How to capture a castle

5 min read

Dr Marc Morris reveals his top tips for prosecuting a successful medieval or early modern siege

SURROUND THE CASTLE EFFECTIVELY

RIGHT: A medieval image shows a scaling ladder perched against a castle wall. Ropes with grappling hooks were sometimes also used

GETTY IMAGES X4

This sounds obvious, but in practice it is very difficult to achieve. The surest way to get a garrison to surrender is to starve them into submission, which means ensuring that they can’t get any extra supplies of food. Creating an impenetrable ring around a castle, however, presents a considerable challenge. In order to stay safe themselves, the besiegers need to remain beyond the range of the bows or guns of the defenders, so they cannot encircle the castle too tightly. The perimeter of their lines might therefore run for a mile or more, which is a lot of ground to cover, even if you have sufficient troops to do so. It becomes even more difficult at night, when the garrison might try to sneak supplies into the castle under cover of darkness.

When Oliver Cromwell arrived to take over the siege of Pontefract Castle in 1648, he discovered that its royalist garrison were abundantly supplied thanks to the negligence of the previous parliamentarian commander, who had failed to mount an effective blockade. “The castle has been victualled with 240 cattle within these three weeks,” he wrote to his colleagues in London, “and they have also gotten in salt enough for them, so that I apprehend they a victualled for a twelvemonth.”

BELOW: The royalist defenders of Pontefract Castle still got their hands on a plentiful supply of cattle when under siege in 1648

TRY TO SNEAK IN

Launching an all-out assault on the castle walls could get messy – it was sometimes better to try and sneak in undetected

If it’s difficult for the besiegers to maintain constant vigilance, the same goes for the defenders. One of the swiftest ways to bring a siege to a successful conclusion is to sneak inside, taking the garrison by surprise. There are various ways that attackers might attempt to go over a castle’s walls – by using scaling ladders, or ropes with grappling hooks. They might also bring up to the walls a wheeled tower known as a belfry, though that would almost certainly deny them the element of surprise.

Many famous sieges have been ended by acts of cunning on the part of the besiegers. In the case of Pontefract in 1648, the royalists had originally gained control of the castle by posing as delivery men. The parliamentary garrison had ordered more beds from the town, so the royalists s

This article is from...

History Revealed Magazine

13 April 2023

Who Do You Think You Are?

Q & a

Q I am trying to work out what Joseph Mellor Vernon (1886–1953) did during the First World War. A pottery worker living in Porthill, Stoke-on-Trent, he married Phoebe Turner in 1911 and they had three

Fortean Times

Thelevitationsofst josephofcopertinoexplained?

The idea of human levitation is, by its very nature, subversive and surreal. The phenomenon – if we temporarily accept such a thing in order to examine it – involves events that imply that our underst

BBC Wildlife Magazine

On thehunt

S ince 2009, Amy Dickman has come across some horrific sights on the edge of Ruaha National Park in Central Tanzania where she studies, and tries to resolve, conflict between people and predators. The

History of War

‘sink the bismarck!’ churchill's revenge

The Allies were stunned when in 1941 Germany’s largest battleship sank the pride of the Royal Navy… but the hunter quickly became the hunted

BBC History Magazine

The empire’s last hurrah?

In the summer of 1924, Scientific American’s ‘Special Correspondent in Great Britain’ warned his readers that, “the size and scope of the British Empire Exhibition, like the British empire itself, is

BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Touching thesun

On 12 August 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into the pre-dawn Florida sky on a mission to become the first-ever spacecraft to ‘touch the Sun’.