[HN Gopher] Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise f...
___________________________________________________________________
Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the
defender's advantage
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 216 points
Date : 2023-10-09 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fakehistoryhunter.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fakehistoryhunter.net)
| Levitating wrote:
| This reminds me of the many articles stating that pirates didn't
| wear eye-patches to cover up an injury but that they used them
| for for their eyes to adjust to the dark when entering a ships
| hold. Even though there's more evidence that eye injuries were
| probably just common across pirates.
|
| Applying Okkam's razor I'd conclude that most medieval staircases
| were probably build clockwise simply because most staircases were
| already built clockwise.
| JdeBP wrote:
| It's amusing that the Hacker News reaction so far is to advance
| alternative hypotheses as to why helical staircases have a
| predominant chirality, without first establishing, as one should
| do if one were rigorous, that there is a need for an explanation
| in the first place, and that this is not, as is suggested in
| other articles (including one hyperlinked by the headlined one
| here), just a statistical fluke without significance that doesn't
| need explanation.
|
| To put things in modern parlance: A meme, invented from whole
| cloth by Daily Telegraph writer Theodore Andrea Cook 120 years
| ago because he liked fencing, was still going strong on Twitter
| in 2022; and people are still falling prey to believing its
| assumptions.
|
| One has to appreciate the additional irony of the Twitter account
| actually being named "history _in memes_ ".
| the_af wrote:
| Agreed! I like that there _has_ to be an explanation. "Just
| because" or "it's the same either way" aren't acceptable. I
| suppose the internet loves to solve a puzzle (a sentiment I
| understand and share!).
| [deleted]
| fsckboy wrote:
| this title/headline is ambiguous as to what it means.
|
| claim: "Medieval staircases were built going clockwise for the
| defender's advantage"
|
| counterclaim: "no they were not; medieval staircases were not
| built going clockwise for the defender's advantage"... it was for
| a different reason, or even, they weren't even built that way.
|
| clarifying original claim: "Medieval staircases were not built
| going clockwise for the defender's advantage, they were built
| counterclockwise."
|
| confused? me too.
|
| The title should be, "Exploring whether medieval staircases were
| built with chirality to benefit right handed defenders."
| codedokode wrote:
| Such staircases are pretty scary to climb even without a knight
| attacking you because there is nothing to hold, the steps are not
| flat and it is easy to fall down.
|
| Also, such straicases are used not only in medieval castles. A
| modern Russian 19th century cathedral also has a staircase of
| such type. Probably, because cathedrals must be built using
| traditional architecture?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That cathedral you are talking about, has two spiral
| staircases, one counter-clockwise and the other clockwise.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Usually if the siege got to the point where attackers were IN
| YOUR TOWERs, then the next logical step would have been to either
| surrender or collapse the tower on the attackers to win a
| tactical victory.
|
| I am willing to bet $10000, that the number of sieges won or lost
| due to a staircase fight between knights is 0.
|
| Also I wonder what led to this hypothesis being created in the
| first place? That's a much more interesting question to me. Was
| it some eccentric historian just inventing it?
| chmod600 wrote:
| Considering that the construction costs are identical, there
| needn't be a very strong reason to do it one way vs the other.
| Any reason would be enough, which might include some remote
| possibility of a battle advantage.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What about evidence for a simpler theory, such as they were built
| in the direction that made most sense from where the doors would
| wind up?
|
| Like if you go through the bottom/top door, it's more natural to
| walk straight forwards and then curve, rather than walk in, turn
| 90deg, and then walk upwards.
|
| Obviously this wouldn't matter if the door were located facing
| precisely the middle of the spiral, but it certainly does if it
| more naturally opens on one side of the spiral.
| pzs wrote:
| Doors can be built to open in four ways: inwards or outwards,
| hinge on the left or right. (Sorry if the language is wrong,
| non-native speaker here.) Considering that I am not sure I can
| follow why the door would make one direction more natural than
| the other. Maybe because there were more right-handed people
| than left-handed which made one setup more natural than the
| other?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sorry, I don't mean the direction of the door but the
| _position_ of the door itself in the wall.
|
| I can't draw anything here, but imagine the staircase is the
| width of two doors. So the door could be on either side
| (closer to either edge).
|
| If the door is on the left, you want the staircase to curve
| upwards to the right. And vice-versa.
| bluGill wrote:
| Often the room itself gives you reason to prefer one
| direction or another. If the door is in a corner you want the
| open door to be against the wall (unless you don't - I can't
| think of why, but...). If there are other doors on the same
| wall you need to consider them - sometimes hinges all the
| same for symmetry; sometimes opposite so the the doors don't
| bang into each other (when they are right next to each other.
| gowld wrote:
| > hinge on the left or right.
|
| Not "left" or "right", which is different on roomside and
| stairside, but inside or outside of the spiral.
| w-ll wrote:
| Wouldn't the doors likely be on the wall of the spiral. A
| door in the spiral stairs seems very awkward.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Left and right are usually (at least here in Germany)
| defined relative to "standing on the side the door will
| open towards and facing the door".
| MarketingJason wrote:
| What if it was still about the weapons - but more about them
| being sheathed? A right hander will usually have a sword sheathed
| on their left hip sticking out and down. Maybe it was a safety
| measure to have the tip not hanging over the inner part of the
| stairwell as someone was going up where someone behind them could
| get poked versus more along the outer wall?
| aristofun wrote:
| This is what strikes me more than the topic:
|
| > The person below you has the advantage of jabbing at your legs
|
| Weren't virtually all fighters in those times men?
| goodpoint wrote:
| No.
| aristofun wrote:
| oh really, how much evidence do you have about women storming
| the castles all the way through inside?
| JdeBP wrote:
| How much evidence do you have that "storming the castles"
| was how sieges ended _at all_? Errol Flynn movies are not
| reality.
|
| To quote James Wright, who is an archaeologist:
|
| > we know a fair bit about how sieges were ended, and it
| was never the desperate violent rout on the staircases that
| is so beloved of Hollywood films.
|
| https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-
| my...
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Can you expand on that?
| aristofun wrote:
| why use (abuse) the word "person" then?
| beej71 wrote:
| Because if you say the "man" it implies that women fighters
| would not have the same advantage, when clearly they would.
|
| As since men are people, I'd argue it's not an abuse of
| language.
| aristofun wrote:
| again -- in those times women did not fight to get
| advantage in the first place why not use this to be more
| precise in the language?
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Majority, but not all were men? But why care about that
| at all and consider it the most striking thing about the
| article? Even rethinking it 3 times I'm not sure what you
| find preciser in this, or how it is not completely
| irrelevant?
| dplavery92 wrote:
| From the captioned art in the article: "Siege, from the
| Peterborough Psalter, early 14th century, via the KBR Museum,
| Belgium. Yes, those defenders are all women."
| hnarn wrote:
| So what?
