Description
A Norman castle in England started as a pile of dirt with a wooden fence on top, the motte, and centuries later Parliament packed the stone castles that grew out of it with gunpowder after the English Civil War. This is how you get from one to the other, one problem at a time. The first problem: wood burns.
A pile of dirt can't carry a stone tower. At Duffus Castle in Scotland they built one on the motte anyway, and its walls slid down the slope; they are still lying there. So you ring the top of the motte with a light stone wall, the shell keep. A real tower, the keep, goes on solid ground, with walls up to 7 metres thick and the door a floor up, reached by a stair, where no ram can reach it. Your archers can't hit men at the foot of the wall without leaning out, so you hang wooden hoardings off the top with holes in the floor to drop stones through. Hoardings burn too, so you build them in stone as machicolations. Then a second, lower wall goes around the first, and archers on both walls shoot at once: the concentric castle, like Harlech and Beaumaris in Wales.
In 1646 the civil war ended, and Parliament slighted castles so nobody could hold them again. At Corfe Castle the sappers dug holes, filled them with gunpowder, and brought the towers down. Many of England's mottes are grassy mounds again, with nothing left on top.
#Shorts #Castles #History