Name: Kids Rule! TV | Episode 3: Castles
Uploaded: 2025-10-26T18:28:08.000Z
Duration: 27 min 38 s
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Foreign hello and welcome to Kids Rule tv, brought to you by English Heritage.

I'm Esme and I'll be your guide on this time traveling quest through English history.

We'll be joined along the way by some amazing historians and curators and a few other helpers.

So if you've ever wondered who built Hadrian's Wall or or what the Tudors had for dinner, then you've come to the right place.

Coming up in today's show, we'll be lowering the drawbridge and crossing the moat as we step inside the wonderful world of medieval castles.

Joining us is castle lover and expert in Medieval Archaeology, Dr. Jeremy Ashby.

We'll discover who was who in castle life and reveal how these fantastic fortresses were defended.

We'll also show you how to make your very own castle out of cardboard and share a tasty recipe for a medi pie.

Now, to really understand the story of castles, we need to go back to 1066.

William the Conqueror had successfully invaded England and become king after victory at the Battle of Hastings.

To defend his new kingdom, William ordered a castle to be built at Pevensey, his landing place in England.

The next day, he ordered another at Hastings, just a few miles away.

Over the next 150 years, the Normans built hundreds more castles all across England and Wales.

Some of the first castles were called Motten baileys.

These were mounds of earth inside deep ditches with wooden towers and fences on top.

over time, they were replaced with more sturdy fortresses made of stone, with high walls and defensive towers that were better at keeping attackers out.

Sadly, many castles were left to fall into ruin over the centuries.

But some became the homes of wealthy lords and lad and still survive to this day.

To explain how castles evolved over time, let's watch this animation.

It was both a fortification and the home of a lord.

The first castles were just earthwork enclosures.

Later, earth mounds and timber towers were built, forming a type of castle called a motte and bailey.

However, the timber constructions were vulnerable to fire, so shell keeps were built to protect the wooden structure within a stone wall or shell.

During the time when the motte and baileys were being built, powerful noblemen were constructing the Norman great towers.

There was no tactical reason for building them so high.

The great tower in all its forms became a symbol of power and nobility.

The curtain wall was the castle's most important defensive feature.

At first, it was just a wall with a Crenellated parapet.

Fighting platforms were built first from timber and later stone.

At the same time, gateways evolved from simple openings within towers to twin towered gateways.

And castles built with an outer wall around the curtain wall were known as concentric castles.

Inside, domestic life often centered around the great hall, where the wealthy could entertain guests with lavish feasts.

In the case of fortified manor houses, battlements were more for show than defense.

Medieval castles were considered so prestigious that the style was revived by rich men who wanted to appear as powerful as the noblemen of the Middle Ages.

Now, if, like me, you're eager to find out what it was actually like to live in a castle, then I know just the person who can help us.

Hi, Jeremy, and welcome to our castle show.

Jeremy, can you first tell us about your job at English Heritage?

Well, the first things, my job title is the Head Properties Curator.

And what that means is that I am the person who make sure that our sites and buildings get properly researched so that we know how to look after them and most importantly, how we get to tell people their stories.

And since there are 420 properties that we look after, it's actually quite a big job.

It'll take me all my life to do it and I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm going to have to go for Rochester Castle.

It's got a tower that was once upon a time the tallest castle building in Europe, maybe even the tallest castle in the world.

But most importantly, I've known this place my whole life.

I was first taken here when I was three and I remember it scared.

It scared me to death being taken up to the top.

But I've never fallen out of love with it.

And quite recently I actually came back and now I live here again, having been away for 30 years.

So that's going to have to be at the head of my list.

What would it be like to live in a castle during medieval times?

Well, you've got to imagine a place that's very busy, there's lots of hustle and bustle, it's going to be noisy, there's going to be lots of people, lots of coming and Going.

Nowadays, when we look at castles, we just see the bare stonework and we just, you know, it's hard to imagine the people.

It actually would be very colorful, all the clothes they're wearing.

And actually, if you could go inside the buildings, you'd see paintings on the walls, you'd see hanging of tapestries, as well as the smells of the cooking and stuff like that.

There's also, you got to imagine the horses.

And finally, everyone's favourite, the smell of the toilets.

What you've got to imagine is our modern flushable toilets.

You've just got a simple hole in the middle of a wooden board and underneath that what comes out goes down to the bottom, so it all drops down.

The poo, or the gong, as it's called, is probably going to be lying around.

And that's one of the things that you would smell inside our castle, I would think.

So they don't sound like the most hygienic of places.

I'm also guessing they didn't know about germs in medieval times.

They say, well, you know, they don't stay in one place for too long and half of the reason why they travel around is to give people a chance to go and clean out the toilets.

So who would have lived in the castle and what different roles did they play in daily life?

Okay, there are lots of different people and they're going to be men and women, that's quite important to say, each of them with their own individual role to play.

And they go from the very rich to the very poor right at the top.

For some castles, you would genuinely have kings and queens living there.

Some of the, some of the most famous castles, most important ones that we look after were royal castles.

So Dover Castle, that's just one example, really had kings and queens in.

And that would mean that there would have their friends, their courtiers, the people that look after them, their servants are in there.

And then when you start to go down a little bit further, conditions perhaps get a little bit simpler.

So the king and queen, they have very fine, luxurious rooms.

But if you go down perhaps to the level of, you know, individual servants within the household or soldiers even, they're living in much more spartan conditions.

So, you know, really, it's very, very varied.

But there's a lot of people, a lot of different people, all doing different jobs, day and night.

Now, when we talk about castles, the first thing that springs to mind is knights on horseback.

Would they have actually lived in the castle?

Yes, some of the time they would have done.

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Kids Rule! TV | Episode 3: Castles

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