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| Saying it definitively didn't factor in is _at least_ as stupid
| as saying it definitively did.
| usrusr wrote:
| Long article without even the tiniest hint of evidence to support
| the claim that the easier to defend theory wasn't the reason why
| apparently there is a considerable imbalance in staircase
| direction.
|
| The reality is that most of the time most castles were not
| involved in violence at all (outside of rough methods of keeping
| order I guess). Even if staircase fighting never ever happened,
| the _imagination_ of heroically fending off invaders who made it
| that far in person could have easily been a clever pose, a tool
| of the trade for architects to give the impression of really
| knowing _all_ the tricks. Claiming better defensibility would
| have made an even bigger impression on the future inhabitant than
| on tourists hundreds of years later. Because, assuming that the
| article is not wrong in this, the customer has just as little
| experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes.
|
| Medieval snake-oil, claiming that it never happened should
| require better evidence than "you really would not want to ever
| let invaders get that far".
|
| If it's a 30/70 distribution chances are that almost half of
| those 70 are just as random or motivated by more pressing
| concerns than the "wrong direction" 30, and of the remaining 40
| that make up the imbalance, a certain amount will be habitual
| copies of conscious decisions for the snake-oil winding.
|
| Yeah, whenever a tour guide brings up the defensive advantage
| story, chances are that this particular staircase wasn't really
| designed as defense-optimized but random/some other
| reason/habitual. But unless someone proposes a better explanation
| for the imbalance (I don't know, some pseudoreligious thing
| perhaps? Some echo from whatever way Romans preferred? Oncoming
| traffic etiquette, like climbing side steps toward the steep
| side, taking a break grabbing the stair's spine while the
| descending side slides past at the outer wall, and they'd both
| rather have their dominant hand wall-side?), it's a rather bold
| claim to call it a victorian era fabrication.
| p1esk wrote:
| _the customer has just as little experience fighting in a
| staircase as the tourist hordes_
|
| You're talking about a customer who most likely received a
| rigorous sword fight training, and probably participated in
| numerous knight tourneys. And spent his life living in castles,
| walking up and down those stairs. And who most likely knew
| someone who had personally engaged in castle offense or defense
| (the world was a lot smaller back then). Somehow I think this
| customer would know a thing or two about defending castles.
|
| You could be right about the sales tactics, but comparing a
| medieval castle owner and a 21st century tourist is a bit much.
| [deleted]
| civilitty wrote:
| I recommend Bret Devereaux's series on medieval fortifications,
| specifically the manpower problem [1]:
|
| _> While sapping (tunneling under and collapsing
| fortifications) remained in use, apart from filling in ditches,
| the mole-and-ramp style assaults of the ancient world are far
| less common, precisely because most armies (due to the
| aforementioned fragmentation combined with the increasing
| importance in warfare of a fairly small mounted elite) lacked
| both the organizational capacity and the raw numbers to do
| them._
|
| Overall, medieval armies just didn't have the resources to
| siege for as long and as intensely as the Romans and other
| ancient armies did. Until the early modern period and gunpowder
| artillery, defenders in castles had a much bigger advantage
| over attackers so often attackers just didn't bother. They were
| more common than actual pitched battles though and most ended
| through surrender rather than successful assault.
|
| The book Devereaux mentions _Soldiers' Lives Through History:
| The Middle Ages_ is a great resource for further reading -
| there 's a whole chapter on sieges. It starts out describing
| how much worse the life for siegers often was compared to the
| besieged.
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-
| part...
| JdeBP wrote:
| You have the burden of proof the wrong way around.
|
| The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by
| Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the Victorian Era,
| but was _later_. Cook was not a historian, but a sports writer
| and art critic. The book was _Spirals in Nature and Art_. And
| this hypothesis is a half-paragraph aside, with words like
| "would" and "probable", given with _zero_ supporting evidence,
| and clearly one (as xe wrote "I think") that Cook originated.
|
| The burden of proof is to prove that _that_ is _true_ , not to
| blithely assume that it is true and demand that there be
| evidence to prove it false.
|
| Especially since Theodore Andrea Cook held that "right-handed
| spirals are more common in staircases". By "right-handed
| spiral", Cook actually meant anti-clockwise staircases (as can
| be seen from figure 29 in the book). Not even Cook believed the
| premise that has given rise to this 120-year-old myth. Cook
| wrote that anti-clockwise staircases were "more common"
| _despite_ the fact that clockwise ones would have been better
| for this reason, a reason that xe invented from whole cloth
| without any support from how helical staircases even featured
| in any siege of any castle in history.
|
| 120 years of uncritical out of context repetition and
| augmentation later, here we are; with people demanding that the
| burden of proof lies with those who challenge something that
| was never proven in the first place, not expertly held, and not
| even held true by its own originator.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Even if defensibility was not the primary design concern, I am
| sure it factored in as an obvious consideration to accommodate
| when possible - eg if you could make it go any which way, you
| might as well make it go the way that gives you a better chance
| in the most likely scenario.
| karaterobot wrote:
| To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of
| stairs _were_ built clockwise, which seems salient. And the
| strongest arguments against the myth are that fighting on a
| staircase is bad no matter what (granted), and that certain,
| specific, famous staircases (like those in the Tower of London)
| were built counter-clockwise. To me, that 's not a slam dunk case
| against the myth, it could be explained by there not being a
| centralized Castle Staircase Building Code across all Europe,
| over the course of 1000 years, which was not a misunderstanding I
| had anyway. I am unconvinced for now!
| afterburner wrote:
| The article is from the point of view of a responsible
| historian.
|
| There is no evidence of the myth being true. There are no
| sources in history suggesting it.
|
| It might be true. But there is no evidence that it is.
|
| Proving it false is another matter.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't know about that. They seemed to be definitively
| saying the staircases were not built to aid defenders, but
| didn't have strong evidence for that. If they'd said "there
| is no positive evidence that..." or "we have no reason to
| believe that..." then I'd agree with you, but what they wrote
| was:
|
| > Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the
| defender's advantage
|
| and
|
| > it's not true.
|
| Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative
| evidence to support them.
|
| In fairness, their conclusion is more measured:
|
| > So in conclusion: there's no evidence for this claim and it
| also doesn't make a lot of sense.
|
| But that's not the headline they went with.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| by default, it is untrue until sufficient evidence arises
| that it is true
|
| see also: Russell's teapot
|
| _[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot_
| ncallaway wrote:
| Okay, so let me them make the claim: "It is false that
| staircases were built clockwise to advantage the
| defender".
|
| Then, since we agree that the claim has no evidence to
| support it, we assume it is false.
|
| Therefore, we conclude, "it is true that staircases were
| built clockwise to advantage the defender".
|
| I agree that the burden of proof lies upon the person
| that makes the claim. But that doesn't mean we assume the
| opposite of the claim must be true until they do. It
| means we assume ignorance.
|
| So, a more correct statement would be: "In the absence of
| evidence of why the staircases were constructed, we do
| not know why they were constructed".
|
| To say the absence of evidence proves the opposite of the
| claim is wrong.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| the actual (and also initial) claim here is that the myth
| is true, the author is simply pointing out that there is
| insufficient evidence to support the myth, and thus we
| fall back on the null hypothesis, aka the default: that
| there does not yet exist sufficient evidence to conclude
| the myth is anything other than false.
