Birth: June 1239 at Westminster (reigned 1272-1307)
The Life and Times of Edward the First
Edward Longshanks
Edward took the reins of power at the death of his father Henry III, who had proven to be a weak ruler. Edward, however, grew to be one of England’s greatest leaders: a ruthlessly energetic warrior-king who sought to extend and consolidate the power of the English crown over Scotland and Wales.
Britain and the World in 1272
When Edward ascended to the throne with the death of his father Henry III in 1272, England was in the midst of a period of growth and increasing prominence in the world. The population had been rising slowly but steadily since the Norman Conquest, and English agriculture was increasingly prosperous. The Crusades, which had begun in 1095, had come to an end with the death of the Louis IX of France and the withdrawal of Edward from the Holy Land in 1272, though the story of the Crusader Kingdoms would not be closed until the fall of Acre in 1291. France was the preeminent power in Europe, largely as a result of the prestige of leading the Crusades and the close contacts it had forged with the East. The Eastern Roman Empire was nearly extinguished; although it would rise again, it would never attain anything like its past glories.
The feudal system was still at his height in the thirteenth century. Although there was enormous power and prestige in the throne, in many ways kings were no different from large landowners. War was not purely the domain of the royal government: landowners could and did conduct their own private wars. Although cash was to become an increasingly important part of the economy as the thirteenth century progressed, land ownership was still the true basis of wealth. Since the possessions of landowners were often widely scattered and transportation was slow and difficult, the authority of the king was often weak. War was the only way landowners could settle disputes, assert their rights and protect their wealth.
It is easy to picture the feudal system as a pyramid, with the king at the apex, the barons in the middle and the peasants at the base. The reality is far more complex. Take, for example, King Edward. Although he was the feudal overlord of the English barons, Edward also had inherited possessions in France, most importantly Gascony. In matters relating to his possessions in France, Edward was actually a vassal of the King of France. Landowners who had holdings in both England and Scotland or England and Wales were also subject to the same sort of divided loyalty. Such tangled lines of authority, together with intermarriage among the leading families, led to a system of shifting and overlapping circles of influence. It’s worth remembering that throughout the period, allegiance was an individual and personal manner rather than something owed to an abstract office or institution.
The late thirteenth century was more than a period of strife and struggle for dominance. By 1272, Oxford and Cambridge Universities were flourishing. St. Thomas Aquinas had nearly finished his Summa Theologica , Roger Bacon was attracting controversy for his new approaches to learning, and Marco Polo was crossing Central Asia. The lines of Modern Europe were slowly beginning to take shape.
Edward the King
Henry III died on November 16, 1272, while Edward was in Sicily. Edward was proclaimed king without opposition. Slowly he made his way back home, not reaching London until August 1274, when he received the crown. He was thirty-five years old, a respected warrior and a prestigious crusader.
Wales
At this time, only parts of Wales were under English control. The south was a patchwork of small princedoms, and the English border was ruled by the Marcher Lords, independent-minded rules of a buffer territory set up by William the Conqueror to protect England from Welsh raids. The north of Wales was ruled by Llywelyn ap Gruffyd, a vassal of Edward. Llywelyn had, however, taken advantage of the disorder of the Baron’s War and had ceased paying homage to Edward or fulfilling his feudal duties; when Edward was crowned in 1274, Llywelyn did not attend. By 1277, Edward had lost all patience with Llywelyn and invaded northern Wales. Llywelyn was quickly defeated, and forced to accept Edward as his overlord. Only five years later, Llywelyn, together with his brother David, who had supported Edward in the previous Welsh war, rebelled again. Edward assembled what was then the largest army ever commanded by an English king and invaded again. He forced David and Llywelyn up to the harsh, rugged territory around Mt. Snowdon and, using both land and sea power, cut off all Llywelyn’s supplies. Llywelyn was killed in battle, and David was captured and executed. Edward brought Wales into the legal and administrative framework of England, and spend the vast sum of 80,000 pounds to construct a number of massive castles to project his authority.
The Great Cause
One of Edward’s chief policies during his reign was the Great Cause of bringing Scotland under the control of the English Crown. In 1174, William the Lion, king of Scotland, was defeated in an attempt to invade England, and was forced to become a vassal of Henry II of England. Later, however, Richard I of England returned sovereignty to Scotland in exchange for 10,000 marks, which he needed to fund his crusading. Since 1249, Scotland had been ruled by Alexander III and had enjoyed independence and lasting peace; but Alexander died suddenly in 1286, leaving as his only heir his three-year-old granddaughter, daughter of the King of Norway, Margaret the Maid of Norway. Edward saw his chance and arranged a marriage between his eldest son Edward of Carnarvon (later Edward III) and Margaret, which would have neatly united the crowns of England and Scotland. Unfortunately, Margaret died on her journey from Norway to Scotland, leaving the succession in dispute. Edward’s beloved wife Eleanor died around the same time.
The nobles of Scotland, fearing a destructive civil war, asked Edward to settle the succession. Edward accepted under the condition that he be recognized as the feudal overlord of Scotland; the Scottish nobles eventually agreed. After a complex and protracted inquiry, examining both the legal precedents and the historical record, Edward’s commission chose John Baliol, who did have one of the stronger claims. Baliol was crowned, but he soon broke with Edward, denied Edward’s supremacy, and made an alliance with France. Edward, who was at war with France at this time over Gascony and other matters, invaded Scotland in a fury. He was joined by a number of Scottish nobles who were loyal to him, and soon defeated Baliol. Baliol begged forgiveness, gave up his crown and surrendered to Edward. (The weak, spiritless Baliol would go down in Scottish history as the “Toom Tabard,” meaning “empty coat.”) Edward set up his own administration to rule Scotland, and when he left, he took the Stone of Destiny, on which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned, with him to Westminster. It would remain in Westminster for over 700 years, only being returned in 1996.
Only a year later, Edward faced a new rebellion in Scotland. William Wallace , a member of the minor gentry, led a popular revolt, fueled in part by rumors of Edward’s death. Wallace won a decisive victory against the English at Stirling Bridge, and the revolt spread throughout Scotland. Edward himself was on the Continent, and was able to return only the following spring. He assembled an army and defeated Wallace at Falkirk in August, 1299. Wallace’s forces, mainly commoners, were crushed, but Wallace was to remain at large until 1305. Edward decided to remove any hope of further Scottish resistance: his campaigns throughout the Scotland would go on for five more years.
Late Difficulties
Edward was now in the most difficult period of his reign: he was at war with both Scotland and France, while also being involved in other conflicts in Wales and the Low Countries. Scotland was finally subdued in 1303, and a diplomatic settlement with France was reached the same year. Edward married the King of France’s sister Margaret, while Edward’s son married the French king’s daughter Isabel.
Edward was to enjoy peace for only a short time. In 1302, Robert Bruce, son of one of the claimants to the Scottish throne when John Baliol was crowned and a former ally of Edward’s, rebelled and proclaimed himself king. Edward was 68 years old and in failing health, but he insisted on marching on Scotland. He became so sick and weak that he had to be carried, and he died just before reaching Scotland. The dying Edward had asked that his heart be buried in the Holy Land and his bones be carried at the head of the army into battle in Scotland, but instead the invasion was called off and Edward was buried in a plain tomb of black marble in Westminster.
From the History of England:
Born in June 1239 at Westminster, Edward was named by his father Henry III after the last Anglo Saxon king (and his father’s favourite saint), Edward the Confessor. Edward’s parents were renowned for their patronage of the arts (his mother, Eleanor of Provence, encouraged Henry III to spend money on the arts, which included the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey and a still-extant magnificent shrine to house the body of Edward the Confessor), and Edward received a disciplined education – reading and writing in Latin and French, with training in the arts, sciences and music.
In 1254, Edward travelled to Spain for an arranged marriage at the age of 15 to 9-year-old Eleanor of Castile. Just before Edward’s marriage, Henry III gave him the duchy of Gascony, one of the few remnants of the once vast French possessions of the English Angevin kings. Gascony was part of a package which included parts of Ireland, the Channel Islands and the King’s lands in Wales to provide an income for Edward. Edward then spent a year in Gascony, studying its administration.
Edward spent his young adulthood learning harsh lessons from Henry III’s failures as a king, culminating in a civil war in which he fought to defend his father. Henry’s ill-judged and expensive intervention in Sicilian affairs (lured by the Pope’s offer of the Sicilian crown to Henry’s younger son) failed, and aroused the anger of powerful barons including Henry’s brother-in-law Simon de Montfort. Bankrupt and threatened with excommunication, Henry was forced to agree to the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, under which his debts were paid in exchange for substantial reforms; a Great Council of 24, partly nominated by the barons, assumed the functions of the King’s Council.
Henry repudiated the Provisions in 1261 and sought the help of the French king Louis IX (later known as St Louis for his piety and other qualities). This was the only time Edward was tempted to side with his charismatic and politically ruthless godfather Simon de Montfort – he supported holding a Parliament in his father’s absence.
However, by the time Louis IX decided to side with Henry in the dispute and civil war broke out in England in 1263, Edward had returned to his father’s side and became de Montfort’s greatest enemy. After winning the battle of Lewes in 1264 (after which Edward became a hostage to ensure his father abided by the terms of the peace), de Montfort summoned the Great Parliament in 1265 – this was the first time cities and burghs sent representatives to the parliament. (Historians differ as to whether de Montfort was an enlightened liberal reformer or an unscrupulous opportunist using any means to advance himself.)
In May 1265, Edward escaped from tight supervision whilst hunting. On 4 August, Edward and his allies outmanoeuvred de Montfort in a savage battle at Evesham; de Montfort predicted his own defeat and death ‘let us commend our souls to God, because our bodies are theirs … they are approaching wisely, they learned this from me.’ With the ending of the civil war, Edward worked hard at social and political reconciliation between his father and the rebels, and by 1267 the realm had been pacified.
In April 1270 Parliament agreed an unprecedented levy of one-twentieth of every citizen’s goods and possessions to finance Edward’s Crusade to the Holy Lands. Edward left England in August 1270 to join the highly respected French king Louis IX on Crusade. At a time when popes were using the crusading ideal to further their own political ends in Italy and elsewhere, Edward and King Louis were the last crusaders in the medieval tradition of aiming to recover the Holy Lands. Louis died of the plague in Tunis before Edward’s arrival, and the French forces were bought off from pursuing their campaign. Edward decided to continue regardless: ‘by the blood of God, though all my fellow soldiers and countrymen desert me, I will enter Acre … and I will keep my word and my oath to the death’.
Edward arrived in Acre in May 1271 with 1,000 knights; his crusade was to prove an anticlimax. Edward’s small force limited him to the relief of Acre and a handful of raids, and divisions amongst the international force of Christian Crusaders led to Edward’s compromise truce with the Baibars. In June 1272, Edward survived a murder attempt by an Assassin (an order of Shi’ite Muslims) and left for Sicily later in the year. He was never to return on crusade.
Meanwhile, Henry III died on 16 November 1272. Edward succeeded to the throne without opposition – given his track record in military ability and his proven determination to give peace to the country, enhanced by his magnified exploits on crusade. In Edward’s absence, a proclamation in his name delcared that he had succeeded by hereditary right, and the barons swore allegeiance to him. Edward finally arrived in London in August 1274 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Aged 35, he was a veteran warrior (‘the best lance in all the world’, according to contemporaries), a leader with energy and vision, and with a formidable temper.
