Fairy tales abound with stories of castles, romantic, picturesque places, homes to kings and queens, princes and princesses. A chivalrous knight may storm a castle, and rescue a lady in distress. A grand ball is held, elaborate, fanciful gowns are worn, fireflies twinkle, a prince falls in love with the belle of the ball and fireworks appear out of nowhere as true love is finally realized. Little girls live and dream in a fantastical world of castles and knights and princesses, fairy godmothers. And now, you’re at Disney World, gazing up at Cinderella's castle, a structure so familiar, it’s graced the opening of every Disney movie for the last 40 years. But, hate to break it to you Walt, Cinderella’s castle is not actually a castle. Believe it or not, castles were a fairly specific thing constructed during a fairly specific time period in a specific location for a specific purpose. And there’s a significant difference, it turns out, between actual castles and the palaces of fairy tale lore. Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, my name is Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. It’s gotten real biographical around here lately, which is fine, but I’m hoping to mix it up this week with some social history. Also, for some reason, I cannot stop thinking about castles. For real, I’ve been thinking about castles nonstop lately. I don’t know why, this is going to sound crazy, but for some reason when I’m feeling really overwhelmed and like overstimulated, I think about castles and it like calms me down. What does that mean? Like, I need a psychologist to break this down for me. It started soon after I had my youngest kid. We had a two year old and a newborn which is so tough and, adding to that, the newborn had terrible reflux. I couldn’t lay him down at night, at all. I literally walked circles around my house holding him all night long for weeks until we finally got him on some medication that helped a little. I was so incredibly sleep deprived and he was such a clingy baby he cried any time I put him down. He wouldn’t let anyone else hold him. So I just held him 24/7 and like literally did not sleep. Eating, showering, sleeping, basic physiological needs were very hard to meet and I was so incredibly overstimulated and overwhelmed at all times. Sleep deprivation will do that to you. I’m also really bad at asking for help and like to do all the hard things myself, I’ll go ahead and admit that. It got so bad that one day my husband just took the baby, like physically took him from me and was like “go, do whatever you need to do right now.” And you might think, oh well I’m sure she took a nap, or maybe she took a shower, or maybe she just started running, ran down the street, and kept on running Forest Gump style, I fantasized about that plenty, trust me. Never did it. Kind of hate running. But no, I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I went into my room and I shut the door, and I put on headphones to drown out the crying and I watched a video about castles. And it wasn’t like a suggested video that popped up and I was like “oh, that looks interesting,” no. I intentionally opened YouTube and typed castles into the search bar. And even while I was doing it, I was like, “this is really weird, where is this coming from?” But I watched a video about castles and it like instantly calmed me down. I don’t know. I don’t know. Something about a castle as like a protective fortress keeping all the bad stuff out, you’re sort of locked inside and safe like an old school panic room. Just learning about them, thinking about them made me feel calm and safe and regulated somehow. I don’t know. Unpack that for me guys. But anyway, I’ve been feeling real castley lately. And something about the geopolitical climate tells me some of you guys might be too. So come tuck yourself away in a castle with me this week. We’ll post some sentries, pull up the draw bridge and cozy up in the keep. 

When most of us picture a castle, what we’re actually picturing is a palace, an elaborate, beautiful, royal residence. It has impressive architecture, lots of detail and lavish furnishings. It’s comfortable and luxurious, right, fit for kings and queens. But that’s not a castle. Castles were military fortifications. They were built for defense. Now, did they house the royal family, the nobility? Yes, often they did. But they wouldn’t have been light and airy and lavishly furnished and comfortable. They would have been dark and cold and fairly creepy. Castles arose to fill a very specific need during a specific time and place, the medieval period AKA the middle ages AKA the dark ages, all across Europe. That’s roughly the 400s through the 1400s, a one thousand year period of time where all of these castles are popping up all across Europe. And those years are significant bookends to this period. The 400s, that’s when the Roman empire fell. The 1400’s, that’s when the Renaissance, the rebirth, began. But in between, in that 1,000 years, in the middle… ages, we have a lot of chaos and death and destruction going on.

