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The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)

208 points by dgellow 5y ago

pmdulaney 5y ago
I guess this is a reminder to all of us not to make confident assertions about things we don't really know. Calling BS is a service to those around you.
qw 5y ago
As a right-handed person, I find it is much easier to run down stairs if I can use the wall or railing for support. To me, it sounds as plausible as the sword fight theory.
Finnucane 5y ago
So on the one hand we have folklore passed down from generation to generation, and on the other we have a finding of no documentary evidence for it. But no evidence for much of any other explanation either. Not much to go on either way. In medieval times, the thinking could well have been "we have to favor the right-handed because the left hand is the tool of the devil."
paulmooreparks 5y ago
I'm no expert in medieval warfare, but it seems to me that if an army has breached the outer and inner castle defenses and is fighting its way up the tower stairs, bigger failures have occurred than which direction the stairs turn. As if the lord of the castle is rubbing his hands gleefully, saying, "No matter, wait until they see THE STAIRS!" Nah, I don't buy it. Random chance or individual preference seems a bit more likely.
- glxxyz 5y ago
  Yes once the attackers had got inside the keep it would have been all over. If the builders had been serious about defending the spiral stairs, they'd have added something like a portcullis or replaced the stairs with a ladder. I've heard this myth a few times and even repeated it myself without question. It's an obviously fanciful idea now I think about it some more.
wisty 5y ago
So why were they clockwise? Here's my guess. Falling down a staircase is way worse than falling up it. If it's clockwise, then if you hug the outer wall (with the less steep steps) as you go down then your dominant hand can hold the wall (and any handrail).
- porlune 5y ago
  From my years playing Minecraft, it's probably got a lot more to do with the layout of the upper room. Like you don't want your spiral ending toward a wall, you want it ending toward the room itself.
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- hericium 5y ago
  You can fall down positioned upwards or downwards.
  - eCa 5y ago
    Falling upwards generally comes with less potential for injury. Falling backwards when going up is probably about equally bad regardless of clockwiseness.
  - DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
    Unless walking backwards, it is normally more common to trip and fall over forwards; when walking upstairs, you could just fall on your hands, since there's stairs in front of you. It is very difficult to trip and fall over backwards, specially when walking upstairs.
- midasuni 5y ago
  One comment was “it was easier and more natural for a right-handed architect to draw plans for a staircase with a right-handed spiral” There’s also the claim that 30% of staircases are anti-clockwise. That’s a lot for any statement of always or mostly clockwise.
4monthsaway 5y ago
"there are a substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise (approximately 30% of all surviving examples)." I wonder how survivorship bias would affect this argument (pro or against). Neat article.
- mimon 5y ago
  Survivorship in what sense? The castles that exist today have not survived because they were better at repelling swordsmen, they survive because someone in the nobility happened to like them and protected them from development and hundreds of years of disrepair.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Nobles who died defending on a staircase that advantaged the attacker don't leave family behind to care for their castle. I don't know if it is true or not, but your explanation doesn't seem to hold up.
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    In England, it's more the case that the castle survived because the occupier didn't do anything to annoy Cromwell.
    - KineticLensman 5y ago
      Yes. Like Corfe Castle in Dorset, which was taken by treachery, and was demolished some time later, when the fighting was done. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfe_Castle#Post-medieval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfe_Castle#Post-medieval
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      Indeed, Cromwell tried very hard to destroy castles. The trouble was that they were very hard to destroy. Most of the ruined castles are not in that condition out of neglect; that was simply the "best" they were able to do at destroying them. Eventually, the cost of gunpowder was just too much to continue that campaign.
rusk 5y ago
> It is not the purpose of this blog post to outline all of the evidence against the swordsman theory. Oh. Okay then … that’s a pity. Kind of pointless advancing a contrarian position unless you’re going to back it up … > That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on Ah. How mediaeval :-)
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  > How mediaeval :-) Sir, this is HN. We are not amused.
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    You folks would then surely take great comfort, or so I've heard, when I assure you, by Jove, that I did find ample evidence to support my position, yet it is too voluminous to be drawn out here at length within the narrow confines of this commentary box.
mrjangles 5y ago
Yeah so obviously spiral staircases turn clockwise on the way down to give defenders an advantage. This guy claims it isn't true, then offers no evidence, except that he can't find any evidence that it is true.
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  The article explicitly states that it is not going to present the evidence against the myth; it isn't trying to demonstrate that the myth is false, it's leaving that for elsewhere.
- jgilias 5y ago
  Well, no, it's not obvious at all. It's a neat conjecture that may be true in some cases and false in others. I mean, for all we know there may be castles where staircases spiral a certain way because of some beliefs about the devil. It's fine to say that we don't have enough information to say anything definite about the subject.
- cesaref 5y ago
  I think the point is that this theory was first proposed in the 20th century, and given the structures were designed and built something like 1000 years earlier, it is at this point speculation, and there is no evidence to support the assertion. It's useful to dig into beliefs and try and find their basis, and it appears that in this case it's not forthcoming. Of course, this doesn't rule out that in the future some academic finds a 12th century french scroll on how to defend staircases that talks about this!
  - toshk 5y ago
    Your argument is the main point he makes in the intro and is the strongest argument against the theory. But the arguments the author lists himself are not very strong: 1. "The swordsman theory is predicated upon the belief that castles were intrinsically designed as military structures" => "just because most were; there are a lot of castle like fortress that were actively used as defense sitations. 2. If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. => No, opposite, since not all were used military it might not have been a priority for all, and also not all builders might have been aware of this strategy. etc...
watwut 5y ago
> castle specialists have proposed that these buildings were primarily structures intended to be impressive theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige I have seen castles that had only military living in them. Like, they were military outposts build around the time of Turk attacks. They tend to be high on mountain, not comfortably next to city. > If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. Should they? I don't want to question the history here, but the logic of this does not follow to me.
- eesmith 5y ago
  It's a definition thing. What you described is a fortress, not a castle. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for royalty or nobility;
  - mellavora 5y ago
    Etimology. Castle is Norman French for Chateau. A special kind of house, typically/historically for a nobleman, i.e. a landowner. Remember much of English is actually Norman French. After the conquest and all.
    - mkl 5y ago
      Okay, but etymology is not meaning. Meanings change quite a bit.
    - KineticLensman 5y ago
      > Castle is Norman French for Chateau According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both 'castle' and 'chateau' are modern variants of the older Latin 'castellum'.
  - 5y ago
zelos 5y ago
Would the defenders necessarily be the ones higher up the stairs anyway? If attackers scale the walls, they'd be fighting their way down the stairs.
- watwut 5y ago
  They probably wont scale all the way to tower. That would be excessive scalling, since walls are smaller by a lot.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    You scale the walls, then go down in the actual castle. Why bother about the getting in the higher parts of the tower itself? People trapped inside a single tower won't last long, as they probably don't have much supply stored there.
    - watwut 5y ago
      The tight spiral staircase thing is about towers. The road toward and from wall was large non-spiral staircase. There is entrance from tower too, but in castles I have seen it was not the only way to get there.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  If I were an attacker, with the defendants stuck in the tower, I'd probably just shut the door at the bottom and wait. Maybe start a small fire at the bottom and let the smoke do the rest. No need to get messy on the actual stairs.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    > No need to get messy on the actual stairs. This would only be a problem if you didn’t bring any lefties.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Time is on the defenders side though. They can just wait you you in their well stocked castle, while you need to find food and worry about someone from outside coming to rescue the defenders.
null_object 5y ago
