103 Fun Facts About Castle

The word castle comes from Latin castellum, a diminutive of castrum, which means what?

Fortified place is the sense of Latin castrum; its plural, castra, meant a Roman army camp, which Old English borrowed as ceaster, the root of town names such as Chester and Lancaster.

The word "castle" entered English shortly before which event?

The Norman Conquest of 1066 was still years off when Norman knights serving Edward the Confessor raised England's first castles in the 1050s, bringing their French word for them along.

In its simplest terms, what is the academic definition of a castle?

A private fortified residence is the scholars' shorthand: a castle was one lord's home as well as his stronghold, which is why communal defences such as Anglo-Saxon burhs and walled cities do not count.

In castle terminology, what is a motte?

A motte is an earthen mound with a flat top, usually heaped up from the soil dug out of the ditch around it, so a single job gave the castle two defences.

What is the ditch, wet or dry, that was dug around a castle's walls called?

A moat could be wet or dry; either way it kept siege towers and battering rams away from the walls, and a water-filled one made tunnelling beneath them far harder.

A bailey, the fortified enclosure of a castle, is also known by what other name?

A ward is another name for a bailey; large castles nested one inside another, so attackers who broke into the outer ward still faced the walls of the inner one.

What did medieval people call the great tower, before 'keep' was applied in the 16th century?

Donjon was the medieval name for the great tower; the modern word dungeon is a corruption of it, which is how a lord's grandest tower became a byword for a prison.

What is a portcullis?

A portcullis is a metal-reinforced wooden grille that slid down grooves to seal a gateway; many gatehouses had two, trapping attackers in the passage between.

Which popular belief about a castle's murder holes do historians doubt?

That defenders poured boiling oil through them is mostly legend: oil was far too costly to waste, so the holes more likely dropped stones on attackers or let water douse fires set against the gate.

Arrowslits, the narrow vertical openings in castle walls, are also commonly called what?

Loopholes is the other name for arrowslits; the legal loophole borrows the image, the word's sense of a narrow way out of a tight spot dating from the 1660s.

What were machicolations?

Machicolations were wall-top projections with holes for dropping objects on attackers at the foot of the wall, so defenders no longer had to lean out over the parapet to hit them.

Machicolations were introduced into Western architecture as a result of what?

The Crusades brought them west: builders in the Levant had used machicolations for centuries, and returning crusaders carried the idea home to the castles of Europe.

Which French château, fortified around 950, is the oldest known castle in Europe?

Château de Doué-la-Fontaine in Anjou began as a ground-floor hall around 900 and was raised into a fortified tower around 950, making it the oldest known castle in Europe.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows attackers trying to do what to the wooden castle at Dinan?

Set it on fire is what the Tapestry's attackers try at Dinan; fire was the great threat to timber castles, and a strong argument for rebuilding them in stone.

Which weapon's earliest known European picture is in a manuscript of 1326?

The cannon in Walter de Milemete's manuscript is a vase-shaped gun firing an arrow; it was another century before artillery grew strong enough to break through stone walls.

As castles declined, what type of fortification replaced them for military purposes?

Star forts, angular artillery works of the trace italienne, replaced castles as military strongholds; they had no civil role, while lords moved into indefensible country houses.

Which castle is the longest-occupied palace in Europe?

Windsor has housed England's monarchs since Henry I, some 900 years, making it Europe's longest-occupied palace; in 1917 George V even renamed the royal house after it to shed a German name.

Neuschwanstein Castle was commissioned by which monarch?

Ludwig II of Bavaria paid for Neuschwanstein from his own fortune and heavy borrowing, not state funds; when banks threatened to seize his property, his ministers had him declared insane and deposed in 1886.

Neuschwanstein was built partly in honour of which composer?

Richard Wagner heard of the plan in a letter from the king, who promised him a castle whose halls would recall Tannhäuser and Lohengrin; the composer died in 1883 with it still unfinished.

What happened to Neuschwanstein weeks after its builder died?

Opened to visitors is the twist: the shy king built Neuschwanstein as a refuge from public life, yet within weeks of his death in 1886 crowds were touring his private rooms.

Neuschwanstein served as the inspiration for the Disneyland castle of which princess?

Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland was modelled on Neuschwanstein and opened in 1955, four years before the film it is named after reached cinemas.

Himeji Castle in Japan is nicknamed after which bird?

