The same authority asserts that when Henry III. was besieging Kenilworth Castle, the garrison had engines which cast stones of an extraordinary size, and that near the castle several balls of stone sixteen inches in diameter have been found which are supposed to have been thrown by engines with slings[33] in the time of the Barons’ war.
[33] The engines here alluded to by Camden were trebuchets.
Holinshed writes that ‘when Edward I. attacked Stirling Castle, he caused an engine of wood to be set up to batter the castle which shot stones of two or three hundredweight.’ (See allusion to this, [p. 33].)
Père Daniel, in his Histoire de la Milice Françoise, writes: ‘The great object of the French engineers was to make siege engines of sufficient strength to project stones large enough to crush in the roofs of houses and break down the walls.’ This author continues: ‘The French engineers were so successful and cast stones of such enormous size that their missiles even penetrated the vaults and floors of the most solidly built houses.’[34]
[34] These engines would also be trebuchets.
The effects of the balista on the defenders of a town were in no degree inferior to those of the catapult. The missile of the balista consisted of a huge metal-tipped wooden bolt which, although of far less weight than the great ball of stone cast by a catapult or the far larger one thrown by a trebuchet, was able to penetrate roofs and cause great destruction in ranks of soldiers. Cæsar records that when his lieutenant Caius Trebonius was building a movable tower at the siege of Marseilles, the only method of protecting the workmen from the darts of engines[35] was by hanging curtains woven from cable-ropes on the three sides of the tower exposed to the besiegers.[36]
[35] Balistas.
[36] ‘For this was the only sort of defence which they had learned, by experience in other places, could not be pierced by darts or engines.’ Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Civil War, Book II., Chapter IX.
Procopius relates that during the siege of Rome in 537 by Vitiges King of Italy, he saw a Gothic chieftain in armour suspended to a tree which he had climbed, and to which he had been nailed by a balista bolt which had passed through his body and then penetrated into the tree behind him.
Again, at the siege of Paris by the Northmen in 885–886, Abbo writes that Ebolus[37] discharged from a balista a bolt which transfixed several of the enemy.