It's a mildly interesting topic, but the 'myth' (if it is one) is hardly killed by the accumulated trivia in the article (some of which seems to favor neither side), and the tone is somewhat off-putting - dragging-in sexism and personal quarrels totally unnecessarily: > Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk) and it may be that this familial link creates a strong bond between the myth and its proponents. >[EDIT: Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.]
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Take a sample of O(10) year olds, pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys. Probably similar with parents instead of kids. It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution.
  - watwut 5y ago
    This sort of thing tend to be explained to much younger kids then 10. And I assure you, little girl visiting the castle will listen to exact same trivia with total interest too. I mean, common, castles feature both genders of kids, they all go through all rooms. > pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys Like really, kids of both genders when being in castle and looking at knight armor are going to listen to you talking about knights fighting. They will be way more biased when picking souvenir toys, there they will follow gender. But the whispered "this turns right because this or that" does not have that large bias of interest. -------------------- If the author is wrong about this trivia being explained only to buys, then the author is making sexist assumption about dads. Which is possible actually.
  - null_object 5y ago
    > It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution. I'm not denying the possible 'societal interest distribution', I simply felt it was an irrelevant strawman that's virtually impossible to argue against without instantly being called-out as a sexist "gent", and had no place in what purported to be a historical discussion about stairways.
rich_sasha 5y ago
I wonder if it’s like panic rooms etc. Perhaps the owner, putting the money into the castle and paranoid about their safety, specified a long list of requirements to the builders, who nodded, smiled and complied. So the direction wasn’t really a large-scale defence consideration but rather a “and what if I’m walking down the stairs and an assassin attacks me with a dagger?”. We know castles had secret passages and other means of evading assassination etc so that could make sense.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  I think that the secret passages are more often a way for the servants to do daily maintenance without disturbing the owner and guests. In rare occasions they were used so that the lord/lady can visit a lover without bringing unnecessary attention.
  - GoodbyeMrChips 5y ago
    Anecdote: I was attending a drinks party at a friends house and nearly shit when a bit of wood panelling suddenly opened up next to me.... only for a young lady to appear with a tray of canapes. Here, quite a few large 18th & 19th century houses were built with separate, discrete, servants staircases and passageways.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    This is the case for the castle in Versailles (obviously not medieval). There areplenty of doors (more or less visible) that are used to split the public and private activities (and a way for servants to better navigate the castle). The doors are not always hidden - they clearly separate these two worlds, and may also led to very nice places that are just not public.
  - beardyw 5y ago
    I once had an office (c 1740) with a secret passage. It would only open from inside, so not an access for staff. More like a quick getaway!
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Mountain_Skies 5y ago
A modern occurrence of the spiral staircase defense came when a mentally unwell fan broke into the home of Richard Garriott (Lord British) and was held off by Garriott but using an Uzi instead of a sword. Apparently castles aren't build like they used to be as news articles mention that the Uzi "blew a hole through the house".
- nickkell 5y ago
  Do you happen to know whether the staircase rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise? It could have been a deciding factor in how the events played out
jimmytidey 5y ago
It's always struck me as obvious this is a 'factoid'. How much of a sword fight can you have on a spiral staircase? It's fun though? And a great learning opportunity - you can teach a kid the fun factoid, plus something about how hard it is to find out if a commonly-held belief is true.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  And as the article itself mentions, if it's down to that level of desperation you've already lost. I mean the attacker can start a fire to smoke anyone upstairs out, or continue the siege and just wait.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    True, but like all security measures the point is to make things harder for intruders. Security through obscurity is prudent in addition to other measures, so would this. (Regardless of wheather this actually was a thing or not).
    - zimpenfish 5y ago
      > the point is to make things harder for intruders If the intruders are at the bottom of your stairs, you've probably already lost, no?
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Depends. Most castles had defense in depth. You could lose a few wings and survive long enough for external defenders to come rescue you. I don't see why you would fight on the stairs though, as opposed to running to the top where you can close a door behind you, or fight from a flat floor.
      - Swenrekcah 5y ago
        With that attitude one certainly has already lost :)
- 5y ago
DeathArrow 5y ago
I would like to hear the opinion of an architect. If staircases being clockwise or anti-clockwise can have some advantages. From my POV since most people are right handed, an anti-clockwise staircase would feel more natural for going up, since you can make the first step with your right foot and use your dominant hand for the handrail. But for getting down a clockwise staircase would feel more natural.
- soco 5y ago
  All the church tower climbs I can recall in this moment are on anti-clockwise stairs, so there may be a point here. The decent was never so exciting so I really can't remember if the other stair was twisting the other way around...
- jaclaz 5y ago
  Not an architect, but having more than a little experience in house (and staircases) design. There are some geometrical limits that will make the stair start and land on the same or opposite side, both "top" vs. "bottom" and "left" vs. "right". Usually (but not always) you want the stair to start and land on the same (bottom vs. top) side and this - generally speaking - implies having a 180° turning of the stair, which itself implies that if you start left, you land right or - viceversa - if you start right you land left. How much is the height you have to cover? How large is the staircase diameter? A typical height of around 3 meters will give you, with steps between 15 (very "plain") and 25 cm (rather steep) anything between 4 and 5 (max 6) steps per meter of height. If you have a 2 m diameter staircase and a central hub of - say - 40 cm diameter, each step will be 80 cm wide. On the outer side it will be anything between 25 and 35 cm. So, let's test what happens with 15 cm high steps and outer side 30 cm. The perimeter of the staircase is Pix2.00=6.28, with 30 cm on the outside it will give you around 6.28/0.30=~21 steps for a 360° rotation, and 21x15=3.15 height, but you want actually 180° or 540° as you would want to have the stair land on the same side (top vs. bottom), for 180° you have only 10/11 steps, and you cannot make 27/30 cm high steps. So you either enlarge the staircase (to increment its perimeter) or reduce the max size of the step (but remember that when you decrease the size of the step on the outer size, the size near the hub will also become smaller). Let's try again with the same 2 m diameter staircase and 25 cm outer step, 180° 3.14/0.25=12,56->13 steps 3.00/13=0.23 cm, steep but doable. In a "lower left corner" (what you can imagine as a letter "L") it makes sense (to minimize area needed) to have the first step, at the lower level, on the left (but you will land on the right). In practice you have to decide whether you want around 1 meter space between the outer (left) wall and the step on either the lower or the higher level, it depends, but you want the extra 1 m space at the level where you can possibly put some piece of furniture (a closet, a library, whatever). There is no particular ergonomical reason (AFAIK) why one would prefere a clockwise or anticlockwise staircase, as you noted if one might feel more comfortable going up, it will feel less so going down or viceversa. Here is a simple guide on designing: https://www.granddesignstairs.com/spiral-staircases-design/ https://www.granddesignstairs.com/spiral-staircases-design/
usrusr 5y ago
The “theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige“ made me wonder if that "myth" has maybe existed the entire time: not as a clear design rule that would make the opposite formally wrong (e.g. surely an appeal to symmetry would easily overrule it), but as a detail tweak an architect might occasionally bring up to appear clever, or a lord to appear diligent. The entire idea of "primarily for appearance of status and strength, actual military qualities not as important as one might think" is basically today's SUV vs actual off-road. And with that premise "staircase winding direction selected for defense" can very much be both true and a fantasy: it would have been mostly a fantasy already back at the time it was built, but not untrue either. Just like the zombie apocalypse qualities of SUVs that are never used for anything more adventurous than a grocery ruin.
- berkes 5y ago
  > grocery ruin A very on-topic typo. One that has me wondering what this would look like. A crumbling, mediaeval tower to store harvest, maybe?
  - shiomiru 5y ago
    Or one of those abandoned grocery stores in zombie apocalypse films. At least that's the first thing it made me think of.
    - Infernal 5y ago
      In which I suspect I’ll be able to find a few full cans of grape soda (though dented of course) and inexplicably, an entirely unmolested first aid kit.
- limbicsystem 5y ago