Edward was determined to enforce English kings’ claims to primacy in the British Isles. The first part of his reign was dominated by Wales. At that time, Wales consisted of a number of disunited small Welsh princedoms; the South Welsh princes were in uneasy alliance with the Marcher lords (feudal earldoms and baronies set up by the Norman kings to protect the English border against Welsh raids) against the Northern Welsh based in the rocky wilds of Gwynedd, under the strong leadership of Llywelyn ap Gruffyd, Prince of Gwynedd. In 1247, under the Treaty of Woodstock, Llywelyn had agreed that he held North Wales in fee to the English king. By 1272, Llywelyn had taken advantage of the English civil wars to consolidate his position, and the Peace of Montgomery (1267) had confirmed his title as Prince of Wales and recognised his conquests.
However, Llywelyn maintained that the rights of his principality were ‘entirely separate from the rights’ of England; he did not attend Edward’s coronation and refused to do homage. Finally, in 1277 Edward decided to fight Llywelyn ‘as a rebel and disturber of the peace’, and quickly defeated him. War broke out again in 1282 when Llywelyn joined his brother David in rebellion. Edward’s determination, military experience and skilful use of ships brought from England for deployment along the North Welsh coast, drove Llywelyn back into the mountains of North Wales. The death of Llywelyn in a chance battle in 1282 and the subsequent execution of his brother David effectively ended attempts at Welsh independence.
Under the Statute of Wales of 1284, Wales was brought into the English legal framework and the shire system was extended. In the same year, a son was born in Wales to Edward and Queen Eleanor (also named Edward, this future king was proclaimed the first English Prince of Wales in 1301). The Welsh campaign had produced one of the largest armies ever assembled by an English king – some 15,000 infantry (including 9,000 Welsh and a Gascon contingent); the army was a formidable combination of heavy Anglo-Norman cavalry and Welsh archers, whose longbow skills laid the foundations of later military victories in France such as that at Agincourt. As symbols of his military strength and political authority, Edward spent some £80,000 on a network of castles and lesser strongholds in North Wales, employing a work-force of up to 3,500 men drawn from all over England. (Some castles, such as Conway and Caernarvon, remain in their ruined layouts today, as examples of fortresses integrated with fortified towns.)
Edward’s campaign in Wales was based on his determination to ensure peace and extend royal authority, and it had broad support in England. Edward saw the need to widen support among lesser landowners and the merchants and traders of the towns. The campaigns in Wales, France and Scotland left Edward deeply in debt, and the taxation required to meet those debts meant enrolling national support for his policies.
To raise money, Edward summoned Parliament – up to 1286 he summoned Parliaments twice a year. (The word ‘Parliament’ came from the ‘parley’ or talks which the King had with larger groups of advisers.) In 1295, when money was needed to wage war against Philip of France (who had confiscated the duchy of Gascony), Edward summoned the most comprehensive assembly ever summoned in England. This became known as the Model Parliament, for it represented various estates: barons, clergy, and knights and townspeople. By the end of Edward’s reign, Parliament usually contained representatives of all these estates.
Edward used his royal authority to establish the rights of the Crown at the expense of traditional feudal privileges, to promote the uniform administration of justice, to raise income to meet the costs of war and government, and to codify the legal system. In doing so, his methods emphasised the role of Parliament and the common law. With the able help of his Chancellor, Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Edward introduced much new legislation. He began by commissioning a thorough survey of local government (with the results entered into documents known as the Hundred Rolls), which not only defined royal rights and possessions but also revealed administrative abuses.
The First Statute of Westminster (1275) codified 51 existing laws – many originating from Magna Carta – covering areas ranging from extortion by royal officers, lawyers and bailiffs, methods of procedure in civil and criminal cases to freedom of elections. Edward’s first Parliament also enacted legislation on wool, England’s most important export at the time. At the request of the merchants, Edward was given a customs grant on wool and hides which amounted to nearly £10,000 a year. Edward also obtained income from the licence fees imposed by the Statute of Mortmain (1279), under which gifts of land to the Church (often made to evade death duties) had to have a royal licence.
The Statutes of Gloucester (1278) and Quo Warranto (1290) attempted to define and regulate feudal jurisdictions, which were an obstacle to royal authority and to a uniform system of justice for all; the Statute of Winchester (1285) codified the policing system for preserving public order. Other statutes had a long-term effect on land law and on the feudal framework in England. The Second Statute of Westminster (1285) restricted the alienation of land and kept entailed estates within families: tenants were only tenants for life and not able to sell the property to others. The Third Statute of Westminster or Quia Emptores (1290) stopped subinfeudation (in which tenants of land belonging to the King or to barons subcontracted their properties and related feudal services).
Edward’s assertion that the King of Scotland owed feudal allegiance to him, and the embittered Anglo-Scottish relations leading to war which followed, were to overshadow the rest of Edward’s reign in what was to become known as the ‘Great Cause’. Under a treaty of 1174, William the Lion of Scotland had become the vassal to Henry II, but in 1189 Richard I had absolved William from his allegiance. Intermarriage between the English and Scottish royal houses promoted peace between the two countries until the premature death of Alexander III in 1286. In 1290, his granddaughter and heiress, Margaret the ‘Maid of Norway’ (daughter of the King of Norway, she was pledged to be married to Edward’s then only surviving son, Edward of Caernarvon), also died. For Edward, this dynastic blow was made worse by the death in the same year of his much-loved wife Eleanor (her body was ceremonially carried from Lincoln to Westminster for burial, and a memorial cross erected at every one of the twelve resting places, including what became known as Charing Cross in London).
In the absence of an obvious heir to the Scottish throne, the disunited Scottish magnates invited Edward to determine the dispute. In order to gain acceptance of his authority in reaching a verdict, Edward sought and obtained recognition from the rival claimants that he had the ‘sovereign lordship of Scotland and the right to determine our several pretensions’. In November 1292, Edward and his 104 assessors gave the whole kingdom to John Balliol or Baliol as the claimant closest to the royal line; Balliol duly swore loyalty to Edward and was crowned at Scone.
John Balliol’s position proved difficult. Edward insisted that Scotland was not independent and he, as sovereign lord, had the right to hear in England appeals against Balliol’s judgements in Scotland. In 1294, Balliol lost authority amongst Scottish magnates by going to Westminster after receiving a summons from Edward; the magnates decided to seek allies in France and concluded the ‘Auld Alliance’ with France (then at war with England over the duchy of Gascony) – an alliance which was to influence Scottish history for the next 300 years. In March 1296, having failed to negotiate a settlement, the English led by Edward sacked the city of Berwick near the River Tweed. Balliol formally renounced his homage to Edward in April 1296, speaking of ‘grievous and intolerable injuries … for instance by summoning us outside our realm … as your own whim dictated … and so … we renounce the fealty and homage which we have done to you’. Pausing to design and start the rebuilding of Berwick as the financial capital of the country, Edward’s forces overran remaining Scottish resistance. Scots leaders were taken hostage, and Edinburgh Castle, amongst others, was seized. Balliol surrendered his realm and spent the rest of his life in exile in England and Normandy.
Having humiliated Balliol, Edward’s insensitive policies in Scotland continued: he appointed a trio of Englishmen to run the country. Edward had the Stone of Scone – also known as the Stone of Destiny – on which Scottish sovereigns had been crowned removed to London and subsequently placed in the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey (where it remained until it was returned to Scotland in 1996). Edward never built stone castles on strategic sites in Scotland, as he had done so successfully in Wales – possibly because he did not have the funds for another ambitious castle-building programme.
By 1297, Edward was facing the biggest crisis in his reign, and his commitments outweighed his resources. Chronic debts were being incurred by wars against France, in Flanders, Gascony and Wales as well as Scotland; the clergy were refusing to pay their share of the costs, with the Archbishop of Canterbury threatening excommunication; Parliament was reluctant to contribute to Edward’s expensive and unsuccessful military policies; the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk refused to serve in Gascony, and the barons presented a formal statement of their grievances. In the end, Edward was forced to reconfirm the Charters (including Magna Carta) to obtain the money he required; the Archbishop was eventually suspended in 1306 by the new Gascon Pope Clement V; a truce was declared with France in 1297, followed by a peace treaty in 1303 under which the French king restored the duchy of Gascony to Edward.
In Scotland, Edward pursued a series of campaigns from 1298 onwards. William Wallace had risen in Balliol’s name and recovered most of Scotland, before being defeated by Edward at the battle of Falkirk in 1298. (Wallace escaped, only to be captured in 1305, allegedly by the treachery of a fellow Scot and taken to London, where he was executed.) In 1304, Edward summoned a full Parliament (which elected Scottish representatives also attended), in which arrangements for the settlement of Scotland were made. The new government in Scotland featured a Council, which included Robert the Bruce. Bruce unexpectedly rebelled in 1306 by killing a fellow counsellor and was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. Despite his failing health, Edward was carried north to pursue another campaign, but he died en route at Burgh on Sands on 7 July 1307 aged 68.
According to chroniclers, Edward requested that his bones should be carried on Scottish campaigns and that his heart be taken to the Holy Land. However, Edward was buried at Westminster Abbey in a plain black marble tomb, which in later years was painted with the words Scottorum malleus (Hammer of the Scots) and Pactum serva (Keep troth). Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Exchequer paid to keep candles burning ’round the body of the Lord Edward, formerly King of England, of famous memory’.
Edward and William Wallace
Though he died seven hundred years ago, William Wallace remains one of the greatest heroes of Scotland, second only, perhaps, to the poet Robert Burns. Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart (1995) added to popular interest in Wallace, especially at a time when Scotland was seeking a degree of autonomy within the United Kingdom. To an increasing extent, Wallace became the symbol of Scottish nationalism. He had been born with none of the advantages of aristocracy, but, for a time, he succeeded in leading a truly popular revolt and standing up to the might of King Edward.
Much of what we know of Wallace comes from the epic poem “The Wallace” written by Henry the Minstrel (usually known as “Blind Harry”). But “The Wallace” was written about 200 years after Wallace’s death; Wallace’s story, especially the story of his early years, is therefore blurred and uncertain. Wallace was probably born in the village of Elderslie in Renfrewshire sometime around 1270. He was the middle son of a minor knight and landholder. Wallace was first educated by his uncle, a priest, and later at a church school.
By the time Wallace was in his mid-twenties, Scotland had fallen under the direct rule of Edward I. John Baliol had surrendered his crown, and Edward had been tightening the integration of Scotland and England. As Edward prepared for war with France, he demanded soldiers from Scotland. This demand provoked widespread unrest: in 1297 the Scottish noble Andrew de Moray rebelled in the north, a faction of nobles aligned with Robert Bruce, son of a claimant to the Scottish crown, rebelled in the southwest, and William Wallace led a daring attack on the English sheriff at Lanark. Wallace’s band killed the sheriff, then moved on to Scone, where the English justiciar (chief administrator and judge) fled before Wallace arrived.
Edward was most troubled by the revolt of the Bruce faction. He sent two of his most powerful barons from the border region, Percy and Clifford, to oppose Bruce. The armies met at Irvine on July 9, 1297. The Bruce faction surrendered to the English with barely a fight, leaving the struggle for freedom in the hands of Wallace and Moray. Their rebellion spread like wildfire, but there was no response from the English for some time. Wallace proved to be a skilled guerrilla leader. He received solid support from the commoners of Scotland, but the nobles remained uncommitted, waiting to see which way the struggle would go.
Wallace and Moray soon joined forces, laying siege to Dundee and threatening Stirling Castle, which sat at the strategically valuable point controlling access to the north of Scotland. Edward had already gone to war on the Continent, but he sent an army against Wallace and Moray under the command of his viceroy John de Warenne and his treasurer for Scotland Hugh Cressingham. Warenne was an experienced soldier, but he was by then in his late sixties. The English army numbered 50,000 foot and 1000 horse. They headed north for Stirling.