 

So let’s take a look at why this period was so dark. It’s really a post apocalyptic world, for Europe at least, if you think about it. A post apocalyptic world that took people 1,000 years, a millennium to crawl back out of, which I don’t think enough people realize. You know, I talked in the Great Pyramid episode way back when, episode 10, I talked about how we like to think of human history as linear, right, progressing linearly. We started half naked in caves beating things with rocks and we’ve been getting better and better and smarter and smarter ever since. And we want to believe this, it’s self preservation, because to not think this way, we have to accept that things could get worse for us, that things could backslide. That we could regress as a species and that’s pretty scary. No one wants to go back to time before modern technology and conveniences, a time of chaos and violence and disease. But the reality is, it has happened before. That’s essentially what happened in Europe when the western Roman Empire collapsed in 476. There was no longer a strong, centralized government. It was anarchy and it was every man for himself. 

 

I mean, think about last week’s episode in ancient Greece, ancient Athens in the 400s BC. Athens was much more like our modern world today than anything in Europe during the medieval period. They had advanced technology, beautiful stone architecture, democracy, they’re all about education, they’re creating incredible artwork, they are writing plays, comedies, like, they reached the upper tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy which means they were self-actualizing. They had physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, and esteem all covered. They’re past that. They’re making art and coming up with great ideas and leaving their mark on humanity. I mean, the men were anyway. Flash forward 800 years and onward for a millennium no one is doing anything like that. They are just trying to survive on those bottom levels of the hierarchy, physiological needs, safety needs are not being met. And, as I know, something about not having your physiological needs met makes you want to build a castle, or at least learn about them. 

 

It must have been really bizarre for medieval people to look upon the ruins of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the parthenon on the acropolis in Athens, structures carved from marble for god’s sakes and then to go home to your shack made of sticks and mud and be like “what the heck happened?” It’s the equivalent of us being able to visit the ruins of an ancient city with like skyscrapers built of I don’t know like titanium like floating in the air, just something completely unattainable from centuries, a millennium ago. Or, like us visiting the Great Pyramid in Egypt with 70 ton slabs of solid granite suspended 350 feet in the air. Yeah, it’s like that. It wouldn’t have made any sense because that regression in the human timeline was so severe. 

 

And what that meant was, this collapse of centralized power and anarchy that would have followed, it meant that there was a lot of violence and warfare between smaller groups that tried to rise up and take control. And when you have these outsiders coming to your home on the reg and trying to take what’s yours, you’re going to develop some way of defending against that, right, a way to keep them out, a way to protect your resources. Castles emerged in medieval Europe because medieval Europe was essentially a post-apocalyptic hellscape. And I think we forget that because it’s been so romanticized in literature, this time period and its castles. It’s a time of brave knights and beautiful princesses in our minds. But in reality, it would have been a very difficult time to be alive. 

 

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe resorted to feudal systems. There aren’t like big countries with strong rulers, kings, ruling over huge areas of land and lots of people, like in the modern world. There are small areas, just like a single village basically and surrounding countryside where one dude rose up and was like “I’m the boss. Y’all listen to me. I got this.” But just over the hill over there, there’s another one of these with a different guy in charge. And that guy starts to think, you know, how easy would it be to just waltz over the hill and take over that guy’s village. Then we’ll have two villages. We can combine them, make this awesome super village. It’s human nature, right, it’s in us, to improve and achieve and grow and to protect our own. Who cares about those guys, they aren’t in our tribe. Our tribe gets the best of the best and the best of the best is that guy’s village. Now let’s go take it. And we see this on a larger scale with, for example the Vikings in Scandinavia who were the let’s go take that guy’s village kings. Also, a group we don’t think about as much that mostly affected southern Europe, mostly countries on the Mediterranean, Muslims from the middle east and northern Africa. Because while Europe was in a major backslide during this time, Muslim cultures farther south were kind of killing it. They don’t really tell you that in history class. That’s not the kind of history white Christians like to highlight. According to a History.com article about the Middle Ages quote “Meanwhile, the Islamic world was growing larger and more powerful. After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph. At its height, the medieval Islamic world was more than three times bigger than all of Christendom. Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. Poets, scientists and philosophers wrote thousands of books (on paper, a Chinese invention that had made its way into the Islamic world by the 8th century). Scholars translated Greek, Iranian and Indian texts into Arabic. Inventors devised technologies like the pinhole camera, soap, windmills, surgical instruments, and an early flying machine. And religious scholars and mystics translated, interpreted and taught the Quran and other scriptural texts to people across the Middle East,” end quote. It’s not post-apocalyptic at all down there. They are self-actualizing. The crusaders don’t like to teach you that part. 

