# How well guarded was a typical castle? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 3, 2013, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057 "2013-06-03T19:23:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Baron\_Greenback](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baron_greenback/32/48_2.png) [@Baron\_Greenback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baron_Greenback)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/21 "2013-06-05T17:32:55Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > I’m trying to figure out why almost half the images Bing found for Harlech are just pictures of brunettes, almost all of them dressed in black. Looks like mostly the same woman, Lady Amanda Harlech. ---
**Author:** ![PoorYorick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@PoorYorick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PoorYorick)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/22 "2013-06-05T17:37:18Z")
> [@simster](#): > > I have it on good authority that usually 20 men would gaurd the Port callis, where usually a single man held the key. > > Sometimes they would double the guard to 40, like when an important wedding were taking place and there were rumors of pirates. Unless, of course, the attacker was wearing a Holocaust Cloak. In that case, it was every man for himself. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/23 "2013-06-05T20:16:24Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > The Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine was garrisoned by 2,000 men when it was occupied by the British during the 18th century. It required a larger complement than most forts because it was built of the patently useless (for defense against heavy guns, anyway) _coquina_, a sort of limestone filled with bits of seashell. (I suspect **RNANTB** knows about this, but I’ll continue the thread since it was a good point.) Forts of the 18th/19th centuries in general required much larger garrisons, since defensive works trended increasingly towards soft-sided walls instead of hard stone structures. Not entirely, of course. But the ideal for the period would have been a pentagonal fort with sloping sides, tall and step enough athat scaling was easy, but with side constructed of grassy earth or even sand. Cannon fire did absolutely nothing to it, but soldiers had a hard time assaulting it when the defenders could easily fire over the top or roll explosives down. The downside was that these kinds of works were more vulnerable to attack even so, and faced larger and better-equipped armies, and so needed more soldeirs, supplies, and cannon to defend themselves. In practice, of course, forts were often much less defensible and made out of whatever you could get at hand: wooden stockades, older stone works, brick buildings, or even just a series of trenches and abatis. Anything which could be used to hosue soldiers in a way that kept them reasonably able-bodied and which increased the advantage of the defense. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/24 "2013-06-05T20:22:27Z")
I didn’t. I know a lot about the CDSM because my wife is always making me take her to St. Augustine 'cause she thinks it’s romantic. Most of what I “know” about defensive fortifications is from things in fantasy novels that sound plausible and CCF (British equivalent of ROTC). ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/25 "2013-06-05T21:03:36Z")
Thing is, if you’ve got a hundred men-at-arms garrisoning the castle, what are you going to do with them? Well, some will be sleeping, some will be getting chow, some will be drilling, some will be repairing equipment, and so on. And so you’ve got your men holed up there sitting around, you might as well stick some guys in front of the door, some up in the towers as lookouts, some walking the walls, some riding on patrol, and so on. A castle without defenders to man the works is just a pile of rock. You don’t have to hire an extra guy just to be a bouncer at the front door, instead you’ve got a bunch of soldiers sitting around waiting for the next war to break out and they might as well pretend to be soldiers while they’re waiting. Yeah, nobody is going to try to crash the gate today, or tomorrow, or the next day, but eventually somebody will, and you’ve got to be ready for that day. If you can’t support enough armsmen garrisoning the castle to put shifts of guys at the doors and walls to keep out the riff-raff, then what kind of feudal lord are you? How are you going to repel a real siege or assault? The job of staffing the castle will be taken from you and someone else will take over the job. Castles weren’t built as decorations, they were built as military bases. ---
**Author:** ![Shmendrik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee7513/32.png) [@Shmendrik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shmendrik)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/26 "2013-06-05T21:09:15Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > If you can’t support enough armsmen garrisoning the castle to put shifts of guys at the doors and walls to keep out the riff-raff, then what kind of feudal lord are you? The kind that doesn’t have a large standing professional army, like most feudal lords? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2013, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/27 "2013-06-05T22:00:36Z")
They didn’t have large standing armies, by modern standards. But if the castle garrison is so small you can’t have guards at the gates and lookouts in the towers at all times, then the castle isn’t a castle, it’s a pile of rock. Castles don’t defend themselves, they require men to defend them. A castle is a military base. Yes a lord’s vassals aren’t all going to be packed into the castle, they’ll be at their own lands unless they’re called up for service. But the lord of the castle is also going to have landless knights and men at arms directly in his service. Think of the economics of it. Yes, there were plenty of knights with so little land that they could barely generate enough revenue to arm themselves. That guy isn’t going to be sitting by himself in a castle, he’s going to have a manor house barely different than the rest of the peasants on his lands. A castle without soldiers makes no sense, since the whole point of the castle is to support and protect the soldiers. If you can’t afford to staff the castle, you couldn’t have afforded to build the thing in the first place. If you can’t spare one guy with a sword to stand at the front gate then you might as well hand the keys over to someone who can. ---
