Building in stone

It's easy to think of the Middle Ages as building in stone.  After all, almost all medieval buildings that survive are the stone ones.  The cathedrals, the parish churches, the castles, are stone structures.

But in fact the majority of buildings in the Middle Ages were not stone.  As I have discussed previously, most town and village houses were "wattle and daub," wood and plaster, what would be called half-timber now.  All-wood structures were found in some places like Scandinavia, but in France and England the good big timbers were gone by the twelfth century, so people used the smaller pieces of wood for wattle and daub, though perhaps with a stone first floor if one were very wealthy.

The reason stone wasn't used more is because it was too expensive and too hard to work.  We think of the Middle Ages as built in stone because the structures that survive from them are, to a large degree, the stone ones.  Even when they are not maintained, stone buildings survive as solid ruins.

In the early Middle Ages, castles and churches were built of field stone, stones picked up from the ground and carefully set together.  In the example below, from an eleventh-century castle in Burgundy, the stone mason seems to have become creative.

In the twelfth century, castles and churches began to be build almost exclusively from quarried stone, nice rectangular blocks.  Both the inside and outside of the wall would be smooth stone, but the center was usually filled with rubble, field stone, gravel, bits of pottery, whatever was lying around.

When the Spaniards first reached the New World and saw the impressive stone buildings that the indigenous peoples of Latin America had built, they promptly decided to use some of them as foundations for their own buildings.  They appreciated good stonework when they saw it.  The church of Santo Domingo in Cusco (Peru) was build on top of the Inca temple to the sun.

In subsequent centuries there were periodic claims that Europeans had crossed the Atlantic and gotten across the Amazon basin to the Andes to teach the Incas how to build in stone.  This is wildly improbable, based on the assumption that only Europeans can figure out how to do stonework, but at least I guess is beats the aliens-from-space hypothesis.

Inca stonework, for their finest buildings, was quarried, but they did not try to make everything rectangular.  Rather they just tried to make sure all the stones fit together very tightly.  This is especially impressive since they had no iron and had to shape their stones with chisels and polishing sand.  It is especially noteworthy that the Incas were using granite (extremely hard), not the limestone (not as hard) that medieval Europe used for its churches.  The wall pictured below is outside Cusco and is about 20 feet high (and 700 years old).

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval castle building, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Castles through the Ages

Castles, as I've noted in previous posts, really only first appeared around the year 1000, as a combination of palace and fortress.  There had of course been palaces and fortresses going back to prehistoric times, but their combination in a single defensible structure was new in the eleventh century.

We have very few eleventh-century castles.  The occasional grim eleventh-century square tower is about all that we have, or perhaps an outer wall such as the eleventh-century shell-keep of Gisors in Normandy, seen below.

The reason we have such few remains of eleventh-century castles is because castles were rebuilt a lot.  Siege technology was constantly improving (think trebuchets), and castles had to stay one step ahead.  Besides, castles had to make a Statement, and the bigger, the stronger, and more elegant they were, the better statement they made.  Any castle lord who could afford it would renovate and rebuild his castle every generation or so.

In some ways gunpowder did in castles.  In France, where under Louis XIV his war minister, Vauban, systematically went around the countryside with cannons destroying castles (or at least knocking big holes in them), castles were pretty much given up in the early modern period.

But the castles were still there.  They were built of literally millions of stones and were not going anywhere.  And all that stonework could be made defensible again with some effort.  In some places, like Scotland, where it was harder to get cannons across the lochs and highland hills, new castles were being built in the early modern period, designed pretty much the same as medieval castles.  After all, that's what a castle was supposed to be like.

The image below is of Blackness Castle in Scotland, on the Firth of Forth.  It was used for its original military purpose up through the nineteenth century, when soldiers were quartered there.

For the most part, however, most medieval (and early modern) castles had become ruins by the nineteenth century, with a lot of the best stone carried off by enterprising locals to use in their own building projects.  With the development of the Romantic movement (think Ivanhoe) as a reaction against the industrial age, people decided they liked ruined castles.  Castles were romantic.

Some castles were renovated once again in the twentieth century, becoming elegant homes (by twentieth-century standards) as they had once been elegant homes (by twelfth-century standards) in the Middle Ages.  These aren't ruined anymore, but they sure are romantic.

The image above is the Scottish castle Eilean Donan, on an arm of the Irish Sea.  It's now a house as well as a castle that has been voted "most romantic" by various entities.  It really is a romantic site.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook sellers.  Also available in paperback!