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Concentric Castles
By Med | April 23, 2006
The concentric castle was an enclosure castle with an additional curtain wall built, in close proximity, around the entire enclosure. In a sense, the concentric castle consisted of “walls within walls”, where the inner walls, gatehouses and towers were higher than the outer walls, gatehouses and towers. This was so that soldiers fighting from the higher set of walls could shoot at the enemy and avoid hitting their fellow soldiers standing on the lower, outer set of walls.
In its most sophisticated form the concentric castle had several sets of curtain walls - each one higher than the previous one - round towers at the corners and double towers making a barbican at the gateway.
Concentric castles were the next follow on from stone keep castles. Concentric castles, in Britain, are most associated with Edward I and North-West Wales where a series of huge castles were built. The most famous concentric castles are at Harlech, Beaumaris, Caernarvon and Conway.
Unlike square keep castles, concentric castles had no central keep. In many senses, they had no centre either as all parts of the castle would have been considered to be a strong point. Each concentric castle had a very heavily defended entrance and the central core was defended by a series of curtain walls. The furthest of the curtain walls would have been the smallest in height to allow the defenders to see an approaching enemy. The curtain wall nearest to the castle would have been the highest to give the defenders the maximum height advantage over those attempting to take over the castle.
However, concentric castles had two major weaknesses. They were massively expensive to build and if an attacking army decided to ignore them, troops within concentric castles had the choice of either staying where they were and not involving themselves in combat or leaving their place of safety and fighting on open ground. That stated, concentric castles were built in highly strategic areas and an invading army would usually have had no choice but to attack.
One of the finest example of a concentric castle is at Caernarvon in Wales. Here the walls are, in fact, two walls with the hollow middle between them filled in with rubble. The blocks of stone had to be extra large and strong to cope with the huge pressure put on them when the rubble was put in.
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