ACTIVITIES TEACHER’S KIT

CASTLES - ATTACK & DEFENCE This information, along with the ‘Attack Cards’ and ‘Defence Cards’ are designed to be used by teachers on self-led tours around castles. Teach your students how castles were attacked and how they were defended. Show your students the weapons and tactics used, including what gruesome things were flung!

Castle design and evolution - how castles changed and why A castle was a fortress built to protect strategic locations from enemy attack or to serve as a military base for invading armies. It’s where Lords and their families lived and ruled the land. They were served by peasants who were controlled by fear and their lives were extremely hard. Over time castle design changed. They were rebuilt and added to many times during their life so there may be a mixture of features or some may have completely disappeared. Motte and Bailey Castle - built in the 11th century by the Normans The motte: • Was a natural or man-made hill on which the keep stood • Had a ditch around its base and a wooden fence called a palisade around the top • Had a protected entrance within which a wooden tower would be built • Had a wooden bridge that connected it to the bailey which could be easily burnt to protect the motte from enemy attack The bailey: • Was a courtyard and was built on flat land • Was between the gatehouse and the motte and contained guardrooms, stables, kitchens, storerooms and a chapel • Was also protected by a palisade and a ditch or moat around it • Buildings were made of wood so were vulnerable to attacks by fire Stone Keep Castle - built during the 11th and 12th century • Replaced motte and bailey castles which were easily destroyed by fire • Defences were rebuilt in stone • Siege machines were built which could breach the stone walls so square keeps were built with massively thick walls • Over time the keeps went from rectangular in shape to cylindrical • The palisade was replaced by a wall-walk above the battlements • Accommodation was built inside against the curtain wall leaving a courtyard in the centre Concentric Castle - built during the 12th and 13th century • A second curtain wall was built. The inner wall was higher than the outer wall so the archers could still bombard the enemy • Turrets were placed along the wall with a wall-walk running between • The land between the two walls was called the ‘death hole’ BOOKING AND SITE INFORMATION: 0870 333 0606

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ACTIVITIES TEACHER’S KIT

CASTLES - ATTACK & DEFENCE

ATTACK CARDS

Aim it high! Tactics: Use a catapult known as a trebuchet to fling stuff over the castle walls on to the enemy. Weapons: Trebuchet - fires missiles ¼ of a mile. Stones - shatter into deadly splinters. Plague victims/poo to spread disease!

Break through the doors! Tactics: Use a battering ram. Set the wooden door on fire. Weapons: Battering ram. Flaming arrows. Your cunning to lure them out! Scale the walls!

Make it through the drawbridge! Tactics: Use grappling hooks to pull it down. Disguise yourself and try to charm your way in. Weapons: Grappling hook. Costume to disguise yourself Your charm/wits.

Tactics: Put ladders against the walls. Use a siege tower to protect the soldiers. Use grappling hooks to climb the walls. Weapons: Ladder. Siege tower. Cross the moat!

Surprise attack! Tactics: Look for hiding places to wait, then attack at night. Aim for the archers on the walls. Sneak in - through the garderobe! Weapons: Long bows/crossbows. Sword.

Tactics: Lay planks/ladders across the moat. Set fire the timber spikes in a dry moat or dig a channel to drain a wet moat. Weapons: Ladder. Fire (or shovel to dig with!).

Siege! Tactics: Block roads to stop supplies of food. Poison the water supply. Fling diseasedover the walls to make them ill. Weapons: Trebuchet (catapult) & diseased animals. Time – you need to be patient

Smash down the walls! Tactics: Fire heavy missiles into the walls at high speed using a mangonel - a specialised short range catapult Pick the weakest part of the wall. Weapons: Mangonel Very big stones!

Send in the sappers! Tactics: Use skilled miners (sappers) to dig tunnels under the walls/ towers, using wooden poles to support the tunnel. Burn the poles to make the tunnel and the wall/tower collapse. Weapons: Miners with tools for digging.

Shoot them down! Tactics: Use your skilled archers to shoot the defenders. Fire burning missiles at the wooden parts of the castle and kill the soldiers living there. Weapons: Arrows. Long bows/crossbows.

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ACTIVITIES TEACHER’S KIT

CASTLES - ATTACK & DEFENCE

DEFENCE CARDS

On your guard! Tactics: Build on a hill/high ground. Reasons: So you can spot the enemy a long way off. Makes access difficult. Makes mining under the walls impossible! Pull up the drawbridge! Tactics: Pull up the drawbridge and shut and bar the main door. Reasons: A big wooden bar makes the door impossible to push open. Having the drawbridge up means you can’t cross the moat. Barricade the entrance! Tactics: Lower the portcullis. Get ready to man the murder holes. Reasons: It was an extra barrier to get through. Murder holes in the ceiling let you pour boiling oil on intruders! Destroy it! Tactics: Send soldiers on horses to destroy the trebuchet. Reasons: A trebuchet can only fire once in an attack, then it must be rebuilt to be used again. If your soldiers have killed enough enemy soldiers there won’t be enough to rebuild it. Undermine them! Tactics: Dig ‘countermines’ into the tunnels the enemy are digging under the castle and put any captured miners in the dungeon. Reasons: To attack them in their own tunnel. To make their tunnel collapse on them!

Be prepared! Tactics: Stock up supplies of food, water and ammunition. Ration what supplies you have. Reasons: Having plenty to eat and rationing it means they can’t starve you out! More ammunition means more fighting. Create a barrier! Tactics: Dig a moat and fill it with water or wooden spikes. Empty the garderobes (toilets) into the moat. Reasons: To stop the enemy mining under walls. To stop the enemy using siege towers. No one wants to swim through poo! Curtain of stone! Tactics: Build high stone walls up to 6m thick. Reasons: To stop things flung from a catapult. High walls means archers can’t shoot over them. Makes it hard for attackers to climb them. Kick them down! Tactics: Kick away the ladders of attackers. Hide on the wall walk to surprise attackers. Reasons: Waiting until the enemy soldiers are part way up their ladders means you’ll kill or injure more of them when you kick the ladder away! Fire power! Tactics: Shoot the enemy from the wall walk. Shoot from inside arrow loop windows. Reasons: Shooting downward makes it easier. Arrow loops make it easy to shoot out of and really hard to shoot in to!

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ACTIVITIES TEACHER’S KIT

CASTLES - ATTACK & DEFENCE

ACTIVITY IDEAS

These resources can be used at any castle site in a variety of ways: • Use the descriptions of castles to ask your students to work out what type of castle they are at. • Share out both the attack and defence cards amongst your students. Then ask those with attack cards to question those with defence cards to work out which is the best defence against their form of attack at that particular castle. • Divide your students into groups and give each group a different attack card. They must find the part of the castle that it relates to and work out the best place to use that tactic (eg. the best place to cross the moat, the weakest part of the walls etc). • Encourage students to imagine what it would be like during a siege. They could try to work out solutions to problems such as: Where could food and ammunition be stored? Do the arrow loops let you defend all the ground in front of the castle? Where did the soldiers sleep? • In opposing teams students could devise a battle plan to either withstand a siege or cause one. Their plans could be acted out using role-play, with the opposing team looking for weaknesses in their plans. • Using the castle ruins and the drawings of the different methods of attack and defence as evidence, create a reconstruction drawing showing the castle as it might have looked in the past. • Use ‘hot seating’ activities to help students ask questions and discover more. They could imagine that they are the defenders who have managed to capture one of the attackers who was spying on them. The attacker could be interrogated to help them find out more. The attacker could then also describe their emotions and what it felt like to be put in the ‘hot seat’ and interrogated.

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