Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

Summoning the Castle.

But the assailed may succeed in throwing down the ladders; or in beating the enemy off them by hurling down great stones ready stored against such an emergency, or heaving the coping-stones off the battlements; or they may succeed in preventing the assailants from effecting a lodgment on the wall by a hand to hand encounter; and thus the assault may be foiled and beaten off. Still our mediæval captain has other resources; he will next order up his “gyns,” i.e. engines of war.

The name applies chiefly to machines constructed for the purpose of hurling heavy missiles. The ancient nations of antiquity possessed such machines, and the knowledge of them descended to mediæval times. There seems, however, to be this great difference between the classical and the mediæval engines, that the former were constructed on the principle of the bow, the latter on the principle of the sling. The classical ballista was, in fact, a huge cross-bow, made in a complicated way and worked by machinery. The mediæval trebuchet was a sling wielded by a gigantic arm of wood. In mediæval Latin the ancient name of the ballista is sometimes found, but in the mediæval pictures the principle of the engines illustrated is always that which we have described. We meet also in mediæval writings with the names of the mangona and mangonella and the catapult, but they were either different names for the same engine, or names for different species of the same genus. The woodcut here introduced from the MS. Add. 10,294, f. 81 V., gives a representation of a trebuchet. A still earlier representation—viz., of the thirteenth century—of machines of the same kind is to be found in the Arabic MS. quoted in a treatise, “Du feu Grégois,” by MM. Favé and Reinaud, and leads to the supposition that the sling principle in these machines may have been introduced from the East. There are other representations of a little later date than that in the text (viz., about A.D. 1330) in the Royal MS. 16 G. VI., which are engraved in Shaw’s “Dresses and Decorations.” We also possess a contemporary description of the machine in the work of Gilles Colonne (who died A.D. 1316), written for Philip the Fair of France.[379] “Of perriers,” he says, “there are four kinds, and in all these machines there is a beam which is raised and lowered by means of a counterpoise, a sling being attached to the end of the beam to discharge the stone. Sometimes the counterpoise is not sufficient, and then they attach ropes to it to move the beam.” This appears to be the case in our illustration. The rope seems to be passed through a ring in the platform of the engine, so that the force applied to the rope acts to the greater advantage in aid of the weight of the beam. “The counterpoise may either be fixed or movable, or both at once. In the fixed counterpoise a box is fastened to the end of the beam, and filled with stones or sand, or any heavy body.” One would not, perhaps, expect such a machine to possess any precision of action, but according to our author the case was far otherwise. “These machines,” he continues, “anciently called trabutium, cast their missiles with the utmost exactness, because the weight acts in a uniform manner. Their aim is so sure, that one may, so to say, hit a needle. If the gyn carries too far, it must be drawn back or loaded with a heavier stone; if the contrary, then it must be advanced or a smaller stone supplied; for without attention to the weight of the stone, one cannot hope to reach the given mark.” “Others of these machines have a movable counterpoise attached to the beam, turning upon an axis. This variety the Romans called biffa. The third kind, which is called tripantum, has two weights, one fixed to the beam and the other movable round it. By this means it throws with more exactness than the biffa, and to a greater distance than the trebuchet. The fourth sort, in lieu of weights fixed to the beam, has a number of ropes, and is discharged by means of men pulling simultaneously at the cords. This last kind does not cast such large stones as the others, but it has the advantage that it may be more rapidly loaded and discharged than they. In using the perriers by night it is necessary to attach a lighted body to the projectile. By this means one may discover the force of the machine, and regulate the weight of the stone accordingly.”[380] This, then, is the engine which our captain, repulsed in his attempt to take the place by a coup de main, has ordered up, adjusting it, no doubt, like a good captain, with his own eye and hand, until he has got it, “so to say, to hit a needle,” on the weak points of the place. It was usual in great sieges to have several of them, so that a whole battery might be set to work to overmaster the defence.

The Assault.

We must bear in mind that similar engines were, it is probable, usually mounted on the towers of the castle. We should judge from the roundness of the stones which the defenders in both the preceding woodcuts are throwing down by hand upon the enemy immediately beneath, that they are the stones provided for the military engines. We find that, as in modern times cannon is set to silence the cannon of the enemy, so that a battle becomes, for a time at least, an artillery duel, so engine was set to silence engine. In the account which Guillaume des Ormes gives of his defence of the French town of Carcasonne in 1240 A.D., he says: “They set up a mangonel before our barbican, when we lost no time in opposing to it from within an excellent Turkish petrary, which played upon the mangonel and those about it, so that when they essayed to cast upon us, and saw the beam of our petrary in motion, they fled, utterly abandoning their mangonel.”

There was also an engine called an arbalast, or spurgardon, or espringale, which was a huge cross-bow mounted on wheels, so as to be movable like a field-piece; it threw great pointed bolts with such force as to pass successively through several men.

If the engines of the besiegers were silenced, or failed to produce any decisive impression on the place, the captain of the assailants might try the effect of the ram. We seldom, indeed, hear of its use in the Middle Ages, but one instance, at least, is recorded by Richard of Devizes, who says that Richard I., at the siege of Messina, forced in the gates of the city by the application of the battering-ram, and so won his way into the place, and captured it. The walls of mediæval fortifications were so immensely thick, that a ram would be little likely to break them. The gates, too, of a castle or fortified gate-tower were very strong. If the reader will look at the picture of a siege of a castle, given on page 373, he will see a representation of a castle-gate, which will help him to understand its defences. First he will see that the drawbridge is raised, so that the assailant has to bridge the moat before he can bring his battering-ram to bear. Suppose the yawning gulf bridged with planks or filled in with fascines, and the ram brought into position, under fire from the loops of the projecting towers of the gate as well as from the neighbouring battlements, then the bridge itself forms an outer door which must first be battered down. Behind it will be found the real outer-door, made as strong as oak timber and iron bolts can make it. That down, there is next the grated portcullis seen in two previous woodcuts, against which the ram would rattle with a great clang of iron; but the grating, with its wide spaces, and having plenty of “play” in its stone groove, would baffle the blows by the absence of a solid resistance, and withstand them by the tenacity of wrought-iron. Even if the bars were bent and torn till they afforded a passage, the assailants would find themselves in the narrow space within the gate-tower confronted by another door, and exposed to missiles poured upon them from above. It is, perhaps, no wonder that we hear little of the use of the ram in mediæval times; though it might be useful occasionally to drive in some ill-defended postern.