side rooms, and hiding spots.

View on HN

The relative scarcity of castle sieges doesn't mean they weren't a major concern. It's quite likely that castles served as an effective "siege deterrent". That is, sieges weren't common specifically because the likelihood of success was low.

My point was to criticise this paragraph: " For attackers it’s also not a very tempting scenario. If you’ve already breached all the outer walls and defeated all the soldiers there, who would want to risk their life crawling up some stairs where the defenders are waiting for you? 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."

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.

The whole article is awful.

> 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’m not going to claim I’m a medieval military tactician, but if you have some amount of resources stockpiled and friendly armies in the field, why surrender immediately? Your forces or allied forces could pin the siege force against your walls possibly giving you an advantageous position. Perhaps stockpiling supplies that didn’t go bad was difficult back then or militaries didn’t consistent of more than one army so if there was a siege that meant your main force was already defeated?

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.

> where they brought in supplies by boat and waited the Spartans out

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.

Nice to see my home town - and its castle - on HN.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64tCM9zXTE4#t=345

Athens-Sparta would be the Peloponnesian War, Punic wars were between Rome and Carthage. Sorry for the nitpick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com