|
| _> But that doesn 't mean we assume the opposite of the
| claim must be true until they do. It means we assume
| ignorance._
|
| Regardless of the wording, the gist is the same: we _/
| don't/_ assume ignorance, we treat the claim, like
| Russell's teapot _[0]_ , or any other unsupported claim,
| as false until such evidence arises, since there are an
| infinite number of unfalsifiable premises, and we neither
| want to, nor do, in practice, treat them all as maybe
| true, maybe not, forever.
|
| tl;dr: As Russell's teapot _[0]_ demonstrates, _yes_ ,
| there is a default, and that is that a thing is false
| unless sufficient evidence exists to believe otherwise.
| _No_ , we don't treat all unfalsified (and unfalsifiable)
| hypotheses as unknown and assume ignorance.
|
| _[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot_
| calderknight wrote:
| If there's no evidence about a situation, there's no
| evidence for _any_ theory about the situation. There 's
| no evidence for the proposition _A_. There 's no evidence
| for the proposition _not A_. By your reasoning we have to
| believe that both these propositions are untrue: _A_ and
| _not A_. This seems totally insane.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| As Russell's teapot _[0]_ demonstrates, that is not the
| case. A thing, whether the existence of a teapot floating
| in space, or an old architecture myth, is by default
| untrue until sufficient evidence arises showing it is
| true. This article is simply pointing out that such
| evidence doesn 't exist in the staircase attacker theory.
|
| We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot
| exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis
| (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been
| falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a
| thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe
| true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as
| equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying
| to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a
| thousand more.
|
| That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the
| person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief
|
| To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to
| identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in
| statistics, A = _" this staircase explanation has
| sufficient evidence to say it is true"_, not-A = _" this
| staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence
| to conclude it is true"_. Not-A here is example of what
| is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null
| hypothesis is the default.
|
| _[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot_
| calderknight wrote:
| The point of Russell's argument is that we should not
| believe in the Christian god/the teapot. Not that we
| should believe that those things do not exist.
|
| It's an argument against believing without evidence, not
| for believing without evidence.
| karaterobot wrote:
| My comment was that I was not convinced of the argument
| the article made, not that I was convinced the opposite
| was true.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The article doesn't make any arguments, it simply
| examines the arguments made by others, and concludes that
| those arguments aren't convincing enough to conclude the
| myth is true (and thus we fall back to the default: that
| the myth is false)
| bluGill wrote:
| Even if you can prove it true in some specific castle that
| doesn't not mean it is true for all. Maybe other castles just
| copied the one where it was - often type of thing is done in
| architecture without realizing why, and so one castle built
| for fighting on stairs was copied in others without the other
| features that make fighting on stairs possible. (Or maybe the
| first was built for fighting on stairs, but after it was
| built practice proved it was still a bad idea - lots of
| variations on this idea).
| [deleted]
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70%
| of stairs were built clockwise
|
| I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a
| staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern
| staircases are built in a particular direction?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I think the slam dunk against the myth is simply that there's
| no evidence for it at all. If you have no primary sources or
| archaeological evidence, and the only "source" is tour guides,
| then there's no reason to believe it.
|
| It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if
| it's definitely true is simply wrong.
| [deleted]
| jjk166 wrote:
| There's no evidence for an alternative either. We simply
| don't have surviving documents that talk about the logic of
| why staircases were built that way, which is hardly
| surprising given that even nowadays when books are
| dramatically cheaper to produce, architects don't tend to
| write down the logic they use when designing the details of
| functional structures.
|
| The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything
| else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly
| not proven to be false.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I don't see anything in your comment that contradicts what
| I said:
|
| > It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as
| if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
| whall6 wrote:
| I think all the article is arguing is not to just accept that
| explanation as fact. There is no conclusive evidence that this
| is the reason stairs were built this way.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I'd imagine they were built in a direction without a ton of
| thought, and it's not really surprising to me that if you
| basically flip a coin - 70% of them landed one way.
|
| If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it
| would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows
| would work - for example.
|
| If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be
| better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc
| wizofaus wrote:
| If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then
| chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin
| flips seems unimaginably small. More likely the first one
| happened to built that way and most others copied that until
| someone wondered if you couldn't go the other way instead. Or
| maybe it is connected to handedness in some other way (easier
| to draw the design? To lay the stone work? Traditions around
| who should pass who and how if somebody going up encounters
| somebody coming down? Who knows...)
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think it would be more likely that the staircase fit
| better going one direction than the other. Eg taking the
| most used path to the staircase and going straight onto the
| stairs vs having to do a 90 degree turn before you can step
| on the stairs.
| notahacker wrote:
| It seems unlikely that random chance would lead to a
| 70/30 ratio for "best fit" either, so that just seems to
| be moving the phenomenon that needs explanation to
| _layouts around stairwells_ , which certainly weren't
| standardised in the medieval era.
|
| The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like
| 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance
| explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise
| staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise
| individual towers were less important to the overall
| defensive scheme
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I am not a medieval stonemason but these were lifelong
| craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought.
| They did it with one specific thought it their mind I
| suspect, it was the way that they were most familiar with
| doing it so it was the fastest / easier / cheapest way to do
| it! The same reason any modern craftsman does quite a lot of
| things.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it
| without a lot of thought_
|
| There are _so_ many things that could bias this result.
| Maybe it 's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps,
| north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in
| certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells
| tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there
| is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those
| hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I'd like to see that 70% distribution mapped out against
| corner adjacency. As in, if I have a square room [ ] and I
| put a stairway on the right wall in the bottom corner
| there, there is a good chance I'm going to go counter
| clockwise, but if I put it on the right top, I'll go
| clockwise. I feel like the general flow of a room needs to
| be mapped out on this as well to get the full context.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Flipping a coin 1000 times and getting >=700 heads has a
| ~1/10^24 probability.
|
| There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it
| was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
| bluGill wrote:
| But just that in some direction maters for some reason
| (layout of the castle forced a direction and thus this
| works out to random chance?), and the rest was just what
| the mason felt like building (default to right handed?).
| You can come up with your own story about why direction
| would matter, and why for the rest there would/would not be
| a bias in direction. Then play with how random each one is
| to get the 70/30 percentage split.
| canadianfella wrote:
| If it was up to a coin flip, it wouldn't be 70 percent.
| civilitty wrote:
| The source mentioned in TFA is much better, with more photos and
| original content:
| https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/12/18/no-medieval-sta...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| But did staircases going into basements go clockwise?
| sethammons wrote:
| There we go; now something to falsify against. If the left or
| right is a defensive choice, we should see the reverse
| handedness defending attackers going down. Great point.
| some_random wrote:
| I'm not actually convinced, there's been a disconnect between the
| theory of war and the reality for as long as there's been war.
| Just because you'd never actually want to fight on a staircase
| doesn't mean that money and thought didn't go into defending a
| staircase from its middle. How many militaries today still issue
| bayonets to foot soldiers and handguns to rear line officers?
| samus wrote:
| A modern bayonet is basically a combat knife, not a single-use
| item. Even though it has become rare, it is occasionally
| deployed.
|
| Officers simply retain their handguns when they get promoted
| into rear line positions; no special accommodation is required.
