Castle facts for kids
A castle (from the Latin word castellum) is a fortified structure made in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages. People argue about what the word castle means. However, it usually means a private structure of a lord or noble. This is different from a fortress, which is not a home, and from a fortified town, which was a public defence. For about 900 years that castles were built they had many different shapes and different details.
Castles began in Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries. They controlled the places surrounding them, and could both help in attacking and defending. Weapons could be fired from castles, or people could be protected from enemies in castles. However, castles were also a symbol of power. They could be used to control the people and roads around it.
Many castles were built with earth and wood at first often using manual labour, and then had their defences replaced by stone instead. Early castles often used nature for protection, and did not have towers. By the late 12th and early 13th centuries, though, castles became longer and more complex.
Europe began using gunpowder in the 14th century. It did not stop castle building at first. But by the 15th century, shots became powerful enough to break through stone walls. Castles were still built, but new ways to protect castles from cannons and guns made them uncomfortable places to live in. Because of this, people stopped building true castles. Instead, country houses or military forts were built. From the 18th century, people began building castles again from new interest in Gothic architecture, but they were not used for fighting.
Definition
Etymology
The word castle comes from the Latin word castellum, which is a diminutive of the word castrum, meaning "fortified place". The Old English castel, French château, Spanish castillo, Italian castello, and many other words in other languages also come from castellum. The word castle became a part of the English language soon after the Norman Conquest to describe this new type of building. However, though these words all came from the same basic meaning, they can describe different types of structures. For example, the French château can simply be used to describe a great country house in the middle of an estate.
Important details
A castle is seen by most to be "a private fortified residence" (place to stay). This makes it different from earlier fortifications, such as walled cities like Constantinople and Antioch in the Middle East. Castles were not made to protect the community. They were built and owned by lords, either for themselves or for their ruler.
Wall
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A castle's main defense was a wall. A wall was used to block the offensive side from breaking into a castle. The rooms inside the castle sometimes had small holes, or slits, cut in the walls, so the soldiers could fire out through them without being hit. These were called arrowloops. The way a person or thing got into a castle was through a gate. A gate was a mostly wooden structure with a heavy metal gate behind it. This was used for two purposes: to let allies in or out, and to keep enemies out. If an attack did get past a gate, missiles and other objects would be dropped through holes (called murder holes) in the upper part of the gate. The gate was also one of the most protected parts of a castle. Some castles also had moats which were water filled ditches encircling the whole castle where the only way in was over a drawbridge which was a heavy wooden door that could be pulled up by chains to protect the main gate and let down to act as a bridge over the moat to allow access to the castle. You could also pour oil that was hot down a hole. The soldiers attacking the castle sometimes tried to knock down the castle walls, or dig under them. A siege was when the attackers just sat outside and waited. When the people inside were starving they had to give up and come out, which is called surrender. A siege could go on for months, if the castle had plenty of food and water.
Castles were built for defense until about 500 years ago, at the end of the Middle Ages. After that people still built very big stone buildings. They looked like castles, but they had bigger windows and more fireplaces and were much more comfortable. Really they were just great big houses. When castles were built to be homes instead of fortresses, the word 'Castle' was often put at the front of the name. One example is Castle Oliver in Ireland. This had 215 windows and 65 chimneys, as well as dozens of bedrooms. It was built about 150 years ago. It is very light and bright inside, because it was built to have parties, not to keep out soldiers.
Many castles are very beautiful and are public. Sometimes you can see furniture and clothes, armour, musical instruments, carpets, cannon and other weapons that once belonged to the people who lived there. Some castles have legends of ghosts. Some had very famous owners, like mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Some, only a very few, are still lived in by the families who built them. Many others have become hotels or museums.
Castles seem romantic and mysterious to us now, but they were cold, dark places to live, often damp. Because the walls were so thick, sometimes 12 feet (4 metres) or more, they never got warm. Their windows also had no glass in them. Castles might have been safe, but they weren't very comfortable.
Images for kids
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Dating back to the early 12th century, the Alcázar of Segovia is one of the most distinctive castles in Europe.