There Wallace set a brilliant trap for the English. In order to reach Wallace, the English had to cross the Forth, but only one narrow wooden bridge over the Forth remained. Wallace placed his army of 4000 mostly untrained foot soldiers and perhaps 200 horse behind dense thickets at the base of a ridge beyond the north end of the bridge. When the English reached the south end of the bridge, Warenne was unwilling to cross. He suspected a trap, and pointed out that there was no way to know how large an army Wallace might have on the other side. Better to delay and search for a more secure place to cross. Cressingham, however, perhaps overconfident after the easy English victory at Irvine, wanted to finish Wallace off quickly. Somehow, Cressingham prevailed, and the following morning the English began to cross Stirling Bridge. Wallace watched from his cover as the English slowly made their way across the bridge—so narrow that only two horses could cross abreast. Timing was of the essence: if he signaled the attack too early, only a few English would be overwhelmed and the damage would be slight; if he waited too long, the English force would be too large and Wallace himself might be overwhelmed. Finally he gave the signal and the Scotsmen flew from the thicket. Part of Wallace’s force took the end of the bridge, while his main force engaged the English who had already crossed and backed them into a bend in the river where the English were slaughtered. Those English still on the bridge were crushed forward by their own still-advancing ranks and forced into Scottish pikes or over the rails and into the icy Forth. Five thousand English, including Cressingham, were killed, and the remainder of the English forces with Warenne quickly retreated far south. When the body of Cressingham was found, Wallace’s men flayed it and handed out pieces of the skin as keepsakes.
Andrew de Moray was wounded at Stirling Bridge. He died a few weeks later, leaving Wallace the sole leader of the rebellion. He assumed the title “Guardian of Scotland” and ruled in the name of the deposed king John Baliol. Clearly, Wallace was not fighting for personal aggrandizement but for Scotland. In the following weeks, his forces took all the major centers of Scotland and made raids over the border, burning towns and fields in northern England. Wallace was now in complete control of Scotland, a position he would hold for ten months.
Edward returned from the Continent six months after the English defeat at Stirling Bridge. He immediately set about raising an army. He sought the assistance of the Scottish lords, but they did not respond, and Edward was forced to pay for mercenaries. His army doggedly pursued Wallace, finally forcing him to fight at Falkirk. With the desertion of Wallace’s cavalry and the might of the Welsh longbowmen, Edward defeated Wallace’s forces.
Wallace survived the battle, but the rebellion of the commoners was broken. Although a lack of supplies forced Edward’s army to return immediately to England, Wallace relinquished the title of Guardian and went into hiding. Edward regrouped his forces and began a six-year campaign to completely break any hope of future Scottish resistance. Wallace traveled to Norway and France, perhaps even as far as Rome, to seek support for the cause of Scottish freedom. When he finally returned, all the other rebels had surrendered or had made their peace with Edward. In 1305, while at a tavern near Glasgow, Wallace was betrayed by a former ally and given into the hands of the English. He was taken to London in irons and immediately put on trial. Since Wallace was considered on outlaw, he was not allowed to speak in his own defense. Wallace remained defiant to the very end. He was found guilty of treason, and that very day was publicly and brutally tortured and killed and his body mutilated. His head was set on a pike on London bridge, and his four limbs sent to cities across Edward’s kingdom as a warning to anyone else contemplating rebellion. Edward did not attend the execution.
Soldiers of the Thirteenth Century
Since the armies of the thirteenth century were not standing armies of professional warriors, training and cohesion could not be assured. Edward was unusual among the commanders of his time because he gave careful consideration to building his armies and using them to best effect; when Edward died, this knowledge was lost, since there were no permanent military institutions to preserve it and pass it on. In a way, each commander had to start from scratch, and success or failure in a battle depended to a great extent on the commander’s knowledge and will and the force of his personality.
Infantry
The foot soldier was the backbone of the thirteenth-century army. Foot soldiers were mainly peasants, but because the chronicles, illuminated manuscripts and monuments of the time were produced for the aristocracy, who fought on horseback, the lives and exploits of the foot solders were largely unrecorded.
A well-equipped foot soldier of the time would have worn an iron cap and a padded cloth jacket and carried a shield, a spear and possibly a sword. The key to effective use of infantry was tight formation: when the infantry became scattered and their lines broken, they were vulnerable to cavalry. Since moving a formation of untrained soldiers carried the risk of breaking the formation, infantry tended to stay put, their main function being to hold ground.
Battlefield graves that have been examined by modern scientists reveal that the hand-to-hand combat of the period was incredibly brutal. The nature and extent of injuries show that soldiers put their full weight into their blows, probably leaping or springing as they struck. Mutilation of corpses was not unusual—an indication of the fury that was unleashed in battle.
Bowmen
Edward’s employment of the longbow was one of his great military innovations. Longbowmen were drawn from the same humble class of society as foot soldiers were. English commoners were required by law to own a longbow and to practice weekly. This was important, because effective use of this heavy weapon required great strength and constant practice.
Bowmen were lightly armored and always used in large formations. Trained longbowmen could shoot so rapidly and accurately that their effects can be compared to those of automatic rifles of the twentieth century. Opposing forces could not get close enough to a formation of longbowmen to engage it. The English victories at Falkirk, Crecy, and Agincourt demonstrate how destructive massed formations of longbowman could be.
Crossbowmen
Unlike longbowmen, crossbowmen were largely professional soldiers. Edward’s crossbowmen, mostly from his possessions in Gascony, were carefully selected and highly paid. At the height of his strength, Edward employed about 1500 professional crossbowmen: 200 mounted and 1300 on foot.
Cavalry
By Edward’s time, knighthood was firmly associated with noble status. Knights formed the core of the medieval heavy cavalry. With their heavy armor and the sheer striking force of the couched lance, the cavalry charge could deal a formidable blow, through highly disciplined infantry could still put up firm resistance. The real strengths of the knightly cavalry were its mobility, cohesion and training. When both opposing armies possessed heavy cavalry, the forces neutralized one another. However, if only one side possessed it, as at Falkirk, the effect could be decisive.
The Templars, one of the more disciplined fighting forces of the Middle Ages, have left behind one of the only records of medieval cavalry doctrine. They put their cavalry in groups of ten knights, which were to fight in tight formation around a banner. Squires carrying a supply of lances stayed with the group, and servants with fresh horses would keep close behind. The organization into small groups shows how medieval close combat was more a collection of fights between small groups than the coordinated clash of lines or fronts.
As archery techniques improved through the century, knights became more and more heavily armored. This tended to reduce their mobility, making it more difficult to ride on uneven terrain or around obstacles. Although horse armor was common, it was never very effective: archers often killed horses, and unhorsed knights often had difficulty mounting fresh horses and instead continued to fight on foot.
Knights were not the only soldiers who fought on horseback. Other, less heavily armored soldiers also fought in the cavalry. In England, these men would be classified as “sergeants,” fighters without noble rank but more professionalized than the common soldiers. (Siege engineers, for example, were considered sergeants.) Large numbers fought alongside the knights, making them an important part of the cavalry, though their wealth did not allow them equipment as elaborate and heavy as that which the knights possessed.
Armor of the Thirteenth Century
Throughout the thirteenth century, armies were temporary assemblages, formed and dissolved as needed. Feudal subjects were expected to provide their own arms and armor. By the time of Edward I, there were laws clearly detailing exactly what kinds of equipment the king’s subjects—from the wealthiest nobleman to the poorest farmer—were expected to bring to war.
1. Mail
The basic armor of the thirteenth century remained what it had been for the previous two hundred years: the hauberk or coat of mail. The hauberk reached down to the knees. It usually included a mail hood, or coif, and was split up to the groin to allow the wearer to ride a horse. Thirteenth century hauberks extended to the wrists, sometimes ending with mail mittens with leather palms. Separate mail leggings were usually worn, although as the century progressed these were supplemented or replaced with solid plates. The hauberk was worn over a padded undershirt known as the aketon; on top of the hauberk was worn a flowing cloth surcoat, often decorated with heraldic markings.
Mail was costly and difficult to produce. Each ring was made by hand from wire, pierced at each end, threaded with four other rings, then riveted shut. When completed, the entire hauberk was tempered in a forge. The cost of a coat of mail at this time was about one pound sterling, the same price as two head of cattle or twenty sheep.
Mail was effective against glancing blows, but could be penetrated by the direct thrust of a lance, a crossbow bolt or an arrow from a longbow. In response to the improvements in archery of the thirteenth century, mail was increasingly supplemented with plate armor. At first, strips or plates of iron were attached to the inside of the surcoat or even worn underneath the mail. Later in the century, full breastplates of hardened leather were worn underneath the surcoat. (Full steel breastplates would not be seen until the second half of the fourteenth century).
Poorer foot soldiers might wear a shorter mail shirt, a leather jacket studded with iron, or, most modest of all, a padded cloth jacket.
2. Helmets
The helmets of the thirteenth century evolved from the familiar Norman conical iron cap with nosepiece. By the thirteenth century, the nosepiece had fallen out of use, perhaps because it gave the enemy an effective handhold in close combat. Fully enclosed helmets (the cylindrical “great helm”) appeared early in the century, but they were by no means universally used. More popular styles were the bascinet, a one-piece helmet that extended over the cheeks and neck, and the kettle-hat, with a round or flattened bowl and a broad brim. The kettle-hat was popular with both cavalry and infantry, and remained in use throughout the Middle Ages. (The kettle-hat is perhaps the most successful helmet design ever: British infantrymen were still wearing them well into the twentieth century.) Helmets were worn over the mail hood, and secured with leather straps.
3. Shields
From the time of the Norman Conquest to the early thirteenth century, a long shield with a round top, tapering to a point at the bottom, was used by both cavalry and foot soldiers. This design would protect a foot soldier from shoulder to knees, or the entire side of a mounted soldier. As the century went on, shields became shorter and wider, with a flat rather than a rounded top.
Shields were made of wood, bound with an iron rim, and often mounted with a large iron stud or “boss” in the center.
Weapons of the Thirteenth Century
Swords
For centuries, the sword changed little from the Viking design perfected in the Dark Ages. These were broad-bladed weapons, two and a half to three feet long, with a rather blunt point. The blade was double-edged and often grooved down the center to reduce weight without reducing strength. They were surprisingly light at three to five pounds, and were well-balanced. Swords were made from narrow strips of iron forged together into a strong, flexible steel capable of taking a sharp edge.
These weapons were intended for hacking and chopping. Beginning in the twelfth century, blades became narrower and longer and more suited to thrusting. In the thirteenth century, new designs of swords appeared: the two-handed sword, an infantry weapon that was often very large and heavy, and the falchion, a single-edged curved sword, broader and heavier near the point, designed for slashing and chopping. The falchion was used by both cavalry and infantry.
Spears
The spear is the most basic of weapons, and the one least changed by time. Infantry spears were used in a variety of lengths. Shafts were typically made of ash, and spearheads varied from narrow, piercing forms to longer, broader heads with cutting edges.
The cavalry spear, the lance, could be an incredibly deadly weapon. By the thirteenth century, stirrups and saddles were well-developed, and horsemen had learned to hold their lances tightly under their arms (couched) rather than wielding them overhand. By firmly couching the lance, a cavalryman could transmit the entire forward weight and thrust of his charging horse through his lance and to his enemy. There was little that could resist such a charge.
Other hand weapons
A variety of other hand weapons were used at this time. The axe (short-handled for cavalry and long-handled for infantry) was especially popular in Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia. Maces were used in a wide variety of forms. Perhaps in response to improvements in armor, a war hammer with a long, piercing beak appeared in the thirteenth century.
The crossbow
The crossbow came into widespread use around 1000. So deadly was this weapon that in 1139, Pope Innocent II banned its use in conflicts between Christians. The ban was ineffective, and the crossbow continued to develop and improve for centuries.