The white heron gives Himeji its nickname, Shirasagi-jō: the walls are coated in brilliant white plaster, which also fireproofed the timber, and the tiered roofs are said to look like a bird taking flight.

Who completely rebuilt Himeji Castle between 1601 and 1609 after receiving it from Tokugawa Ieyasu?

Ikeda Terumasa, Ieyasu's son-in-law, was granted Himeji for his service at Sekigahara in 1600 and spent eight years rebuilding it, ringing it with three water-filled ditches.

According to Guinness World Records, which is the largest ancient castle in the world?

Prague Castle holds the Guinness title; in 1618 Protestant nobles threw two royal governors out of one of its windows, the defenestration that helped set off the Thirty Years' War.

Which Polish castle is the largest in the world measured by land area?

Malbork spreads over more ground than any other castle; fighting in early 1945 destroyed more than half of it, and it took Poland decades of work to rebuild.

Which crusading order built the brick fortress of Marienburg, now in northern Poland?

The Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order, named it Marienburg after the Virgin Mary; in 1309 their Grand Master moved his seat there from Venice, making it the capital of a monastic state.

How did Poland's Casimir IV gain Marienburg in 1457?

Bought it from mercenaries: the Bohemian soldiers hired to defend Marienburg had gone unpaid and sold it to Casimir IV, and it then served Poland's kings as a residence until 1772.

Which Romanian castle is marketed abroad as "Dracula's Castle"?

Bran Castle near Brașov is sold to tourists as Dracula's Castle, although there is no evidence Bram Stoker knew of it and Vlad the Impaler is not known to have lived there.

Krak des Chevaliers in Syria was given in 1142 to which military order?

The Hospitallers received Krak des Chevaliers from Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, then rebuilt it into a fortress that could hold some 2,000 men and exact tribute from the lands around.

How was Krak des Chevaliers' garrison reportedly persuaded to surrender in 1271?

A forged letter from their Grand Master is the story told: after 36 days of siege a message arrived authorising the knights to yield, and the sultan spared their lives.

Edinburgh Castle stands on the plug of what?

Castle Rock is the plug of an extinct volcano that erupted about 350 million years ago, in the lower Carboniferous; glaciers later scraped away the softer rock around it.

Edinburgh Castle's One O'Clock Gun is fired daily except on Sundays, Christmas Day and which other day?

The One O'Clock Gun is silent on Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day; it began in 1861 as a time signal for ships in the Firth of Forth.

What is Mons Meg, displayed at Edinburgh Castle?

A 15th-century siege gun, Mons Meg is named after the Belgian town where she was forged; after her barrel burst she spent 75 years in England before a triumphant return to the castle in 1829.

Which king began the White Tower at the Tower of London?

William the Conqueror began it in the 1070s; it only became the White Tower after Henry III ordered its walls whitewashed in 1240.

Legend says the kingdom will fall if which birds ever leave the Tower of London?

Ravens: at least six are kept at the Tower, their flight feathers trimmed by the Ravenmaster so they stay; Charles II is said to have ordered them protected, though the tale may be a Victorian invention.

Which monarch gave Henry III the polar bear that was kept at the Tower of London from 1252?

The King of Norway, Haakon IV, sent the bear; London's sheriffs had to pay fourpence a day for its keep, and it was let out on a chain to fish in the Thames.

Which French king, Leonardo da Vinci's last patron, commissioned the Château de Chambord?

Francis I began Chambord in 1519 as a hunting lodge, yet he stayed there only a few weeks in his whole reign, on short hunting trips.

What is the celebrated centrepiece of the Château de Chambord, sometimes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci?

The open double-spiral staircase at Chambord's heart lets two people climb at once without ever meeting; Leonardo, who died the year building began, may have inspired it.

Which playwright premiered Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at Chambord in 1670?

Molière and his troupe first staged it at Chambord on 14 October 1670, with music by Lully, during one of Louis XIV's hunting stays at the château.

Caernarfon Castle's polygonal towers and bands of coloured stone are thought to echo the walls of which great eastern city?

Constantinople's walls are the likely model: the design echoed imperial Roman power and recalled the Welsh legend of Macsen Wledig, a Roman emperor who dreamed of a great fort at a river's mouth.

The Alhambra palace and fortress complex is in which Spanish city?

Granada's Alhambra crowns the Sabika hill; when the city fell in 1492, ending Muslim rule in Spain, the palace became the royal court of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Which dynasty, the last Muslim rulers in Spain, began the Alhambra in 1238?