| pagekicker wrote:
| This article is not very good, notably, it is almost all
| guessing, no evidence.
|
| An explanation that I would have found plausible: building stairs
| clockwise is cheaper somehow.
| JdeBP wrote:
| The irony is that you would have found the original proposition
| of the hypothesis, by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903, to be
| _exactly the same thing_. Cook presented zero evidence, clearly
| was originating the hypothesis, and made it up from whole
| cloth.
|
| Xe was a sports writer and art critic, not a historian,
| moreover.
|
| It's a half-paragraph aside in a book entitled _Spirals in
| Nature and Art_, using words like "would" and "probable". And
| after 120 years of uncritical repetition and amplification,
| here we are.
| cushpush wrote:
| Really fun question! Let's investigate chirality in all its
| manifestations, natural and humanmade.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Theodore Andrea Cook did, writing _Spirals in Nature and Art_
| in 1903 and _The Curves of Life_ in 1914. Unfortunately, we are
| here fighting the fallout 120 years later, as xe is the source
| of this very myth.
| sixothree wrote:
| Clockwise upward staircases do actually have one advantage (in
| certain locales). Going upwards your forward travel distance is
| less than going downwards. This is assuming people generally walk
| on the right hand side. It just feels easier to traverse stairs
| as close to the inside as possible.
| watwut wrote:
| We walk on the right side, because of cars.
| [deleted]
| Someone wrote:
| > It just feels easier to traverse stairs as close to the
| inside as possible.
|
| I would expect that depends on the design of the spiral
| staircase.
|
| In a spiral staircase, you want to go up about 3 meters in a
| 360deg turn because you need a bit over 2m of headroom and some
| space for the stair itself.
|
| That means that, 1m away from the center of the staircase, the
| slope will be about 50%. The ideal staircase has more or less
| "step width + twice the step height = 63cm" [1], so that would
| give a good step width of 31cm and a step height of 16cm.
|
| However, 2m away from the center, that same stair would have a
| slope of about 25%, and the ideal step would be 41cm wide and
| 11cm high or thereabouts.
|
| 3m from the center you'd have a 16% slope, and the ideal step
| would be 45 cm wide, 8cm high, etc.
|
| Now, in 'standard' designs [2], step height can't change with
| distance to the center, so the designer has to pick one, and
| thus has control over the distance from the center where it's
| easiest to step.
|
| [1] https://www.practicalarchitecture.com/blog/the-geometry-
| of-a.... Of course, that's a heuristic, and the ideal will be
| different for different persons, but what's important is that
| simply scaling up a staircase in order to get wider steps is
| not a good idea.
|
| [2] very wide stairs can and sometimes do have steps that are
| sloping upwards. I don't think these are non-standard, but
| can't think of a better word now.
| Scarblac wrote:
| I don't think spiral staircases generally get even 1m wide,
| it's not trivial for two people going in opposite directions
| to pass each other. You walk on the middle of the step as
| there isn't much room to the left or right to go to.
| JackFr wrote:
| Actually more dangerous traveling downward on the inside, where
| a small misstep will have you miss 2-3 treads, as opposed to
| the outside where the same misstep won't have you miss any.
| afterburner wrote:
| I don't think there was so much traffic on these stairs that
| you ended up forced to one side the whole way.
|
| The forward distance travelled is also trivial in terms of
| effort compared to the height displacement upward. Most people
| can walk for 10 minutes without breaking a sweat, but way fewer
| would feel fine walking up stairs for 10 minutes.
|
| Not to mention, you can simply have a convention that the
| downward walker on a spiral staircase favour whichever side is
| best.
| m463 wrote:
| I bet there is one way to climb that is easier than the other.
|
| Being right-footed, I can do cross-over turns while ice-skating
| in one direction MUCH easier than the other.
|
| However, not sure whether that translates to clockwise or
| counter-clockwise stairs being easier without trying it.
|
| maybe it would be counter-clockwise? Right foot travels
| further?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > Castle builders knew that it didn't really make a huge
| difference which way the stairs go, they're not suitable for
| fighting at all, neither party has a lot of space to wield those
| long, pointy, sharp weapons.
|
| This is written by someone without experience in hand to hand
| combat as many weapons were blunt (like a mace or club) and a
| rondel dagger in an unarmored spot is far more difficult to parry
| than a sword. Speaking of which, a rondel dagger was specifically
| intended for grappling situations. Thrusting weapons were in many
| cases preferred for tight quarters combat although there are
| slashing weapons specifically designed for tight quarters combat
| as well. Sword variants like longer greatswords specifically
| designed vs. halbred or pike formations were not ideal for close
| quarters, but there were several short sword types
|
| Even in more ancient times, weapons such as the Sica, from which
| we get the word sicario, were well known as a tool used in
| gladiatorial combat, and in the Judean wars. Additionally, the
| gladius wielded with the large shield, the scutum, was only an 18
| inch short sword. Short because it was ideal for close quarters
| fighting via a thrust against other heavy infantry.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Something I would like to know: Do chirality statistics differ
| between castles and other buildings from the same era?
| legitster wrote:
| This explanation has always seemed a bit daft to me.
|
| > If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why
| are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-
| clockwise staircases?
|
| AKA it's almost surely just a builder's preference probably
| stemming from their handedness.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Fighting is fun to talk about but most of the time people didn't
| fight on the stairs, they, unsurprisingly, simply climbed up and
| down on them. So, maybe it's more comfortable to walk up the
| stairs that way? People are mostly right footed (60% as per [1]),
| so perhaps there is something about having the stronger right
| foot where the stairs are narrower when going up.
|
| [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-
| brain...
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Ah, but going down is more tricky than up, so you want the
| strong foot on the slim side rather in this case.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I have to admit I had that thought - if I needed to get down
| a narrow staircase in a hurry, I'd prefer if it were anti-
| clockwise. But apparently another competing theory is that
| clockwise staircases allow people to put their right hand
| against the wall for balance/safety... implying if they had
| anything to carry (including a lamp!) they'd prefer to do so
| in their left hand, which isn't too convincing either. But in
| fact on further consideration, the fact that if you have
| something largish to carry, you'd probably want it on the
| wider side, and would be more likely you'd carry it in your
| right hand, might have something going for it...though I'm
| not sure why that would be obviously more so going down than
| going up (and logically I'd expect more things would be
| carried up from the ground floor than v/v, particularly
| shortly after building the castle. From the upper floor you
| can discard used/broken objects by tossing them over the
| side!).
| qup wrote:
| Maybe the castle with both was doing an A/B test
| usrusr wrote:
| I wonder what the etiquette for oncoming traffic was, those
| spiral staircases with a central spine aren't really
| walkable anywhere but at the outer wall.
|
| Whoever has to step to the spine side would probably want a
| hand on the spine, palm making contact from the uphill side
| no matter wether facing up or down. So for someone uphill,
| the spine contact would be made with the outside hand (arm
| crossing in front), for someone downhill with the inside
| hand. On a clockwise staircase, this would leave the right
| hand comfortably idle for candle, tool or whatever the
| person deferring to (presumably higher ranking?) oncoming
| traffic on the wall side is carrying.