The bows of crossbows were first made of wood, but by 1300, more powerful bows make of composites of wood, horn and sinew were common. The earliest record of a steel crossbow bow is from 1314. Crossbows fired short, thick bolts or quarrels of wood with iron heads and flights of feathers or leather. Crossbows were originally drawn (“spanned”) by hand, but by the twelfth century a method of spanning by catching the bowstring in a hook worn on the belt and pressing down on the crossbow became common. In the thirteenth century, a stirrup was added to the front of the crossbow, which allowed leg-power to be used to span the bow.
Although the crossbow did not have the range, accuracy or rate of fire of the longbow, it did have some advantages. It didn’t require the strength, training or constant practice that the longbow did; it could be kept spanned and ready for immediate firing; bolts were cheaper and more compact than arrows; and the crossbow was well suited for use in the confined spaces and small openings of fortifications. The crossbow was the preferred weapon of castle garrisons, and crossbowmen were frequently professional soldiers.
The longbow
During Edward’s early campaigns in Wales, his forces took significant losses from the long, heavy bows of the highly skilled archers of southern Wales. Although the longbow existed in England prior to Edward’s Welsh campaigns, Edward’s experience led him to adopt the longbow as no commander had done before–a decision that was to give England supremacy on the battlefields of Europe for the next century.
The longbow was a straight round staff six feet in length. It took considerable strength to draw and skill to shoot, but it had a range of over three hundred yards. Contemporary accounts claim that its arrow could pierce an oak door four inches thick; it could certainly penetrate chain mail. A skilled longbowman could accurately fire twelve arrows a minute, so a large contingent of longbowmen could bring down a deadly hail of tens of thousands of arrows on the enemy. One chronicler speaks of the white flights of arrows looking like a blanket of snow on the ground after a battle.
The longbow arrow was one clothyard (37 inches) long. The shaft was usually of ash, and the fights of goose feather. The most common arrowhead used in war was the “bodkin point,” a sharp narrow spike of square cross-section. It was often waxed to help it penetrate armor.
Castles
Castles were not simply fortresses where soldiers could hide for protection: they were the visible projection and manifestation of feudal authority. Building a castle was an immensely expensive and complex undertaking, beyond the resources of all but the king and a handful of nobles.
The Development of Castles
The development of fortifications in Western Europe lagged far behind the achievements of the East. The ancients had built elaborate and massive stone city walls, and by the sixth century, the Byzantines were building castles Western Europe would not rival for another five hundred years. Up until the ninth century, the only fortification in Western Europe, apart from a few fortresses left by the Romans, were wooden palisades, and in some cases, simple earthworks.
In France in the ninth and tenth centuries, a new type of fortress appeared: a flat-topped hill, often man-made, surrounded by a ditch and topped with a wooden stronghold. This type of fortress could be effective in protecting men, but it would be too small to protect livestock, supplies, workshops or living quarters, so another feature was soon added: second fortified area next to the hill. A roughly circular ditch was dug at ground-level, and the earth from the ditch was mounded into a rampart behind the ditch. This way, and area of ground outside the main stronghold could be protected; it would not be as secure as the stronghold itself, but it would be large enough to contain several buildings.
This plan was known as the “motte and bailey.” The motte was the flattened mound; it was surrounded by a ditch, the top was ringed with a wooden palisade, and in the center was the wooden stronghold. The bailey was the separate, ground-level area protected by a ditch and an earthen rampart; the rampart was usually topped with a palisade as well. The ditches of the motte and the bailey usually connected to one another, and one motte often had two or more separate baileys. Entrance to the motte was usually through a wooden bridge from the bailey–if the bailey fell to the enemy, the bridge could be cut or knocked down as the garrison retreated to the motte. The motte and bailey design spread quickly through Europe. It could be built rapidly and cheaply, and provided effective protection for people as well as goods. Shortly after the Norman Conquest, the Normans built over 2000 of these structures in Britain, mainly to serve as military garrisons to secure their dominance.
Wooden construction was gradually replaced with stone construction. In Britain, the process began shortly after the Norman Conquest. First, the palisade on top of the motte was replaced with a circular stone structure known as a shell keep. The shell keep was a ring wall, built of rubble and mortar, about 20 feet high, enclosing an open yard. Wooden buildings were built inside. A wooden platform, or “wall-walk” ran around the inside, and the walls were often crenellated (that is, cut with repeating open spaces). Shell keeps were typically 45 to 75 feet across. Often, the bailey palisade was replaced by a stone wall as well. Shell keeps were still being built into the early thirteenth century.
A more massive type of castle, also introduced by the Normans, was the tower keep. Unlike the shell keep, the tower keep was a complete, roofed building of stone, usually square or rectangular. The keep itself was the front line of defense. Tower keeps were typically three stories high, with a windowless basement below. There were battlements along the top of the keep, and often turrets at the corners. The entrance was usually on the second floor, which served as the main hall, and was reached by a stairway running against the outer wall, sometimes with a drawbridge at the top. In later tower keeps, a smaller, separate building (the “forebuilding”) was added to protect the stairway. The most familiar tower keep in Britain is the White Tower at the Tower of London, begun by William the Conqueror.
With the Crusades, Western Europe came into contact with the massive fortifications of the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East, and witnessed siege warfare on a scale it had never before imagined. The crusaders returned with a new emphasis on enclosing ground with stone walls and an overall increase in scale. A large area (the ward) was enclosed by curtain walls, with the keep, still the strong point of the castle, either completely encircled by the walls or built into them. The outer ring of curtain walls would serve as the first line of defense, and the defenders could withdraw to the keep if the outer walls fell. To the curtain walls were added towers projecting outwards (called flanking towers or mural towers) that allowed archers to fire across the face of the wall and fight off attempts at ramming, mining or scaling. The gate, the weakest point of the wall system, was usually protected by one or two flanking towers, or by a pair of walls projecting outwards (a barbican), which would allow approach to the gate or drawbridge to be controlled from three sides. The gatehouse became a strong point in its own right.
The zenith of medieval castle design was the concentric castle: two or more concentric rings of walls completely surrounding an inner ward. The outer wall was usually lower than the inner wall, so defenders could man both sets of walls simultaneously. If attackers managed to overwhelm the outer wall, they would be faced with another complete fortification, even taller than the first. Many older tower keeps had concentric walls added, the most familiar example being once again the Tower of London, which was converted from a tower keep (the White Tower) with bailey to a concentric castle by Henry III and Edward I. Other concentric castles did away with the keep entirely. In terms of technical perfection, Beaumaris castle in Wales, designed by Master James of St. George, the chief castle architect of Edward I, is probably the greatest concentric castle in Britain.
There was little further development after 1400. For the next hundred years, there were improvements in comfort and amenities, but little change in overall plan. By 1500, cannon had advanced to the extent that the medieval castle was becoming obsolete. The age of castles was over, and the age of modern military fortification was beginning.
Castle Architecture
As the technology of medieval warfare and siegecraft evolved, the defensive elements of castles evolved along with it. Famous designers of castles, such as Edward’s castle architect Master James of St. George, developed and refined a number of defensive elements that made castles much more difficult to take by force.
1. Curtain Walls
The primary line of defense of the medieval castle was the curtain wall, the solid stone wall forming the perimeter of the castle. The area enclosed by the wall was known as a ward. Later castles sometimes had two rings of curtain walls, forming outer and inner wards. Curtain walls could be six to twenty feet think; earlier curtain walls were up to twenty feet high, but by the thirteenth century, they could be forty feet high.
Curtain walls were topped with a wall-walk (also called an allure) and, of course, battlements. Access to the wall-walk would either be from a wooden staircase running along the inner face of the wall or through towers.
Since curtain walls were vulnerable to tunneling and siege engines, especially at their foundations, in the late twelfth century the bottom half or third of curtain walls became thickened and angled outwards. This flare was known as a spur or batter. The widened base made the wall less vulnerable to mining, and the angled face made battering rams less effective and allowed rocks and missiles dropped from the battlement to bounce outwards towards the attackers. A variation on the spur is the chemise, a low wall that ran at the foot of the curtain wall forming an elevated terrace around it.
2. Battlements
Battlements are the most characteristic elements of castles–so much so that unfortified buildings sometimes had non-functional battlements added to make them appear more formidable than they really were. The wall-walk with its battlements served as the main fighting platform for castle defenders. Defenders could fire through the openings (known as crenels) which were typically two or three feet wide and waist high, and take cover behind the merlons (the projections between the crenels) which were usually about three feet high.
Often, an additional wooden superstructure was added to the battlements. Known as a hoarding or brattice, this structure provided a roof over the battlements to protect defenders from missiles, and often projected outwards from the walls to allow defenders to drop missiles on attackers below. Hoardings were often roofed with hides or tiles to make them more resistant to fire. They were often temporary structures, put up only in times of danger. Many walls were built with sockets or stone brackets to support hoardings.
Later, a stone version of hoardings, known as machicolations, came into use: these lacked the roof, but they carried the wall-walk out forward from the walls and had openings in the floor through which defenders could drop stones or fire directly at attackers below. Machicolations were typically used only above gates or other points where extra security was required.
3. Towers
Towers had always been built where curtain walls met in a corner, but they were later used along straight stretches of curtain walls, to allow archers and crossbowmen to fire across the face of the wall. Towers set into a curtain wall are known as mural towers. They were usually one story higher than the curtain wall itself. The most common shape was a half-circle projecting from the curtain wall, but there are examples that are square and even polygons. Mural towers ranged from six to thirty-five feet in diameter. Some were purely defensive, while others served as living space as well.
There is at least one example of a tower specifically constructed to house an engine of war: this is the Engine Tower at Criccieth Castle, probably built to house a springald, an engine that used a single bent plank of wood to launch a javelins or firebrands.
4. Gates
Since gates are designed to allow entry and exit, they are potentially the most vulnerable part of castle defenses. Castle architects went to great lengths to fortify them: gates were usually the most elaborately and ingeniously defended parts of castles.
The gate itself would be equipped with a drawbridge. The simplest design hinged up at the foot of the gate, but later designs extended forward and backward from the gate and pivoted in the center: this had the advantage of creating a well or void behind the gate in case the attackers somehow managed to penetrate it. There was sometimes even a water chute in the wall above the drawbridge to douse the fire if attackers attempted to burn it. Behind the drawbridge was a portcullis–an iron or wood-and-iron grate that could be lowered from above to block entry. Often, several portcullises were used in series.
The outer gate usually led to a passage underneath the guardhouse. The ceiling of this passage was pierced with ports (murder holes) through which defenders could drop missiles on attackers. There were also often loopholes in the walls so defending archers and crossbowmen could fire on attackers.
The entry passage often took one or even several sharp turns to slow attackers down and make it impossible to use battering rams on the inner portcullises. This arrangement is known as a bent passage. The gatehouse usually had a pair of towers or even walls projecting forward on either side of the gate. This structure, known as a barbican, would allow defenders to control access to the gate from three sides.
Often, castles had one or more hidden, small gates. Known as postern gates or sally ports, these were usually concealed behind corners of towers or landscape features. They allowed defenders to make sorties, send or receive messengers or discreetly escape if the castle should fall.
5. Moats
It was important to locate castles in the most strategically favorable site possible: if natural water defenses, such as bends in a river, were available, then the castle would be designed to take full advantage of them. Edward I took particular care to site his Welsh castles near open water, so that they could be easily resupplied or relieved by sea.
If there were sources of springs, lakes or rivers nearby, a ditch could be dug around the castle and water diverted to create a moat. While some moats were lined with stone, most were plain earth. The level of water in the moat was usually controlled by dams.
A moat made mining extremely difficult: the mine would tend to fill with water. Any attempt to wade the moat, even if the moat was shallow enough to allow it, would fatally expose the attackers to defensive fire. Some moats were even equipped with submerged sharpened wooden stakes to make crossing even more dangerous.
Most castles, however, were not situated where water moats would be practical: it was far more common for castles to be circled by dry ditches than by water-filled moats.
