second floor of a stone structure, wood or stone?

[Mouse]

Going back to the original question for just a moment, none of the castles I've visited in England had wooden floors in the outer defence area. They're all thundering great slabs of stone, supported as Larb described by vaulted ceilings below. What you've got to remember, however, is that back in the day the average height for a man was only 5'4" due to the harder less well-nourished lives people used to live back then. Nowadays most women would be taller than that, and in fact some of the crenulations on the Welsh castles are too dangerous to allow visitors to go up the smaller towers without a guide, purely because they only just come up to the belly on us taller 'moderns'.

So the vaulted ceilings were nothing spectacular in the outer defence work - the walls and the towers, because the stairs were really quite small, and so were the rooms (except in the inner parts, like the keep).

Wooden floors would have been something of a health hazard if you think about it, since I imagine the first reaction to discovering your men were dying just trying to get into the towers would be to set a bonfire at the base of the stairs and smoke the defenders out. It would work even better, of course, if the floors were wooden.

Maybe a bonfire would be impractical to build if missiles rained down from above whenever the tower was approached, or it would have been done again and again... unless... maybe the medieval armies were not so inclined to such horribly evil ideas! I'm really not so sure I'd be able to do it if I was transported back in time and put in charge of a failing invasion force. I think I would be more inclined on second thoughts to starve them out instead. I mean - just how much food and water can you keep in a tower that's stuffed full of men and munitions?

[rdanhenry]

Actually, people in the Middle Ages were not, in general, as short as all that. Average heights varied according to local conditions, but there were populations at or near the current American levels. The general shortening of Europe came in the post-Medieval period and peaked in the early stages of industrialization. Without researching the specific population in an area at a time, you don't know what the heights were like (also, some groups are just genetically inclined to be shorter or taller, and the Welsh are somewhat shorter than other British ethnicities). Going by the article here (https://phys.org/news/2017-04-highs-...ge-height.html), peaks for height among the English came during the Roman occupation, following the Norman Conquest, following the Black Death, and the past century. The idea that shortness was a general trait of earlier humans was based on extrapolating from the diminished heights of the 17th and 18th Centuries, possibly with a bit of arrogance about the straight arrow of progress preventing recognition that the more modern period had provided less well for its people and left them shrunken compared to their more well-fed and towering ancestors.

[Redrobes]

Hmm, Now I recall that most of the castles I have visited had stone basements and maybe a stone first floor level with the ground but floors above the ground level were usually wooden. Its making me think now... Certainly towers having multiple floors had wooded upper floors. You normally see towers as hollow with stone corbels jutting out of the sides of the walls. These took the massive beams stretching across the floor then the floor was planked across those. The outer walls and barbican towers were usually stone but the keep and main tower were often wood. I think I could show examples of both TBH.

As for spiral staircases. Almost all of the ones I have seen have been clockwise but I have known a couple to be anticlockwise - I know I have the photos to prove it. The ones I recall seeing anticlockwise were mirror images of a set of stairs that were clockwise on the other side tho.

As for short I think so. Many of the beds I have seen in castles and middle aged stately homes are very short. Presumably it varies by family and race too. Scottish people were known to have been tall - maybe not as tall as the stories that were told of them but if you look at some of the (real) swords that they used, they were pretty long. A lot of historical retelling of events can skew heights so as to make the people involved more or less impressive.

Edit: Pembroke Castle in Wales with anticlockwise stairs and open tower with holes in walls for the beams. Note tho, I took the photo of the stairs because they were very unusual indeed. Almost all spiral stairs and clockwise.

Edit2: I have found another good photo from the set. Also Pembroke but this time showing some of the inner buildings. So you can see that the outer wall on the right has stone walls and tower with stone floor but the inner building has stone walls but holes in the walls for the beams again. I have put some red dots on it in case you cant spot them. That hole is a doorway onto that missing wooden floor and the arch to the right is probably a fireplace. So there is clearly a mix depending on its military and strategic importance. From my memory living quarters usually had wooden floors and garrisoned / fortifications had stone. Also note that the roof of this building would have been wood / tile or something not stone too as you can see its pitched. Ok the tiles might have been slates (probably in fact) but not like big boulder stones that you see on barbicans etc.

Edit 3: Ok last one I promise. This one is Nunny Castle with a super view of all of the floor beam holes. This is a dead cert that it was a wooden floor in this one on the upper levels.

[tilt]

Don't know about the height, but even with the stories of the huge viking warriors harrying the world, when i visited a village with houses from 1650-1940, here in Denmark I could barely fit anywhere without keeping my head down.. yep, I'm 6'4" today, but a bit smaller back at school when I visited

And now I had to check:
Vikings - average height:
Men: 171 cm (5'6")
Women: 158 cm (5'2")

[rdanhenry]

1650 is already post-medieval, though, and into the 17th-18th century long-term low of Western European heights. Also, they just didn't build for as much headroom as we do today, because it costs more to build higher and they spent much less time sitting around the house.

5'6" is taller than the average height for an American man in 1900, when Americans were probably as tall as anyone. We are taller now, but the medieval period did not represent some low point in human height. Rather, we have in the last few decades produced people who are extremely tall.

[Mouse]

I think it varies much more with diet, decade by decade. When I was in my early twenties 5'4" was the average height for a woman of my race in my country (ONS statistics), and at half an inch taller I was used to having to look down at the eye level of the majority of other people in a supermarket. I'm still the same height today (no shrinkage... yet) but these days I find myself looking up at the eyes of others in the very same supermarket, even though I believe the average height of a woman has actually fallen to 5' 3" by the very same ONS statistics. Its all a bit confusing. The reality I see right in front of me and the statistics I read don't seem to tie up at all, which makes me a little sceptical about any of the official statistics.

The only thing that makes sense to me is the fact that the doorways of different age buildings would seem to be a dead giveaway to the real average-maximum height for a person at the time they were built, and since I am supposedly within an inch and a half of average height for a woman in the UK, the same height as my Welsh grandfather used to be, and I have always had to mind my head through the doorways of Welsh castles, I would say that both he and I are likely to have been taller than the Welsh men who built them.

I don't think anyone would have built a doorway in a brand new castle that they would have had to duck to get through, but I might be wrong. Maybe there is a defensive advantage to forcing your enemy to bow their heads to get into the room where you are holed up?

Yes, the keep (the large building at the heart of the castle) mostly had wooden floors, but the towers in the outer walls were all stone floored in the ones that I visited - possibly to discourage the use of fire as previously described?


AND - I am SO sorry morganPotPie. I meant to say that your map is a good looking map the first time I commented, but I seem to have gotten carried away by the wood/stone conversation straight away!

[morganPotPie]

Thank you very much for the tips. I had no idea about the stairs in that respect, thank you!