| javcasas wrote:
| I don't think going down was a priority. When you are under
| attack, you want your archers to rush up to the walls, with
| some extra fighters for good measure, and you don't want
| them to go down until the enemy has decided to leave. At
| that point, the speed of your archers going down doesn't
| matter much.
| alastairp wrote:
| Another anecdotal description of old staircases that I've heard
| of before is from Burgos castle in Spain, where (it's said) that
| the stairs to the bottom of the well change direction half way
| down to prevent you from getting too dizzy [1]
|
| > Se accede al interior por unas escaleras de caracol. Para
| evitar el mareo, los 4 primeros tramos se hacen en el sentido de
| las agujas del reloj y los dos ultimos tramos en sentido
| contrario.
|
| [1] https://rutasparatodaslasedades.blogspot.com/2019/07/el-
| cast...
| jameshart wrote:
| Similar article discussed previously:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29274875
| wizofaus wrote:
| Were staircases built around the same time but in non-
| strategic/non-fortified buildings (private manors etc.) notably
| different? Or were spiral staircases only built in circular
| towers that existed primarily for defence? Presumably the
| narrowness was largely due to the difficulty of being a strong
| enough tower with a wider radius.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| I often notice comments made regarding ancient or historical
| locations and civilisations, when discussed by a historian in a
| documentary, often seem to be opinions based on pretty flimsy
| evidence. In some cases no evidence at all, just things could be
| likely maybe possibly. Relying on the fact that there's no
| written evidence for or against any claim.
| watwut wrote:
| You expect pop documentaries to contain evidence? I do not mean
| it as snark, it is just that evidence is something popular
| entertainment ia not even supposed to have.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| According to the OP, there is written evidence for it, from the
| Victorian era, which was 400 years after cannons made castles
| obsolete. It's hard to fault modern historians too much if
| they're simply trusting the old records to be accurate. Or as
| we say in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.
| pmichaud wrote:
| > It's hard to fault modern historians too much if they're
| simply trusting the old records to be accurate.
|
| Basically the entire job of a historian is to determine the
| credibility of old sources, so they can interpret all the
| data and come to the most accurate conclusion about what
| happened.
| 221qqwe wrote:
| > credibility of old sources
|
| Unsubstantiated conjecture by Victorian historians
| shouldn't really be treated as a "source" in the first
| place by actual historians.
| [deleted]
| gwern wrote:
| If you click through, you can see there's no 'evidence'
| there. He simply offhandedly, in a sentence or two, makes the
| same speculation about fighting, with no sources, and the
| whole discussion of staircases in general is based on only 2
| named examples. Chesterton's fence is satisfied: he knew no
| more than we did.
| JdeBP wrote:
| A few points.
|
| Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't a historian. Xe was a writer for
| the Daily Telegraph, amongst other things, who wrote about
| sports such as fencing and rowing; and who was also an art
| critic.
|
| Theodore Andrea Cook wasn't writing in the Victorian Era.
| _Spirals in Nature and Art_ was a 20th century work, in the
| Edwardian Era. _The Curves of Life_ was from the subsequent
| Georgian Era.
|
| Theodore Andrea Cook is the earliest person found espousing
| this hypothesis. This is, as far as anyone has determined,
| Theodore Andrea Cook's own original hypothesis, based upon
| _zero_ evidence. That is certainly what the text of _Spirals_
| implies.
| wnissen wrote:
| Yes, it would take not just a real historian, but someone who
| had done research, to answer this question. Having been up and
| down a few of those, it certainly seems more than just
| plausible to me, even taking into account the numerous recorded
| sieges. On the other hand it is also true that spears and
| shields play a much greater role than swords. Hard to imagine
| wielding a full-sized shield, let alone a spear, in one of
| those staircases, though!
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Fighting on the stairs would be kinda silly. Better to wait
| outside the doorway so that after your attackers are done
| running up the stairs with armor and weapons, you and your
| pals are waiting there at the choke point to layeth the
| smacketh down. The only real benefit to fighting on the
| stairs is that you still effectively impede progress if
| you're dead.
| the_af wrote:
| Exactly, fighting on the stairs is pointless.
|
| If you are the attacking army, just wait it out. You've won
| the siege, and any defenders up the stairs will have to
| either come down or starve to death. Why risk attacking _up
| the stairs_?
| vidanay wrote:
| If you're at the bottom of the stairs, stuff the stairs
| full of firewood (tables, chairs, dressers, etc) and
| light it.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Yeah, just burn/smoke out the defenders. If you're
| already in the bottom of the building it's over, just a
| matter of time when. You can also take the castle apart
| and cause it to collapse.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what happens if you're running down the stairs and come
| upon the attackers on the way down?
| the_af wrote:
| Die? Surrender? If attackers have stormed the castle and
| are running up the stairs all is presumably lost anyway?
| dylan604 wrote:
| If Errol Flynn could do it, then surely, everyone can do
| it
| the_af wrote:
| It's safe to assume if Errol is on your side, you've won.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But this goes against if you're down to defending in the
| stairwells, you've already lost.
| the_af wrote:
| Let me fix it: _if_ you are going down _but_ you do not
| have Errol in your ranks, you 've lost?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I think the bigger point from the article is that by the time
| people are fighting hand-to-hand in the tower stairwells, the
| defenders have already well and truly lost: comeback from
| such a state was probably impossible (and if the walls were
| breached the defenders would almost certainly have
| surrendered rather than fought to the last man). So it
| wouldn't have really made sense to design things for this
| possibility.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This comment is a perfect example of GGP's problem with
| historical analysis.
|
| As is the nearly-exactly comment in TFA:
|
| > Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the castle
| is probably already lost.
|
| It's conjecture all the way down.
| qwytw wrote:
| > It's conjecture
|
| Just like the entire staircase argument?
|
| Except that we actually know that:
|
| > Frankly, if you find yourself in this position the
| castle is probably already lost.
|
| Was true in almost all cases.
| ramblenode wrote:
| That's not a good counter-explanation.
|
| A castle staircase takes a lot of time and effort to build.
| Choosing to build the staircase in one direction or the
| other has negligible cost. If there is even a slight or
| possible advantage to one direction then it would make
| sense to build it that way.
|
| Defense in depth.
| the_af wrote:
| > _If there is even a slight or possible advantage to one
| direction then it would make sense to build it that way_
|
| If it's true that the battle at this point is lost for
| the defenders -- and known history indicates this is so
| -- then why would the builders choose directions based on
| this extremely unlikely scenario, instead of on just
| about any other consideration (aesthetic, practical, or
| even random)?
| lazide wrote:
| Why does the USMC issue bayonets still?
| qwytw wrote:
| Because it's a multi-purpose utility knife that can also
| optionally be mounted on a rifle?
|
| Having a knife might be useful in various situations even
| outside combat as far as I know.
| the_af wrote:
| I've honestly no idea.
