Why are they called square keep castles?
A Square Keep Castle is an extension from a motte and bailey castleand can be called two different things, Square Keep Castle or a Stone Keep Castles. The reason from both of these names is that they were square and they were made out of stone. Q: What are square keep castles? Write your answer... Still have questions?
What is a keep in a castle?
Early on, the term was used for towers in a castle that would work as both fortifications and high-status residences. The typical Norman keep is square or rectangular, with circular shell keeps. There are three different types of keeps: Motte and bailey, stone keep, and concentric.
What are the parts of a medieval castle?
Parts of a Medieval Castle: The Keep A castle’s Keep is the strongest portion of a medieval fortification and the last resort in case of a siege or attack. It was usually a fortified tower built within the walls and used as a last refuge in case of an attack. The name keep derives from the Middle English kype, meaning basket or cask.
What is the purpose of a tower keep?
Tower Keep - aka Great Tower or Donjon, a large stone tower of several floors built within the circuit walls of a castle which acted as the primary place of residence and last place of refuge in the case of attack.
What are the advantages of a square keep castle?
Square keep castles: made of stone so they lasted longer. Stone would not rot so the castles were a lot stronger than wooden ones. because stone is strong, it is possible to build up so that you have a height advantage and can see for miles.
What are the disadvantages of a square keep castle?
Square keeps did have their weaknesses. It was possible to undermine the corners of a square keeps to make them collapse. Enemy minors would dig tunnels beneath the castle at the corner removing the foundations and replacing them with wooden props.
What was a keep in a castle?
keep, English term corresponding to the French donjon for the strongest portion of the fortification of a castle, the place of last resort in case of siege or attack. The keep was either a single tower or a larger fortified enclosure.
Whats the difference between a castle and a keep?
Scholars have debated the scope of the word keep, but usually consider it to refer to large towers in castles that were fortified residences, used as a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an adversary.
How were stone keep castles attacked?
A good way of attacking a stone castle was through mining. Attackers would dig a tunnel underground up to the castle walls, under the gatehouse if possible. They would then set a charge and make an explosion which would make the walls crumble and collapse.
What are Norman keeps?
Norman keeps were a form of stone keep built in England and Wales following the invasion of 1066. The Normans brought the design from northern France, where a few of the strong, square designs had already been constructed.
What was the weakest part of a castle?
The entrance to the castle was always its weakest point. Drawbridges could be pulled up, preventing access across moats. Tall gate towers meant that defenders could shoot down in safety at attacks below. The main gate or door to the castle was usually a thick, iron-studded wooden door, that was hard to break through.
What is the safest part of a castle?
What other rooms were there in a Medieval castle? At the time of Chr tien de Troyes, the rooms where the lord of a castle, his family and his knights lived and ate and slept were in the Keep (called the Donjon), the rectangular tower inside the walls of a castle. This was meant to be the strongest and safest place.
What is the difference between a keep and a tower?
The tower is a circular or square building, which was used as a lookout and for defence. The central tower in a motte and bailey castle was known as the keep. The height of the keep depends on how big the castle is, or how wealthy its owner is! Some towers are extremely tall, like the tower at Chateau de Coucy.
When were square keep castles built?
Many of these castles were built as fortresses in France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and in England after the Norman Conquest (1066).
What is inside a keep?
The new stone wall of a shell keep, either circular or polygonal, could be 3-3.5 metres (10-12 ft) thick and 4.5-9 metres (15-30 ft) high. Inside were such buildings as a hall, barracks, chapel, accommodation, and storehouses. An excellent example of a surviving shell keep is at the c. 1150 CE Cardiff Castle, Wales.
Why were stone keep castles built?
They were very vulnerable to attacks using fire and the wood would eventually start to rot. Due to these disadvantages, King William ordered that castles should be built in stone. Many of the original timber castles were replaced with stone castles.
What is the best shape for a castle?
The horseshoe-shaped (or D-shaped) tower is a compromise that gives the best of a round and a square tower. The semicircular side (the one facing the attacker) could resist siege engines, while the rectangular part at the back gives internal space and a large fighting platform on top.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of stone keep castles?
The primary advantage of a stone keep castle is that it was tremendously difficult to attack, requiring a large army, siege weapons, and enough supplies to keep up the attack. On the other hand, a stone keep castle was vulnerable to a long siege: if the defenders ran out of food or water, they were as good as dead.
What are three advantages stone has over wood for providing protection in a castle?
Stone keeps solved that problem. Stone doesn't rot, can't be set on fire, and is stronger than wood. Stone keeps could also have thicker walls and be taller than wooden keeps. People in the castle could stand on top of the keep and see any enemies coming.
What are the advantages of a watchtower?
Its main purpose is to provide a high, safe place from which a sentinel or guard may observe the surrounding area. In some cases, non-military towers, such as religious towers, may also be used as watchtowers.
What is a keep without a curtain?
An early form of keep, in effect a keep without a curtain (surrounding) wall, was seen when the first simpler castles, the motte and bailey castles, evolved into the more familiar and complex all-stone castles. The Normans were great builders of motte and bailey castles across northern France and England in the 11th century CE. A wooden tower was built on the motte - a natural or artificial hill - and, at the base, a bailey or courtyard was created by constructing an encircling wooden wall connected to the motte. The whole was then surrounded by a ditch. When the timber palisade on top of the motte was replaced by stone it acquired the new name of a shell keep.
Why did the tower keep decline?
