Castles: Part 3 - Medieval Fortress

Good Morning Room 3

Bienvenue (Welcome) to Part 3 of the Castles posts. Part 3 is about Medieval fortresses! Boys ready your swords and girls grab you bow and arrows because it is time to protect the castle.

I have been lucky enough to visit two medieval fortresses in France and they were both amazing!

These are a special type of castle because within the huge castle walls is also the town. Many of these are now named 'old cities'.

Aigues-Mortes 

Aigues-Mortes is just outside the large city of Montpellier. The huge walls of this fortress have been well preserved. Inside the city walls is a town, this town is like any other with restaurants, shops and people. 

View of Aigues-Mortes from above. You can see the walls and towers surrounding the city.

We went up the towers and walked around the whole outside (perimeter) of the city's walls. It was really fun to imagine when these walls would have protect the castle and the people that lived in the townships. Along the walls there are small slits where guards would have keep watch with their weapons.

One of the famous towers of Aigues Mortes. The french word for tower is tours. This is Tours Constance.

At the top of the tower it can get a little windy.

Gates protecting the entry.

These were made from iron - they would have been very heavy the lift.

One of the canon balls

One of the specially designed holes that they would drop the canon balls into.

If they were under attack they would use these weapons to defend their land for their king. One of the interesting weapons were huge canon balls. They drop these huge balls, some weight more than 50kg over the walls. Sometimes they would drop them down specially made holes in the castles that were before the gates.   

I really enjoyed learning all the medieval history of this huge fortress. 

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is another medieval city that has been well preserved and it is huge!

View from above of Cite de Carcassonne

Carcassonne had huge walls protecting it's city and castle. You could walk on top of these walls too.

Miss Stinson in front of Carcassonne. It is 9.30pm. The sun is just starting to set.

 The towers to go into the castle are huge! They used to have a draw bridge that would be lowered and raised for people to enter and exit the castle. Now they have built a bridge so people can get in and out easily.

This is the basic design of a drawbridge on a medieval castle. It helped stop the enemy from entering the castle.

I am standing where the old drawbridge would have been. It has now been replaced by a permanent bridge.

 Inside this castle it had many facts about medieval times. One thing that I found fascinating at Carcassonne was there was a real mile stone. Back in the medieval times they didn't have road signs like we do now telling us how far to the next city or town. They used mile stones on the side of the road. Nowadays we use the term mile stone for when someone reaches an important time in their lives. For example, losing your first tooth, riding a two wheel bike with no training wheels, or your birthdays are all mile stones.

This is a real mile stone!

One last thing about this city that was really cool was everything was set out like an old medieval style city. All the cafes and restaurants had medieval style names, you could buy wooden swords and shields and you could ride around in a horse and cart. One of the coolest things was the lolly shop. All the lollies were in big barrels! 

Barrels upon barrels of lollies

More barrels! 

Aigues-Mortes and Carcassonne were both very cool medieval cities. Could you imagine if Camboon Primary had to turn into a medieval fortress? The office would become the castle and we would have to fight to protect it! We could build up and protect the walls!

I hope you are all enjoying the last couple of weeks of Term 2 - holidays soon!

Au revoir

Miss Stinson

Castles: Part 2 - Bedrooms

Good Morning Room 3

Welcome to Part 2 of the Castles series in this blog. Part 2 is focussing on bedrooms throughout these famous chateaus.

The bedrooms are huge and when I say huge some of the bedrooms are the size of your whole house! Yep, believe it.

Here are some of the beds in the castles. The beds are all four poster beds which means they have large wooden posts are each of the corners of the bed. They have large thick hand made canopies that hang from the top of the bed. At night they closed the curtains on all sides of the bed and there were 2 main reasons for this.

Reason 1: Warmth. The castles had very large rooms, often with no carpeting or heating so it would get very cold. Closing the curtains maintained warmth in the bed.

Reason 2: Privacy. They also closed the curtains on the beds for privacy. Often rooms were shared and people working in the castles would walk in and out the rooms so those that were asleep did not want to be disturbed. Think of it like closing your door to your bedroom at home.

The details on the canopies and linen were amazing.

These beds were mainly for royalty, royalty means kings, queens, princesses and princes. Nobility may also have slept in beds like these, so lords and ladies. These were not beds for the average commoner like you and me.

True or False question. People slept sitting up?

That is actually true! Many people slept in an upright position with their legs out straight (like some of you do on the mat at school). They did this because they believed laying down was only for people that were no longer living. They thought it would be creepy to lay in a position like you are dead. Weird! I could not imagine having to sleep sitting up. Do not try this at home!

This is the bed that Leonardo Da Vinci slept in while he stayed in France.

The bedrooms were truly fascinating. 

I hope you are all enjoy the cold winter months. maybe you can try and make a canopy for your bed this weekend!

Au revoir

Miss Stinson