|
| I'll take a stab at guessing (mind you, this is blind
| guessing, happy to be corrected!): the USMC still issue
| bayonets because of both tradition, which is important to
| the military, and also because they are actually useful
| in close quarters battle, which still occurs on occasion,
| such as in urban warfare and house-to-house combat
| clearing, etc. The likelihood of having to use a
| bayonet/knife in modern CQB is probably significantly
| higher than the likelihood of medieval defenders
| recovering from an enemy army that has stormed their
| castle.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| For perspective, Norman keeps were often built with a
| large internal cross wall, so even if troops made it
| through the stair door and swarmed into the room they'd
| still have to fight their way into the other half of the
| floor. By the stage these expensive and space consuming
| walls were defensively relevant, defenders would have
| already lost outer walls, viable long-term food and water
| supplies and much of the garrison defending it... and any
| real chance of holding out. But an invading army would
| still lose more men storming it; so it functioned as a
| deterrent.
|
| I've heard this "it's a myth" argument before, but 70% of
| staircases is quite a _large_ proportion of staircases
| spiralling in a particular direction which would offer
| the defender a marginal advantage to be pure coincidence.
| Particularly when the ratio of clockwise to anticlockwise
| staircases in _Norman_ castles was about 20:1; it was
| later generations of castle of builders who added many
| more anticlockwise stairwells, in an era when individual
| tower defence was less importance, and builders may have
| simply forgotten or come to doubt arguments about the
| defensive advantages of clockwise spirals (the blog 's
| arguments for why spiral staircase defence is rubbish
| work here of course!). Contemporary cathedrals which were
| not at all defensible tended to build clockwise and
| anticlockwise spiral staircases as matching pairs, so it
| wasn't like there was some other sort of massive aversion
| to stairs in a particular direction.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| It's a really good explanation. Castle sieges were big
| events, so historically we know the outcomes. Nearly 100%
| of the time, the garrison has already surrendered if it's
| this bad. Medieval sieges come in three major flavors:
| ones where you sneak in, ones where you bombard the
| fortification, and ones where you don't let anything in
| or out and you wait until they give up.
| ramblenode wrote:
| If you examine a military you will find volumes of plans
| for incredibly unlikely situations. Once you have
| addressed all the likely and significant threats, you
| don't just stop planning--at least not any good military.
|
| Saying that castle sieges didn't tend to involve stairway
| fights doesn't imply that stairways wouldn't have had
| defensive measures built in. That is post-hoc
| rationalization.
| 221qqwe wrote:
| > That is post-hoc rationalization.
|
| You're asking to a disprove a purely(?) speculative
| claim, though.
| prewett wrote:
| Any defenders defending a tower are obviously above the
| ground floor, which is where access to food and water is.
| So why bother fighting up the stairway, when you can just
| block all the downstairs exits? The castle's defenses are
| the walls; if attackers are in a position to go up the
| stairs then the castle's defenses have failed, and the
| only defense left is the manpower of the defenders. So
| instead of being "besieged" up their towers, the only
| realistic strategy the defenders have is to come down
| from the towers and join the melee. Or just surrender,
| because the attackers have an army and the castles only
| had dozens of defenders (if that). What tactical
| situation do you have in mind where the success of the
| attack depends on success in a staircase battle?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Every day the attackers besiege you is one they have to
| defend against potential counterattacks from your allies.
| And even if your castle falls you might buy your empire
| time to raise a bigger army and rally more allies in
| order to win the next bigger war. Delaying enemies could
| be an important function of castles.
| ramblenode wrote:
| Defense in depth isn's about justifying in advance how
| every measure will win the battle; it's about giving
| yourself as many small, incremental advantages as
| possible so that the odds steadily tick up in your favor.
| Battles are famously difficult to predict so every
| advantage is sought, and even small advantages can have
| multiplier effects.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| An interstate takes a lot of time and effort to build.
| And yet which side you drive on doesn't matter; it simply
| needs to be consistent with all the other roads you're
| connected to. There are plenty of countries that, through
| historical happenstance, drive on the opposite side of
| the road, and it's fine.
|
| So in other words, just because the staircases take a lot
| of time and effort to build, simply means that having the
| staircase itself is important, not necessarily that its
| chirality is important. It has to have a chirality but it
| may well not matter which one, just like roads.
| ramblenode wrote:
| Your example misses the point.
|
| If there were evidence that driving on the right side or
| left side of the road slightly reduces car accidents and
| a country with previously no roads or cars began planning
| to automotize the country, then, all things considered,
| it would make sense to have people drive in the lane with
| a slightly reduced fatality rate.
|
| If there are two choices where one presents a slight
| advantage but no additional cost then a rational actor
| will go with that choice.
| qwytw wrote:
| The event has to occur relatively frequently for that
| slight advantage to become statistically noticeable.
| Direct assaults on castles with hand-to-hand combat
| occurring in stairwells were extremely rare as far as we
| know.
| gowld wrote:
| Where's the contemporary research to determine which
| direction has advantage?
| Cass wrote:
| That's a bizarre line of thought to me. If you build an
| expensive structure for fortification, you don't usually
| get to the interior design and then go "Oh fuck it, this
| extra safety measure wouldn't cost anything, but if they've
| got this far we might as well surrender, so let's not
| bother."
|
| Going by that logic, the president's bunker under the
| pentagon would've been built without a lock. After all,
| people don't usually have to physically drag a country's
| leader out of their locked bunker, right? By the time
| anyone's knocking on that door, usually the war is lost and
| the country has surrendered.
|
| And yet, if you're designing for defense, why NOT take such
| a cheap and easy countermeasure as putting a lock on the
| door or choosing the more defensible way to spiral your
| staircase? You might want to buy a few more minutes to
| negotiate in a desperate situation; you might want at least
| the option of taking that futile last stand; you might be
| facing not an invading army but a single lunatic with a
| sword who snuck past the outer guards.
| whiw wrote:
| I imagine that it would be more difficult to gain entry to
| an upper floor (at the top of a narrow staircase so single-
| file attackers) and a sturdy door with a couple of guards
| outside, than it would be to gain entry to rooms on the
| same level. Perhaps the women were tucked away on the upper
| floors, in relative safety.
| catlover76 wrote:
| A lot like evolutionary psychology; it seems like a reasonable
| explanation or story and is supported by at least some
| circumstantial evidence, so it _must_ have been the way things
| were
| duxup wrote:
| I love me some history information, documentaries, and etc. But
| yeah I get strongly allergic to stuff where suddenly I wonder
| "Wait did you just logic that out in your head? Like there's no
| basis for that other than you observing how the thing /
| situation is?"
|
| I'm sure it has been an issue forever but online especially it
| seems painful how much of that information there is.
| alexpotato wrote:
| My favorite version of the logic it out:
|
| "People asked me if this tribe was originally from this area
| or if they migrated here.
|
| I always say: clearly they were from here. The weather is so
| bad around these parts, who would choose to move here from
| somewhere else?"
|
| - German historian
| groestl wrote:
| Along these lines, a well established rule in Archaeology: "Was
| man nicht erklaren kann, sieht man gleich als kultisch an"
| (what cannot be explained, is immediately perceived as
| religious)
| pc86 wrote:
| "That is either an incense dispenser, or a ceremonial ...
| sarcophagus."
|
| "My German is pre-industrial, and mostly religious."
