Basic mistakes in worldbuilding a "feudal" monarchy

[_Michael_]

It would go something like: ‘we have an historian in the group’ who would be the underdog, and then they would be able to direct the others on how to recreate any number of unfathomable historical tactics, and it would make for a great fictional part of the plot.

But you also have to consider that doing anything like that would take planning and provisions, which in a zombie post apocalyptic shitstorm would be far easier said than done. Especially if the zombies can run.

They need motivation to make those curtain walls and find those provisions. I just happen to know someone who is the perfect labor organizer.

EDIT: Would explain why most of the castle builders of the medieval era were all warlords...

 

[Mad Swede]

I’ll admit, I’m always a little disappointed when I see shows like Walking Dead and it’s like everyone forgot about basic siege warfare and how to build a barbican. Let them make it through the first gate, and then close it behind them and rain death from above. Take a page from the Prince of Orange and Coevorden and build it right.

Except that the design and construction of castles and other fortifications varied from place to place and depended to a large degree on who built the castle and what knowledge and experience they had. As a British example of this you can compare Urquhart Castle and Harlech Castle, which are contemporary and which differ in layout and design.

 

[Finchbearer]

I really recommend watching Secrets of the Castle, a documentary that follows two archaeologists and one historian in the construction (and restoration) of a 13thC castle in France, using entirely the techniques of the time. I think I learned that English craftsmen would go and cut their teeth on building French castles to learn how it was done.

 

[_Michael_]

Except that the design and construction of castles and other fortifications varied from place to place and depended to a large degree on who built the castle and what knowledge and experience they had. As a British example of this you can compare Urquhart Castle and Harlech Castle, which are contemporary and which differ in layout and design.

Without a doubt. But some basics remain the same. The construction of a gatehouse, for instance. A barbican with two gates and murderholes above is the same whether it's in France or England. Certain principles, I guess, remain the same. Curtain walls are prone to sapping, so you develop bastion towers (or bartizans, in Spain). Before that, castles would have hoardings built over the wall to allow direct fire at the base of the curtain wall.

I mean, Negan showed some degree of this awareness in how he laid out his HQ before Rick came along.

Even having multiple walls as fall-back points would be better than nothing. Ring walls go far. What about just cutting down timber and making a palisade out of timbers? Go Jamestown on them, minus the whole Kroatoan thing.

Some great books illustrating castle layouts and technologies in my library.

The Medieval Fortress by Kaufmann and Kaufmann
Medieval Warfare Sourcebooks by David Nicolle
The Art of Warfare in Western Europe by Verbruggen

Edward Hamilton (an online book wholesaler) has tons of deals on such reference books. I'll post the link here for anyone who wants to acquire more such titles. This subcategory is specifically focused on castles, but they have other categories within the military category like tactics and whatnot.

 

[Mad Swede]

Without a doubt. But some basics remain the same. The construction of a gatehouse, for instance. A barbican with two gates and murderholes above is the same whether it's in France or England. Certain principles, I guess, remain the same. Curtain walls are prone to sapping, so you develop bastion towers (or bartizans, in Spain). Before that, castles would have hoardings built over the wall to allow direct fire at the base of the curtain wall.

No, that's my point. What you think of as the basics were nothing of the sort at the time. The design of western European castles and other fortifications was evolving very quickly at this time, partly as a result of lessons learned during the crusades. Yes, you needed a gate and it was usual to have a tower on each side. But a full-scale barbican? No, that wasn't so obvious, as can be seen when you compare Urqhart Castle and Harlech Castle.

 

[_Michael_]

That feels right, too. But damned if there isn't a temptation to look back with revisionist eyes. Back at the time these technologies were being developed, they were undoubtledly not obvious to the commoners. We are looking at it with the benefit of knowledge learned from the internet and from libraries. In modern times, though, there should be enough of a collective knowledge through exposure to mass media to overcome that ignorance--practically every single medieval movie features a barbican with portcullises. The idea of luring enemies into a false breach or into controlled ingress points and then trapping them and pouring boiling oil and arrows on them from above should be a fairly easy leap of logic--for modern people.

There's also the other aspect--it's likely the soldiers would be very familiar with barbicans (during the times when these technologies were being employed) and would be wary of approaching too closely to the wall for fear of being shot or being trapped. Even the guys doing the escalades using ladders and siege towers had to have balls of steel the size of cantaloups. lmao

Again, though, it's easy to ignore the fact that most people aren't fantasy writers and don't have the depth of knowledge that comes from reading reference books as studiously as I did (and I wasn't that studious, to be fair...lol). To me, siege warfare and the construction of castles was always a topic of fascination because literally nobody builds them anymore. Yes, I get there's no reason to when you can just vaporize a castle with a single bomb, but there was a sculptural, artistic quality to castles that is found nowhere in modern architecture. Everything these days is built in butt-ugly Brutalist style and looks like Soviet-era concrete block housing.

We need more Beaumaris Castles these days--architecture meant to inspire and strike awe. I get that castles are impractical, but here's a question: If you're as rich as Croesius, and money is not an issue, why not build Beaumaris anew and finish it? Why not build a symmetrical castle on par with Neuschwanstein? Not like you're going to be able to take your billions with you. No one gets out alive. Might as well do something outrageous with it. lol So, you've all heard it here first. If I hit the Powerball, expect to hear about me in the news when I break ground on Minas Tirith.

 

[skip.knox]

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.

 

[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.

 

[_Michael_]

Edit: There's also

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.

This. It's more fun to build on something realistic and then deviate in subtle ways because you know how to deviate without calling attention to it. The way I look at it, the more realistic you make it, the more time you're putting into it, and that should translate to more quality in terms of world-building and depth.

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.

No one really shows these intermediary styles unless you go back to movies like Ivanhoe. It's always, "Filthy peasant village full of mud with an overcast sky that just rained and a bunch of pissed-off looking people dirty from standing in said mud herding pigs and yelling about the price of potatoes, as the camera pans over and a large stone fort rises up in the background. Enter Kevin Sorbo on horseback."

 

[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.

 

[_Michael_]

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.

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.

 

[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.