How Castles were Built
A great stone castle was not only a strategic asset, it was a symbol of power and standing. Castle building in the thirteenth century was an extremely expensive undertaking, requiring the employment of an army of skilled laborers for a period of five to ten years or more. Only the most powerful individuals, such as kings and major barons, would be able to build a stone castle.
As many as two thousand workers might be employed on the construction of a castle at any one time. Masons, quarrymen, carpenters, blacksmiths and a host of unskilled laborers were needed. At the top of the hierarchy was the master builder, who was responsible for both design and construction. Many of Edward’s castles were built by Master James of St. George, a master builder who Edward brought from Savoy, where James and his family had built several castles for other masters.
The most highly skilled workers beneath the master builder were the masons. When a castle was to be built, masons would be recruited from all over the country. The master and the most skilled workers were well paid. James of St. George received a sizable salary, and was granted a manor by Edward. It was not unusual to grant land to other highly-skilled workers as payment. Unskilled laborers were also paid, but it is not known whether they were compelled to work or whether they freely worked for the pay.
The first step in building a castle was setting out the plan on the ground. The entire layout was carefully marked with rope. Since there were no detailed blueprints, this step depended entirely on the skill and experience of the master builder. Next, trenches for the foundation would be dug. These would be filled with loose rubble, and mortar (a mixture of water, sand and lime) would be poured in and allowed to set.
Local stone would be used wherever possible, but if high-quality limestone was not available locally, builders would not hesitate to transport stone long distances, preferably by water. (The Normans imported stone from France for their first castles in England.) Walls and towers were not made of solid cut stone. Rather, they consisted of two faces of cut stone with the space in between filled with rubble and mortar. Since the mortar knitted together the three layers, these walls were exceedingly strong.
Construction could only proceed from April to November, because frost would cause unset mortar to expand and weaken. During a typical building season, walls and towers might grow by about ten feet. As walls became higher, construction became more difficult: medieval builders used a range of rigging and cranes to raise stone and other materials.
It should be no surprise that such expensive and drawn-out undertakings should sometimes go unfinished. Many things could disrupt such an expensive and drawn-out process: a change in the strategic conditions, lack of funds, war, the death of the intended occupant. It may be more surprising that so many were finished. Those castles that remain to this day stand as testaments to the magnates who were able to build them, and the vast resources that they were capable of marshalling.
Engines of War
To attempt to take a castle with any hope of success required the services of engineers well-versed in the military high technology of the day. The engines of war of the thirteenth century were complicated and expensive, but they came close to making the contest between attackers and defenders an even one.
Siege Tower
The siege tower (also known as a belfry) was a massive rolling fortified structure used to attack castle walls directly. In order to be effective, they had to be several feet taller than the castle walls they were attacking. Like testudos, they would be covered in hides or even metal plates. Inside could be several levels of fighting platforms: sometimes a battering ram at ground level, platforms with loopholes for archers and crossbowmen. and on top more archers or even a siege engine. Although some siege towers were used only as firing platforms, able to dominate an entire castle thorough greater height, most were equipped with a drawbridge or ladders to allow soldiers to clamber from the tower onto the castle battlements. Siege towers could be seventy feet tall; their construction involved vast expense. Once built, these cumbersome structures would be rolled up to the castle walls (after any moats or ditches had been filled and planked over by workers protected by still more rolling shelters) either by men inside pushing or turning the wheels with levers, or by teams of oxen pulling on ropes through pulleys fixed near the walls (so that the oxen could pull away from the castle). All the time, defenders would be bombarding the tower, and trying to set it on fire using a variety of sticky mixtures of pitch, tar, sulfur and wood-shavings. Defenders might even build cranes taller than the siege towers and use them to drop firebrands or burning liquids onto the tower.
Very soft or steeply sloping ground made the use of siege towers impossible. The huge expense in labor and materials and the long time needed for construction meant that siege towers were only used in the largest sieges against the most important objectives.
Ram
Battering rams were crude but highly effective. A battering ram was simply a heavy log, usually the trunk of a straight tree, with an iron head mounted on one end. Repeated hammering of the heavy ram could crack masonry and splinter wood. A large ram might be swung by fifty or sixty men; to protect the soldiers who swung them, rams were usually suspended from stout timbers inside a rolling shelter known as a tortoise or testudo . Like siege towers, these rolling shelters were covered with untanned animal hides, iron plates or even turf to protect them from missiles and fire. Since testudos had to be rolled into position, they could only be used against a castle if the ground was relatively level and any moats or ditched filled or bridged.
Defenders could attack the testudo itself, either with heavy stones or with fire, but they could also limit the damage caused by the ram by lowering a buffer (a large flat sack packed with straw or other material) to absorb the force of the blows. Defenders could also try to snare the ram itself with ropes and grappling hooks, thereby rendering it ineffective.
Onager
The onager (also known as the mangonel) is what most people picture when they hear the word “catapult.” Actually, the term catapult can refer to any type of engine of war that throws some kind of projectile. The terms onager and mangonel both refer to a type of engine that uses as single torsion spring (a bundle of twisted hair or rope) to power a throwing arm.
Although there are some vague descriptions of a single-armed throwing device dating back to 300BC, it’s difficult to tell today what exactly is being described. In any case, the onager, as we know it, was probably first built by the Romans around 300AD. Clearly, the idea for the onager came from that of the ballista : in effect, the onager is half a ballista (a single torsion spring and arm rather than two) turned over on its side and made much larger. Although these types of engines are commonly depicted with a spoon-like cup at the end of the arm to hold the stone, most experts believe that a sling was used rather than a spoon, because slings impart much more velocity and range to the projectile.
The design of the onager required extremely heavy construction: when the firing arm was released, its forward motion was stopped only by a padded crosspiece in the frame itself. Since Roman onagers are believed to have been equipped with firing arms ten to fifteen feet long, the force that was suddenly transmitted to the frame was enormous. This force actually made these huge engines kick in the air when they were fired—the name “onager” means wild donkey, and refers to this kick. Modern attempts at reconstruction have had difficulty with this aspect of the onager: the firing arms have a tendency to break, and one group who attempted a modern reconstruction found that the force of the arm striking the leather padding of the crossbeam was so powerful that the nails holding the leather cover were shot out like bullets. Apparently a more porous material than leather was used to cover the padding, so the air could escape without killing bystanders.
The Roman onager was a fearsome weapon, the most powerful engine in the Roman arsenal. Descriptions survive of onagers capable of throwing fifty-pound stones up to 400 yards on a very high, curved trajectory. It would take four men to winch down the arm of such a machine, which probably weighed more than three tons. Given this tremendous size, the onager was probably assembled on the battle site, with only the spring, winch, sling and the hardware being saved and transported.
The onager was used for sieges, but not necessarily to break down walls. Because of its very high trajectory, the onager could be more useful in lobbing stones beyond the walls of a fortification and onto the heads of those inside. It appears that large onagers were used by the Romans until the very end of the Western Empire, but they appear to have fallen out of favor as counterweight engines came into use in the early Middle Ages; some continued to be used, but they were much smaller than the mighty onagers of the Roman Empire.
Ballista
Of all the siege engines, the ballista can trace the longest history, with roots going back almost 2500 years. The predecessor of the ballista is the Greek gastraphetes, first produced in the workshops of the tyrant Dionysos of Syracuse about 400BC. We would immediately recognize it as a crossbow. To draw the gastraphetes, its butt was braced against the stomach, and the bowstring was pulled by hand with the help of a simple ratchet device. (The Greek word gastraphetes means “stomach bow.”) In its earliest form, the gastraphetes was not much more powerful than a common bow, but it did have better range. The gastraphetes became a more formidable weapon when the simple bow was replaced with a more powerful composition bow, made of laminated layers of sinew, wood and horn.
Ancient engineers reached the limits of the composition bow just before the time of Alexander the Great. The next step in the development of the ballista was a true technological breakthrough: the replacement of the bow with two thick, ropelike springs made of hair and sinew. The change from tension (bow) to torsion (spring) allowed much larger engines to be built; this advance was soon adopted throughout the Greek world. The hand-held, hand-drawn gastraphetes gave way to engines mounted on bases and drawn with winches. These new torsion engines took two main forms: the euthytonon, which fired large arrows , and the palintonon, which fired stones .
These engines of war represent some of the most advanced technology of the ancient world. A description of a large palintonon from about 300BC survives: this particular engine threw thirty-pound stone balls about three hundred yards on a flat trajectory. It was about fifteen feet long and weighed over three tons; its two springs along weighed over seven hundred pounds. In little more than a hundred years, the technology had advanced from the stomach-braced crossbow to a monstrous engine such as this. The Jewish historian Josephus records a comparable (though much later) engine sending a thirty-pound stone through several ranks of enemy infantry.
Although these large rock-throwing engines are particularly impressive, the arrow-throwing euthytonons were used in greater numbers. In the siege of Tyre, Alexander the Great made use of both: rock-throwers to destroy the walls themselves and arrow-throwers to fire on the enemy soldiers at the battlements.
The euthytonons fired large wooden darts with metal heads and metal flights. These fearsome engines could kill at five hundred yards, and pierce a shield and breastplate at four hundred yards. The Romans made expensive use of the euthytonon, which they called the ballista, the name we still use today. The Romans used them not only in sieges but on the open field as well. They continued to refine the design, adding metal reinforcements to strengthen critical stress points, and devising new hardware that allowed the tension of the springs to be adjusted without disassembling the frame. (The springs were the trickiest aspect of these machines, since they were affected by humidity and lost elasticity with use; a further complication was that the two springs had to be set to exactly the same tension for the engine to shoot straight.) There have been several important archaeological finds of this hardware, (the wooden parts having long since decayed) which give excellent first-hand evidence of the scale and operation of these engines.
By the Middle Ages , much of the Roman ballista technology was lost. Medieval ballistae were smaller than their Roman predecessors, and usually bow-powered rather than spring-powered. They were sometimes used in fortifications as defensive weapons and in naval warfare. Because of their flat trajectory and the fact that they could be easily swiveled and tilted on their bases, ballistae remained the most accurate engines of war used in the Middle Ages.
Perrier
The perrier can be considered the small-scale predecessor of the mighty trebuchet . In essence, a perrier is simply a lever with the fulcrum near one end. On the long arm of the lever is a sling for holding a projectile, and on the short arm are fixed ropes for men to pull. By having a large number of men pull hard on the ropes, the sling can be made to throw a projectile with great speed and force. This is exactly the same principle the trebuchet uses, through the trebuchet uses a counterweight in place of muscle power.
The perrier was probably invented in China: there is evidence that it was first used around the fourth century BC. From China, knowledge of the perrier spread westward through Persia and Byzantium, and from there to Western Europe.
Perriers ranged from small, lightweight engines with as few as six men pulling on three ropes, firing ten-pound projectiles, to massive engines rivaling the range and power of a small trebuchet, and using 200 men to pull the ropes. The great advantage of the perrier over the trebuchet is the perrier’s high rate of fire: it requires no heavy hauling to re-arm. There are reports a single perrier being able to throw 500 stones in ten hours with a crew of 100 men working in shifts. Imagine the effect of several such emplacements raining down stones on a besieged city.
Contemporary illustrations show one man holding the stone in its sling in his hands for firing. He could then hold back on the stone as the other men began to pull the ropes, and release the stone under tension to gain a whipping effect. (The throwing arms of perriers were often flexible to amplify the whipping effect; the trebuchet required a completely rigid throwing arm: with nothing to hold back the sling, a flexible trebuchet arm would simply dissipate energy.)
Perriers were often used inside castles as defensive weapons. They were light and easy to build, so they could be stationed on walls and towers, and they could be effectively operated by garrisons or even townspeople with little or no experience.
