But in time a method was discovered of successfully
attacking this device of the defending party. Great catapults, the most ancient of military engines, invented away back in the early classic times, were now employed to hurl barrels of burning tar up on to the temporary wooden shelters, which were soon demolished by this means.
For centuries this method of attack and defence flourished, and it was not until the beginning of the fourteenth century that the machicolated battlements came into existence. From ancient times the old crenellated battlements had served through ages that were engaged in fighting. The ancient Egyptians and Assyrians used them, and it was reserved for the military genius of the Middle Ages to invent the machicolated parapet. This consisted of building out from the main walls of the tower or castle a curtain of masonry, supported by stone brackets. This gave a thorough protection to the besieged, who could look down through the apertures between the corbels and drop their missiles, molten lead, burning sulphur and melted pitch, on to the heads of their assailants.
The Tower of Philip the Fair is built with a machicolated battlement, and over the small doorway there is an “échauguette,” or small projecting tower, which commands the entrance. Even if the besiegers managed to escape the missiles dropped through the floor of the little tower, and forced their way into the porch, their task was not accomplished, for from the roof of the narrow passage leading into the large ground-floor chamber a long chimney runs right up to the top of the tower and down this projectiles could still be dropped.
The tower contains three lofty chambers, one above the other, each of which has a finely vaulted roof, the ribs resting upon fantastically carved corbels. These chambers are in an absolutely perfect state of preservation, a rare thing in a fourteenth-century building in this part of the country. The narrow winding staircase lit by oylets, which betray the thickness of the walls, has at intervals little branch stairways of only a few steps. These give