Muhammad I founded the Nasrid dynasty, whose emirs kept enlarging the Alhambra until their emirate fell in 1492; Charles V later planted a Renaissance palace beside their work.

Bodiam Castle in Sussex was built in 1385, ostensibly to defend against invasion from which country?

France was the declared threat when Richard II licensed Sir Edward Dalyngrigge to fortify Bodiam in 1385; Dalyngrigge had made his own fortune there, fighting as a mercenary.

Which Danish castle is immortalised as Elsinore in Shakespeare's Hamlet?

Kronborg at Helsingør is Shakespeare's Elsinore; Hamlet was first staged there in 1816 by soldiers of the castle garrison, and later Hamlets on site have included Laurence Olivier and Jude Law.

Which Romantic poet made Chillon Castle famous with an 1816 poem about a prisoner chained in its dungeon?

Lord Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon after touring the castle with Shelley in June 1816; its hero is François Bonivard, a Genevan prior whom Bernese troops freed from the dungeon in 1536.

Eilean Donan, Scotland's much-photographed island castle, was the MacLeod clan's home in which 1986 film?

Highlander shot its clan scenes there; the castle itself is a 20th-century rebuild, since Royal Navy frigates blew up the original in 1719 for sheltering Spanish troops and it lay in ruins for 200 years.

Hohenzollern Castle is the ancestral seat of the dynasty that gave which country its last emperors?

Germany's Hohenzollern emperors took their name from this Swabian hilltop; today's castle is the third there, built from 1846 by Frederick William IV of Prussia as a memorial to his family.

Which Japanese castle's main tower is a 1931 concrete rebuild with an elevator?

Osaka Castle's tower is a ferro-concrete copy; only twelve Japanese castles, Himeji among them, still have their original keeps, the rest lost to demolition, fire or wartime bombing.

Which castle, the largest in Wales, is surrounded by a vast system of artificial lakes?

Caerphilly, begun by Gilbert de Clare in 1268, covers some 30 acres; its south-east tower leans about ten degrees from upright, further than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Master James of Saint George, Edward I's castle designer, built which castle?

Beaumaris on Anglesey, begun in 1295, was Master James's last Welsh castle; money ran short as Edward I turned to war in Scotland, and it was never finished.

Which king rebuilt Dover Castle with its great tower in the 1180s?

Henry II spent lavishly on the great tower, perhaps to impress grand pilgrims on their way to Becket's shrine at Canterbury, since he owned little else in Kent.

What is the fortified outwork of rampart, ditch and tower built in front of a castle gatehouse called?

A barbican stood outside the main line of defence, so attackers had to fight through it first, and it dictated the only approach to the gate; castle builders took it up in the later Middle Ages.

Which duchess married King Charles VIII at Château de Langeais in 1491?

Anne of Brittany had already been married by proxy to Maximilian of Austria, a union later annulled; she wed Charles VIII in the great hall of Langeais on 6 December 1491.

King John brought down a corner of Rochester Castle's keep in 1215 by burning the fat of forty what?

Pigs supplied the fuel: John ordered forty of the fattest sent at speed, the blaze went into a mine dug under the south-east corner, and that corner of the keep collapsed.

In a medieval castle, the small chamber known as a garderobe most commonly served as what?

A toilet is what the word usually means in a castle: a simple hole emptying down the outside wall, although a garderobe was first a secure store for clothes and valuables.

Leeds Castle stands not in the Yorkshire city of Leeds but near Maidstone in which English county?

Kent is the home of Leeds Castle, built on islands in a lake beside a village also called Leeds, and Henry VIII remodelled it for his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Which Northumberland castle stood in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films?

Alnwick Castle is the lived-in seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, and its turn as Hogwarts in 2001 and 2002 brought a surge of public interest.

Kissing a stone set in the battlements of which Irish castle is said to bring the gift of eloquence?

Blarney Castle, near Cork, asks a lot of its visitors: to reach the stone they must climb to the top and lean over backwards on the edge of the parapet.

Which stately home, seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, is the main filming location of Downton Abbey?

Highclere Castle also holds an Egyptian collection, because its 5th Earl employed Howard Carter in the search for the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Hever Castle was the childhood home of which queen, later beheaded by her husband Henry VIII?

Anne Boleyn spent her early youth at Hever, and after her execution Henry gave the castle to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, in their annulment settlement.