**Author:** ![AdamF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/adamf/32/6246_2.png) [@AdamF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AdamF)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/28 "2013-06-06T12:14:38Z")
> [@Johnny\_Ecks](#): > > In video games, books and movies, strongholds like castles and such are constantly patrolled-day and night-by pairs of guards, armed and armored, with others at stations in front of important doorways. Of course, any noise will bring a troop of more guards from the room where they have been waiting for just such an occurrence. > > This is obviously ridiculous. Castles were working buildings, and the cost of such security measures would be too high to justify them. > > But how well were such places guarded? Were there actual, dedicated guards, or was the possibility of infiltration by a sneaky individual so unlikely as to be ignored? Like most things, it depends. Most lords rich enough to have a castle had multiple castles and residences. When the lord was in, the castle was crawling with people. There were guards at every entrance into the castle and a lookout on top of the tallest tower. You may also have a person stationed in front of the room where money and valuables were kept, though usually it was just locked. But there certainly were no large groups of guards sitting around and just waiting for alarm. Everybody had some job to do. Allowing your armed retinue to grow lazy and bored was not a safe or wise thing to do. If nothing else, you would have them training with swords or out hunting. And while every man was carrying a knife, and some had swords, only guards on duty would likely wear armor. And this only for appearances sake. Armor is heavy and uncomfortable for wear all day, especially if you are very unlikely to need it. Medieval armies were slow and noisy, and rumors traveled much faster through countryside. So you will have several days of warning, time enough to dig out your mail from whatever cellar you left it in. On the other hand, when the lord was away, the castle was mostly deserted. This applied particularly for royal castles. There were no standing armies. You would have one person left in charge and a couple of men to help guard stored provisions, plate glass and silver cutlery. At most, you’d have one person on guard by the main entrance. There would also be some servants to help with minimum maintenance and local peasants “recruited” for the same task. But most castles quickly slid into disrepair anyway and had to be fixed up very quickly just before the lord’s arrival. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/29 "2013-06-06T12:46:02Z")
From : [http://www.angevin.org/siege\_warfare.htm](http://www.angevin.org/siege_warfare.htm) > [@](#): > > The traditional methods for taking a castle in this time were; all out assault, undermining, starvation, or treachery. All out assault was risky as you might take the castle but lose so many men doing it that you could not then defend the castle if you were attacked by a relieving force. Worse still you could be bloodily repulsed and then not be left with enough men to adequately lay siege to the castle. Undermining was a popular method of siege. This is where sappers dug out the bottom of a wall and placed tar soaked props under the wall as they went, when the mine was finished it was fired so as the props burned out the wall would collapse. The defenders were not idle in this time however. Bowls of water were placed on the walls and the garrison would watch them for signs of vibration that indicated that sappers were at work. Then they might counter sap and a bloody battle would then happen underground when both sides sappers met, or as at Dover in 1216 the garrison fell back and as the wall fell, the French charged the breach and the garrison counter charged and after a bloody fight the garrison managed the block the breach and keep control of the castle. Starvation was the default siege method but most castles were adequately provisioned to withstand long periods of siege and its was not always possible to leave a large army standing in their siege lines to wait months for a surrender. The last technique was treachery and a few castles fell this way to surprise attacks but very few in total. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/30 "2013-06-06T17:18:44Z")
In Anglo-Norman Studies 10: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1987 there is an article by John Moore that discusses Anglo-Norman garrison sizes. You can dig up most relevant portions at google books ( I did ). In general it appears _average_ peacetime garrisons were under two dozen. Ranges: Peacetime: 4-35, modal 12, average 16. Wartime: 4-2,121, modal 60, average 144, median 72. In the wartime numbers he noted in particular that the highest and lowest numbers were likely extreme outliers, in the largest probably represented very temporary detachments of field armies ( or flat out exaggerations ), rather than true garrisons. ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2013, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/31 "2013-06-06T20:34:33Z")
Sometimes even modern palaces aren’t guarded quite as well as they should be: [Michael Fagan (intruder) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fagan_incident) ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/32 "2013-06-07T04:12:51Z")
Some castles have proven to be difficult even for modern armies to capture. Buda Castle held out for several months in 1945.Metz was taken after 3 months and 50,000 Thrid US Army Casualties. There is a castle in Lebanon which the Israelis attempted and failed to take in 2006. They did take it in 1982, with an aeriel assault. There is a fortress in Sindh which withstood a major Indian assault in 1971. ---
**Author:** ![Pabitel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bbce88/32.png) [@Pabitel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pabitel)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/33 "2013-06-07T13:35:21Z")
The question is too broad to have a simple answer. Depending on what year you are talking about and who was building, defending and attacking the castle the number of defenders and type of defense would vary. For much of the medieval period castles weren’t generally attacked as such. The defenders would just lock themselves inside and the attackers would wait around until the castle was either relieved from outside or the defenders capitulated. It was vanishingly rare for a castle to actually be taken by force. In most times and places, before the modern area, in times of peace a castle could serve as the permanent residence of the local lord but just as possibly it stood mostly empty until needed. This was especially true of the more strategically placed castles as the same topology that made them easily defended made it a pain in the rear to come and go on a daily basis. So, in general, a castle was defended by as many men as you could muster and would be defended in times of unrest or when important events were in progress. Otherwise you really wouldn’t see armored soldiers leaning on their pikes out front on a daily basis like you see in the movies. There were of course exceptions to this. Border castles would have a regular garrison. As you never knew when those treacherous (Welsh, Scotts, French, Normans, English, Norse, Holy Romans, etc) might come boiling across the border. But any defenders on guard would tend to be on the walls or in more forward positions and not manning the gates. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2013, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057/34 "2013-06-07T16:34:51Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > .Metz was taken after 3 months and 50,000 Thrid US Army Casualties. I don’t think [Metz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_Metz) counts as a castle, as most people use the term. It was a fortified city – really a complex of fortifications – with a ring fortresses around it, miles across, connected by entrenchments and underground tunnels, with concrete emplacements and [turreted guns](http://www.flickr.com/photos/wanus/2869128295/). The fortifications there had been improved in three major (and one minor) stages since around 1870. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-guarded-was-a-typical-castle/660057.md?page=1)