 

But so my point is, we have these invaders from the south, Muslims, right, moors, and we have invaders from the north, Vikings, and we have fighting between all these neighboring feudal villages and so the lords in charge start to construct castles in order to protect themselves and also the people they ruled over. Inspiration for castles was sort of two fold. In ancient Britain, like think Stonehenge days, we have bronze age people constructing earthenwork hillforts, manipulating, moving the Earth, digging ditches and building mounds for protection. We also have inspiration coming from ancient Roman cities, many of which had stone walls built around them with watchtowers. We also see these types of fortifications around ancient biblical cities, Jericho, Babylon, Mycenae. This would have been an inspiration for early castle builders. The earliest type of castle that appears in Europe was called a grod and to make this they basically dug a moat, like a ditch all the way around and used the dirt that they dug up to create like a dirt wall that would be fortified with wood, like a palisade. And there would be some sort of gate to get through the wall that they would control. That evolved, inspired by the watchtowers of ancient Rome, to include a bergfried which was a tower, originally made of wood, and much later stone. 

 

Then came motte and bailey castles. And these were popularized by William the Conqueror who came from Normandy, France, the Norman Invasion and completely took over Britain in 1066. I talk about this in my episode about Vikings, episode 4. Cause William the Conqueror was low key a viking. I mean he wasn’t personally but he was descended from a prominent viking warlord so, like, sort of. William was an outsider, right, and he’s trying to take over a whole country here so he is very into castles, he needs a lot of defense, and so he builds them all over Britain in this motte and bailey style and it basically combined the earlier grod and bergfried into one thing. So a motte is like a mound or hill and it would have been surrounded by a courtyard, called the bailey, that had a wooden wall, like a palisade going around it and then usually a moat around that. So that’s kind of similar to a grod, like an upgraded grod. On top of the motte there would be a wooden watchtower, bergfried type thing, except it was called a donjon now. Later, much later, the name donjon for that central watchtower would change to keep. They called it a keep. But the word donjon didn’t just disappear. It was tweaked and adapted into the word dungeon, like where you keep your prisoners. That’s an early castle. It’s not what we picture now at all. It’s made of wood at first, not stone and there’s really not a whole lot to it, a big fence and a tower, some smaller buildings within the fence. That’s about it. And these were popular with William the Conquorer, a guy who had a lot of enemies, because they were relatively easy to build and it only took a few weeks to a month or two to construct. Also at first this sort of thing, a motte and bailey castle was mostly just like a military outpost, a fort. It wasn’t quite a royal residence at this point. Some serious upgrades would need to be made for that to happen. 

 

Over the next few centuries, wooden walls were replaced with stone and brick walls which were stronger and could be built much higher. They also wouldn’t rot or catch on fire as easily. The donjon, later called a keep, also started to be built out of stone or bricks for the same reason. Some castles started adding an inner wall, like multiple concentric walls for added defense and that bailey, that walled courtyard got a lot bigger. They started putting more buildings in there too - great halls which were gathering places, sometimes these were separate buildings and sometimes they were in the keep. There would have been chapels because as lawless and violent as these people seem to be, religion was actually very important to them believe it or not. There would have been housing for the nobility, whoever was in charge, the lord or the king or whoever. This was usually in the keep because it was the safest place. The keep is the castle right. I mean the whole thing is technically the castle but the keep is what you’re thinking of as the castle. It’s also where they would have stored supplies, food, gold, that kind of stuff. There was also a dungeon in the keep which, as I said earlier, came from the original word for keep which was donjon. At first dungeons were up towards the top of the keep because the height made it harder for prisoners to escape but eventually they were moved down below. I guess the lords got tired of the prisoners having the best view. Within the bailey courtyard area there would have also been open space for like military drills and tournaments and stuff as well as houses for knights and servants, stables, workplaces for craftsmen like blacksmiths and whatnot. So it’s transforming into this little self sufficient walled off community. And that was important because a castle had to be able to withstand a siege. You had to be able to seal yourself off in there if an enemy came a knocking and survive for, possibly months at a time. So you had to have food and water and supplies all within your castle walls and it’s not like just for the nobility, the ruling class that lived there. It's for everyone who lived within the castle walls, servants and knights and craftsmen, but also peasants and farmers from the land outside the walls who would be taken into the castle and protected in the event of an attack. So you’re having to sustainably house and feed the whole kingdom within your castle while you try to hold off the enemy attacking your walls with trebuchets and trying to scale them with ladders and whatnot. And if you had a decent castle, it would be impenetrable. You would be able to hold them off indefinitely. And this is why siege warfare evolved. The attackers go “okay we can’t get into the castle but they can’t leave either. Let’s just hang around out here long enough to starve them out. Eventually they are going to run out of food and they are either going to starve to death or surrender to us.” And so that’s what they did a lot of the time and why it was so important to have everything you needed, for like a long time within your castle walls. 