Which chess piece, often nicknamed a castle, joins the king in the special move called castling?

The rook is the only piece that castles with the king, and modern chess writing treats "castle" as an informal, old-fashioned name for it.

A 12th-century tale set the conception of which legendary figure at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall?

King Arthur was placed at Tintagel by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and a century later an Earl of Cornwall built the castle there to link himself to the legend.

The ruined Urquhart Castle, whose garrison blew up its own gatehouse, overlooks which Scottish loch?

Loch Ness stretches below the headland where Urquhart Castle stands, and its garrison wrecked the gatehouse themselves so that Jacobites could not move back in.

Which future king was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle by his mother, the Queen?

Charles III followed a precedent set in 1911, when the future Edward VIII was invested there at the urging of David Lloyd George, a Welshman raised nearby.

Which monarch was crowned as a baby at Stirling Castle after the death of her father, James V?

Mary, Queen of Scots had been brought to Stirling Castle for safety that summer and was crowned in its chapel royal when she was only months old.

Which Scottish castle, bought by Prince Albert in 1852, is where Elizabeth II died in 2022?

Balmoral was bought from the Farquharson family for Queen Victoria's household, and Albert himself amended the architect's designs for the new house.

The Yeomen Warders, ceremonial guardians of the Tower of London, are better known by what nickname?

Beefeaters is a nickname of uncertain origin that the warders share with the Yeomen of the Guard, a separate corps of royal bodyguards.

Allied officers held in which German castle secretly built a glider in its attic in World War II?

Colditz held officers who kept escaping from other camps, and their glider was never flown because the castle was liberated soon after it was finished.

Which Scottish castle played Winterfell in Game of Thrones and Castle Leoch in Outlander?

Doune had already hosted Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which used its halls and kitchen for several different castles after other owners withdrew permission.

Which Russian word, meaning a fortress within a city, names citadels in Kazan, Novgorod and Moscow?

Kremlin is a general word, and many historic Russian cities have one of their own; Moscow's became so famous that the word alone can mean the Russian government.

According to Polish legend, which creature had its den in the hill beneath Wawel Castle in Kraków?

A dragon is said to have plagued Kraków until it was tricked into swallowing bait stuffed with sulphur, a ruse that one later telling credits to a cobbler.

Tunnels in the cliffs under Dover Castle were the headquarters for which World War II operation?

The Dunkirk evacuation, code-named Operation Dynamo, was directed by Admiral Bertram Ramsay from tunnels first dug as barracks during the Napoleonic Wars.

Which reformer hid in Wartburg Castle as Junker Jörg while translating the New Testament?

Martin Luther turned the New Testament into German in about ten weeks at the Wartburg, where legend has him hurling an inkwell at the Devil.

Which Shakespeare title character is thane of Glamis, the Scottish seat where the Queen Mother grew up?

Macbeth is thane of Glamis in the play, although the historical ruler of that name, who died in 1057, had no connection to the castle at all.

Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo, later a papal fortress, began as the tomb of which Roman ruler?

Hadrian commissioned the huge drum as a mausoleum for himself and his family, and the popes later turned it into a castle dedicated to the Archangel Michael.

Which English king built Château Gaillard above the Seine in just two years to defend Normandy?

Richard I, the Lionheart, began it in 1196, but within a decade the fortress had fallen to Philip II after a lengthy siege.

Edo Castle, seat of the Tokugawa shoguns, stood at the heart of which modern Japanese city?

Tokyo is the modern name of Edo, and after the last shogun resigned the castle grounds became the Imperial Palace.

Predjama Castle in Slovenia, seat of a notorious robber baron, is built into the mouth of what?

A cave gave the outlaw Erasmus of Lueg a refuge when he fled the vengeance of Frederick III, though the story ends with him killed after a long siege.

Which walled city restored by Viollet-le-Duc gave its name to a tile-laying board game?

Carcassonne nearly lost its ramparts: an 1849 decree to demolish them caused an uproar, the government backed down, and Viollet-le-Duc was brought in to restore them.

Which English city takes its name from a fortress built in 1080 by a son of William the Conqueror?

Newcastle began as the 'New Castle upon Tyne' that Robert Curthose raised in timber on his way home from a campaign in Scotland.

The corridors of Nijō Castle in Kyoto are famous for chirping floors named after which songbird?

Nightingale floors chirp because their nails rub against a clamp as the boards flex, and a sign at the castle says the sound was never intended as an alarm.