  I think of the USS Nimitz. Everything on that ship is (presumably) there for an excellent military reason. Yet it has probably never been attacked directly and it clearly has an important role in maintaining status and prestige. The two things are correlated, not independent.
samizdis 5y ago
I wonder whether clockwise was generally favoured over anti-clockwise (or widdershins [1]) for superstitious reasons. Clockwise is "right" vs anticlockwise as "left". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins
- teorema 5y ago
  I wonder if you just asked 1000 people to draw a spiral without any other context, would there be some handedness/chirality to the drawings? My guess is there would be. https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/ https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf
nabla9 5y ago
The most likely source for the assumption: Straight staircases running against defensive castle walls have intentional design rule where those going up have right hand against the wall. Right handed defender can hack downward freely. They can also have intentionally uneven step length that makes running the stairs difficult. Similar rule is not as useful inside the castle or tower but, it might have been still used from time to time.
tzs 5y ago
> The story goes that all castle staircases turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. Even if the direction was chosen to give downward fighting defenders an advantage, I don't think that would be the specific advantage given. Consider a person standing on the staircase. Whichever direction they are facing, the wall side is more impeded as far as swinging a sword goes than the newel side. Proof: imagine you are standing on the center of your step facing forward, with identical swords in each hand, holding them in mirrored positions. As you move the swords around in mirrored motion any time the newel side sword hits the newel the wall side sword will be hitting the wall. But there will be many positions where the wall side sword hits the wall but the mirrored newel side sword does not. The advantage the newel post side has is that the person going up can can lean the top of their body a little ways over the edge, partly shielding behind the newel post from the point of view of someone going down. If the newel post is on the same side as their sword then when they take advantage of their shielding they make it harder to use their sword (unless they can lean far enough over to attack around the post). If their sword is on the wall side, then they get the newel post shielding for free. If you were worried about castle defense when designing your staircase, I'd guess that it is this shielding considering that would lead to clockwise.
- Bobylonian 5y ago
  People clearly have not visited medieval castles and walked on those stairs. They are so STEEP, that your main worry about using those is not to slip on your way down and taking breath, when you are gone through them up to a place where you can rest. PS those staircases are ideal places to just barricade and set fire and let defenders to die from smoke. People in medieval times were not such morons to fight there...
Jenk 5y ago
My history teacher brought this topic up in my class. He had a less violent theory about the reason for clockwise stairs, which is still related to the majority right-handed population. That people carrying things up these staircases would be using their right hand to carry the item(s), and so would use their left hand to steady themselves on the wall (or the rope/rail/etc affixed to the wall).
- Radim 5y ago
  In my experience, going down is far tricker (and riskier) than climbing up. Especially when carrying things. So that theory doesn't sound right either.
  - Jenk 5y ago
    He was specifically thinking of food/drink. Coming down would be empty, going up is full. He also said it'd be servants doing this, which is also why the stairs were always so small.
  - 101008 5y ago
    My experience is the same, from stairs to mountains, descending is much harder (maybe because we are tired of going up?). Anyway, I can see that intuitively, one can imagine that you need help to go up when you are carrying stuff.
    - jamincan 5y ago
      I think it is due to the fact that going down stairs requires eccentric muscle contraction which is harder on the joints and also harder to control.
    - deleted 5y ago
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    - bipson 5y ago
      Don't over-interpret: It is just way easier the way we are built, kids learn climbing stairs (and other things) way before they can safely walk stairs downwards. The smarter ones go backwards. Standing on a step and stepping down is just ... complicated ... and requires considerably more body control. The risk of toppling forwards and falling down the stairs (or the couch) is considerably higher than "stumbling the stairs upwards".
lqet 5y ago
Slightly related, examples for exceptionally beautiful spiral staircases that turn anti-clockwise are the original [0] and 1930s [1] Bramante staircases in the Vatican, which feature a double-helix design. The original could be used by carriages. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bramante_Staircase_3_%2815614276112%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bramante... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_Museums_Spiral_Staircase_2012.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_...
Aeolun 5y ago
> It is not the purpose of this blog post to outline all of the evidence against the swordsman theory. Well then. Bye. Seriously, why even write a blog post like this if you’re not going to put the necessary information in it to make your point.
- lucideer 5y ago
  > why even write a blog post like this The very next sentence explains why. Did you really not read past the line you quoted? > That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on The blogpost is a teaser for an upcoming book: that's pretty common.
123pie123 5y ago
there's another tale thats gets told a lot about castles or fotified homes and that's about the height of the steps in a staircase on the staircases most of the steps on the stairs are a constant(ish) height except one or two the story is if that someone is running fast up or down the stairs (presumingly they're chasing someone who lives/ works in the castle) and this odd step will trip the attackers up - assuming they're not familiar with the odd height of one of the steps
lucideer 5y ago
Hopefully the book they're working on makes more compelling arguments, as the bullet points listed in this blogpost are pretty weak: 1. "Castles were built for prestige not fortification". Regardless of actual use as fortification (frequency of battles), it's pretty self-evident that the intent of much of a castles design is fortification. Even if moats, arrow slits and parapets are just for show, they would still be to show off your defensive capabilities, in which case (at least apparent) defense would still be the primary concern of the architect. 2. "Some turn anti-clockwise" Wherein the author assumes that all wisdom is automatically universally shared and all architects/planners/builders are universally competent. A fact as true today as it ever was. 3. is pretty much the same argument as (2) repeated. 4. An argument against how practical they would be in reality (already superceded by their first point that they were probably just for show). There's very little of substance in this article. Hopefully the book does a better job.
- qw 5y ago
  I think one of the points in the article is that the walls and moat are the main lines of defence. The castle is protected by the walls. If they breach the walls and actually enter the interior of the castle, they have already lost and no staircase design can save them.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    There were interior defenses though. In some of the more impressive castles there were concentric rings of walls so breeching on wouldn't surrender the whole castle. There were often also keeps. Even in early proto castles you had motte and bailey designs where the main walls defended the low ground (bailey) for an interior fort built on a hill or prominence (the motte). Castles weren't single layer defenses that stopped at the walls, they were definitely designed to continue the fight and protect the nobles even if the enemy did get through the walls. Given that it's not so out of line to think the interior architecture might have been designed to increase defender's advantages.
    - timcederman 5y ago
ptx 5y ago
> 3. If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. However [...] there are a substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise (approximately 30% of all surviving examples). Couldn't this minority be explained by engineers either doing it wrong, being given bad requirements or being overruled by misguided management? I.e., the clockwise turn was indeed for military purposes and as much as 70% of projects were done correctly but in 30% of projects one or more project management issues led to the staircases being built wrong. > 4. The direction of a spiral staircase was an architectural decision, not a military one. Perhaps different stakeholders had different priorities and the military advantage was one of many considerations.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Exactly. I found this article a poor rebuttal. As a lefty who is pretty clumsy on the right, there are many implicit design decisions that favor whatever right handed people do for the simple reason that most people are right handed. There was accommodations for lefty’s in some ancient battle formations, so while it may be a myth, it may be one with a kernel of truth as conventions for things like castle construction are probably ancient and lost to modern people.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I doubt all architects knew all the details. They would look into how to defend the attacks they expected, and the ones they had given to others. It is entirely possible that the trope is true, but only for a small minority of castles where they expected such fighting, and in the vast majority it is false because they didn't expect it. If it is true, you would expect other evidence that in the design that they expected the walls to be breached and thus have to fight in such a way, and also that it wasn't a hopeless idea to fight on. This does seem unlikely based on what I know of historical war, but I'll freely admit what I know is minimal. Any real historians care to comment?