 

And, while this all seems very masculine, castles and siege warfare and William the Conqueror, a lot of times it was the women who ensured that a castle was equipped with all of these supplies and rations. The king or the lord or whoever, his wife, the first lady of the castle, that was her job. It is Women’s History month after all so I would be amiss not to mention that. Historian Pamela Toler writes quote “The skills needed to withstand a siege were an extension of housekeeping when the idea that a man’s home was his castle was a literal description for members of the aristocracy. In medieval and early modern Europe, noblewomen were often responsible for managing family properties, and consequently for providing the military resources needed for those properties. Provisioning a household that was as much an armed fortress as a family domicile involved procuring the cannons, small arms, and gunpowder needed for its defense as well as the day-to-day supplies of food, clothing, or household linens. Noblewomen supervised men-at-arms in the course of daily life and helped mobilize the household’s resources for war. Leading its defense was one more step down a familiar road.” end quote. Because there are accounts of women actually leading the defense of castles in their husband or father or son’s absence. We’ll get into one such story soon. 

 

But let’s talk about defense first, because what exactly did that entail? Let’s say you plan to attack an enemy’s castle. You want to conquer it, take it over, make it part of your kingdom, whatever. You get your guys together, grab your weapons - this would be swords, bows and arrows, crossbows, trebuchets which are a type of catapult - no guns or cannons yet. There’s no gunpowder in Europe until the 1300s so we’re not there yet. So you gather your men, you gather your weapons, and you go storm the castle. The first obstacle you would come to would be the moat, this ditch running all the way around. Sometimes it was filled with water, sometimes it was filled with sharpened spikes and this would slow you down considerably. There would be a draw bridge but of course it would be pulled up so that you couldn’t cross it. Moats were also basically sewers. There was no indoor plumbing at this time and waste was typically dumped directly into the moat. Towers were designed so that, when someone used the bathroom, it would literally run down the side of the building and into the moat. So it was nasty which, I’m sure only added to its defense. 

 

If you managed to get past the moat, you would hit the outer wall or curtain wall. This guy would, eventually be made of stone or brick and it was massive, typically 6 to 10 meters high, which is like 20 to 30 feet, high enough to not be easily scaled with a ladder. It was also super super thick, because you’re going to be launching boulders and stuff at it with your trebuchet so it had to withstand that. The outer walls of castles were usually 1.5 to 8 meters thick. That is anywhere from 5 feet to 25 feet thick, this wall going all the way around. And that was usually achieved by building actually like two concentric walls and then filling them in with rocks and rubble and whatnot. These outer walls usually had battlements on top. So as you're standing at the base of the wall trying to figure out how to get over it or through it, someone would be attacking you from above. This was achieved with either stone or wood walkways on the inside of the wall towards the top that guys could move around on. A lot of times the wall itself would be crenellated. This is that classic castle look where it’s like one block sticking up every other block, I don’t really know how to describe it without a visual but if you were to draw a castle, you would probably draw it crenellated at the top, so yeah. And this was so that guys could hide behind something and shoot their arrows or crossbows through the opening at whoever is down below. Walls also had arrow loops which were narrow openings or slits in the wall for the same purpose, being able to shoot arrows and remain shielded behind the wall. 

