For those people who spend their weekends at various medieval and Renaissance re-creation events, the primary form of residence is probably a tent or pavilion. In the Middle Ages, however, only crazed hermits, particularly dim-witted cattle and crusading knights lived in such flimsy structures. Sane people, on the other hand, chose to reside in that most famous of medieval structures: the castle. This column is an ideal place to explore the social, political and economic role which the castle played throughout the Middle Ages. This, of course, is complicated by the fact that A castles changed drastically throughout the shifting geo-political climate of the period, and B> I was not really planning to do any research. So, instead, I'll just make some stuff up.

During times of peace, the lord or knight who held the castle would stockpile his fortress with food, weapons and supplies, host tournaments and celebrations, and plot the overthrow of the king. When the castle was threatened with war, the people of the surrounding countryside would gather inside, ready to lend their help in the defense of the lord's manor until that desperate moment when the peasants actually wanted to eat some of the food they had worked so hard to stock. They would then be forcibly ejected and left to the mercy of the enemy troops so the lord and his knights could throw a huge party inside with the remaining wine, bread, cheese and farm animals.

The most dangerous threat to the inhabitants of a castle was the possibility of a siege. The word "siege" comes from the Latin "sedere," meaning, "to trap people inside a building until they are so desperate for food that they gladly establish a lucrative market in the sale of live cockroach grubs." In the Middle Ages, a siege could go on for weeks, months or even years. While we might like to imagine medieval warfare as exciting and dramatic, in fact, most military encounters in the Middle Ages were about as action-packed as a corporate tax audit.

Apart from death by boredom, there were other ways to assault a medieval castle. One of the most common was for the attackers to breach the walls by hurling large boulders at them with catapults and trebuchets. These huge machines were typically made of questionably acquired, substandard materials, constructed by drunken engineers with absolutely no safety mechanisms (the weapons, not the engineers) and manned by untrained and frequently belligerent operating crews. As you might expect, these weapons could be expected to work for as many as two or even three shots before malfunctioning and flinging armored soldiers several miles downrange, or sending hundreds of pounds of airborne granite in the direction of the commanding general (who was one of those unfortunate individuals who had chosen to reside in a pavilion).

Although assembling a reproduction of a medieval castle for a faire or tournament might be too much work for a weekend's entertainment, the legends of these magnificent fortresses can still inspire those who seek to recapture the color, pageantry and flavor of the Middle Ages -- minus the cockroach grubs, of course.

Although Sir Guillaume has visited several medieval castles, he is still frequently mistaken for a deranged hermit or a dim-witted cow. Guillaume's column "I Didn't Expect An Inquisition" appears monthly in the SCA publication "The Crown Prints."

About Author

Sir Guillaume is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where he is a knight, Pelican and baron, much to the dismay of the other members of those orders. His column "I Didn't Expect An Inquisition," which appears monthly in The Crown Prints, has received several awards and was once described as "completely devoid of social value."