- jameshart 5y ago
  Any programmer should be able to spot the syllogism here, yes. Just because something is a security best practice definitely does not guarantee that it will be followed universally by architects. Not all the castle builders were up to speed on CVE-1271-53 “left-handed spiral staircases enable swordsman overflow attacks”, and more importantly their clients didn’t know how to evaluate a competent castle architect either. Maybe they should have had some sort of certification scheme. But even then, once a pen tester gets in and tells you your staircases were built backwards, what are you going to do? They’re made of stone and built into structural walls in a tall building.
smitty1e 5y ago
> substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise Missed an opportunity to use 'widdershins'.
wongarsu 5y ago
> Secondly, they were lavish residences and only finally was there some consideration of fortification I would have argued the contrary, the vast majority of European castles were uninhabited or manned by a skeleton crew the majority of the time, and only inhabited when threats demanded it. There certainly were castles that served as primary residences (like the mentioned Arundel Castle), but this mostly became the fashion after the medieval time, when the transition from the fortified castle to the beautiful and nice-to-live in chateaus happened, with fortification elements that were more symbolic than practical (English lacks a clear distinction in name here, but at least German and French draw a clear line here).
unbalancedevh 5y ago
I never understood the argument that it's easier to swing a weapon with the arm on the wall-side. On the wall-side, there's wall everywhere, and closes in both behind you and in front of you. On the newel-post side, the space opens up both behind and in front, which seems like it would make it a lot easier to manoeuver a weapon.
- ginko 5y ago
  This is the first time I've heard of this and I don't quite buy it either. Having your left side on the wall side also means that you can stabilize yourself against a handrail with your left hand.
- jamincan 5y ago
  For the person facing up, their opponent is to their right, which is closed off. They would need to reach up and to the right, and that motion would be blocked by the newel post. For the person facing down, their opponent is to their left, which is open. They would need to reach down and across their body to the left, unobstructed.
zzzeek 5y ago
OK, how about the theory that mens shirts have buttons on the right side so that the swordsman would unbutton his jacket with his left hand while drawing with his right?
- qw 5y ago
  I have better dexterity in my right hand, so I find it easier when the button is on the right side. My left hand only needs to hold the hole steady, while the right hand need more flexibility
- Biganon 5y ago
  So basically, if the action is easier to do with the right hand, it's self-explanatory, and if it's easier to do with the left hand, it's because you used to do it while using a sword in your right hand. We can explain an infinite number of chiralities now!
Tiereven 5y ago
The photos of these staircases reminded me of the insides of the shells of some spiral-shelled animals. Interesting that as you look into the opening of most such shells, they turn to the left as well. I wonder if this observation was an influence on the early architects of these stair structures.
jihadjihad 5y ago
We really need Bret Devereaux of ACOUP [0] fame to weigh in on this--I would trust his judgment and arguments much more than the ones put forth in the article. 0: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...
e2021 5y ago
As others have said, I don't find these arguments very convincing - if castles were mainly residences, then why have crenelations, or arrow slits or a moat, doesn't that argument apply equally to those? The argument that if such a defensive feature was needed, then its already too late, and so it was probably never used is also not a good one imo. Has the CWIS gun on aircraft carriers ever actually been used in combat? Am I to conclude that CWIS has no defensive use and is purely architectural ornamentation? The only good point is that it wasn't mentioned by contemporary sources, but I don't think this proves anything unless you can show that other defensive features on castles were mentioned. Otherwise maybe we just have bad sources about castle design. But if you can show me some documents about why eg. moats are designed they way they are, then I think you have a point.
- pwr-electronics 5y ago
  I can't find it now, but I remember watching a YouTube video about how the military aspect of castles was more about projecting power over the local population to prevent and put down rebellion. This article talks about how it was also both a home security system and a status symbol. You technically had to be licensed to fortify your property. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_to_crenellate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_to_crenellate
- hef19898 5y ago
  Well, castles were also used as bases to dominate the country side. And to show of wealth. The dominating part was made easier by bwing easily defended, turning them into ideal bases of operations. How someone could argue castles weren't military buildings, I don't know.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  It would be worth noting what percentage of castle from this same period feature a moat or crenelations or arrow slits, right? The book is about why it's actually a myth. This article is about how stories get started and passed down with no basis in fact, and is really promotional material for the book. And here we are in 2021, and people are defending a story invented in 1902 about design decisions made more than 500 years prior, and it's unclear how many of them had even heard the original myth before reading this article! The gnosticism is very strong today.
EGreg 5y ago
I agree with the commenter who pronounced it "drivel" and whom the author referenced in his article.
fanzhang 5y ago
It would be way more convincing if the Arthur used primary historical source documents to justify this as a myth. For example, if he could find an old architect who wrote that the spiral staircases were for aesthetic reasons or for making the climb up easier, that would be more convincing. Instead, the author argues from almost first principles and bulk observations, which seems to be unconvincing logic in establishing historical intent.
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- mig39 5y ago
  In the article he finds the first written mention of the "purpose" of the spiral going in one direction is in 1902. And explains that this 1902 author was obsessed with spirals and fencing. I think the fact that there are no primary historical source documents that say "hey, we're building this castle this way just in case it's breached and we have to have a sword fight on the stairs" is one of his main points. It would be easy to disprove the article author by finding such historical documents. Do they exist?
flerovium 5y ago
HN needs more content like this. > Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.
mcguire 5y ago
"The Spiral Stair or Vice: its origins, role and meaning in medieval stone castles: Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Charles Ryder February 2011" (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9632028.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9632028.pdf) I can't find anything specific about the theory, except quotes like "Simpson notes the presence of spiral stairs throughout this work, though sadly, when describing Colchester Castle, Essex, he falls into the old trap of claiming that the spiral clockwise spiral stair aids the defender" and a reference to a different 1854 source mentioning it.
Maursault 5y ago
I had never heard the spiral staircase/right-handed swordsmen legend before today, though it sounds similar to the description of button location on men's shirt's. Both sound silly, the shirt button location because it doesn't explain button location on womens' clothes and the spiral staircase handedness because if they actually had any interest in defense they would have used a counterbalance staircase that could easily be lifted completely denying access to upper levels.
- plank 5y ago
  Not saying that I know for certain that the button-one is not a urban legend, but the tale is usually that the button on womens’ clothes is due to the fact that the lady of the house is dressed more often by the staff. Unlike the gents, which were only helped if they choose to wear armor. (Edit: the => they)
fijiaarone 5y ago
Castles were built with military defense primarily in mind. Just because they were not constantly involved in siege does not negate that -- take the aircraft carrier example. Because it is a strong military defense, it doesn't often need to be used for that. You can see hundreds of architectural decisions that were made with military aims -- some of them didn't work, and some of them weren't used. But, whether staircases were made with the righthanded swordsman in mind is irrelevant. They were created with right-handedness in mind. Because of the placement of railings.
lucas_membrane 5y ago
There was an article in the New Scientist (YMMV) about this subject about 30 or 40 years back. It described research that found (for what was thought by the researchers to be the relevant period in history) just slightly more that 10 percent (not 30% as this article asserts) of staircases were left-handed, that fraction being approximately equal to the proportion of persons or presumed castle defenders who would have been left handed. It drew the inference, compatible with the idea that castles, being large, might require a large number of defenders and would contain a sufficient number of staircases, that defenses would have been optimized by allocating defenders to staircases according to handedness when the aforementioned fractions were equal.