 

These outer walls also evolved to have towers at each corner that were like watchtowers and just places to defend from. And these towers had staircases inside that sentries used to get up to the top and, I thought this was interesting, the staircases were like spiral staircases that always turned clockwise while going up. And this was very intentional because it meant that a righthanded sentry would be able to use his sword arm while going up the stairs and any enemy that made it on top of the wall and tried to come down those stairs would not be able to use his sword arm as well because it would be against the wall. And, this was effective because they were essentially all right handed, by force. According to Dr. Craig Freudenrich writing for How Stuff Works, quote “left-handed people were considered evil, so even if you were left-handed, you learned to fight with your right,” end quote. But, I mean, now I’m kind of thinking it would have been an advantage to be left handed as an enemy trying to come down those stairs right? Diversity. 

 

So you’re outside this super thick tall wall and sentries are firing arrows at you from behind crenellations and arrow loops. It’s too thick to bust down. It’s too tall to climb over. What are you going to do? You’re going to head toward the gatehouse, and you’re going to try to force your way in. This isn’t just like a gate like boop open the gate and you’re in. This is a whole thing. There would have been two towers on either side of the opening where guys would be firing arrows from and then in between those towers was a grated wooden or iron gate called a portcullis. Guys would be firing arrows from inside the portcullis too. If you somehow managed to force it open and get past it, you would enter a long tunnel. This is all part of the gatehouse. In the ceiling of this tunnel are openings that were called murder holes. That’s what they were called. And the purpose of these murder holes was to drop things on you as you passed through the tunnel below. That could have been hot liquids, but honestly it would have been difficult and time consuming to get hot liquids to where they could be dropped down murder holes so, more likely and more often, they probably dropped heavy objects on you. Whatever they had handy. There were also arrow loops in these tunnels and so while you’re dodging falling objects from murder holes, you’re also still being fired on with arrows. 

 

If you managed to somehow get to the end of the gatehouse tunnel, you would reach a massive wooden door that was shut and locked with braces. But let’s say, in theory you managed to get through that door, maybe you busted it down with a battering ram or something and got inside. Then you might be faced with yet another wall if you were in a really solid castle. And you’d basically have to do that all over again. But maybe not, maybe this castle just has the one wall and when you finally get through the gatehouse, you enter the bailey, that courtyard. You are in there baby. You are inside the castle. Except now you are in this big wide open space that can still be fired upon by the guys up on the walls and also by more guys stationed in towers within the walls and they are all above you. So arrows are just raining down on you while you scramble around looking for cover. And where are you going anyway? To the keep? Because that’s heavily defended as well with more battlements and arrow loops. So you can see how actually getting into a castle alive usually wasn’t very possible. So this is why they turned to siege warfare where they surrounded a castle and just tried to starve them until they surrendered. 

 

Now let’s talk about one of those sieges that happened at Lincoln Castle in England in 1217. During this particular siege, the castle defense was led by a woman who I find fascinating but of course had never even heard of until I started researching this episode - Nicola de la Haye. This story takes place during the days of Robin Hood. No, Robin Hood was not a real person, we don’t think, just a folk hero. But some of the other characters in that story were real people. King Richard, for example, known as Richard the Lionheart, hence why his character is a lion in the Disney animated version of Robin Hood. He was King Richard I of England starting in 1189. And after his death, his little brother, known as Prince John in Robin Hood, became King John I. Now, if you know anything about Robin Hood, you know that Prince John is the villain, right, he’s taking all the money from the poor. He’s this evil, greedy character and Richard, King Richard, is more of a hero. This is sort of how these two kings were remembered and immortalized in folk tales but it’s not really fair. Richard is remembered fondly because he was this great crusader, right the crusades. He went off killing infidels to try to regain the holy land. He’s entering into these super violent and pointless holy wars. And this was seen as a good thing and a very noble and righteous thing at the time. Now, I’m like, eww, I think Richard might have been the real villain. And while he’s doing this, he is barely running England. I mean he’s not even there. Even in Robin Hood he’s like this absent king, right. And he’s racking up lots of debt with all these military endeavors. He’s draining the royal coffers. On his way home at one point, he was captured by the Holy Roman Emperor who held him for a hefty ransom that had to be paid by England. So by the time Richard died in 1199 and his little brother John took over, the country was in bad shape financially. Which is why King John actually had to tax people so heavily. It was kind of all Richard’s fault but he got glorified as this righteous crusader and John got blamed for everything. Even in Robin Hood.  

