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Military historian Richard Holmes says castles were
households as well as fortresses.
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Life in a Castle
Professor Richard Holmes, a British military historian
featured in the NOVA film "Medieval Siege," talks here about
everyday life in a medieval English castle, giving a sense
of how lords and ladies, archers and engineers, cooks and
carpenters lived their lives behind castle walls.
NOVA: When we think of life inside a medieval castle,
what usually comes to mind are lords, ladies, and maybe
knights. But it actually was a much more diverse group than
this, wasn't it?
Holmes: That's true. The thing to remember is that a
castle was a residence as well as a private fortress. Most of
the time the castle operated as a small, large, or
medium-sized household.
Now, the number varied hugely depending on the size of the
castle. During the civil wars of King John's reign, Odiham was
defended by a garrison of three knights and ten men-at-arms.
And that's about as small as a garrison would get. However,
Rochester Castle at the same time was held against King John
by a garrison of a hundred knights and men-at-arms and a whole
variety of lesser men. So we're looking at garrisons that went
from a dozen or so to several hundred, though several hundred
would have been exceptional.
Some of the people in the garrison were paid, such as the
crossbowmen. Medieval society was a sort of interlocking
network of relationships between people based on feudal
obligations and on money and very often a bit of both. People
who did jobs in the castle were often paid. They might have
been local people with a long-standing personal or family
relationship with the lord and his family as well.
Knights had more status than many others in a
castle's hierarchy.
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NOVA: What was the hierarchy inside the castle?
Holmes: The lord and lady were at the top of the tree.
However, the single most important figure in the daily life of
a castle was the constable. His job was to look after the
castle, because the lord was not usually at home. In England,
during the period we're talking about, many castles were royal
castles. Clearly, the king could only be at any one place at
any one time. And medieval English kings were always on the
move. They moved from place to place. I live not far from
Winchester Castle, where the king routinely appeared for
Christmas.
So the constable was the person whose job it was to look after
the castle in the lord's absence. He had a number of people
who worked beneath him. There was the garrison, whose members
vary in status, including knights, men-at-arms, archers, and
engineers. You also had grooms, watchmen, porters, cooks, and
scullions, who did all the washing up in the kitchen.
NOVA: Speaking of washing, what was the level of
cleanliness in a typical castle?
Holmes: Well, by our standards, cleanliness in the
Middle Ages was pretty poor. Clearly, a castle was slightly
better maintained than a peasant hovel, but we would still
find the place pretty shocking. We'd have found it very smoky,
for example. Very often in the great hall there was a central
fire. Later on there were proper fireplaces, but a central
fire with a hole in the roof was standard. Perhaps some
carpets hung on the walls, but on the floors were rushes with
dogs rolling around with scraps of meat and bones and such. So
it was a pretty primitive atmosphere.
NOVA: Did personal hygiene habits match the overall
cleanliness level?
Holmes: Well, toilets, or garderobes as they were
called, usually were situated so that they opened over the
moat. If you look at a medieval castle, you can very often see
little stone extensions built out from the walls. The waste
matter fell into the moat below. Even some several hundred
years after they were last used, you still can see castle
walls stained with the results. And medieval men didn't really
bathe terribly often. People might have wiped their hands and
faces from time to time. Clean water, remember, was hard to
come by. So cleanliness was pretty primitive. But clearly
lords and ladies would have been slightly cleaner and
sweeter-smelling than most of their subordinates.
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Castle walls provided good protection from enemies -
and the elements.
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NOVA: Was a castle assignment a plum one for medieval
men or women?
Holmes: Given the ups and downs of medieval life, it
probably was. What you wanted if you were a medieval man was
protection.
It's not unlike the Mafia today. You wanted a job, yes, you
wanted money, yes, you wanted someplace to live. But you also
wanted protection from a great man. And if you were working
for the great man or one of his family—and the idea of
family was very important in medieval England—it helped.
So you were well up the pecking order if you were working for
the great man in the great man's castle. The closer you were
to one of the real movers and shakers, the better the
protection you had. And the nearer you were to a store of
food, the less liable you were to die during one of the
endemic famines. And a stone building means you were probably
warmer and drier.
NOVA: What were sleeping arrangements like for all
these people? Did families in the castle have private rooms?
Holmes: If you were a lord or lady, if you were the
constable or the constable's lady, then you would have had a
private room. You would have had a nice suite of private
rooms. But for most other people, life was pretty communal. An
awful lot of life in a castle went on in the great hall. There
was a fire and shelter in the hall. People ate and slept in
the great hall. Very often, certainly in smaller castles,
before sophisticated domestic arrangements evolved, you would
have found the lord and lady sleeping at one end of the great
hall in a sort of screened-off area. So medieval men and women
didn't have much privacy.
Continue: Division of Labor
Medieval Arms Race
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NOVA Builds a Trebuchet
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Life in a Castle
Destroy the Castle
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Resources
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Transcript
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| Updated November 2000
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