Medieval Warfare: How to Capture a Castle with Siegecraft

 | MHQ  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The present-day notion of medieval warfare is of longbowmen standing shoulder to shoulder loosing arrows and knights charging across open fields before engaging in brutal hand-to-hand battle. Hastings, Bannockburn, and Agincourt come to mind. Such battles, however, were the exception, for during the Middle Ages warfare was a much more complicated affair that more often than not involved siegecraft.

After his 1066 victory at Hastings, William the Conqueror initiated a massive castle-building program in England that was instrumental in completing the Normans’ subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons. Throughout medieval Europe and the Middle East, the castle functioned as a private fortress that, among its other roles, physically–and symbolically–proclaimed the status and strength of its lord to all comers, friend or foe. Even the simplest earth and timber motte and bailey castle, used to great effect by the Norman kings of England, validated the power of the conquering force.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, castles evolved into powerful fortresses capable of defying intensive assaults. At the same time, in order to combat strengthened castle defenses, siegecraft developed. By the late Middle Ages, few major campaigns took place without at least one castle siege. Indeed, while battles such as Crcy (1346) have gleaned all the glory, it was not until the siege of Calais in the following year that the English made significant progress in their fight against France. The successful castle siege skillfully combined sophisticated science with specific standards of conduct known to, but not always practiced by, the participants. Ultimately, the siege dominated medieval warfare for at least as long as the castle dominated the social and political order of the day.

Besieging a castle was a much more complicated affair than simply ‘rushing into the breach,’ as Shakespeare’s Henry V exhorted his troops before the 1415 siege of Harfleur. Sieges, likewise, involved much more than bombarding a fortress until either the garrison surrendered or the defenses were overcome. In fact the medieval siege was a complex, highly choreographed process that ended with a castle assault only when other tactics had failed to force a surrender. Besieging a castle involved assembling and paying an army, gathering supplies, and hauling them to the siege site. Because the costs were so high, military leaders normally did not rush into a siege. Indeed, if a besieging army lost too many men in an initial onslaught, it was often forced to retreat or give up the siege entirely. If it was successful enough to gain control of the castle, the army’s now-weakened troops might not be capable of repulsing a renewed attack by forces sent to relieve the garrison. Consequently, the full-out siege was normally a last resort, unless, of course, the attacking king or lord had a particular investment in breaking his opponent.

Early medieval sieges were generally directed against towns or major cities, which were often fortified, rather than at individual castles. As castle sieges became more commonplace, besiegers devised methods to overcome increasingly complex defenses. Until about 1100, tactics mainly consisted of using firepower to break through the castle’s physical defenses or of starving out the defenders by blockade. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, siege warfare became increasingly sophisticated, and by the mid-fourteenth century enormous timber war machines had become the mainstay of virtually every investment. At the same time, specific conventions for conducting a siege were well established. The most practiced soldiers followed traditional protocol, which encouraged honorable negotiation and surrender before an attacker pummeled the garrison into submission.

Commanders first had to devise an overall strategy for taking the castle. They had to consider from where in the realm the best archers, skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, sappers, and engineers could be drawn. If a king was contemplating launching a siege, he would consider which lords owed him knights’ service and how many men-at-arms they would provide (knights normally were obligated to serve for forty days during the course of a year). Other considerations included how much timber, lead, tools, nails, food, drink, livestock, and other provisions were required for the duration of the siege and where they could be acquired.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Military Technology, Weaponry

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.