208 points by dgellow 5y ago

I guess this is a reminder to all of us not to make confident assertions about things we don't really know. Calling BS is a service to those around you.

qw 5y ago

As a right-handed person, I find it is much easier to run down stairs if I can use the wall or railing for support. To me, it sounds as plausible as the sword fight theory.

Finnucane 5y ago

So on the one hand we have folklore passed down from generation to generation, and on the other we have a finding of no documentary evidence for it. But no evidence for much of any other explanation either. Not much to go on either way. In medieval times, the thinking could well have been "we have to favor the right-handed because the left hand is the tool of the devil."

paulmooreparks 5y ago

I'm no expert in medieval warfare, but it seems to me that if an army has breached the outer and inner castle defenses and is fighting its way up the tower stairs, bigger failures have occurred than which direction the stairs turn. As if the lord of the castle is rubbing his hands gleefully, saying, "No matter, wait until they see THE STAIRS!" Nah, I don't buy it. Random chance or individual preference seems a bit more likely.

glxxyz 5y ago
Yes once the attackers had got inside the keep it would have been all over. If the builders had been serious about defending the spiral stairs, they'd have added something like a portcullis or replaced the stairs with a ladder. I've heard this myth a few times and even repeated it myself without question. It's an obviously fanciful idea now I think about it some more.

wisty 5y ago

So why were they clockwise? Here's my guess. Falling down a staircase is way worse than falling up it. If it's clockwise, then if you hug the outer wall (with the less steep steps) as you go down then your dominant hand can hold the wall (and any handrail).

porlune 5y ago
From my years playing Minecraft, it's probably got a lot more to do with the layout of the upper room. Like you don't want your spiral ending toward a wall, you want it ending toward the room itself.
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hericium 5y ago
You can fall down positioned upwards or downwards.
- eCa 5y ago
  Falling upwards generally comes with less potential for injury. Falling backwards when going up is probably about equally bad regardless of clockwiseness.
- DarkWiiPlayer 5y ago
  Unless walking backwards, it is normally more common to trip and fall over forwards; when walking upstairs, you could just fall on your hands, since there's stairs in front of you. It is very difficult to trip and fall over backwards, specially when walking upstairs.
midasuni 5y ago
One comment was “it was easier and more natural for a right-handed architect to draw plans for a staircase with a right-handed spiral” There’s also the claim that 30% of staircases are anti-clockwise. That’s a lot for any statement of always or mostly clockwise.

4monthsaway 5y ago

"there are a substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise (approximately 30% of all surviving examples)." I wonder how survivorship bias would affect this argument (pro or against). Neat article.

mimon 5y ago
Survivorship in what sense? The castles that exist today have not survived because they were better at repelling swordsmen, they survive because someone in the nobility happened to like them and protected them from development and hundreds of years of disrepair.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Nobles who died defending on a staircase that advantaged the attacker don't leave family behind to care for their castle. I don't know if it is true or not, but your explanation doesn't seem to hold up.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  In England, it's more the case that the castle survived because the occupier didn't do anything to annoy Cromwell.
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    Yes. Like Corfe Castle in Dorset, which was taken by treachery, and was demolished some time later, when the fighting was done. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfe_Castle#Post-medieval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfe_Castle#Post-medieval
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    Indeed, Cromwell tried very hard to destroy castles. The trouble was that they were very hard to destroy. Most of the ruined castles are not in that condition out of neglect; that was simply the "best" they were able to do at destroying them. Eventually, the cost of gunpowder was just too much to continue that campaign.

rusk 5y ago

> It is not the purpose of this blog post to outline all of the evidence against the swordsman theory. Oh. Okay then … that’s a pity. Kind of pointless advancing a contrarian position unless you’re going to back it up … > That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on Ah. How mediaeval :-)

CoastalCoder 5y ago
> How mediaeval :-) Sir, this is HN. We are not amused.
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago
  You folks would then surely take great comfort, or so I've heard, when I assure you, by Jove, that I did find ample evidence to support my position, yet it is too voluminous to be drawn out here at length within the narrow confines of this commentary box.

mrjangles 5y ago

Yeah so obviously spiral staircases turn clockwise on the way down to give defenders an advantage. This guy claims it isn't true, then offers no evidence, except that he can't find any evidence that it is true.

Sniffnoy 5y ago
The article explicitly states that it is not going to present the evidence against the myth; it isn't trying to demonstrate that the myth is false, it's leaving that for elsewhere.
jgilias 5y ago
Well, no, it's not obvious at all. It's a neat conjecture that may be true in some cases and false in others. I mean, for all we know there may be castles where staircases spiral a certain way because of some beliefs about the devil. It's fine to say that we don't have enough information to say anything definite about the subject.
cesaref 5y ago
I think the point is that this theory was first proposed in the 20th century, and given the structures were designed and built something like 1000 years earlier, it is at this point speculation, and there is no evidence to support the assertion. It's useful to dig into beliefs and try and find their basis, and it appears that in this case it's not forthcoming. Of course, this doesn't rule out that in the future some academic finds a 12th century french scroll on how to defend staircases that talks about this!
- toshk 5y ago
  Your argument is the main point he makes in the intro and is the strongest argument against the theory. But the arguments the author lists himself are not very strong: 1. "The swordsman theory is predicated upon the belief that castles were intrinsically designed as military structures" => "just because most were; there are a lot of castle like fortress that were actively used as defense sitations. 2. If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. => No, opposite, since not all were used military it might not have been a priority for all, and also not all builders might have been aware of this strategy. etc...

watwut 5y ago

> castle specialists have proposed that these buildings were primarily structures intended to be impressive theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige I have seen castles that had only military living in them. Like, they were military outposts build around the time of Turk attacks. They tend to be high on mountain, not comfortably next to city. > If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. Should they? I don't want to question the history here, but the logic of this does not follow to me.

eesmith 5y ago
It's a definition thing. What you described is a fortress, not a castle. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for royalty or nobility;
- mellavora 5y ago
  Etimology. Castle is Norman French for Chateau. A special kind of house, typically/historically for a nobleman, i.e. a landowner. Remember much of English is actually Norman French. After the conquest and all.
  - mkl 5y ago
    Okay, but etymology is not meaning. Meanings change quite a bit.
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > Castle is Norman French for Chateau According to my Oxford English Dictionary, both 'castle' and 'chateau' are modern variants of the older Latin 'castellum'.
- 5y ago

zelos 5y ago

Would the defenders necessarily be the ones higher up the stairs anyway? If attackers scale the walls, they'd be fighting their way down the stairs.

watwut 5y ago
They probably wont scale all the way to tower. That would be excessive scalling, since walls are smaller by a lot.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  You scale the walls, then go down in the actual castle. Why bother about the getting in the higher parts of the tower itself? People trapped inside a single tower won't last long, as they probably don't have much supply stored there.
  - watwut 5y ago
    The tight spiral staircase thing is about towers. The road toward and from wall was large non-spiral staircase. There is entrance from tower too, but in castles I have seen it was not the only way to get there.
rich_sasha 5y ago
If I were an attacker, with the defendants stuck in the tower, I'd probably just shut the door at the bottom and wait. Maybe start a small fire at the bottom and let the smoke do the rest. No need to get messy on the actual stairs.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  > No need to get messy on the actual stairs. This would only be a problem if you didn’t bring any lefties.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Time is on the defenders side though. They can just wait you you in their well stocked castle, while you need to find food and worry about someone from outside coming to rescue the defenders.

null_object 5y ago

It's a mildly interesting topic, but the 'myth' (if it is one) is hardly killed by the accumulated trivia in the article (some of which seems to favor neither side), and the tone is somewhat off-putting - dragging-in sexism and personal quarrels totally unnecessarily: > Whilst working at or visiting castles I inevitably hear a dad proudly imparting this knowledge to his little boy (and it usually is boys’ talk) and it may be that this familial link creates a strong bond between the myth and its proponents. >[EDIT: Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.]