Cannon
Although the Chinese were aware of gunpowder by the eleventh century, they apparently used it at that time only for fireworks. The first account of gunpowder in Europe was written by Roger Bacon some time before 1249: he knew the mixture was explosive, but he makes no mention of its use as a propellant. There have been assertions that the Arabs built some sort of cannon by 1304, but the evidence is not very solid. Most likely, the first gunpowder weapons were made in Europe between 1320 and 1325. In 1326, a government document in Florence clearly mentions a bronze cannon, and that same year, the first image of a cannon appeared in a book presented to King Edward III at his coronation.
The Earliest Cannons
The earliest cannons, like the one pictured in Edward III’s book, were vase-shaped: broad at the breech end and narrow at the muzzle. They fired an arrow-like projectile, which seems to have stuck out of the muzzle of the weapon. These early cannons were cast from brass or bronze: the technology of casting bells was well-developed and easily adapted to cannons, which were roughly the same size. By the mid-1300s, there are more frequent mentions of cannons: Edward III had over 100 in his inventory at the Tower of London in 1345. These early cannons were probably not very effective. At the end of the 1300s, the largest had a bore of five inches. In the 1400s, however, there began a push to make cannons larger and larger, particularly for use as siege weapons.
Cannon Forging
Since it was very expensive to cast large guns out of brass or bronze, and iron-casting technology was still not up to the task, large cannons of the 1400s were forged by specialized blacksmiths. A wooden cylinder of the desired bore would be made, and iron bars would be tightly fit around it. Any gaps would then be sealed with molten lead. Next, iron rings, just too small to fit around the bars when cold, would be heated to white heat; this caused the rings to expand so they could be fit around the bars, either spread apart, or, in the case of large guns, each one against the next. As the rings cooled, they would shrink and tightly bind the bars together, just like the staves of a barrel. (This is why we call them “gun barrels”.) The breach end would either have an iron cap welded to it, or a separate, removable breech block with powder chamber would be made.
The artisans who built these cannons were the same men who operated them on the field. These artillery masters were much sought after, and often worked as free agents for the highest bidder. Operating these cannons was something of a black art. The handling of the powder was especially tricky: the slightest shaking would cause the components to separate, so gunpowder had to be prepared on the field. If it was packed too tightly, it wouldn’t ignite, but if it was packed too loosely, it would simply fizzle. Too large of a charge could cause the gun to explode. In the late 1400s, artillery masters learned how to form gunpowder into stable grains. The process (called “corning”) involved mixing the finely ground gunpowder with liquid, allowing the paste to dry, then breaking the dried cake into small fragments and separating the into uniform size with sieves. The rough-shaped, uniform-sized grains allowed air to come into contact with all the gunpowder, making its explosion much more rapid and efficient, and cannons far more powerful.
Bombards
Some of the largest cannons ever built were made in the 1400s. Known as bombards, they fired huge stones at a high angle to come crashing down on fortifications. Some famous bombards still survive. “Dulle Griete” of Ghent, a bombard weighing thirteen tons with a twenty-five-inch bore, fired a 200-pound stone ball. “Mons Meg,” at Edinburgh Castle, has a nineteen-inch bore, and could fire an iron ball a mile. Such weapons could smash the heaviest masonry, but moving them was obviously a problem.
These guns were drawn by oxen and propped into firing position on the ground or on simple wooden platforms. There was no provision for absorbing their recoil. By the early 1500s, though, the new, more powerful corned powder led to a move back to smaller cannons. Iron-casting technology had advanced so that the newer guns were almost all cast-iron. They could be accurately bored after casting, unlike the somewhat rough forged weapons. This made the fit between projectiles and barrels more precise, resulting in a more accurate, powerful weapon. Trunnions (the two lugs projecting from the sides of the barrel) were a small but important addition. They allowed the gun to be pivoted to any desired elevation and they transmitted the force of the recoil to the carriage. Carriages themselves were improved, and specially trained teams of horses rather than oxen were more frequently used to pull them. All these refinements meant an increase in mobility, accuracy and power—which, in turn, meant the end of the medieval castle, and with it, feudalism itself.
Trebuchet
The trebuchet was a marvel of medieval technology. Capable of bringing down masonry fortifications with a single shot, it was the most fearsome weapon in the medieval siege arsenal from the twelfth century until well into the age of gunpowder. It was the only major engine devised in the Middle Ages: all the others were well-known to the ancients.
The trebuchet operates on a seesaw principle just like a perrier : there is a long lever with a pivot close to one end. To the long arm of the lever is attached a sling which can throw a stone, and to the short arm is attached a heavy counterweight. The long arm is brought down with winches and pulleys, raising the counterweight; a stone is placed in the sling; and the arm is released. The counterweight falls and the long arm swings up, whipping out the sling. Roughly half way up, the sling opens, throwing the stone in a high, arching trajectory to come crashing down on the target. It is an extremely efficient design, and from an engineering standpoint there is no limit to the size and power of a trebuchet but the strength of the timbers, particularly the throwing arm. Indeed, there are many references in medieval chronicles to dead horses being hurled into enemy fortifications to spread disease; since a small horse can weigh upwards of half a ton, at least some enormous trebuchets must have been in use.
The lever-and-sling concept probably originated in China and spread to Europe by way of the Byzantine Empire. Somewhere along the way, the idea of replacing human pulling power (the perrier) with a counterweight (the trebuchet) came into use. The counterweight trebuchet appears in the historical record quite suddenly around 1150, and seems to have been adopted rapidly throughout Europe and the Middle East. Although no medieval trebuchet survives today (a single example was discovered in Europe in the 1890s as an old building was being torn down, but it was cut up for firewood before it could be studied closely) we do have a detailed diagram from the mid-1200s. This famous diagram was drawn by Villard de Honnecourt, a man of whose life nothing is known, but who left behind a “sketchbook” detailing various aspects of the technology of his day. Although Honnecourt’s diagram shows only the base of the trebuchet, his notes describe a counterweight consisting of a hopper eight by twelve by eight feet filled with earth. It would have weighed twelve tons, and shows that very large engines were already being built in the 1200s.
The mechanics of a trebuchet are mathematically quite complex. Medieval trebuchet-masters would have had to arrive at their designs by trial and error. Factors such as the length of the two arms, the sling release, the counterweight and the weight of the projectile itself all have large effects on performance. The trebuchet itself must be on a perfectly level base, with counterweight, pivot, arm and sling all operating in the same plane; if there is any deviation the trebuchet will quickly tear itself apart. Trebuchets are capable of extreme accuracy: the range can be adjusted by adjusting the counterweight or the release of the sling. Changing direction, however, requires that the entire trebuchet be rotated; a team of ten to twelve men could rotate even a large trebuchet using crowbars. The parts of medieval trebuchets were probably held together with wedges: this would make disassembly easy (trebuchets were transported from siege to siege in parts) and would allow he parts to be easily tightened as they worked themselves loose under heavy use. The best projectiles were spherical stones, quarried and dressed specifically for this use and often transported long distances to the site of a siege. The stone itself had to be particularly hard, otherwise the projectile would simply shatter on impact rather than transferring its energy to the target; the size, shape and weight had to be uniform to maintain accurate aim. There are reports of projectiles other than stone being used, such as beehives and burning barrels of oil or tar.
The trebuchet was truly a formidable weapon, easily capable of hurling a 300-pound stone over 150 yards. There are reports of masonry towers being brought down by a single shot from a trebuchet, and the psychological effect of huge stones raining down must have been enormous. In some cases, the very appearance of a large trebuchet on the field was enough to cause castle defenders to surrender. The threat of the trebuchet even led some castle-builders to situate their fortifications behind large ponds to keep trebuchets out of range. It’s no wonder, then, that the trebuchet continued to rule, even many years after the introduction of gunpowder.
Siege Warfare
A thirteenth-century siege could be a massive undertaking, and would not be contemplated unless there was no alternative. The cost of maintaining a besieging army and its equipment for a drawn-out siege could be a huge drain on resources for the attackers, but the reward for success could be great: not just control of the castle itself, but of the surrounding territory.
Siege Strategy
A castle was not just a passive defensive position, but a center of offensive military strength, a way to project power over a whole section of countryside. In order to dominate a region, it was necessary to dominate its castles. Since conflict was almost endless in the Middle Ages, siege warfare evolved into an elaborate science. Many historians believe that siege warfare was the most characteristic form of warfare in the Middle Ages.
Negotiation
Sieges were expensive in both money and lives, so besieging armies typically tried to negotiate a surrender before opening hostilities. The attacking army would offer to let defenders leave unharmed, even with their goods, if they turned over the castle without a fight. If the defenders refused, then the attacker would feel fully justified in treating the defenders brutally—even executing large numbers of inhabitants—if the castle eventually fell. Sometimes the castle’s commander would be left without instructions from his lord, and the besieging army would allow a certain number of days for an answer: if there was no word within the time limit, the defenders would forfeit the castle. Sometimes lords even instructed their commanders to surrender in order to prevent loss of life.
Under Siege
If there was no immediate surrender, the castle would be placed under siege. From the attacker’s standpoint, starving out defenders was the safest method, but it could take months. It was an expensive proposition, since feudal lords could only expect military service from vassals for a fixed period of time, typically forty days. After that, the lord would have to pay; mercenaries, of course, would have to be paid the entire time. If a castle could be completely cut off, in theory it would eventually have to surrender; but the besieging army typically had limited supplies as well, especially because it was common practice for both attacking and defending armies to completely strip and burn the surrounding countryside before a siege. If a castle could be cut off, starving out became a test of wills between attacker and defender, each waiting for the other to break. Water supplies were particularly critical: for this reason, most castles had wells inside.
The attacker faced the additional danger of an outside army coming to relieve the castle; if this happened, the attacker could find himself trapped between a hostile castle and a hostile ground force—a potentially disastrous position. To protect against relieving armies, as well as from sorties from the castle itself, it was common for besieging armies to build a fortified camp, usually of timber, but sometimes with elaborate earthwork defenses. If a siege promised to be protracted, but the attackers resources were limited, the attackers might even build their own siege castle just outside the gates and leave a small garrison to control access to the castle without fully surrounding it. The main army could then return home.
Assault
If it wasn’t practical to starve out a castle, the castle could be assaulted. The most reliable method was to bring down the castle walls by tunneling. Miners would select a starting point hidden from the view of the defenders, then dig down and towards the castle walls. When the tunnel reached a point underneath the wall, a large space would be dug out and shored up with timbers. When the miners finished, the timbers would be set on fire, causing the empty space to collapse and hopefully bring down the wall.
There were countermeasures against mining, of course. The use of a heavy talus (a thickening of a wall at its base) or high terraces around the wall could collapse a mine before it could reach the main wall. Moats could easily flood mines, so miners were usually unwilling to dig under them. Wet or marshy soil was also unsuitable for mining; if the castle was built on solid rock, mining would be impossible. If defenders detected a mine, they might dig their own mine to intersect with the attacker’s. If the mines met, there could be hellish hand-to-hand combat in the confined spaces. Defenders might also try to send fire or noxious smoke through the countermine. Although a countermine itself might further weaken a wall, mining was so effective in bringing down walls that the countermine was considered worth the risk.
Walls might also be attacked directly. One device, known as a bore or musculus (meaning mouse, because it gnawed at the wall) was simply an iron bit at the end of a wooden shaft. Under the protection of temporary wooden shelters and a suppressive hail of arrows from the besieging army one or two workers would rotate the bore to drill into the wall. A Byzantine siege manual describes an elaborate procedure: a row of parallel holes would be bored inward and upward. As each hole was completed, it would be packed with wooden slats soaked in oil or tar (to support the wall as more holes were drilled). When enough holes were made, the wooden slats would be set alight and the workers would get away. As the oil-soaked wood burned away, the wall would suddenly fail, sliding downward and outward, and hopefully filling in any moat or ditch in the process. Such was the theory, although it didn’t always work.