 

Anyway, Nicola de la Haye was born in probably 1150ish making her around 50 years old when Prince John became King John. She was the oldest of only daughters and so when her father died, she inherited his estate. There was no one else for it to go to. And that estate included a castle, Lincoln Castle, which was built by William the Conqueror around a hundred years before Nicola was born. This made her a very eligible bachelorette. Her marriage prospects were great. She came with a castle. Her first husband died pretty soon after they were married and then she remarried guy named Gerard de Camville. And once she was married, legally, he became the lord of the land and of the castle. He was in charge of it all but she continued to play a very active role in managing all of it. I imagine in her mind she was like “he can think what he wants, this is my castle.” But according to historian Catherine Hanley, Gerard was kind of cool with letting her be in charge. She writes quote “Did Gerard feel she was owed this as he had gained the estates from her? Or was she simply so strong-willed that he had no choice?” end quote. 

 

In 1191, Gerard, her husband, gets mixed up in a dispute between one of King Richard’s chancellors and Prince John who isn’t king yet. Gerard is on John’s side of whatever this argument was. And it turns ugly. He has to leave Lincoln to go support John and he officially leaves Nicola in charge which was very rare, to not name a male deputy, to leave your wife in charge. But he did. And while he’s gone and she’s officially in charge of Lincoln castle, the chancellor’s forces attack. She has to lead the defence of the castle and withstand the siege for over a month until a truce could be arranged. Fast forward 25 years. Gerard dies in 1215 when Nicola is around 60 years old and she never remarries. She decides to claim the castle and the land in her own right as a widow and rule over it. And this happened just as France began to invade England. In 1216 King John visited Lincoln Castle and appointed Nicola the position of Sheriff of Lincolnshire. Hanley writes quote “The appointment of a woman to a shrievalty was unprecedented and shows the high regard which John had for her capabilities in a time of war. It is true to say that many of the male candidates who might have been eligible for the position were actually siding with the French against him, but no doubt he could have found a man to act as sheriff if he’d really wanted to. Indeed, Nicola’s son Richard had by now reached adulthood, but it was his mother and not he who was appointed. He died in March 1217 but this huge blow did not stop the bereaved Nicola from carrying out her duties. Her finest hour was yet to come,” end quote. King John also died in October of 1216, leaving his 9 year old son Henry III as King, with a regent ruling for him until he came of age. 

 

Soon after, French forces arrived in Lincolnshire. They quickly took the city but the castle, under Nicola’s command, was another story. They set up their siege machinery, and bombarded the walls all through March, April, and early May. Months of this, months of boulders and stones and burning materials being lobbed at the castle. Months of rallying the men to fight back, to protect the walls. Months of food supplies dwindling, the walls closing in, claustrophobia and sleep deprivation. Hanley writes quote “It would have been very easy for Nicola to look at the haggard faces around her, the injuries and deaths, the gradual destruction of the walls, and to give in and ask the attackers for terms. But she did not. Week by week, month by month, she rallied her troops. She had little or no communication with the outside world but would have known that the regent (acting for the nine-year-old Henry III, John’s son) would recognise that Lincoln was an important stronghold for the royalist cause, and would surely send help. Her determination was rewarded on 20 May 1217, when the regent led an army in person to the relief of Lincoln. There was fierce fighting in the narrow streets of the city, the siege machinery was destroyed and the castle liberated. Many of the French and rebel forces were captured, and Louis lost half his army. Lincoln turned the tide of the war,” end quote. 

 

And then, you guys, and then, after all that, four days after the battle that ended the siege of Lincoln castle, Nicola had the title of Sheriff stripped from her and it was given to the King’s uncle, the Earl of Salisbury instead. This gave him control over the county, the surrounding lands, but he went ahead and seized control of the city and the castle too, Nicola’s castle. She’s like “oh heck no.” She travels, as an old woman at this point, sixties is an old woman in the 1200s, she travels to the King’s court, the king is 9 years old remember, and she reminds him, or his regent at least, of all that she did, her faithful service during the attack. Salisbury is ordered to give back the castle and the city, he’s dragging his feet. They try to arrange something where Nicola’s granddaughter marries Salisbury’s son so they can like share it. He’s still not cool with that. Finally he dies and Nicola reclaims her castle for good. It’s peacetime now, she goes home, and just enjoys her inheritance finally, until she dies in her late 70s. 

