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The buildings were also constructed against the inner side of the wall, in order to increase its strength. While they were an inventive solution to the problem of weight, shell keep castles were limited by the size of the mottes they were built upon and could not get much larger. They were not popular outside Britain and by the early 13th century had fallen out of fashion.
Castles
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Instead, many castles used a pivoted system, where the a plank for a drawbridge was fixed on a ledge between two moats – like a big see-saw. Additionally, the advantage of round towers is that they couldn’t be toppled over that easily. Attackers had got wise to the fact that, by burrowing under the corner of a square tower, they would disrupt the foundations and collapse the whole tower. Entertaining important guests was a fundamental purpose of many castles – this helped secure the power of the castle’s Lord and Lady. Many Medieval castles had moats to improve their defensive capabilities.
How Did They Build Castles in Medieval Times?
The earliest castles in England were defended by wooden ramparts placed on top of earthwork banks and ditches. Stone walls gradually replaced many of these, with some walls reinforced internally with intra-mural timbers. External castle walls are often called curtain walls, enclosing a bailey or ward. Barbicans, walled enclosures positioned outside of a gatehouse, provided an additional layer of protection for the main castle. The architecture of castles has been extensively studied over the last 150 years. Some approaches have focused on the military functions of their defences; others on the social and cultural roles of their buildings and design.
Different Types of Castles Built Throughout History
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These castles were very commonly seen between the 10th and 12th centuries. The ear-shaped complex includes a labyrinth of marble buildings, lush courtyards, and a network of underground rooms. The Musamman Burj, an octagonal tower made of marble lattices, was built for Shan Jahan’s wife Mumtaz, offering the maiden views of the nearby Taj Mahal and river. A good example is Hunyad Castle in Romania, built in the 15th century, which still has its gothic arches, windows with bar tracing, and towers with thin spires. It also made use of ribbed vaulting, which helped to distribute the weight of the roof, directing it onto load-bearing columns. As a result, walls could be built much thinner than before, and a building could be much lighter and more decorative, whilst still being extremely large.
Battlements, machicolations and similar defensive features became common, particularly once crossbows became common on the battlefield. Weak corners of walls might be further protected with stone spurs, or parts of the wallwalk designed with wooden segments which could be withdrawn or destroyed in an emergency. In common usage, a castle is generally any building that is constructed using fortifications of some kind and is intended to protect the occupants from the dangers of combat. The Renaissance was one of the earliest periods in which Classical forms of architecture, as descended from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, were placed at the forefront of architecture in general.
Towards the end of the medieval period, the rise of gunpowder artillery made earthwork defences critical again. Some castles were refortified with extensive earthwork bastions, typically faced with stone, with the same features used in some of Henry VIII’s new Device Forts. Early castles depended on extensive defences comprising banks of earth, protected by timber defences, and defensive ditches. These might reuse older Iron Age defences or be built on top of natural features, sometimes revetted to improve the angle to their slope. Baileys had multiple functions, both military – protecting key parts of a castle such as the keep – and domestic – providing space for the castle’s inhabitants to live and work.
Stone Castles
You have seen how these castles were built in order to defend the ruler and armies from invading forces. The concentric castle takes things a step further by providing several layers of defenses for the castle. These were safer to use than square stone keeps and still retained all of the other desirable features of a stone keep.
I also explain how a person who has zero experience in architectural design or construction can design and build a 7500 sq. A day on the beach is never complete for a child unless they have had a chance to build their best sand castle. Using tools such as small shovels and buckets to help them form towers, children will build up their sand castles to the best of their abilities. This is a fun and wholesome activity that helps children to bring out their creativity.
Mid Century Modern Furniture
Medieval Castles were constructed in three different architectural phases, depending on the primary purpose of the castle and the necessity for a castle to be fortified as a stronghold against invaders. For example, Germanic castles differed from British castles but kept the basic architectural designs. Eventually, medieval castles continued onto more modern styles across the board, around the 1500s. From the humble origins of the simple wooden motte-and-bailey designs, castles grew to be enormously complex fortifications in the late middle ages, with multiple layers of carefully planned outworks, walls, and towers.
The adjacent image which you can see of a castle moat is taken from Beaumaris Castle, one of the most impressive moated castles in the whole of the UK. Very few castles had the advantage of a fresh-flowing natural moat (formed from the loop of a river, for example). This is the layout of Farleigh Hungerford castle, as it would have been in Medieval times. You can compare it to the recent satellite image from Google, which you can see above. So let’s look at the layout of an excellent example of a Medieval castle – Farleigh Hungerford castle, in Somerset, UK. Farleigh Hungerford has many traditional features of Medieval castles.
The circular bailey would be situated outside the walls of the keep and below the motte. It would contain buildings like the hall, kitchen, stables, and workshops. The bailey also had a ditch dug around it, which joined up with the smaller motte ditch, creating a settlement shaped in figure eight. The motte and bailey is recognized as the first castle style to emerge in Europe.
The Medieval years represented an active era of castle-building throughout Europe and the Middle East. They were built from around the 9th to 15th century and ranged from basic wooden structures to colossal stone buildings. Many of the wealthier Italian states commissioned architects to design and build star forts to defend their regions.
The castle’s name comes from two Norman French words – motte, meaning raised mound or clot of earth, and bailey, meaning enclosed land. During the late 1700s, authors took advantage of public fascination with legends of bizarre happenings in secret rooms and passages in now-antiquated medieval gothic castles. They built on imagery created by stories of castles once filled with laughter and music, now haunted by ghosts and ghouls from the past. Walls and towers were lowered and infilled with earth to strengthen the structures. Whereas most types of rock shattered when hit, bricks were able to absorb the shock of artillery fire. As building techniques advanced, castles were eventually built from blocks of hewn rock and bricks.
However, many Medieval castles shared similar features – defensive barbicans and deep moats, with a kitchen and a great hall; and a Keep (or donjon) at their heart. For example, a castle built on the turbulent borders of England and Wales might have been built to be as strong and as defensive as possible. Similar to Anna and Elsa’s regal residence in Disney’s Frozen, a castle in Wyoming—that’s right, Wyoming—doubles as a whimsical residence with breathtaking mountain views.
It was a bloody era where people took land and riches based on the strength of their armies. They would typically be quite spacious and were large enough to store an ample amount of food as well. This was important because when a keep was under siege, the enemies might have the idea of trying to starve the people inside. Throughout Western Europe, you will find many square stone keeps that are still standing today.
Some of the most common attributes of Renaissance castles are indicative of Renaissance architecture in general. Renaissance architecture made use of classical orders, newly constructed columns and pilasters, vaults, and domes. Renaissance castles took on some of these new iterations of old ideas and produced far more beautiful castles than had existed in previous centuries. These castles do not look like what we typically consider to be castles, but they were technically constructed for defensive purposes.
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