Whereas the Gatehouse simply protected the entrance to the castle, the Barbican was designed to be a deathly obstacle course, preventing attackers from even reaching the gatehouse.The Great Hall would have been a social focus of any Medieval castle layout. The most elaborate kitchens would have been all-set to cook and prepare game and fish, which had been caught when hunting in the castle grounds.These designs tended to be added in later years.
During this time, many castles were built in Europe and the Middle East. Archeologists working on Farleigh Hungerford castle have indeed discovered evidence for sizeable hay-lofts within this castle.In Early Medieval times, castles didn’t really have dungeons – simply because the idea of keeping someone prisoner was, back then, a very strange punishment. Whereas horses and pigs would have been grazed in the outer courtyard, it’s likely the inner courtyard would have been used for more formal events.Stables would have often included hay-lofts and space for the grooms to live.
They can carry large loads. The men's pay has been and still is very much in arrears, and we are having the greatest difficulty in keeping them because they have simply nothing to live on. This always sounded unpleasant, especially when I saw the state of the floors in castles that I visited. Aside from the coverings on tatami mats, rushes for floors can also be purchased as medieval or apple matting. This meant that the only way to the gatehouse was through an entrance riddled with danger and entrapment.Love discovering the secrets of English castles?It took castle designers a surprisingly long time to solve this problem. When the castle was on low ground near a stream, the moat was filled with water, but such castles were comparatively rare. You can compare it to the recent satellite image from Google, which you can see above.Additionally, the advantage of round towers is that they couldn’t be toppled over that easily. This would have been another area of hustle-and-bustle, and the focus of day-to-day residential life in the castle.
This image shows the stone vault on the ground floor at Craggaunowen Castle in County Clare. Stone vaults are architecturally very strong. This is because the rushes are thick, long, and strong: short, fragile grass cannot be made into mats. Attackers had got wise to the fact that, by burrowing under the corner of a square tower, they would disrupt the foundations and collapse the whole tower.In fact, beer was so important to Medieval life that a designated Ale Wife (yes, she was always a woman!) In case you should wonder where so much money could go in a week, we would have you know that we have needed – and shall continue to need 400 masons, both cutters and layers, together with 2,000 less skilled workmen, 100 carts, 60 wagons and 30 boats bringing stone and sea coal; 200 quarrymen; 30 smiths; and carpenters for putting in the joists and floor boards and other necessary jobs.
Indeed, the guests of honour would have been seated on a dais (stage) at the front of the hall.The barbican was a thin, enclosed passageway that would have jutted out from the gatehouse.
It was usually the tallest and strongest tower, situated at the heart of the fortifications.The presence of a chapel gave a castle a sense of prestige and significance within the local area.Alternatively, castle in a more peaceful, prosperous part of Southern England may have been designed to culture an air of luxury and magnificence for a local Lord and Lady.Farleigh Hungerford Castle was, first and foremost, a grand residence for the Hungerford family. Farleigh Hungerford has many traditional features of Medieval castles.This is the layout of Farleigh Hungerford castle, as it would have been in Medieval times. Entertaining important guests was a fundamental purpose of many castles – this helped secure the power of the castle’s Lord and Lady.Very few castles had the advantage of a fresh-flowing natural moat (formed from the loop of a river, for example).Christian belief (and, don’t forget, that England was Catholic prior to Henry VIII) permeated every aspect of life.Well, there wasn’t a carbon-copy plan that was rolled-out across Europe.Every castle suffered a huge conundrum – people and supplies needed access to the castle, but building a route into the castle formed an incredibly obvious route for attackers.Most castles didn’t have dungeons – in actual fact, dungeons are a bit of a modern-day obsession.So let’s look at the layout of an excellent example of a Medieval castle – Farleigh Hungerford castle, in Somerset, UK. In actual fact, a chained drawbridge (as we think of it today) was an uncommon feature of a typical Medieval castle layout.The presence of a chapel (and the ‘safe haven within’) would be of practical use if the castle was ransacked.When a banquet was on, the Great Hall would have been decked out to impress and entertain the most important visitors. In most houses, the floors of the rooms on the ground floor were simply beaten earth.