About the models
Siege in Miniature is No. 73 in Whyarium, a non-commercial catalogue of encyclopedias. It borrows the look of the plans-reliefs: the scale models of fortified towns that French military engineers built from the 1660s onward, many of which survive in a museum in Paris. Nothing here is a copy of one of them; every model is built in code.
What the models are
The castles, engines and landscapes are not surveys of real places. They are typical examples, built from what survives in standing castles and what the written sources describe, so that each part can be shown clearly. The siege models set out the ground, the walls and the attackers' lines as a model maker would, not to measured scale. Figures are oversized so that people read at all; so are the trebuchet's stones.
How the trebuchet is worked out
The trebuchet is a two-part pendulum: a rigid arm on an axle, and a sling hanging from its long end. The model writes down the energy of the falling counterweight, the turning arm, and the stone in the sling, and steps the motion forward four thousand times a second. While the stone is still in the trough, the ground pushes back on it. When the direction of the stone's flight falls to the release angle you set, the sling lets go; the stone then flies through air that slows it, with drag worked out for a sphere of stone.
It leaves out a good deal, on purpose: the counterweight is fixed to the arm (many real ones hung on a hinge and threw further for the same weight), the frame never shifts or bounces, the sling never tangles, the axle has only a little friction, and nothing wears out. With 6 t of counterweight it throws a 90 kg stone about 190 m, which sits inside what reconstructions and medieval accounts suggest.
The wall's response is not physics. It is a rule of thumb invented for the demonstration: below a certain energy the stone bounces off, then it chips the facing, cracks it, and finally starts to expose the rubble core. Real breaching took dozens or hundreds of hits on the same spot. The ram and the mine work the same way: real directions, invented numbers, and the timings of the mine squeezed from weeks into seconds.
Where the facts come from
The texts were written from published histories and the guides of the bodies that care for the castles (English Heritage, Cadw, Historic Environment Scotland and others), then checked again, line by line, by a separate pass that corrected what it could and marked what stays uncertain. Where historians disagree, about numbers, dates or famous stories, the pages say so rather than pick a side.
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Glossary
- Bailey
- An enclosed courtyard inside a castle's walls; also called a ward.
- Bastion
- An angled, arrow-shaped projection of a fortress wall, built so its guns can sweep the faces of neighbouring bastions.
- Batter
- A sloping, thickened base to a wall or tower, also called a talus.
- Belfry
- A medieval name for a movable siege tower.
- Bombard
- A large early cannon, usually firing stone balls.
- Breach
- A gap broken in a wall by guns, engines or a mine, through which attackers can storm.
- Chemise
- A wall closely surrounding a keep, forming an extra ring of defence around it.
- Corbel
- A stone bracket jutting from a wall to carry a parapet, gallery or beam.
- Counter-mine
- A tunnel dug by defenders to find and destroy an enemy mine.
- Counterscarp
- The outer slope or wall of a ditch, facing the fortress.
- Crenel
- Another name for an embrasure, the gap between two merlons.
- Curtain
- The stretch of wall between two towers or bastions.
- Donjon
- The French word for a keep, the great tower of a castle.
- Embrasure
- An opening in a parapet or wall through which a defender shoots.
- Enceinte
- The complete circuit of walls enclosing a castle or fortified town.
- Glacis
- A gentle bank of earth sloping away from a fortress, exposing attackers and shielding the walls from gunfire.
- Merlon
- The solid raised part of a crenellated parapet, between two embrasures.
- Motte
- An artificial earth mound carrying a tower, the heart of an early Norman castle.
- Palisade
- A fence of sharpened timber stakes used as a wall.
- Ravelin
- A triangular outwork built in front of the wall between two bastions.
- Sally port
- A small gate from which defenders could make a sudden attack, or sortie, on the besiegers.
- Sapper
- A soldier who digs trenches, tunnels and mines in a siege.
- Scarp
- The inner slope or wall of a ditch, directly below the rampart.
- Springald
- A medieval torsion engine that shot heavy bolts, like a Roman ballista.
- Trace italienne
- The Italian-born system of low, angled bastion fortification used from the 16th century.