4 ms·

The real argument the article makes is that no one seems to have proposed the theory until 1902. If it was generally a design consideration when the castles wer

The real argument the article makes is that no one seems to have proposed the theory until 1902. If it was generally a design consideration when the castles were built, we'd expect to have contemporary documentation of it.

simias 5y ago
Would we? I ask genuinely, not rhetorically. Literacy was a lot lower back then, and even what was written has often been lost in time. I mean I can offer the same argument in reverse: if 70% of these staircases wound clockwise, they clearly favoured this orientation. How come we don't have contemporary documentation of the reason?
- dmurray 5y ago
  I'm not sure, but no doubt this will be the subject of a 10,000 word post on acoup.blog before long.
- varjag 5y ago
  Literacy (especially among noble and architects) was not at all uncommon before 1902. We're not talking exactly neolithic age.
  - liamN 5y ago
    Fair, but there may have been security reasons for not recording something like this (if the swordsman theory is true), you wouldnt want enemy castles to be built as well, so you might not write down any defensive design strategies in an effort to horde your knowledge.
    - wokwokwok 5y ago
      Oh come, this is truely gasping at straws. People were not stupid; if there was an actual technical benefit, it would have been known and shared, the same way that people knew and shared other castle construction techniques amongst craftsmen. Tangibly, the absence of evidence for something can’t be magicked away by the “but what if they didn’t record it for a reason because it was a secret!?”. If there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence. You can ponder all day, but it still boils down to, bluntly: there is no evidence that conjecture is correct.
- skwirl 5y ago
  But if there's no evidence of something, the best you can say is that you don't know. And it's possible that the dominant orientation is just an accident, in which case they wouldn't even have a "reason" to document.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  70% is an election landslide, but I'm not sure it tells you that one kind of staircase is preferred over another. If the swordsman theory were correct, it ought to be higher. Either it is really important that you can defeat invaders on stairs, and handedness matters for this, or it's not that big a deal and we can let some other consideration decide, for instance the descending stairs hypothesis. So if was a big deal you'd think everyone would insist on having the stairs the right way, nearly 100%. If not there might be another weaker reason that leads to 70%.
  - oaktrout 5y ago
    "70% is an election landslide, but I'm not sure it tells you that one kind of staircase is preferred over another." I think 70% definitely tells you what kind of staircase was preferred assuming there are enough staircases (and assuming that that clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise staircases had equal probability of surviving and being counted). Assume there are 40 staircases, and that 70% (28) are CW. The binomial distribution tells us that the probability of there being more than 27 staircases that run CW is less than 0.83% if staircase direction is chosen at random. Thus, the binomial distribution suggests that it is highly unlikely (<1%) that staircase direction was determined at random. If you want to play around with the binomial distribution: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D50+p%3D0.5+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+...
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      I actually thought about this exact thing before I wrote my comment. What you forget is this is an adversarial situation you're dealing with. If it really mattered, nobody would leave it to a coin toss as to which way the staircases have to be. Much like in sports, every little edge counts. Yeah, it isn't chance that 70% of them are CW, but it also doesn't make sense that it's only 70%. The proper comparison is not a 50% cointoss, which is how you might think about some elections, it's a 100% world where every castle maker would tell their apprentices about this important CW swordfighting idea, and people who forget this are castigated for building an obvious weakness into their design. The only reason it would be somewhat lopsided, but not decisively, is if there was some mild reason why people preferred one over the other, which is what your numbers actually suggest. Something like the "easier to walk down" hypothesis might make sense here, where for instance the CCW staircases are accounted for by aesthetic considerations like symmetry.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> if 70% of these staircases wound clockwise, they clearly favoured this orientation. If 70% of surviving staircases are clockwise and they were built in similar numbers then there is clearly an advantage to the clockwise orientation. If they were not built in similar numbers, then its on the author to find a specific reason rather than simply reject the conventional wisdom on the subject. You don't disprove something like this by pointing to a lack of evidence. You do it by finding compelling evidence for an alternative.
  - anonAndOn 5y ago
    Aren't ~70% of humans right hand dominant? Maybe the local builder just built what the customer wanted.
    - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