rich_sasha 5y ago
Take a sample of O(10) year olds, pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys. Probably similar with parents instead of kids. It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution.
- watwut 5y ago
  This sort of thing tend to be explained to much younger kids then 10. And I assure you, little girl visiting the castle will listen to exact same trivia with total interest too. I mean, common, castles feature both genders of kids, they all go through all rooms. > pick out the ones interested in knights killing each other in a castle, you will find the selection heavily biased towards boys Like really, kids of both genders when being in castle and looking at knight armor are going to listen to you talking about knights fighting. They will be way more biased when picking souvenir toys, there they will follow gender. But the whispered "this turns right because this or that" does not have that large bias of interest. -------------------- If the author is wrong about this trivia being explained only to buys, then the author is making sexist assumption about dads. Which is possible actually.
- null_object 5y ago
  > It’s hardly sexism, it’s a pervasive fact of societal interest distribution. I'm not denying the possible 'societal interest distribution', I simply felt it was an irrelevant strawman that's virtually impossible to argue against without instantly being called-out as a sexist "gent", and had no place in what purported to be a historical discussion about stairways.

rich_sasha 5y ago

I wonder if it’s like panic rooms etc. Perhaps the owner, putting the money into the castle and paranoid about their safety, specified a long list of requirements to the builders, who nodded, smiled and complied. So the direction wasn’t really a large-scale defence consideration but rather a “and what if I’m walking down the stairs and an assassin attacks me with a dagger?”. We know castles had secret passages and other means of evading assassination etc so that could make sense.

gostsamo 5y ago
I think that the secret passages are more often a way for the servants to do daily maintenance without disturbing the owner and guests. In rare occasions they were used so that the lord/lady can visit a lover without bringing unnecessary attention.
- GoodbyeMrChips 5y ago
  Anecdote: I was attending a drinks party at a friends house and nearly shit when a bit of wood panelling suddenly opened up next to me.... only for a young lady to appear with a tray of canapes. Here, quite a few large 18th & 19th century houses were built with separate, discrete, servants staircases and passageways.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  This is the case for the castle in Versailles (obviously not medieval). There areplenty of doors (more or less visible) that are used to split the public and private activities (and a way for servants to better navigate the castle). The doors are not always hidden - they clearly separate these two worlds, and may also led to very nice places that are just not public.
- beardyw 5y ago
  I once had an office (c 1740) with a secret passage. It would only open from inside, so not an access for staff. More like a quick getaway!
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Mountain_Skies 5y ago

A modern occurrence of the spiral staircase defense came when a mentally unwell fan broke into the home of Richard Garriott (Lord British) and was held off by Garriott but using an Uzi instead of a sword. Apparently castles aren't build like they used to be as news articles mention that the Uzi "blew a hole through the house".

nickkell 5y ago
Do you happen to know whether the staircase rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise? It could have been a deciding factor in how the events played out

jimmytidey 5y ago

It's always struck me as obvious this is a 'factoid'. How much of a sword fight can you have on a spiral staircase? It's fun though? And a great learning opportunity - you can teach a kid the fun factoid, plus something about how hard it is to find out if a commonly-held belief is true.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
And as the article itself mentions, if it's down to that level of desperation you've already lost. I mean the attacker can start a fire to smoke anyone upstairs out, or continue the siege and just wait.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  True, but like all security measures the point is to make things harder for intruders. Security through obscurity is prudent in addition to other measures, so would this. (Regardless of wheather this actually was a thing or not).
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    > the point is to make things harder for intruders If the intruders are at the bottom of your stairs, you've probably already lost, no?
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Depends. Most castles had defense in depth. You could lose a few wings and survive long enough for external defenders to come rescue you. I don't see why you would fight on the stairs though, as opposed to running to the top where you can close a door behind you, or fight from a flat floor.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      With that attitude one certainly has already lost :)
5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

I would like to hear the opinion of an architect. If staircases being clockwise or anti-clockwise can have some advantages. From my POV since most people are right handed, an anti-clockwise staircase would feel more natural for going up, since you can make the first step with your right foot and use your dominant hand for the handrail. But for getting down a clockwise staircase would feel more natural.

soco 5y ago
All the church tower climbs I can recall in this moment are on anti-clockwise stairs, so there may be a point here. The decent was never so exciting so I really can't remember if the other stair was twisting the other way around...
jaclaz 5y ago
Not an architect, but having more than a little experience in house (and staircases) design. There are some geometrical limits that will make the stair start and land on the same or opposite side, both "top" vs. "bottom" and "left" vs. "right". Usually (but not always) you want the stair to start and land on the same (bottom vs. top) side and this - generally speaking - implies having a 180° turning of the stair, which itself implies that if you start left, you land right or - viceversa - if you start right you land left. How much is the height you have to cover? How large is the staircase diameter? A typical height of around 3 meters will give you, with steps between 15 (very "plain") and 25 cm (rather steep) anything between 4 and 5 (max 6) steps per meter of height. If you have a 2 m diameter staircase and a central hub of - say - 40 cm diameter, each step will be 80 cm wide. On the outer side it will be anything between 25 and 35 cm. So, let's test what happens with 15 cm high steps and outer side 30 cm. The perimeter of the staircase is Pix2.00=6.28, with 30 cm on the outside it will give you around 6.28/0.30=~21 steps for a 360° rotation, and 21x15=3.15 height, but you want actually 180° or 540° as you would want to have the stair land on the same side (top vs. bottom), for 180° you have only 10/11 steps, and you cannot make 27/30 cm high steps. So you either enlarge the staircase (to increment its perimeter) or reduce the max size of the step (but remember that when you decrease the size of the step on the outer size, the size near the hub will also become smaller). Let's try again with the same 2 m diameter staircase and 25 cm outer step, 180° 3.14/0.25=12,56->13 steps 3.00/13=0.23 cm, steep but doable. In a "lower left corner" (what you can imagine as a letter "L") it makes sense (to minimize area needed) to have the first step, at the lower level, on the left (but you will land on the right). In practice you have to decide whether you want around 1 meter space between the outer (left) wall and the step on either the lower or the higher level, it depends, but you want the extra 1 m space at the level where you can possibly put some piece of furniture (a closet, a library, whatever). There is no particular ergonomical reason (AFAIK) why one would prefere a clockwise or anticlockwise staircase, as you noted if one might feel more comfortable going up, it will feel less so going down or viceversa. Here is a simple guide on designing: https://www.granddesignstairs.com/spiral-staircases-design/ https://www.granddesignstairs.com/spiral-staircases-design/

usrusr 5y ago

The “theatrical backdrops for complex ceremonies relating to status and prestige“ made me wonder if that "myth" has maybe existed the entire time: not as a clear design rule that would make the opposite formally wrong (e.g. surely an appeal to symmetry would easily overrule it), but as a detail tweak an architect might occasionally bring up to appear clever, or a lord to appear diligent. The entire idea of "primarily for appearance of status and strength, actual military qualities not as important as one might think" is basically today's SUV vs actual off-road. And with that premise "staircase winding direction selected for defense" can very much be both true and a fantasy: it would have been mostly a fantasy already back at the time it was built, but not untrue either. Just like the zombie apocalypse qualities of SUVs that are never used for anything more adventurous than a grocery ruin.

berkes 5y ago
> grocery ruin A very on-topic typo. One that has me wondering what this would look like. A crumbling, mediaeval tower to store harvest, maybe?
- shiomiru 5y ago
  Or one of those abandoned grocery stores in zombie apocalypse films. At least that's the first thing it made me think of.
  - Infernal 5y ago
    In which I suspect I’ll be able to find a few full cans of grape soda (though dented of course) and inexplicably, an entirely unmolested first aid kit.
limbicsystem 5y ago
I think of the USS Nimitz. Everything on that ship is (presumably) there for an excellent military reason. Yet it has probably never been attacked directly and it clearly has an important role in maintaining status and prestige. The two things are correlated, not independent.

