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A diagram of a Motte and Bailey Castle. Surviving examples of medieval secular architecture mainly served for defense, these include forts, castles, tower houses, and fortified walls. Fortifications were built during the Middle Ages to display the power of the lords of the land and reassure common folk in their protection of property and ...
Portcullis at Desmond Castle, Adare, County Limerick, Ireland The inner portcullis of the Torre dell'Elefante in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy A portcullis (from Old French porte coleice ' sliding gate ') is a heavy, vertically closing gate typically found in medieval fortifications. [1]
Cooper, Thomas Parsons. (1911) The History of the Castle of York, from its Foundation to the Current Day with an Account of the Building of Clifford's Tower. London: Elliot Stock. OCLC 4246355. Creighton, Oliver Hamilton. (2005) Castles and Landscapes: Power, Community and Fortification in Medieval England. London: Equinox. ISBN 978-1-904768-67-8.
Beaumaris Castle in Wales was built in the late 13th century and is an example of concentric castles which developed in the late medieval period. Badajoz Castle of Topoľčany in Slovakia Medieval fortification refers to medieval military methods that cover the development of fortification construction and use in Europe , roughly from the fall ...
A 19th-century reconstruction of the keep at Château d'Étampes. Since the 16th century, the English word keep has commonly referred to large towers in castles. [4] The word originates from around 1375 to 1376, coming from the Middle English term kype, meaning basket or cask, and was a term applied to the shell keep at Guînes, said to resemble a barrel. [5]
Ringworks are essentially motte-and-bailey castles without the motte. Defences were usually earthworks in the form of a ditch and bank surrounding the site. [1] Ringworks originated in Germany in the 10th century as an early form of medieval castle and at first were little more than a fortified manor house. They appeared in England just prior ...
In particular, a medieval type of European castle is known as a motte-and-bailey. Castles and fortifications may have more than one bailey, and the enclosure wall building material may have been at first in wood, and later transitioned to stone.
Although castle has not become a generic term for a manor house (like château in French and Schloss in German), many manor houses contain castle in their name while having few if any of the architectural characteristics, usually as their owners liked to maintain a link to the past and felt the term castle was a masculine expression of their ...