A hoard or hoarding was a temporary wooden shed-like construction on the exterior of a

castle A castle is a type of fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by military orders. Scholars debate the scope of the word ''castle'', but usually consider it to be the private fortified r ...

during a

siege A siege is a military blockade of a city, or fortress, with the intent of conquering by attrition, or a well-prepared assault. This derives from la, sedere, lit=to sit. Siege warfare is a form of constant, low-intensity conflict characteriz ...

that enabled the defenders to improve their

field of fire The field of fire of a weapon (or group of weapons) is the area around it that can easily and effectively be reached by gunfire. The term 'field of fire' is mostly used in reference to machine guns. Their fields of fire incorporate the beaten zon ...

along the length of a wall and, most particularly, directly downwards towards the bottom of the wall.Hull, Lisa E (2006)
''Britain's Medieval Castles''
Praeger Publishers, (p. 67) The latter function was the purpose of the invention of

machicolation A machicolation (french: mâchicoulis) is a floor opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement, through which stones or other material, such as boiling water, hot sand, quicklime or boiling cooking oil, could be dropped on attackers at ...

s, which were an improvement on hoardings, not least because masonry is fire proof. Machicolations are also permanent and always ready for a siege. It is suspected that hoardings were stored as prefabricated elements in peacetime. Construction of hoardings was often facilitated by putlog holes, sockets that were left in the masonry of castle walls for wooden joists called "putlogs". However, some hoardings were supported on permanent stone

corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in the wall, whereas a console is a piece applied to the s ...

s. Some medieval hoardings have survived, including examples on the north tower of

Stokesay Castle Stokesay Castle is one of the finest surviving fortified manor houses in England, and situated at Stokesay in Shropshire. It was largely built in its present form in the late 13th century by Laurence de Ludlow, on the earlier castle (some of w ...

, England, and the keep of Laval, France. The Château Comtal of

Carcassonne Carcassonne (, also , , ; ; la, Carcaso) is a French fortified city in the department of Aude, in the region of Occitanie. It is the prefecture of the department. Inhabited since the Neolithic, Carcassonne is located in the plain of the Aud ...

and the keep of

Rouen Castle Rouen Castle (''Château Bouvreuil'') was a fortified ducal and royal residence in the city of Rouen, capital of the duchy of Normandy, now in France. With the exception of the tower wrongly associated with Joan of Arc, which was restored by Vi ...

, both in France, have reconstructed wooden hoardings, and also

Castell Coch (; ) is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff G ...

South Wales South Wales ( cy, De Cymru) is a loosely defined region of Wales bordered by England to the east and mid Wales to the north. Generally considered to include the historic counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, south Wales extends westwards ...

, which was wholly rebuilt in 1875 and which has a hoarding over the

drawbridge A drawbridge or draw-bridge is a type of moveable bridge typically at the entrance to a castle or tower surrounded by a moat. In some forms of English, including American English, the word ''drawbridge'' commonly refers to all types of movea ...

William Burges William Burges (; 2 December 1827 – 20 April 1881) was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoc ...

. Pettifer, Adrian (2000)
''Welsh Castles: A Guide by Counties''
The Boydell Press, (p. 91) Another reconstructed hoarding can be seen in

Caerphilly Castle Caerphilly Castle ( cy, Castell Caerffili) is a medieval fortification in Caerphilly in South Wales. The castle was constructed by Gilbert de Clare in the 13th century as part of his campaign to maintain control of Glamorgan, and saw extensi ...

, also in South Wales, which extends along the northern curtain wall of the

inner bailey The inner bailey or inner ward of a castle is the strongly fortified enclosure at the heart of a medieval castle.Friar, Stephen (2003). ''The Sutton Companion to Castles'', Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2003, p. 22. It is protected by the outer w ...

References

{{Fortifications Castle architecture

See also

References