samizdis 5y ago

I wonder whether clockwise was generally favoured over anti-clockwise (or widdershins [1]) for superstitious reasons. Clockwise is "right" vs anticlockwise as "left". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins

teorema 5y ago
I wonder if you just asked 1000 people to draw a spiral without any other context, would there be some handedness/chirality to the drawings? My guess is there would be. https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/ https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf

nabla9 5y ago

The most likely source for the assumption: Straight staircases running against defensive castle walls have intentional design rule where those going up have right hand against the wall. Right handed defender can hack downward freely. They can also have intentionally uneven step length that makes running the stairs difficult. Similar rule is not as useful inside the castle or tower but, it might have been still used from time to time.

tzs 5y ago

> The story goes that all castle staircases turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. Even if the direction was chosen to give downward fighting defenders an advantage, I don't think that would be the specific advantage given. Consider a person standing on the staircase. Whichever direction they are facing, the wall side is more impeded as far as swinging a sword goes than the newel side. Proof: imagine you are standing on the center of your step facing forward, with identical swords in each hand, holding them in mirrored positions. As you move the swords around in mirrored motion any time the newel side sword hits the newel the wall side sword will be hitting the wall. But there will be many positions where the wall side sword hits the wall but the mirrored newel side sword does not. The advantage the newel post side has is that the person going up can can lean the top of their body a little ways over the edge, partly shielding behind the newel post from the point of view of someone going down. If the newel post is on the same side as their sword then when they take advantage of their shielding they make it harder to use their sword (unless they can lean far enough over to attack around the post). If their sword is on the wall side, then they get the newel post shielding for free. If you were worried about castle defense when designing your staircase, I'd guess that it is this shielding considering that would lead to clockwise.

Bobylonian 5y ago
People clearly have not visited medieval castles and walked on those stairs. They are so STEEP, that your main worry about using those is not to slip on your way down and taking breath, when you are gone through them up to a place where you can rest. PS those staircases are ideal places to just barricade and set fire and let defenders to die from smoke. People in medieval times were not such morons to fight there...

Jenk 5y ago

My history teacher brought this topic up in my class. He had a less violent theory about the reason for clockwise stairs, which is still related to the majority right-handed population. That people carrying things up these staircases would be using their right hand to carry the item(s), and so would use their left hand to steady themselves on the wall (or the rope/rail/etc affixed to the wall).

Radim 5y ago
In my experience, going down is far tricker (and riskier) than climbing up. Especially when carrying things. So that theory doesn't sound right either.
- Jenk 5y ago
  He was specifically thinking of food/drink. Coming down would be empty, going up is full. He also said it'd be servants doing this, which is also why the stairs were always so small.
- 101008 5y ago
  My experience is the same, from stairs to mountains, descending is much harder (maybe because we are tired of going up?). Anyway, I can see that intuitively, one can imagine that you need help to go up when you are carrying stuff.
  - jamincan 5y ago
    I think it is due to the fact that going down stairs requires eccentric muscle contraction which is harder on the joints and also harder to control.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bipson 5y ago
    Don't over-interpret: It is just way easier the way we are built, kids learn climbing stairs (and other things) way before they can safely walk stairs downwards. The smarter ones go backwards. Standing on a step and stepping down is just ... complicated ... and requires considerably more body control. The risk of toppling forwards and falling down the stairs (or the couch) is considerably higher than "stumbling the stairs upwards".

lqet 5y ago

Slightly related, examples for exceptionally beautiful spiral staircases that turn anti-clockwise are the original [0] and 1930s [1] Bramante staircases in the Vatican, which feature a double-helix design. The original could be used by carriages. [0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bramante_Staircase_3_%2815614276112%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Bramante... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_Museums_Spiral_Staircase_2012.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Vatican_...

Aeolun 5y ago

> It is not the purpose of this blog post to outline all of the evidence against the swordsman theory. Well then. Bye. Seriously, why even write a blog post like this if you’re not going to put the necessary information in it to make your point.

lucideer 5y ago
> why even write a blog post like this The very next sentence explains why. Did you really not read past the line you quoted? > That data will eventually appear in the content of a book that I am working on The blogpost is a teaser for an upcoming book: that's pretty common.

123pie123 5y ago

there's another tale thats gets told a lot about castles or fotified homes and that's about the height of the steps in a staircase on the staircases most of the steps on the stairs are a constant(ish) height except one or two the story is if that someone is running fast up or down the stairs (presumingly they're chasing someone who lives/ works in the castle) and this odd step will trip the attackers up - assuming they're not familiar with the odd height of one of the steps

lucideer 5y ago

Hopefully the book they're working on makes more compelling arguments, as the bullet points listed in this blogpost are pretty weak: 1. "Castles were built for prestige not fortification". Regardless of actual use as fortification (frequency of battles), it's pretty self-evident that the intent of much of a castles design is fortification. Even if moats, arrow slits and parapets are just for show, they would still be to show off your defensive capabilities, in which case (at least apparent) defense would still be the primary concern of the architect. 2. "Some turn anti-clockwise" Wherein the author assumes that all wisdom is automatically universally shared and all architects/planners/builders are universally competent. A fact as true today as it ever was. 3. is pretty much the same argument as (2) repeated. 4. An argument against how practical they would be in reality (already superceded by their first point that they were probably just for show). There's very little of substance in this article. Hopefully the book does a better job.

qw 5y ago
I think one of the points in the article is that the walls and moat are the main lines of defence. The castle is protected by the walls. If they breach the walls and actually enter the interior of the castle, they have already lost and no staircase design can save them.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  There were interior defenses though. In some of the more impressive castles there were concentric rings of walls so breeching on wouldn't surrender the whole castle. There were often also keeps. Even in early proto castles you had motte and bailey designs where the main walls defended the low ground (bailey) for an interior fort built on a hill or prominence (the motte). Castles weren't single layer defenses that stopped at the walls, they were definitely designed to continue the fight and protect the nobles even if the enemy did get through the walls. Given that it's not so out of line to think the interior architecture might have been designed to increase defender's advantages.
  - timcederman 5y ago

ptx 5y ago

> 3. If staircases were genuinely engineered for military purposes, then we should always find that they turn clockwise. However [...] there are a substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise (approximately 30% of all surviving examples). Couldn't this minority be explained by engineers either doing it wrong, being given bad requirements or being overruled by misguided management? I.e., the clockwise turn was indeed for military purposes and as much as 70% of projects were done correctly but in 30% of projects one or more project management issues led to the staircases being built wrong. > 4. The direction of a spiral staircase was an architectural decision, not a military one. Perhaps different stakeholders had different priorities and the military advantage was one of many considerations.