Another more dramatic method was battering with a ram: a tree-trunk with an iron head that would be repeatedly swung against a wall or a gate. Battering rams were usually suspended from ropes in rolling shelters with roof of fresh hides or even metal plates to ward off attacker’s missiles and fire. This shelter was known as a testudo, meaning tortoise: the shelter looked like the shell, and the ram like the a head going in and out. A large ram might be swung by as many as fifty men. Moats and ditches would have to be bridged or filled to allow the testudo to approach the wall: when they reached the wall, the wheels of the testudo would either be removed or stakes driven into the ground to keep the testudo from rolling back with the impact of the ram. Ramming was particularly effective in breaking walls already weakened by mining, boring or bombardment. One can imagine the psychological effect on defenders of having their castle shaken to the roots by the endlessly repeated blows of a huge battering ram. Defenders would attack the testudo, attempting to smash it or set it on fire, or use grappling hooks and ropes to try to snare the ram itself.
Attempting to scale the walls was the most hazardous method of all. Long siege ladders would simply be carried to the walls and leaned or hooked onto the battlements, while the attacking armies attempted to keep defenders away with intense fire from archers and siege engines. Still, those climbing were completely exposed: apart from raining missiles and fire on attackers, defenders would attempt to push the ladders over with long hooks or forks. Ladders could be effective for surprise attacks—at night for example—because they could be put into place quickly and quietly.
The most deliberate way to storm walls involved constructing a siege tower . Siege towers were extremely effective, but they were very expensive and time-consuming to build, and therefore used only against the most important objectives. They could be used simply as firing platforms for archers, crossbowmen and even perriers or ballistae, or, more commonly, as a platform from which to mount the castle walls. The siege tower was often by Crusaders in their large-scale sieges in the Middle East. The mere presence of a huge tower would be highly intimidating to castle garrisons.
The nature of the ground and the resources available to the besieging army dictated whether a siege tower could be used. Very soft or sloping ground would be unsuitable, and ditches or moats would have to be filled in and planked over before the heavy and slow towers could be rolled into place.
Siege engines such as ballistae , mangonels, perriers and trebuchets could be used quite effectively by besieging armies, but they were seldom decisive in and of themselves. Ballistae, mangonels and perriers could be effective against garrisons, but the trebuchet, which came into use in the eleventh century, was the first engine that could do significant structural damage to stone fortifications from a distance. When used in conjunction with attempts at mining or boring, a trebuchet could help to bring down a wall. But if attackers could use siege engines, defenders could as well. Perriers in particular were effective defensive weapons, especially when mounted on towers. Trebuchets were also used by defenders, often against the attacker’s siege engines. The psychological effect of an intense bombardment must have been powerful, and if, as was known to happen, an important leader was struck and killed, the entire course of a siege could be decided.
A Test of Wills and Resources
Since a siege often became a drawn-out test of wills, each side attempted to break the will of the other through acts of brutality. Hostages or prisoners captured from a sortie might be beheaded in full view of the defending garrison, and their heads put on pikes or even hurled back into the castle with trebuchets. Captured attackers might be hung on the castle walls and left there.
A besieging army had to try a range of techniques against its enemies, since there was never a way to know in advance which methods would be effective. In medieval siege warfare, where was never a decisive, systematic advantage to either attacker or defender: victory favored the leader with the greatest resources, wealth and organization. Sieges were won or lost by men, not by stone, iron or timber.
Defending Against Siege
Before the Siege
The task of defending against a siege began even before the attacking army came near the castle. When warning came that a siege was imminent, defending armies would spread out over the countryside to ensure that the area was stripped of any resources that might be useful to the attackers. Sometimes the garrison might leave the castle to surprise the besieging army while it was still on the move. Important crossroads might be blocked, and bridges might be destroyed to hamper the attacking army’s progress.
In most cases, these sorts of measures wouldn’t defeat the attacking army outright, but they would give the castle and its garrison more time to prepare: large amounts of food and timber would have to be amassed, weaknesses in the fortification repaired, and any trees or brush surrounding the castle that could provide cover to a besieging army would have to be cut down. Hoardings might have to be built or repaired. In short, everything had to be hardened and supplied to ensure that the castle would be ready for what might prove to be a long siege.
In the meantime, the commander of the castle would be urgently trying to get word from his lord with instructions. Since a besieging army would often release all the inhabitants and garrison unharmed if they surrendered without a struggle, it could be wiser to surrender to an overwhelming enemy and escape with at least the garrison intact. The decision was a difficult one, and a castle commander would be unwilling to take responsibility for the choice without consultation. In fact, the possibility of resolving a siege without a protracted struggle was usually so attractive to both sides that the besieging army might allow a period of truce for a castle commander to communicate with his lord. The commander might also try to stall if there was the possibility of a relief army coming in support of the castle, which could easily tip the situation in favor of the defenders.
During the Siege
If the situation settled in to one of a protracted siege, then the castle commander would take special care to ensure that the supplies could last for as long as possible. As supplies dwindled, some in the castle who could not fight or do other useful work might be expelled in order to conserve on the use of supplies; they would simply be let out of the castle to the mercies of the attacking army.
Defenders could do more than simply wait passively and carefully husband their supplies. They often took the lead by launching sorties, usually from hidden gates in the castle (sally ports of postern gates). The purpose of these missions might be to destroy an attacker’s siege engines or towers, take hostages or destroy supplies.
Duty in a castle garrison was typically considered undesirable, so most garrisons were made up largely of mercenaries. The crossbow was the perfect weapon for castle defense: it was extremely powerful and accurate, and it could be held for any length of time ready to fire the moment an attacker exposed himself. The time it took to reload was not much of a disadvantage behind fortifications. It was the job of crossbowmen to keep fire on the attackers, and to catch defenders if they momentarily exposed themselves. Such sniping not only took a physical toll, but was psychologically wearying on the attackers, who, though protected by their own temporary fortifications, were never as well-protected as those in the castle. The deadly toll that defending crossbowmen took is underlined by the fact that they would often be singled out for especially harsh treatment if their castle fell to the attackers.
Damage to walls could be fatal to defenders. Tunneling was a particularly feared. Sometimes, bowls filled with water were set up on the ground or even on the walls near points where tunneling might take place: the slight vibrations in the ground would show up as tiny ripples in the water. If a mine was suspected, the most effective defense was to construct a countermine: if the defenders struck the attacker’s mine, they could attempt to flood it, fill it with smoke or fire, or simply fight the miners hand-to-hand. Large amounts of timber were usually stored in the castle so that repairs could be made quickly. If it appeared that a wall was failing, it could be shored up with timbers or a wooden palisade could be built behind it.
The motivation for castle defenders to hold out, either until a relief army could come or until the besieging army gave up, was powerful: if the castle fell, the besieging army would treat the inhabitants with great brutality. Even if a commander wished his troops to deal with the defeated garrison and inhabitants gently, it was difficult to maintain discipline in medieval armies, especially armies that had finally prevailed after a long, difficult siege.
Battles and Sieges
Sieges could be long, protracted contests of wills, while open battles could be brutal and intense. In either case, success depended largely on the force of personality and will of the commander.
The Siege of Jerusalem, 1099
In the summer of 1096, 150,000 men, fired by a sermon given by Pope Urban II the previous November, set off for the Holy Land. These soldiers of the First Crusade would earn glory and shame, contending bravely and sometimes viciously with the Turks and Arabs, as well as with the harsh conditions of the Middle East.
On June 7, 1099, after many adventures, the crusader army reached Jerusalem. They had fought for over two years and had traveled more than 2000 miles. The army of 150,000 had dwindled to 15,000, but the ultimate goal of the Crusade, Jerusalem itself, was now in sight.
Conditions were not promising. Jerusalem sat on a hill surrounded by deserts. It was well-fortified, with double walls at strategic points–a legacy of Roman rule. The commanders of Jerusalem had prepared thoroughly for the impending siege, laying in water and supplies, expelling the Christian inhabitants and blocking nearby springs. The hot, thirsty, starving crusaders were forced to carry water in animal skins from the Jordan River twenty miles away, harassed by Arab raiders all the way.
The crusader army was far too small to surround Jerusalem completely. Because of internal dissension, there were really two armies. One, under Godfrey of Bouillon, took its place at the north of the city, while the other, under Raymond of Toulouse, camped to the southwest of the city. The soldiers soon grew restless, so on June 12 they attempted a surprise attack with nothing more than ropes and ladders. This desperate assault was soundly repulsed. If Jerusalem were to be taken, far more preparation would be required.
They set to work on the construction of siege towers, movable shelters and throwing engines. The nearest wood was miles away, so huge timbers had to be hauled long distances on the backs of the crusaders themselves. They worked through the heat and wind in a dangerous state of mystical fervor, with constant reports of miracles and visions. Much-needed assistance came when ships from Genoa broke the Arab blockade and landed nearby: although the Genoese ultimately lost their ships, they provided rope, timber, food, tools and engineers.
The laborious construction of the engines went on for three weeks. At the end of this time, the notion took hold that the crusaders’ lack of success up until that point had been the result of their sinfulness (gambling and prostitution were common in the camps) and that they should undertake a three-day fast before attempting to take the city. The fast was performed, and on July 8, the entire army, barefoot and dressed in beggar’s rags, singing psalms, made a solemn procession around the walls of Jerusalem to the jeers and mocking of the defenders. The procession went on to the Mount of Olives, where sermons were made. Their fervor heightened by both the sermons and the jeers of the enemy, the crusaders made final preparations for assault.
On July 10, the newly-built engines were brought onto the field. Two towers had been built: one for Godfrey on the north, and one for Raymond on the southwest. Bombardment from the throwing engines (probably mangonels and large perriers) began. The Arabs strengthened their defenses near the towers, but in the darkness of the night of July 13-14, Godfrey moved his tower–a huge undertaking–to face a weaker point in the walls. On the south, meanwhile, Raymond had offered a bounty of one penny for each three stones thrown into the ditch that separated his tower from the walls. In three days, the ditch was filled.
As night fell on July 13, the assault began with the sounding of trumpets. Through the night of the 13th and most of the 14th, the crusaders struggled to advance under a rain of fire and missiles from the defenders. The fighting continued through the night and into the next day. On the morning of the 15th, Godfrey’s forces on the north managed to make a hole in the city wall with a large ram. The defenders suspended large timbers from ropes and dropped stones behind them to prevent further damage. The crusaders decided to burn their ram where it stood and roll their tower into its place. With their engines, they began to shoot flaming bundles of wood and straw dipped in tar, wax and sulfur; archers fired flaming arrows. Fires broke out on the walls, scattering the defenders. Around noon, soldiers on Godfrey’s siege tower, which had been intended to serve only as a firing platform, got hold of the timbers the Arabs had used to block the ram and made a bridge from the tower to the city walls. Soldiers clambered over and fought their way to a city gate to let in the army.
Godfrey’s men were well inside the city when Raymond realized that the defenses had been breached. When he saw Arab soldiers trying to flee, he urged his men on and took the wall.
Inside the city, street fighting quickly degenerated into massacre. The rampaging crusaders indiscriminately killed the Moslem and Jewish inhabitants of the city. Order was restored two days later, but by that time nearly the entire population of Jerusalem had been killed.
The First Crusade had achieved its goal, but Muslims would see the sack of Jerusalem as an outrage and a sacrilege. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was established, with Godfrey at its head, only to fall again in 1187, when Saladin, showing the same single-mindedness that the crusaders had, took Jerusalem.
The Battle of Evesham, 1265
After the battle of Lewes in 1264, the baronial opposition to King Henry III, led by Simon de Montfort, ruled England. Both Henry and his son Edward were in the hands of the barons. The tables would turn, however, when Edward escaped from his captors in May, 1265. with the help of Roger Mortimer, the royalist Earl of Gloucester, Edward assembled an army and went on the offensive to defeat Simon and to free the king.
