Basic mistakes in worldbuilding a "feudal" monarchy

[skip.knox]

>the basics were nothing of the sort at the time
Yes. And of course, "at the time" was also nothing of the sort. The 8th century was not the 14th. As obvious as that sounds, when one says "medieval castle" there's a type that springs to mind, and it's pretty much northern French and Britain, mostly 14thc-15thc. And much of that has more to do with what has happened to survive than it does with common practice or superiority of design.

It's probably also worth mentioning that for about half the Middle Ages, "castles" were made of wood. It's worth saying, further, that a good many stone castles were basically just square towers three or four stories tall with no entry at ground level.

 

[Aldarion]

Thanks, Aldarion for another informative post. I don't get too upset about this sort of thing, primarily because I subscribe to the view that "feudalism" didn't really exist in the Middle Ages. I've commented on this before, but here's the short version:

It's an abstract term (as are all -isms) that not only fails to capture the variety of institutions and practices even in the High Middle Ages (yes, another outdated term), it fails to capture *any* practice anywhere. It's a concept more or less invented by late medieval legal experts seeking historical precedents for current practices. That gets picked up first by 18thc revolutionaries and then by 19thc historians until it became Known Fact.

But none of that matters much. Heck, one of my favorite historical works is Bloch's Feudal Society. Here are two considerations I think outweigh any discussion of how accurate is any fictional "feudal" creation.

First, story beats fact. Tell the story well, and none of the rest will matter, except perhaps to a handful of people who will fuss over such things.

Second, it won't matter how "correct" is your treatment--of feudal relations or of pretty much anything else historical--most of your readers are going to come to the book with a whole armload of preconceptions that are not at all historical. They're going to read your correct handling and will object because it's not "realistic." And that's ok because of Consideration One--your story will be so well written that their objections will vanish like dew under the morning sun.

I think of historical accuracy as being analogous to grammatical accuracy. The real reason for knowing it well is so when you deviate from the norm, you're doing so with intention and for effect.

I think your last sentence captures it. To break laws properly, you first have to know the laws.

And all attempts at categorization are inherently abstract and incorrect. Doesn't mean they are useless.

 

[Aldarion]

Also, the migration from wooden donjons to full on stone fortresses was not an overnight thing. So long as wooden forts are built with principles like hoardings and bastion turrets to cover the bases of the walls, fire is a minimal threat--the wood didn't just burst into flames at the first flaming arrow, so I don't think fire was the primary motivator for changing over. Many stone castles still built wood hoardings out over the wall to monitor the base. I'm pretty sure many wooden forts were reinforced with stone bases, too, and at weak points.

Main motivator I suspect were better siege engines. When Mongols invaded Hungary in 1241, they had relatively little issue taking wooden castles - but all ten stone castles Hungary had at the time survived the Mongol occupation of 1241-1242.

By the way, post-Mongol-invasions Russia is a good example of what happens when a country decides to replace wooden castles with stone ones, and is likely basically a sped-up version of what happened historically. But basically, they did not immediately rebuilt all castles in stone ground-up: at first, only the most important / vulnerable parts of fortifications were rebuilt in stone, such as the citadel and particularly vulnerable parts of curtain walls. Rest of the wooden construction was then gradually rebuilt in stone.

 

[Aldarion]

Makes sense. Rebuild the foundations in stone with an eye towards adding more, but get the wooden walls thrown up in the mean time, and then just build stone right over the top of them and back fill. These had to be amazing construction undertakings employing thousands.

While that is a definite possibility, what they actually did was rebuild segments of wall first. So basically you would have this 50-metre-long section of the wall in stone, and then the rest of the circuit was a wooden pallisade.