Another factor in the decline of tower keeps was the arrival of bigger and more accurate cannons from the 14th century CE. Many castles were adapted for their own batteries of cannons such as making arrow-slit windows wider for the barrels to go through. More significantly for the tower keep, a cannon could not be fired effectively when angled downwards, and so many castle walls and towers were reduced in height. Finally, castle owners were now looking for greater comfort rather than defensive strength, and so the high towers with limited floor space gave way to lower, more expansive buildings which could accommodate more spacious private accommodation.
How thick was a shell keep?
The new stone wall of a shell keep, either circular or polygonal, could be 3-3.5 metres (10-12 ft) thick and 4.5-9 metres (15-30 ft) high. Inside were such buildings as a hall, barracks, chapel, accommodation, and storehouses. An excellent example of a surviving shell keep is at the c. 1150 CE Cardiff Castle, Wales. Another fine example is Restormel Castle, Cornwall, England (12th century CE), which had a projecting square tower and interior stone buildings added in the 13th century CE which, although ruined, can still be clearly seen today arranged around a central circular courtyard. As nobles sought greater residential comfort, most shell keeps were expanded or abandoned entirely for larger stone castles on another site where more substantial foundations were required than the motte could provide.
Why were towers called Donjon?
This name derives from the French word meaning a lord's area (only much later did it morph into 'dungeon' and acquire the meaning of a prison). The purpose of tower keeps is not entirely agreed upon by historians. The obvious point of a strong defensive retreat does not always match the relatively peaceful times in which some tower keeps were built. If the towers were merely a grandiose gesture to impress the wealth and power of the owner upon the local population, then they were an enormously expensive method. In addition, in the case of castles not used as the primary residence of a baron or monarch, they had limited practical use and would have been rarely visited by locals anyway. Still, the towers would have been seen from afar and would certainly have impressed both local residents and would-be attackers, and their high cost may have been precisely why they were commissioned.
What is the castle keep?
With its extra thick walls and protected entrance, the keep was generally the safest place in a castle during the siege warfare of the 11th and 12th century CE. Inside the largest building a person in the Middle Ages likely ever saw in their lives was the Great Hall, castle chapel, and residential quarters. Expensive and slow to build, tower keeps were steadily replaced from the mid-13th century CE by larger round towers in the circuit wall which were designed to prevent the enemy from ever entering the castle courtyard or bailey. As a lasting testimony to their integral strength, many tower keeps still survive today across Europe, where very often the rest of the castle buildings have long since disappeared.
What was the weak spot of a castle keep?
As with any building, the weak spot of a castle keep was the entrance, and so this was often accessed by a staircase going directly to the first floor (i.e. above the ground floor).
How tall is Dover Castle?
One of the most imposing surviving rectangular tower keeps is that of Dover Castle, Kent, England (11-12th century CE). It measures some 25.3 metres (83 ft) in height while each side is around 29.5 metres (97 ft) in length.
Why are stone castles used as keeps?
The reasons for the transition from timber to stone keeps are unclear, and the process was slow and uneven, taking many years to take effect across the various regions. Traditionally it was believed that stone keeps had been adopted because of the cruder nature of wooden buildings, the limited lifespan of wooden fortifications and their vulnerability to fire, but recent archaeological studies have shown that many wooden castles were as robust and as sophisticated as their stone equivalents. Some wooden keeps were not converted into stone for many years and were instead expanded in wood, such as at Hen Domen. Nonetheless, stone became increasingly popular as a building material for keeps for both military and symbolic reasons.
Why were castles destroyed?
In England, many were destroyed after the end of the Second English Civil War in 1649, when Parliament took steps to prevent another royalist uprising by slighting , or damaging, castles so as to prevent them from having any further military utility. Slighting was quite expensive and took considerable effort to carry out, so damage was usually done in the most cost efficient fashion with only selected walls being destroyed. Keeps were singled out for particular attention in this process because of their continuing political and cultural importance, and the prestige they lent their former royalist owners – at Kenilworth, for example, only the keep was slighted, and at Raglan, the keep was the main focus of parliamentary activity. There was some equivalent destruction of keeps in France in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as the slighting of Montaiguillon by Cardinal Richelieu in 1624, but the catalogue of damage was far less than that of the 1640s and early 1650s in England.
What is the castle keep?
A reconstruction of York Castle in the 14th century, showing the castle's stone keep (top) overlooking the castle bailey (below) A keep (from the Middle English kype) is a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility.
What were the keeps in Spain?
In Spain, keeps were increasingly incorporated into both Christian and Islamic castles, although in Germany tall fighting towers called bergfriede were preferred to keeps in the western fashion. In the second half of the 14th century, there was a resurgence in the building of keeps.
What is a keep in medieval times?
Contemporary medieval writers used various terms for the buildings we would today call keeps. In Latin, they are variously described as turris, turris castri or magna turris – a tower, a castle tower, or a great tower. The 12th-century French came to term them a donjon, from the Latin dominarium "lordship", linking the keep and feudal authority. Similarly, medieval Spanish writers called the buildings torre del homenaje, or "tower of homage ". In England, donjon turned into dungeon, which initially referred to a keep, rather than to a place of imprisonment.
What is the meaning of "keep" in castles?
Scholars have debated the scope of the word keep, but usually consider it to refer to large towers in castles that were fortified residences, used as a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an adversary.
Why did Philip II build a series of circular keeps?
By the end of the century, French and English keep designs began to diverge: Philip II of France built a sequence of circular keeps as part of his bid to stamp his royal authority on his new territories, while in England castles were built without keeps.