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Built in 1385, Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, England, is surrounded by a water-filled moat.
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The Norman White Tower, the keep of the Tower of London, exemplifies all uses of a castle including city defence, a residence, and a place of refuge in times of crisis.
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Windsor Castle in England was founded as a fortification during the Norman Conquest and today is one of the principal official residences of Queen Elizabeth II.
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São Jorge Castle in Lisbon, Portugal, with a bridge over a moat
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The wooden palisades on top of mottes were often later replaced with stone, as in this example at Château de Gisors in France.
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A courtyard of the 14th-century Raseborg Castle in Finland
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The 14th-century keep of Château de Vincennes near Paris towers above the castle's curtain wall. The wall exhibits features common to castle architecture: a gatehouse, corner towers, and machicolations.
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Beaumaris Castle in Anglesey, North Wales, with curtain walls between the lower outer towers, and higher inner curtain walls between the higher inner towers.
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A 13th-century gatehouse in the château de Châteaubriant, France. It connects the upper ward to the lower one.
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Caerlaverock Castle in Scotland is surrounded by a moat.
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Daorson, Bosnia, built around a prehistoric central fortified settlement or acropolis (existed there cca. 17/16th c. to the end of the Bronze Age, cca. 9/8th c. BCE), surrounded by cyclopean walls (similar to Mycenae) dated to the 4th c. BCE.
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Borġ in-Nadur fort in Malta, built during the Tarxien phase and used until the Bronze Age.
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The Bayeux Tapestry contains one of the earliest representations of a castle. It depicts attackers of the Château de Dinan in France using fire, a major threat to wooden castles.
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Albarrana tower in Paderne Castle, Portugal
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The gatehouse to the inner ward of Beeston Castle in Cheshire, England, was built in the 1220s, and has an entrance between two D-shaped towers.
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Krak des Chevaliers in Syria is a concentric castle built with both rectangular and rounded towers. It is one of the best-preserved Crusader castles.
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The design of Edward I's Harlech Castle (built in the 1280s) in North Wales was influenced by his experience of the Crusades.
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The northern walls of the Gran Castello in Gozo, Malta, were built in the 15th century.
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Corvin Castle in Transylvania (built between 1446 and 1480) was one of the biggest in Eastern Europe at that time.
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Castle De Haar, Utrecht, Netherlands.
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The angled bastion, as used in Copertino Castle in Italy, was developed around 1500. First used in Italy, it allowed the evolution of artillery forts that eventually took over the military role of castles.
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Neuschwanstein is a 19th-century historicist (neoromanesque) castle built by Ludwig II of Bavaria, inspired by the romanticism of the time.
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Castello Dei Baroni, a country residence in Wardija, Malta, designed with castle-like features.
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A 19th-century depiction by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc of the construction of the large tower at Coucy Castle in France, with scaffolding and masons at work. The putlog holes mark the position of the scaffolding in earlier stages of construction. The tower was blown up in 1917.
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Experimental archeology castle building at Guédelon Castle site in France (2015).
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God Speed! by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1900: a late Victorian view of a lady giving a favour to a knight about to do battle.
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Highland castles such as Château de Montségur in southern France have become the popular idea of where castles should be found because they are photogenic, where in reality castles were built in a variety of places due to a range of considerations.
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Srebrenik Fortress in Srebrenik, Bosnia: inaccessibility of location with only a narrow bridge traversing deep canyon provides excellent protection.
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Almourol Castle in Portugal, which stands on a small islet in the Tejo River.
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Tavastia Castle in Hämeenlinna, Finland, one of the northernmost castles in Europe. The exact date of construction of the castle is unclear, as far as it is known to have been built in the late 13th century, but the first mention of it in contemporary documents is from 1308. It was built close to Lake Vanajavesi.
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An early 13th-century drawing by Matthew Paris showing contemporary warfare, including the use of castles (here Lincoln Castle), crossbowmen and mounted knights.
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A reconstructed trebuchet at Château des Baux in Bouches-du-Rhône in the south of France.
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See also
In Spanish: Castillo para niños