Which author died before he could finish 'The Castle', a novel published against his wishes in 1926?

Franz Kafka had told his friend Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished work, but Brod set about publishing it instead.

Which annual August spectacle of massed bands is performed on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle?

The Military Tattoo fills temporary grandstands on the castle esplanade each evening of its run, and around 220,000 people a year watch it live.

Which warlord began Osaka Castle in 1583, planning a gold-leafed tower to outdo Oda Nobunaga's?

Toyotomi Hideyoshi finished the castle in 1597 and died a year later; by 1614 Tokugawa Ieyasu was besieging the Toyotomi clan inside it.

Castel del Monte, the Apulian castle on Italy's one-cent euro coin, is famous for which ground plan?

Octagonal throughout, with an eight-sided tower at each corner, it was built in the 1240s by Frederick II, whose many other Apulian castles look nothing like it.

Which Welsh castle's seven-year stand in the Wars of the Roses is remembered in a famous song?

Harlech was held by the Lancastrians until Yorkist troops forced its surrender in 1468, the stand commemorated in the march "Men of Harlech".

What name is given to the deliberate wrecking of castles, widespread after the English Civil War?

Slighting was rarely blind destruction: because a castle was a home and an office as well as a stronghold, the wreckers weighed which of those roles to end.

Which rival of King Stephen is said to have slipped out of besieged Oxford Castle dressed in white?

Empress Matilda, in the popular telling, waited for the mill stream to freeze and crossed the snow in white as camouflage, slipping past Stephen's sentries at night.

Lady Mary Bankes led the defence of which Dorset castle through two sieges in the English Civil War?

Corfe was among the last royalist strongholds in southern England when it finally fell to an assault, and Parliament then ordered it wrecked.

Which architect, the first woman licensed in California, spent more than two decades building Hearst Castle?

Julia Morgan was first asked only for something more comfortable on the family's hilltop, a commission that grew into a castle under almost continual construction.

What was Warwolf, which Edward I ordered built for his 1304 siege of Stirling Castle?

A trebuchet believed to be the largest ever made, Warwolf filled thirty wagons in pieces, and by some accounts Edward insisted on testing it even after the garrison gave up.

The oubliette, a cell entered only by a ceiling hatch, is named after a French verb meaning what?

To forget is the sense of the verb oublier, apt for a basement room whose only way in or out was a hole high overhead.

On a castle battlement, what is each solid upright block between the gaps called?

A merlon gave an archer cover, the gap beside it is a crenel, and a run of the two is what makes a parapet crenellated.

What did the fletcher of a medieval castle make for its garrison?

Arrows were the fletcher's trade: strictly, the craftsman fitted the feather vanes, called fletchings, that keep a shaft flying straight.

What title was held by a noblewoman who attended a queen as a companion rather than a servant?

Lady-in-waiting was a post for women of rank, usually a step below the mistress they attended, who acted as her secretary, courtier and confidante.

After serving as a page from the age of seven, a boy training for knighthood rose to which rank?

Squire comes from a word for shield bearer, and from about fourteen the boy saddled horses and looked after a knight's weapons and armour.

The medieval butler's title comes from an Old French word for the officer in charge of what?

Wine bottles gave the butler his name, and his storeroom, the buttery, was named for its casks of drink and had nothing to do with butter.

In Tudor England, what did a gong farmer dig out and cart away, permitted to work only at night?

Human waste from cesspits was the gong farmer's load, work thought so off-putting that those who did it were nicknamed nightmen.

Which officer of a medieval castle bore a title that originally meant 'horse servant'?

The marshal began as a stable keeper, and as such men became trusted members of medieval courts the title climbed until it named the highest military ranks.

The mews of a medieval castle, a word later used for stables, first housed which animals?

Hawks were confined in a mews while they moulted, and the stable sense arose only because royal stables in London were built on a former hawk mews.

Besides castellan, what title was held by the officer who governed a medieval castle for its lord?

Constable comes from a late Roman title meaning count of the stables; in a castle the post covered the garrison, the defences and justice over the surrounding lands.

What was the duty of an almoner, a chaplain or church officer in a great medieval household?

Giving money to the poor was the almoner's office, and the title descends from the same Greek word that produced "alms".

Which title for the mistress of a castle later named a waist chain hung with keys and scissors?

Chatelaine first meant only the lady of the castle, who wore her keys at her belt; the ornamental chain that borrowed the name came much later.