Thursday

Scumfishing

In the Dark Ages castles were both a Good Thing and a Bad Thing. It depended on your point of view. If you were in one and wanted to stop people pinching your chickens and your daughters, they were a Good Thing. If you were outside one with a view to a bit of pillage and a chicken supper, they were a Bad Thing.

Once the gates were shut, the portcullis was down and the draw-bridge was up just about the only option open to you was to lay siege to the place and hope they ran out of cheese before you did.

You’d camp round the castle for months or sometimes years and build huge siege engines that could hurl rocks into the walls. These had limited effect, it has to be said – some of the castles had walls sixteen feet thick.


the trebuchet

All this is well and good you say, but what’s it got to do with tunneling [or typography for the matter of that]? Well when they found they couldn’t get through the walls, and struggled getting over them, what does any self-respecting Siege Army do? Call in the Tunnel Men obviously.

The Tunnel Men or Sappers as they called themselves, because they also dug trenches, or saps, which zigzagged up to castle walls, would dig under the foundations and lay fires there to de-stabilise everything. By the 15th Century, when Black Powder had filtered through from the East, they were putting gunpowder in the tunnels and blowing up the walls from below.

On the Scottish Borders, where the living was hard, and the ground was harder, they couldn’t roll siege engines across the rocky terrain and they couldn’t use tunnels to get at the foundations so they would pile wood and damp straw up against the lower walls and round the gates and doorways of a tower and set fire to it to smoke the occupiers out – this was called Scumfishing.

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