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Even if there is written evidence, nearly all past written
| information is also difficult to verify, and writers in the
| past were not necessarily unbiased or above lying and
| distortion.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Going through the cited sources, I'm more convinced the
| defender's advantage theory is right than before I started.
|
| First the claim that stairs would not be optimized for combat
| because fighting on stairs was undesirable holds no weight.
| Castles were designed with many layers of defense - it was
| entirely expected that large sections of a castle would be lost
| and the defenders would continue to hold out in other sections,
| bitterly holding chokepoints. From murder holes to
| machicolations, every inch of castles were optimized defense.
| Even if in practice defenders would prefer not to fight on a
| stairway, if all else were equal (and it's hard to think of
| something more arbitrary than which way the stones are flipped),
| why wouldn't they go with the option that potentially could be
| helpful instead of potentially aiding an attacker?
|
| Next, the argument that "not all castles had clockwise
| staircases" seems to be an own-goal. During the time periods when
| having to defend a castle was likely, staircases were
| overwhelmingly clockwise. It is only in the late middle ages when
| defense became much less of a priority that anticlockwise stair
| cases start gaining popularity, and the later it gets the more
| common anticlockwise stairs become. If there were some non-
| military utilitarian reason for the choice, such as making it
| easier for someone to steady themselves or carry lanterns,
| presumably that need would remain. If the choice were non-
| utilitarian from the beginning, why the initial disparity? No
| doubt the designers of these buildings had multiple competing
| concerns, including aesthetics and convenience, but clearly the
| balance shifted. Examples of anticlockwise stairways were common
| in structures not intended for defense in earlier structures,
| which means the shift was not technological and further makes
| non-military utilitarian requirements unlikely.
|
| Obviously it would be nice if we had more surviving sources from
| the time period, but it's hard to imagine any other theory
| fitting the data so well.
| [deleted]
| btbuildem wrote:
| I'm a little disappointed that the article's author didn't make a
| counter-claim, or at least speculate on what some other reasons
| may have been.
|
| I'll throw my idea in: most spiral staircases turn counter-
| clockwise, because they were notoriously dark / badly lit, so one
| had to hold a torch or a lamp while traversing them. Since
| majority of people are right-handed, stands to reason a person
| would be holding the source of light in their right hand, and
| hold on to the hand-rail (or wall) with their left. You'd
| naturally want to lean on the outside wall of the staircase, as
| the stair treads there are wider than near the centre of the
| spiral.
|
| QED!
|
| (let me know if you spot the flaw in my logic)
| [deleted]
| Levitating wrote:
| If I visualize walking up a staircase, I'd much prefer them
| clockwise so that I can touch the center with my right hand
| when walking up, for some additional stability.
|
| Also, much staircases I know are clockwise. Which is also my
| theory for this myth, most staircases were build clockwise
| simply because most were already build clockwise. It fits
| Okkam's razor.
| topspin wrote:
| The flaw is whatever x-wise you pick, you have the torch in the
| "wrong" hand either going up or coming down. Also, hand rails
| weren't a thing in most medieval staircases; you were expected
| to just not fall, and when you did there was no one to sue.
| jedberg wrote:
| That only applies going up.
| illiac786 wrote:
| going down you mean ;)
|
| I would counter argue that one may prefer to hold the ramp in
| one's strong hand...
| tarboreus wrote:
| And if you've been on these stairs you know that down is the
| hard part.
| [deleted]
| gretch wrote:
| My own no-basis 30 second gun theory - what if they are all the
| same way because one guy who was really good at making them
| passed the knowledge down that way. Then everyone else followed
| from that one teaching and never bothered flipping it. It wasn't
| better, it just won the coin flip
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| My own guess - there's already a bias towards right handedness.
| I assume that is related. I don't know how these staircases
| were built but it may be that it's slightly easier to build
| these staircases for right-handed people. And then maybe 30% of
| builders were left handed or some minority of the time the
| architect wanted to prioritize symmetry with another tower.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| You can go a step further and (maybe, I acknowledge this is a
| stretch) apply some evolutionary pressure in that it gave
| defensive advantages they didn't think about and so the people
| whose castles this guy/his students built retained their wealth
| and built more castles from the same building style.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I thought the current thinking was that no battle would ever
| come down to fighting on the stairway. If someone has already
| made it through all of your castle's defences to even be on
| the stairs, then the battle is over.
| dexwiz wrote:
| And if you were defining a stairway, a spear is much better
| than a sword. Stand at the top, poke down.
| autokad wrote:
| this comes off as video game logic. 'well I lost, may as
| well hit the reset button'.
|
| Except when you are going to die, even if the extra odds
| seems pointless, you do it. much like WW2 tankers putting
| sand bags on their tank.
| slim wrote:
| also, when the number of stairs built that way reaches
| critical mass, any stair built otherwise will feel awkward
| derekp7 wrote:
| I recall an interview with someone doing a late night talk
| show, that they tried putting the guest on the right side
| of the host but that didn't sit to well with audiences
| because they were used to seeing the guest on the left
| side. No reason for it other than that is what the first
| popular late show did, so everything else followed.
| usrusr wrote:
| That's what I find most fascinating about the claimed 70/30
| distribution, I'd either expect something very close to
| even or far more lopsided.
|
| Perhaps a closer look at the numbers would show a very
| clear default direction plus a strong priority for symmetry
| where applicable?
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| What if the 30 percent are more close in region or time?
| dbrueck wrote:
| > You can go a _step_ further
|
| I see what you did there.
| [deleted]
| fanf2 wrote:
| But they aren't all the same, they are 1/3 : 2/3
| lawlessone wrote:
| Maybe that's the ratio of left and right handedness in
| medieval staircase builders. i joke.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Inconclusive.
|
| What if they built right-handed defenders AND left-handed
| defenders towers?
| digging wrote:
| The article states that they likely built neither because
| nobody wants to be fighting for their life 1:1 on a dank
| staircase with poor visibility. It's actually the much more
| logical option. Even if attackers are in the stairwell, why
| wouldn't you retreat to the top where you can accumulate real
| advantages?
| the_af wrote:
| Oh, but what if the _attackers_ divided themselves in left-
| handed and right-handed attack groups, and chose the stairs to
| attack accordingly?
|
| This is getting silly :P
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think these staircases evolved to make it impossible for
| rapey male ducks to impregnate the castles. Ancient sources
| agree with my theory, so it must be true.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| You're right, but now I'm disappointed that this didn't make
| it into Monty Python and the Holy Grail!
| gooseus wrote:
| I'm gonna guess it correlates with the handedness of the builder.
|
| As a right-handed person, when I've built spiral towers in games
| they have been clockwise because when building from the bottom
| up, clockwise just seems "right".
| jackconsidine wrote:
| > Sieges often didn't involve much fighting at all, as simply
| waiting outside the castle till the people inside ran out of
| water and food was a much easier and less bloody way to win.
|
| Currently reading Plutarch. Twice already he's mentioned sieges
| where the attackers waited for the besieged to run out of water.
| The grueling wait is compressed in history.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| My favorite siege weirdness is circum- and contravallation.