Spooky23 5y ago
Exactly. I found this article a poor rebuttal. As a lefty who is pretty clumsy on the right, there are many implicit design decisions that favor whatever right handed people do for the simple reason that most people are right handed. There was accommodations for lefty’s in some ancient battle formations, so while it may be a myth, it may be one with a kernel of truth as conventions for things like castle construction are probably ancient and lost to modern people.
bluGill 5y ago
I doubt all architects knew all the details. They would look into how to defend the attacks they expected, and the ones they had given to others. It is entirely possible that the trope is true, but only for a small minority of castles where they expected such fighting, and in the vast majority it is false because they didn't expect it. If it is true, you would expect other evidence that in the design that they expected the walls to be breached and thus have to fight in such a way, and also that it wasn't a hopeless idea to fight on. This does seem unlikely based on what I know of historical war, but I'll freely admit what I know is minimal. Any real historians care to comment?
jameshart 5y ago
Any programmer should be able to spot the syllogism here, yes. Just because something is a security best practice definitely does not guarantee that it will be followed universally by architects. Not all the castle builders were up to speed on CVE-1271-53 “left-handed spiral staircases enable swordsman overflow attacks”, and more importantly their clients didn’t know how to evaluate a competent castle architect either. Maybe they should have had some sort of certification scheme. But even then, once a pen tester gets in and tells you your staircases were built backwards, what are you going to do? They’re made of stone and built into structural walls in a tall building.

smitty1e 5y ago

> substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise Missed an opportunity to use 'widdershins'.

wongarsu 5y ago

> Secondly, they were lavish residences and only finally was there some consideration of fortification I would have argued the contrary, the vast majority of European castles were uninhabited or manned by a skeleton crew the majority of the time, and only inhabited when threats demanded it. There certainly were castles that served as primary residences (like the mentioned Arundel Castle), but this mostly became the fashion after the medieval time, when the transition from the fortified castle to the beautiful and nice-to-live in chateaus happened, with fortification elements that were more symbolic than practical (English lacks a clear distinction in name here, but at least German and French draw a clear line here).

unbalancedevh 5y ago

I never understood the argument that it's easier to swing a weapon with the arm on the wall-side. On the wall-side, there's wall everywhere, and closes in both behind you and in front of you. On the newel-post side, the space opens up both behind and in front, which seems like it would make it a lot easier to manoeuver a weapon.

ginko 5y ago
This is the first time I've heard of this and I don't quite buy it either. Having your left side on the wall side also means that you can stabilize yourself against a handrail with your left hand.
jamincan 5y ago
For the person facing up, their opponent is to their right, which is closed off. They would need to reach up and to the right, and that motion would be blocked by the newel post. For the person facing down, their opponent is to their left, which is open. They would need to reach down and across their body to the left, unobstructed.

zzzeek 5y ago

OK, how about the theory that mens shirts have buttons on the right side so that the swordsman would unbutton his jacket with his left hand while drawing with his right?

qw 5y ago
I have better dexterity in my right hand, so I find it easier when the button is on the right side. My left hand only needs to hold the hole steady, while the right hand need more flexibility
Biganon 5y ago
So basically, if the action is easier to do with the right hand, it's self-explanatory, and if it's easier to do with the left hand, it's because you used to do it while using a sword in your right hand. We can explain an infinite number of chiralities now!

Tiereven 5y ago

The photos of these staircases reminded me of the insides of the shells of some spiral-shelled animals. Interesting that as you look into the opening of most such shells, they turn to the left as well. I wonder if this observation was an influence on the early architects of these stair structures.

jihadjihad 5y ago

We really need Bret Devereaux of ACOUP [0] fame to weigh in on this--I would trust his judgment and arguments much more than the ones put forth in the article. 0: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part...

e2021 5y ago

As others have said, I don't find these arguments very convincing - if castles were mainly residences, then why have crenelations, or arrow slits or a moat, doesn't that argument apply equally to those? The argument that if such a defensive feature was needed, then its already too late, and so it was probably never used is also not a good one imo. Has the CWIS gun on aircraft carriers ever actually been used in combat? Am I to conclude that CWIS has no defensive use and is purely architectural ornamentation? The only good point is that it wasn't mentioned by contemporary sources, but I don't think this proves anything unless you can show that other defensive features on castles were mentioned. Otherwise maybe we just have bad sources about castle design. But if you can show me some documents about why eg. moats are designed they way they are, then I think you have a point.

pwr-electronics 5y ago
I can't find it now, but I remember watching a YouTube video about how the military aspect of castles was more about projecting power over the local population to prevent and put down rebellion. This article talks about how it was also both a home security system and a status symbol. You technically had to be licensed to fortify your property. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_to_crenellate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_to_crenellate
hef19898 5y ago
Well, castles were also used as bases to dominate the country side. And to show of wealth. The dominating part was made easier by bwing easily defended, turning them into ideal bases of operations. How someone could argue castles weren't military buildings, I don't know.
pwinnski 5y ago
It would be worth noting what percentage of castle from this same period feature a moat or crenelations or arrow slits, right? The book is about why it's actually a myth. This article is about how stories get started and passed down with no basis in fact, and is really promotional material for the book. And here we are in 2021, and people are defending a story invented in 1902 about design decisions made more than 500 years prior, and it's unclear how many of them had even heard the original myth before reading this article! The gnosticism is very strong today.

EGreg 5y ago

I agree with the commenter who pronounced it "drivel" and whom the author referenced in his article.

fanzhang 5y ago

It would be way more convincing if the Arthur used primary historical source documents to justify this as a myth. For example, if he could find an old architect who wrote that the spiral staircases were for aesthetic reasons or for making the climb up easier, that would be more convincing. Instead, the author argues from almost first principles and bulk observations, which seems to be unconvincing logic in establishing historical intent.

deleted 5y ago
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mig39 5y ago
In the article he finds the first written mention of the "purpose" of the spiral going in one direction is in 1902. And explains that this 1902 author was obsessed with spirals and fencing. I think the fact that there are no primary historical source documents that say "hey, we're building this castle this way just in case it's breached and we have to have a sword fight on the stairs" is one of his main points. It would be easy to disprove the article author by finding such historical documents. Do they exist?

flerovium 5y ago

HN needs more content like this. > Within a matter of hours of publishing this post one kind gent on a discussion forum had already publicly declared it as “drivel” – it’s odd what folk will get wound up about on the internet.

mcguire 5y ago

"The Spiral Stair or Vice: its origins, role and meaning in medieval stone castles: Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Charles Ryder February 2011" (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9632028.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9632028.pdf) I can't find anything specific about the theory, except quotes like "Simpson notes the presence of spiral stairs throughout this work, though sadly, when describing Colchester Castle, Essex, he falls into the old trap of claiming that the spiral clockwise spiral stair aids the defender" and a reference to a different 1854 source mentioning it.

Maursault 5y ago

I had never heard the spiral staircase/right-handed swordsmen legend before today, though it sounds similar to the description of button location on men's shirt's. Both sound silly, the shirt button location because it doesn't explain button location on womens' clothes and the spiral staircase handedness because if they actually had any interest in defense they would have used a counterbalance staircase that could easily be lifted completely denying access to upper levels.

plank 5y ago
Not saying that I know for certain that the button-one is not a urban legend, but the tale is usually that the button on womens’ clothes is due to the fact that the lady of the house is dressed more often by the staff. Unlike the gents, which were only helped if they choose to wear armor. (Edit: the => they)

fijiaarone 5y ago

Castles were built with military defense primarily in mind. Just because they were not constantly involved in siege does not negate that -- take the aircraft carrier example. Because it is a strong military defense, it doesn't often need to be used for that. You can see hundreds of architectural decisions that were made with military aims -- some of them didn't work, and some of them weren't used. But, whether staircases were made with the righthanded swordsman in mind is irrelevant. They were created with right-handedness in mind. Because of the placement of railings.

lucas_membrane 5y ago

There was an article in the New Scientist (YMMV) about this subject about 30 or 40 years back. It described research that found (for what was thought by the researchers to be the relevant period in history) just slightly more that 10 percent (not 30% as this article asserts) of staircases were left-handed, that fraction being approximately equal to the proportion of persons or presumed castle defenders who would have been left handed. It drew the inference, compatible with the idea that castles, being large, might require a large number of defenders and would contain a sufficient number of staircases, that defenses would have been optimized by allocating defenders to staircases according to handedness when the aforementioned fractions were equal.