Under the castles there were large dungeons

It is believed that any self-respecting castle should have dungeons, secret passages, dungeons, wine cellars and many dark tunnels. In them, of course, you can easily come across the skeletons of the builders of the fortress, forgotten there centuries ago. Traveling through the labyrinths, without fail with torches in their hands, the lords buried their treasures there, in the dark. Well, or the bodies of accidentally killed spouses.

The dungeons in medieval fortresses were located in towers, not underground. The fact is that they were intended primarily for wealthy prisoners – knights and lords taken prisoner on the battlefield and able to give a ransom for their freedom.

Any delinquent commoners did not have to be kept in a castle prison. Feed them on your own? Something else they thought. They were simply flogged for minor offenses or hanged if the crime was serious. And imprisonment as a punishment was incredibly rarely resorted to, so a large dungeon for the castle was simply useless. And it is easier to keep a few prisoners in a tower than in a basement: it is more difficult to escape from there if you do not know how to fly.

Food, wine and supplies were also kept not in cellars, but in specially built rooms to protect their belongings from rats and moisture.

And, finally, castles were built on solid foundations, and even on a rock: on unstable ground, powerful thick walls will begin to sag under their weight, become vulnerable, or even completely collapse. So it was very difficult and dangerous to dig large dungeons under them.

The castle could be equipped with a secret passage to escape unnoticed if the enemy broke through. Although often this was also refused: what if the besiegers find it? Digging out labyrinths and catacombs would never have occurred to any medieval architect at all.

The castles were full of people all the time

Most fortresses were relatively small structures – monsters like Windsor or Bamboro, which look more like cities, are not taken into account. It is a rarity. And even if the castle looks impressive from the outside, it must be borne in mind that there is relatively little living space in it: most of the premises have defensive functions.

Therefore, many believe that these buildings were incredibly crowded. People literally lived on each other’s heads: the lord, his lady and family, a bunch of soldiers, servants, peasants serving the surrounding plots and a lot of other people. However, this was not entirely true.

Many feudal lords did not live in them permanently. If the lord had several castles, he periodically moved from one to another with his family, guards, retinue and servants. At the same time, most of the things – up to dishes, tapestries, candlesticks and bed linen – were taken with them so as not to leave anything valuable in the castle.

Surveillance cameras were not yet widespread, so in the absence of the lord, the servants could steal. And therefore, property that could not be screwed to the floor was taken away from sin.

The richer the lord was, the more he traveled. So, King Henry III changed residences on average 80 times a year. And a simpler lady, Countess Jeanne de Valens, for example, moved about 15 times from May 1296 to September 1297.

And even relatively small feudal lords, who had only one castle (just something, yeah), preferred to spend most of their time in their village estates, where there was fresh air and a lot of good food. And they drove into the fortress only if the army of another lord approached them with clearly bad intentions.

And by the way, for the defense of a well-fortified citadel, large garrisons were not required – a maximum of 200 people gathered there at a time, or even less.

For example, in 1403, a detachment of 37 archers successfully defended Caernarfon Castle twice from the army of Prince Owain IV of Wales and his allies, who were trying to capture the building by storm. As a result, the prince got away without salty slurping.

And the English stronghold Wark on the border with Scotland in 1545 was guarded by 10 artillerymen and 26 horsemen, who went out on guard for 8 people. And they were quite enough to beat off the attacks.

Moreover, too many warriors in the fortress were frankly harmful, because they did not do anything particularly useful – on the walls during the assault, they still would not fit all at once. But at the same time they consumed a lot of supplies.

A normal castle should have a “stone bag” for prisoners

This thing – will kill, from the French “to forget.” Such narrow stone rooms existed in many castles. They descended only on a rope. And it was impossible to get out without outside help. They also called these ubliets the hard-to-pronounce word angstloch – from the German “fear hole”.

Some believe that such a dungeon is needed to throw prisoners there and keep them there for many years until the unfortunate people go crazy. Terrible fate. But this is not true.

It sounds intimidating, but in fact, no one in the Middle Ages would bother to equip a separate room for prisoners. As already mentioned, the captured lords were kept in towers, and they were not subjected to any brutal torture – so that the prisoner’s family would rather think about collecting a ransom, and not rush to take revenge.

In reality, ubliettes were used as stores of various supplies, water tanks, a kind of safes for valuables, and sometimes even septic tanks. Many of them also contained large piles of stones.

As for the terrible name angstloch, in Latin, approximately the same word means “narrow”. The myth of “stone bags” for the prisoners held there appeared in the 19th century, when novels about the misadventures of the knights of the Middle Ages gained particular popularity. In particular, Walter Scott popularized the word ubliette with his Ivanhoe.