| Caesar's seige of Alesia perhaps being one of the better
| examples. The man built a wall around the already walled
| fortification of Alesia... then built a wall behind him to keep
| the besieging army safe from Vercingetorix' allies.
|
| That's a wall around a wall around a wall. Like a frickin'
| onion.
| catlover76 wrote:
| Like an ogre, one might say
| jamiek88 wrote:
| My favorite siege story is Alexander being taunted by
| islanders who thought themselves immune to being under siege
| and attacked.
|
| They slowly stopped laughing as they realized the Macedonians
| were filling in the shore front to make a kilometer long 200m
| wide causeway to march across.
|
| It did not end well for the island City of Tyre and its
| inhabitants.
| Animats wrote:
| > Twice already he's mentioned sieges where the attackers
| waited for the besieged to run out of water. The grueling wait
| is compressed in history.
|
| That's happening now in Gaza. Israel has cut off water.
| lwn wrote:
| I've visited a castle in Germany once, where they had special
| short swords for defending the staircases. The staircases in that
| castle were too small to wield a regular sword.
| russdill wrote:
| Was there period documentation? Or a just so story about short
| swords?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| That sounds eerily similar to the myth from the linked article.
| Although there is a chance that some enterprising blacksmith
| came up with a clever marketing scheme for those to convince
| the nobility that they really needed such a set of short
| swords.
|
| 'Just in case pillagers come up the stairs, and I'll throw in a
| Zweihander for half the price too, in case your attacker steps
| out of reach of your regular sword!'.
| akozak wrote:
| I love this. Naive feudal lords as the historical equivalent
| to high net worth preppers.
| eproxus wrote:
| What could be more prepping than building a whole stone
| castle? It's the historical equivalent of a bunker for most
| part of modern (and ancient) history
| smsm42 wrote:
| Building castles to cover captured terrain was pretty
| common (unless of course there already was one around, in
| which case you besiege and take it, if you can). Of
| course, building a stone ond rakes time, so they'd build
| a temp one first, and then, ic theh manage to keep the
| territory, update it. So if it's prepping, it's a very
| common and prudenf version of it.
| smokel wrote:
| Ehm. The article does not actually give any evidence, so this
| argument is becoming rather absurd.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I wonder if modern spiral staircases but also show the 70/30 R/L
| bias as well?
| [deleted]
| mtreis86 wrote:
| People are dominantly right handed, so right hand on the wall.
|
| You need more space under your foot while descending, you only
| use the ball of your foot while going up.
|
| The stairs are thicker on the outside, so if that is on the right
| as you descend, the staircase will be counter clockwise.
| majikandy wrote:
| 70/30 split sounds like there is a reason even if there isn't
| primary evidence to backup the exact reason. Logically
| attack/defence sounds like it works and I was certainly able to
| imagine that on my first tour of a fort when I was young.
| 221qqwe wrote:
| Or maybe medieval people thought that it's easier to
| climb/carry stuff up if the stairs go clockwise (or some other
| mundane reasons)? Maybe architects just designed it that way
| because that's just how everyone builds castle staircases?
| Seems much more plausible to me (or at least as plausible..)
|
| > I was certainly able to imagine that on my first tour of a
| fort when I was young.
|
| Most people visiting medieval castles probably significantly
| overestimate the frequency of hand to hand combat that might
| had taken place there (almost never as far as we know).
| notahacker wrote:
| The scholarly source he links to (which actually agrees with
| him) notes in passing that for _Norman_ castles, the split wasn
| 't 70/30, it was more like 95/5....
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder what the split is nowadays. For example I lived in an
| apartment that had a counter-clockwise stairway, I'm not sure
| what the landlord's handed was was, but I don't _think_ he
| designed it around defending against left handed sword-armed
| attackers.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I think people found out that more falls happened while
| descending than while ascending, so it was more important to have
| right hand holding the rails at the outer wall when descending.
| Thus counter-clockwise direction while going down and clockwise
| when going up.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| It has no mention of the masons, who had strict codes and rules
| of thumb and where all the knowledge was passed down in oral form
| through apprenticeships and quite a lot of secrecy (hence the
| Freemasons). I'm not sure it proves or disproves the main point,
| but it's a glaring omission that if investigated could explain it
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The victorians created a lot of persistent myths:
|
| -vikings with horns on their helmets
|
| -highlanders all wearing tartan
|
| -knights in plate armour not being able to get up if they fell
| over?
| fsckboy wrote:
| yes, Vikings with horns on their helmets
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veks%C3%B8_Helmets (from
| scandinavia, but a couple thousand years before the Vikings
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age )
| JP44 wrote:
| Could it be them optimising their floorplan? Direction of the
| spiral is based on e.g. the largest possible entry or smallest
| obstruction(in terms of construction and visually for the rest of
| the room/castle?
| a-dub wrote:
| if i were to guess it probably has more to do with left hand side
| driving semantics which as i understand comes from a prevalence
| of right-handedness and a norm of posturing the right hand for
| weapon use.
|
| so, maybe they just adopted the rules of the road, and the
| legends that come from it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A lot of these historic stories are someone's fancy. In Turkey,
| they'll make up all these stories about wine flasks in Cappadocia
| that have this hole in the middle. Supposedly the sun must fall
| through the hole to bless it or something and I can't find any
| reference to that anywhere. But I wasn't able to find a historian
| of Turkey and that region to say it definitely _was_ ahistorical.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| I'll do one better: they weren't built clockwise, as clocks were
| not available. They were built reverse-widdershins or sunwise.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins
| kwyjibo1230 wrote:
| Wow, so Widdershins is not just a made-up word from Terry
| Pratchett's Discworld series!
| Tagbert wrote:
| It seems it goes back a little further than that.
|
| > probably from Middle Low German weddersinnes, literally
| "against the way"
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/widdershins#etymonline_v_799.
| ..
|
| Basically, this is NOT the way.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| I'll admit that Discworld is the first place I heard it. It's
| a perfect example of the sort of idiom authors should think
| about though, rather than using overly modern terms.
| headstorm wrote:
| Deosil is the counterpart which means reverse-widdershins or
| sunwise, mentioned in your link.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I love the word sunwise. In Swedish it's "medsols" and
| "motsols", sunwise and counter-sunwise respectively.
|
| And speaking of, let's start another myth. Swedes always dance
| around the christmas tree or maypole sunwise because it's an
| ancient dance to evoke the sun after months of darkness.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I thought the pole and dance in Sweden was at midsummer. In
| England it's on Mayday.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I call it a maypole to relate to foreigners. What would you
| call the pole? It's actually called a midsommarstang, which
| means midsummerspole...
| gowld wrote:
| 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
|
| Thou art thyself, though not "clockwise".
|
| What's "clockwise"? It is nor hand, nor pen-
|
| dulum, nor face, nor any other part
|
| Belonging to a clock. O, be some other name!
|
| What's in a name? That which we call a rose
|
| By any other name would smell as sweet;
|
| So "Widdershins" would, were it not "Widdershins" call'd,
|
| Retain that dear perfection which he owes
|
| Without that title. Widdershins, doff thy name,
|
| And for that name which is no part of thee
|
| Take all my turns.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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