The secret medieval tunnels that we still don't understand
weirdmedievalguys.substack.com
weirdmedievalguys.substack.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565806
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102069
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332244
Several theories on their purpose, most plausible (IMHO) is that that they were used for knitting.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/17a17ju/roman_...
There is a deep tradition of chthonic ascetic monasticism in Christianity. Many, many Churches from this same period have attached anchorite cells.
It is easy to imagine similar cells/tunnels being used, unremarked, by choice or coercion.
Vs
"and the minimum width between armrests is 39.37 cm (15.5 inches)." https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/articles/31352078107921-Se...
This clandestine treatment would have made sense had the erdstall been built as escape routes in case of invaders, but this can’t have been their purpose. They only ever have one entrance, usually located beneath the floor of a church or farmhouse, or simply under the flagstones of a town square.
That SCREAMS "hidey hole in case of invaders", to me. Like the hole Saddam Hussein was discovered hiding in.
If the countryside is overrun with invaders, there's literally no place for peasants to escape to. But if you can safely hide until dark, you have a chance. If you can wait out until the invaders pass through to their objective (strategic castle, opposing force...), you survive.
> And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones. Though they could have provided refuge for a small family, why would they be accessed from such public spaces?
I don't see why a whole bunch of people couldn't have hidden in them for several hours during an attack/raid? A hiding spot sufficiently known to a few, just big enough. And then it makes perfect sense the entrance would be in some central public place.
> The lack of exits is a further strike against this theory—if enemies became aware of such a tunnel being used as shelter, it would quickly become a death trap for its inhabitants.
Which would contribute to their extreme secrecy. And the loops and dead ends and narrow spots make it all the harder for attackers to pursue you even if they find it.
> Besides, in either of these cases, one would expect at least some goods to have been left behind—remnants of food or clothing, cached or dropped valuables. Instead, there is nothing.
If they were intended for hiding for just a few hours, since oxygen would run out anyways, it makes sense for nothing to be left in there. You rush in and come back out when the raiders have moved on. Clothing was valuable, you weren't going to leave your shawl behind.
If you are hiding your family from almost certain death, 24 hours with no food or water in a cool dark cave is a possibility.
If your family were at home in the nearby countryside they'd flee into the forest or something instead.
For that matter—A place to stash the kids from the census-taker and the harvest from the tax man? Tuck them away, just for that day, once every so often, and pull them out afterward?
Or knowledge privileged to some specific order, whose representatives are geographically widespread but sparse within a given community?
However, this site [1] shows several categories for taxation that might be hidden to falsify the taxation basis. Cash, Inventories, Household Goods, Luxury Clothing. Admittedly, it seems like there would be a greater percentage of items left behind in some of these locations, since there often tend to be something. Yet, for taxation avoidance purposes, maybe they're very motivated to recollect everything that was hidden.
[1] https://ehs.org.uk/taxation-and-wealth-inequality-in-the-ger...
The erdstall surely could not have been built with storage in mind, since their length and narrowness offer no advantages over a conventional and convenient cellar. And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones. Though they could have provided refuge for a small family, why would they be accessed from such public spaces? Or be too small for a large man or pregnant woman to fit through? The lack of exits is a further strike against this theory—if enemies became aware of such a tunnel being used as shelter, it would quickly become a death trap for its inhabitants. Besides, in either of these cases, one would expect at least some goods to have been left behind—remnants of food or clothing, cached or dropped valuables. Instead, there is nothing
You also need to look at the locations and context. There are several of these things in the region my family comes from and at the estimated time they were built there were no invaders or other problems that would justify using them as shelters. Not to mention that if there were, you'd hide your family in existing shelters in the surrounding forests or hills, not some cramped underground deathtrap.
And you might not have time to bring your family out to the surrounding forests. If these were centrally located in town, they might have been intended just for the people who happened to be in town at the moment.
I'm not saying that I know what they were for. Just that the reasons the article gives for saying they weren't for hiding don't hold up at all.
In any case hostile forces don't just teleport into your village, they're moving on foot and stopping to loot on the way, you've usually got weeks of warning that something bad is happening and days of warning that it's about to happen to you. The whole shelter theory just doesn't hold water.
The theories proposed here are merely examples of human brains ability to come up with a fantastic story for anything in the absence of data. Ex falso quodlibet - from zero follows everything, if you have nothing you can just say anything you want, and it will "explain" your non-existing data perfectly /s
The extremely narrow passages, only one exit, bad air circulation, there is nothing that hints towards this being used for hiding, quite the opposite.
> And while three brave explorers in the 21st century once spent 48 hours in an erdstall, crawling to new sections whenever oxygen became scarce, it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones
I know the article mentions why hiding doesn't make sense. My whole comment is about how the reasons it gives don't hold up.
0. https://www.unterwelt-kusch.com/dokumentation/film-und-audio...
Digging a subterranean tunnel with a wooden-bladed shovel is going to SUCK. I'd skimp, too.
very fun!
“it seems unlikely that they would have been constructed as hiding places, even temporary ones.”
What about hiding places for storage? As in, smuggling, illegal trade or evading taxes?
I would like to offer a competing theory. These are thermally stable storage places for perishables.
As heat transfer is directly proportional to surface area, the ideal vessel that maximizes the volume / surface area ratio would be a sphere (like some cryogenic tanks for rockets). But if you don't have the technology to make that or a cylinder, then the best you can do is observe that lowering surface area helps and make smaller, long rounded passages to try and optimize a ratio that you don't understand by feel.
I think it's more likely that these are are ancient fridges / hot boxes than a way to spiritually experience rebirth. I think a thousand places to store hay for horses and cheese for your family is far more likely.
Could these be boltholes? Yes, but how frequently were places getting invaded? War was mostly siege based and was fairly infrequent for a given city / place (i.e. even if the polity next door was under siege at the time. You weren't) Winter and summer - on the other hand - were and are yearly guarantees.
Perhaps. Perhaps that was one of the use cases, but the inconsistent diameter could also be the result of them being bad at digging tunnels. Digging tunnels by hand is hard (and - dare I say - scary).
Some inconsistency from poor digging can be ignored as a minor inconvenience. It is no big deal if in one section you have to duck a little. The bottlenecks on the other hand are so small that the noticeably impede progress, and some people probably could not get through them at all.
If they are not there intentionally that would be too big of an inconsistency to ignore.
The chambers at the ends could have been where the dogs slept and were fed.