Edward pursued Simon’s army. Simon, who realized that his forces were not strong enough to oppose Edward’s, sent for his son, also named Simon, for more troops to relieve his army. They were to meet at Simon’s well-fortified castle of Kenilworth.
Edward realized that his success depended on preventing the two baronial armies from joining. When he received word that young Simon’s army was nearing Kenilworth, he marched his troops almost forty miles in a day and a night to meet them. Foolishly, the young Simon had encamped his army outside the castle walls instead of inside. They were taken by complete surprise when Edward arrived at dawn. Young Simon managed to escape into the castle, but his army was destroyed.
The elder Simon de Montfort did not receive word of his son’s defeat, and continued towards Kenilworth. His army was hungry and exhausted, and stopped at the town of Evesham to rest. Edward’s army marched on to meet them. As he approached the town, Edward sent a detachment under Roger Mortimer to take the bridge on the far side of town to block Simon’s escape. Simon would have preferred to run, but he was trapped and forced to fight. On the morning of August 4, 1265, an oppressively hot day, he prepared his army.
At first Edward’s army flew the banners of young Simon that Edward had captured at Kenilworth. This led Simon to believe that his relieving army had finally arrived, but when Edward’s men threw the banners down, Simon must have realized that his defeat was at hand. “I taught him that,” Simon is reported to have said, seeing the disciplined order of Edward’s army. (Simon de Montfort was Edward’s godfather, and Edward had at one time been close to aligning himself with Simon.)
Simon’s Welsh soldiers fled, leaving him with an army a quarter of the size of Edward’s. Edward put his men at the top of a hill. Simon, knowing escape was impossible, tried to charge uphill into Edward’s forces, but the wings of Edward’s line closed around Simon’s flanks. The battle was short and intense. Simon’s men fought in a circle surrounding the captive king. The melee became a massacre of the baronial army; Henry was wounded and nearly killed accidentally by royalists, but he was rescued. Simon was killed along with most of his men, and his body was hacked to pieces.
The defeat of Simon de Montfort broke the back of the baronial opposition. Although minor resistance continued until the settlement of 1267, the Baron’s War was decided on the field of Evesham.
The Battle of Falkirk, 1298
William Wallace had secured control of Scotland with his victory against the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297. Edward had been distracted with his wars on the Continent, and did not return to retake Scotland until six months after the English defeat. He immediately summoned a parliament, including the Scottish nobles, to raise an army. The Scottish nobles were wary of taking either side in the conflict and did not respond, so Edward was forced to rely to a great extent on mercenaries. Estimates of the size of his army vary, but it seems that Edward marched to Scotland with at least 10,000 Welsh bowmen, 400 English knights, and a number of knights and mounted crossbowmen from Gascony. Aware of Edward’s approach, Wallace succeeded in stripping Edward’s path of food and sources of supply. Edward’s own supply ships were delayed, so his army was already hungry and restless when they reached Scotland. Edward’s Welsh bowmen were at the point of mutiny when he got word that Wallace was near. He hurried in pursuit. Wallace’s strength lie in guerilla combat, lightning raids and evasion, but Edward’s dogged pursuit forced Wallace to stand and fight on the open field at Falkirk.
While at camp the night before the battle, Edward’s horse took fright at some noise and trampled Edward as he lay on the ground, breaking two of his ribs. Not willing to let anything stand in his way, Edward ignored his pain, mounted his horse and ordered his troops to assemble. Wallace had placed his men on a level spot half way up a hill, behind a patch of boggy ground. He made use of a new formation known as the schiltron: a tight circular formation of spearmen set behind a fence of wooden stakes and ropes. With their long pikes projecting thick in all directions, they could not be outflanked and were nearly impervious to cavalry. Wallace set up four schiltrons, and between them placed his small force of archers. His few knights waited behind. As the English approached, Wallace is recorded to have told his men, “I have brought you to the ring, now dance if you can.”
The English attacked. One line of cavalry approached, were slowed in the marsh, veered off to the left and approached Wallace’s army from the rear. A second line of cavalry did the same from the right side. The two lines of cavalry united, and the Scottish knights, never fully committed to Wallace, abandoned the field. The English cavalry overwhelmed the Scottish archers, but the schiltrons held firm against the onslaught. Now Edward showed off his own new military technology: the Welsh longbowman, whose fearsome arrows could pierce armor like a crossbow bolt, but who could fire three times as fast as a crossbowman. A hail of arrows fell on the schiltrons, and with no cavalry to oppose the archers, the schiltrons took enormous losses. They soon broke up, and Edward’s cavalry destroyed the scattered remnants. Wallace was utterly defeated.
Wallace himself survived, and Edward was not able to follow up on his victory: lack of supplies forced him to return to England, and the final pacification of Scotland would take several years. Wallace’s rebellion, however, was broken by the defeat at Falkirk, and the cause of Scottish freedom would have to wait for another champion.
The Siege of Stirling Castle, 1304
Though Edward I defeated William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298, Scotland was not brought back under Edward’s complete control for six years. In 1299, the Scots captured Stirling Castle, which sits at a critical strategic point controlling access to northern Scotland. Edward launched campaigns into Scotland in 1300 and 1302, but Stirling Castle remained the last stronghold of the Scottish opposition.
Stirling Castle is built on a high stone outcropping with a commanding view of the surrounding country. Because of the stone, mining was impossible, and there was no level ground suitable for siege towers. Edward arrived with his army in April, 1304, with twelve siege engines. He immediately ordered that the lead be stripped from the roofs of nearby churches, presumably for use as counterweights for his trebuchets. Even with twelve engines in his arsenal, Edward quickly set his chief engineer, Master James of St George, to begin work on a new, more massive engine called Warwolf—almost certainly a trebuchet .
Though the garrison of Stirling Castle was only thirty strong, with their favorable position they were able to put up firm resistance. Edward himself was nearly killed twice during the siege: once a crossbow bolt struck his saddle, and on another occasion the horse he was riding was killed from under him by a stone fired from the castle. Edward attempted to fill the moat with wood, but the defenders set it on fire. The chroniclers disagree on what eventually led the garrison to surrender on July 20: one says Edward succeeded in filling the moat with earth and stone and prepared scaling ladders and ropes, and the garrison saw their fate and offered their surrender. Another says that Edward managed to breach a wall with a ram, which convinced the garrison to surrender. Whichever is true, it would have been only a matter of time: with Edward’s great resources and no relieving Scottish army in sight, Stirling was destined to fall to the English as it had fallen to the Scots five years before.
Edward refused Stirling’s surrender until he could test Warwolf. He had a special gallery constructed in his quarters in the town of Stirling (below the castle) so the ladies could watch, fired a stone from Warwolf, damaging the fortifications, and accepted the surrender.
Edward must have been pleased with the performance: earlier during the siege, he had repeatedly threatened the garrison of Stirling with hanging or worse, but in the end, he only executed one man, the one who had previously betrayed the castle to the Scots.
Glossary
| Aketon | The padded garment worn underneath chain mail. |
| Allure | The area behind the battlements of a curtain wall. It served as the main fighting platform for castle defenders. The allure is also known as a wall-walk. |
| Arbelest | A heavy crossbow. |
| Ballista | A throwing engine based on the torsion principle. The ballista used two springs of sinew or hair to power two arms. It operated like a huge crossbow, usually firing darts, but sometimes, especially in the classical period, firing stones. |
| Barbican | A pair of walls or towers projecting from a gatehouse on either side of a gate. They allowed defenders to control access to the gate from three sides. The term is also used loosely for the gatehouse itself. |
| Battlements | The top edge of a fortified wall or tower, usually made up of alternating merlons (portions of solid wall) and crenels (openings). |
| Belfry | A siege tower; a large wooden tower, covered with raw hides or other fireproof material and rolled up to a castle wall and used either to enter onto the walls or simply as a firing platform for archers and siege engines. |
| Bent passage | A passage through a gatehouse with one or more sharp turns in it. The bent passage slowed the movement of invaders who had managed to enter the gatehouse, exposed them to fire from loopholes, and hindered the use of battering rams. |
| Bolt | The short, thick arrow fired from a crossbow. Also known as a quarrel. |
| Bombard | An early heavy cannon. Bombards were usually of forged iron, and fired stones or iron balls at a high angle. |
| Coif | A hood of chain mail. In the thirteenth century, helmets were usually worn over a coif. |
| Concentric castle | An elaborate stone castle designed with several independent layers of concentric fortifications. The concentric castle was the most advanced form of medieval fortification. |
| Corning | The process of forming gunpowder into stable grains. Before corning, gunpowder separated easily and ignited inconsistently. Corning made gunpowder easier to transport, easier to use and more powerful. |
| Crenels | The openings between the merlons on a battlement. |
| Curtain wall | A straight wall constructed between towers. |
| Hauberk | A chain-mail shirt. In the thirteenth century, hauberks incorporated a hood and extended down below the knees. |
| Hoardings | Wooden barriers added to battlements to provide additional protection against the missiles of an attacker. |
| Keep | The most heavily defended and usually innermost portion of a castle. |
| Loophole | A small opening in a wall which allowed defending archers or crossbowmen to fire while being protected. |
| Machicolations | Stone projections that extended the battlements forward from the face of a wall. Machicolations usually had openings at floor-level to allow archers to fire downward along the face of a wall and drop missiles on attacking armies below. They were usually used only at important defensive points, such as above gates. |
| Mangonel | See Onager. |
| Merlons | The solid portions of wall between the crenels in a battlement. |
| Motte and bailey | A simple castle made of wood and earth, consisting of a flattened mound surrounded by a ditch (the motte) and an adjacent section of ground protected by wooden walls (the bailey). |
| Murder hole | A hole in the ceiling of a gatehouse which allowed defenders to drop rocks, boiling water or other missiles onto hostile forces below. |
| Onager | A throwing engine powered by spring torsion. Onagers had a single throwing arm and usually fired stones. |
| Perrier | A throwing engine based on the principle of traction. The perrier was essentially a lever with one short arm and one long arm. A sling which held a stone was attached to the long arm, while several ropes were attached to the short arm. Soldiers launched the projectile by pulling on the ropes, whipping the long arm and the sling. The perrier was a direct predecessor of the trebuchet. |
| Portcullis | A heavy iron or wood-and-iron gate that could open and close by sliding up and down. The portcullis was operated with winches, usually from the floor above. Gatehouses were often equipped with several portcullises arranged in series. |
| Quarrel | The short, thick arrow fired from a crossbow. Also known as a bolt. |
| Schiltron | A tight circular formation of spearmen set behind a fence of wooden stakes and ropes. The spearmen stood with long pikes projecting in all directions so they could not be outflanked and would be nearly impervious to cavalry. This formation was used by Wallace at the Battle of Falkirk. Although powerful against cavalry, schiltrons were strictly defensive formations and were vulnerable to archers. |
| Sergeant | A fighting man of the middle ages more well-equipped and professional than the common soldier, but without the noble status of a knight. |
| Shell keep | A simple fortification made of a single, circular stone wall. The shell keep did not have a roof, and usually enclosed wooden buildings. |
| Springald | A throwing engine powered by the spring energy of a bent plank of wood. Springalds were usually used to shoot firebrands or spears. |
| Spur | A flaring-out or thickening of a curtain wall at its base. A curtain wall with a spur presented an angled face to defenders making it more difficult to ram. It also strengthened the wall against mining. |
| Surcoat | The cloth garment worn over chain mail. Sometimes additional plates or strips of armor were attached to the inside of the surcoat. |
| Trebuchet | A heavy throwing engine based on the counterweight principle. Trebuchets were the most powerful siege engines of the medieval period. |
| Wall-walk | See allure. |