 

Hanley concludes quote “The fact that we know so much about Nicola’s life, living as she did during a time when many women were invisible in official records, gives us an idea of how extraordinary she was. Yes, she was an heiress, which put her in a favourable position to start with, but plenty of others in the same situation contented themselves with (or were forced into) a life of domesticity, childbearing and service to their husbands. Nicola’s determination set her apart. One of the most remarkable aspects of Nicola’s legacy is that contemporary chroniclers were very positive in their depictions of her. Generally women who ‘overstepped the mark’ and encroached on male affairs were subject to harsh words, but other than the Anonymous of Bethune (who was ferociously pro-[France] and who called Nicola all sorts of names) the others, unusually, sang her praises. Interestingly, they struggled with having the vocabulary to do so, as they were not used to praising women in this way. Positive feminine portrayals in thirteenth-century works are usually limited to comments on beauty or noble birth; the writers had no frame of reference for a bellicose woman. Writing of her defence of the castle during the 1191 siege, Richard of Devizes said that she did it [quote] ‘without thinking of anything womanly,’ and the Dunstable annals refer to her as a quote ‘noble woman’ who acted ‘manfully.’” end quote. Manfully. They’re like “she was very, um, manful?” They’re so not used to praising women, they literally don’t have the words to do it. Now, Nicola de la Haye is kind of a special case because we actually know her story but I’m sure women often played important roles in the defense of castles under siege. If they didn’t, they’d get like a week in and be like “where’s all the food? Wait we don’t have any bandages? Who was supposed to get the bandages? What do you mean there’s no clean laundry?” It would be a mess and they would never have lasted without all the thankless, invisible, behind-the-scenes work that the women of the castle were doing. 

 

With the introduction of gunpowder in the 1300s came a change in weapons technology. Now we have guns and cannons, cannons that could blast right through a castle wall. And this change started to make medieval castles obsolete as defenses. They weren’t holding up so well anymore and that was kind of the whole point of them. I mean they were not comfortable places to live. No one was living in a castle because it was posh and comfy. It was dark and cold and damp and nasty and now, it wasn’t even holding out enemy attackers anymore. So castles basically became pointless once gunpowder entered the equation. Many of them were abandoned by nobility for more comfortable and stylish palaces. Some were repurposed, upgraded to serve as other things. For example, Windsor Castle was originally built by William the Conqueror in 1070 as a castle, a military fortification to protect London from the west. Over time, starting in the late 1300s, after the introduction of gunpowder, it was transformed into a palace, a royal residence not really meant for defense anymore. And the current royal family lives there to this day, part time at least. King Charles apparently spends two days a week at Windsor Castle. The Tower of London, also built as a castle by William the Conqueror in 1070. The people of London had never seen anything like it before. It was massive and incredibly intimidating. William was not messing around. Over the last thousand years, the Tower of London has been used for defense, as a royal palace, as a prison, a site of many famous executions - Anne Boleyn, King Henry VI, Sir Walter Raleigh. It’s been a zoo, home to a royal menagerie, an arsenal, a royal mint, a public records office, and now it’s home to the crown jewels. So, it’s been repurposed many many times. 

 

And, you know, those are big ones, but if you travel around Europe, especially Germany, there are tons of castles in Germany, castles and witches they just could not get it together over there. But these castles, these ancient crumbling moss covered stone castles, they’re just there, sort of sitting there by the side of the road all over Europe, like no big deal. And that’s so wild to me as someone from the United States because, you know, we don’t have anything anywhere near that old here. We have like old crumbling tobacco sheds where I live here in the south, old southern mansions reclaimed and half buried in kudzu. And I think those are cool. But these castles, you guys, they were built to withstand anything. And the fact that so many of them still remain, ruins now in most cases, but they’re still there hundreds, a thousand years later. That is truly impressive considering what people were working with at that time, the dark ages. It’s truly a testament to human strength and endurance and perseverance and maybe that’s why I’m drawn to them when I’m at my lowest. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, castley. Maybe it’s not that I need to shut myself inside and hide from it all. Maybe it’s inspiration, a reminder of our strength and our ability to withstand anything. You gather supplies, you man the walls, you rally the troops and you hold on until it’s over. The siege will end eventually and all you have to do is hold on, don’t give up, don’t surrender. You got this.  

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from History.com, How Stuff Works, Royal UK, Historic Royal Palaces, Summoning Magna Carta, catherinehanley.co.uk, History in the Margins, Road Trips Around the World, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.