The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Detail #48 "This War Smells Like Bacon"

I've never really understood the concept of a castle. Here' s how the logic goes; "With the whole of my kingdom stretched out around me full of, hopefully, sort of loyal serfs who will feed me or at least hide me, I'm going to hole myself up in the one place where everyone will know where I am, where I cannot escape." Maybe it was the convenience of having your serfs right on hand to beat. "Edgar bring me some mutton and the cat-o-nine tails. I'm bored."

The sad truth is that artillery, from early stone throwing cannon to today's bunker busters have made the business of castle storming sort of passé. In the dark ages though, ah yes, back in the day when you had to get dirty if you wanted to make someone dead, there was some fun to be had in laying siege. Let's take a look at three of the things that made camping out around your uncle the usurper's castle so much more than just a brownie scout trip. Let's look at starvation, exploding pigs, and the trouble with medieval toilets.

To me the first well duh moment that comes when you hide in your castle is when the enemy surrounds you, you bar the door, double the watch then turn to your second in command and say, "so what's for dinner?" Here an important difference between your two armies becomes apparent. Your enemy has got the whole of your countryside to pillage while you've got whatever is milling around in the courtyard. There are supplies of course, but as historical sieges stretched into months and then years, dwellers in the castle often found themselves eating leather fastenings, grass and ultimately each other. It must have been great if your siege was successful. It would be rewarding as the gates opened and you rode in, to see the orderly army that had marched in months ago reduced to haunted shadows gnawing each other's bones. Oooo! That gave me a shiver.

I have to confess that I don't really understand this next part, but I've got it from more than one source so you know it must be true. Apparently, if you wanted to undermine the walls of an enemy's castle, one of the best ways to do so was to dig a tunnel under the wall in question, pack the tunnel with the bodies of dead pigs, set it on fire, and run. Here's where the really cool thing I don't understand happens. The burning pig fat will get so hot down there in the tunnel that BOOM! it'll go off like a bomb, leveling that section of the wall. Someone with a better understanding of things like pressure and temperature would have to explain why it happens, me I'm just so glad it does happen. Imagine, two hundred dead, flaming pigs bursting out of the ground in a castle shattering kaboom! It moves me to tears. It may also go down in history as the only time warfare ever smelled good. Now if only we had a soft boiled egg cannon we'd be in business.

The third issue I want to cover is just dirty, dirty, dirty. It had to do with medieval toilets. There weren't any and a wise general would put that to his advantage. It works very simply. If you as the besieger have access to your opponents' water supply, let your soldiers use it as their toilet. Simple, practical, gross. With the rates of dysentery, rota virus and other intestinal parasites being what they were in the dark ages, the odds were about one to one that someone in your army was carrying. If you had 'em send it down stream into the castle, pretty soon that old "castle full of dysentery" smell would start creeping over the castle walls at you and you'd know your siege was half way over.

There were solutions to all these issues; have your own well for example, but when it comes to just general human not-nice-ed-ness, fighting over castle walls was hard to beat. Ghengis Khan for example would use soldier or citizens he'd already captured as shields when he launched his attacks on fortified positions. That Ghengis, so tricky.

Now get out there and write.    

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