Chepstow Castle figures prominently in this book.

Joseph & Frances Gies’s^• Life in a Medieval Castle^• is a nice little 272-page book¹ covering:

1. The Castle Comes to England
2. The Lord of the Castle
3. The Castle as a House
4. The Lady
5. The Household
6. A Day in the Castle
7. Hunting as a Way of Life
8. The Villagers
9. The Making of a Knight
10. The Castle at War
11. The Castle Year
12. The Decline of the Castle

There’s also a short glossary of castle terms, a short glossary of feudal terms, a geographical guide to “Great Medieval Castles”, and a fairly lengthy bibliography.

Some of the interesting things I’ve learned are that castles often had entrances only on the second floor: the easiest way to keep attackers from bursting the front door is to not have one. The first floor would be used for storage, with, potentially, small slits for combat.

If the climate includes cold weather, there is likely to be a fireplace somewhere near the living quarters set into thick stone so that the stone retains warmth after the fire burns low.

Besides a well or other water source nearby, there might be a cistern on an upper level, with pipes leading down to provide lower levels with easy access to water—that sounds like a fun thing to add to an abandoned dungeon.

Also, castles were too big for an outhouse, so they had garderobe’s built in, usually nestled in a buttress at the end of a short passage, or corbeled out over a moat or river or a long shaft to the ground.

Two of the more interesting chapters are the ones on the villagers around the castle, and the year in castle life.

A peasant’s possessions consisted of three or four benches and stools, a trestle table, a chest, one or two iron or brass pots, a little pottery ware, wooden bowls, cups, and spoons, linen towels, wool blankets, iron tools, and, most important, his livestock. A reasonably prosperous villager owned hens and geese, a few skinny half-wild razor-backed hogs, a cow or even two, perhaps a couple of sheep, and his pair of plow oxen.

They also talk about the villein (the non-free villager, or serf, though “the term was less common in England”) who owed two or three days of labor a week to their lord, and who “could not leave his land or sell his livestock without permission”.

The garderobe was often overhanging some corner of the castle wall.

There were also the free tenants, who did not owe labor:

Some simply held their land free of most labor services, owing money rents and “suit,” meaning attendance at certain courts. Others were the skilled craftsmen: the miller, the smith, the carpenter, the weaver, the tanner, the shoemaker. Most prosperous among these, and least popular, was the miller, who paid the lord for the right to operate the mill, a strictly enforced monopoly. The villagers brought their grain there, contributing in payment the multure, a sixteenth to a twenty-fourth part of the grain. Since the millers did the measuring, they naturally fell under suspicion of cheating on weight… A few villagers secretly ground their grain with a hand-mill at home, but ran the risk of seizure and punishment.

The chapter on the castle’s year covers the seasons, which are somewhat different than ours:

1. Winter was September 29, Michaelmas, to Christmas. Wheat and rye were sown during this period.
2. Spring crops were sown between end of the Christmas holidays and Easter: oats, peas, beans, barley, vetches².
3. Summer lasted from the end of Easter week to Lammas, August 1.
4. And Autumn was the harvest, from Lammas to Michaelmas again.

Michaelmas was also the beginning of the castle’s fiscal year.

The three major holidays were Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. They began with a feast of the Church, followed by a week of vacation (two weeks for Christmas), and ended with a feast of the people before resuming work. There were quite a few lesser feast days and vacation weeks as well.

The castle died less from the technology of gunpowder than from the rise of central governments and their foot soldiers, and the rise of leisure among the nobility, who preferred living in residential manors than damp hard castles.

A single knight might still be more effective on the battlefield than a foot soldier without armor and with a clumsy arquebus, but he was less valuable than ten such, and more expensive. The same sort of economics applied to castle building, with the added factor that the new political geography made obsolete many of the old frontier castles, such as those guarding the long-embattled English-Welsh and Norman-Breton-French borders.

There are small bits of black and white period art and black and white photos throughout the book. A lot of it is Chepstow Castle in Wales, as are many of the quotes about the economics and running of the castle. It was a very interesting read, a blending of popular book and light scholarly work.