      Right hand rule applied to spiral staircases.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "If 70% of surviving staircases are clockwise and they were built in similar numbers then there is clearly an advantage to the clockwise orientation." Archeology of 21st century man definitely states that 70% of adults used to eat burgers, then there is clearly an advantage to putting a piece of meat between two slices of bread. The bread must br protecting meat from rain and wildlife. People who put meat on top of bread have clearly died out in the evolutionary game. Even the few surviving specimen of men that put meat on top of bread, always cover it with cheese to confuse predators.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      I can attest to the bread working. In the late 20th century the extra grip and mobility the bread surrounding the meat (you could even say it 'sandwhiched' the meat) provided definitely helped me protect it from local wildlife (and by local wildlife I mean my siblings).
    - 5y ago
- jameshart 5y ago
  Presumably we also find masonry spiral stairs in contemporary churches, cathedrals, bell towers, monasteries, storage cellars, etc. - do these structures (which one assumes have very different threat models to a castle) exhibit similar bias? Romans built spiral staircases as well - did they favor a particular direction? What about other cultures unrelated to European castle building traditions? Honestly, though, if you’ve ever worked on a construction project you would know: even if you had a record of a papal decree mandating that all staircases must turn to the right, multiple books documenting how to build staircases with a right turn and warning against left-turning designs, and original castle drawings showing the architect marked explicitly that the staircase must turn right, it would not be surprising to find that 30% of staircases turn left just because the contractor installed it backwards.
  - dr_orpheus 5y ago
    Contractors might have their own individual preferences too. "This is my contractor John Mason, who likes to build right handed stairs." "And this is his son Mason Johnson, who hates his dad so he builds left handed stairs"
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Or, I guess, upside down.
q1w2 5y ago
> ...we'd expect to have contemporary documentation of it. Are there many surviving documents outlining the reasoning surrounding each design choice?
- jameshart 5y ago
  LOL I mean, you're lucky when you go looking in version control on a software project from the last couple of years if the documentation surrounding a reason for a design choice is anything more than 'fixed bug'. Expecting more detailed change control documentation from mediaeval castlebuilders seems optimistic.
- laserlight 5y ago
  And especially the most obvious ones?
shatnersbassoon 5y ago
I think the documentation for medieval military architecture choices is extremely sparse. Most of the writers were monks, they weren't so interested in military matters. The author is making an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" error.
- cedilla 5y ago
  In general, sources from the middle ages aren't as sparse as people like to think. He isn't making that kind of error. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim. Otherwise any sort of weakly plausible reason for choosing the staircase direction would be true because there is "only" absence of evidence. Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either.
  - shatnersbassoon 5y ago
    -> Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either. Right, so calling it a "myth", as in the headline, is incorrect. That would imply that you know it to be false. The author is taking the lack of evidence to mean that it can't be true. And as for the burden of proof, as with any hypothesis, anyone is welcome to try to falsify it. I just don't believe that the evidence here has done that.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Military reasons the primary reason we study history. There is the hope that by studying the wars of the past you can learn something - a tactic, strategy, or something else that you can apply to a future battle and win. Some rich person might get interested in something else from time to time and fund the study of that, but nobles always funded military history because it was one of the few ways you could learn if something worked without doing it in a war yourself. We think of monks as the only literate people in the past, but that was far from true. The common person might not have known how to read (I've seen good arguments they did a little, but I'm not qualified to evaluate them) but the rich did, and they hired scholars who could read to study things that were important to them. Any rich person who didn't have scholars studying military matters wouldn't last long in war as many seemingly obvious ideas don't work in real battles.

simias 5y ago

Would we? I ask genuinely, not rhetorically. Literacy was a lot lower back then, and even what was written has often been lost in time. I mean I can offer the same argument in reverse: if 70% of these staircases wound clockwise, they clearly favoured this orientation. How come we don't have contemporary documentation of the reason?

dmurray 5y ago
I'm not sure, but no doubt this will be the subject of a 10,000 word post on acoup.blog before long.
varjag 5y ago
Literacy (especially among noble and architects) was not at all uncommon before 1902. We're not talking exactly neolithic age.
- liamN 5y ago
  Fair, but there may have been security reasons for not recording something like this (if the swordsman theory is true), you wouldnt want enemy castles to be built as well, so you might not write down any defensive design strategies in an effort to horde your knowledge.
  - wokwokwok 5y ago
    Oh come, this is truely gasping at straws. People were not stupid; if there was an actual technical benefit, it would have been known and shared, the same way that people knew and shared other castle construction techniques amongst craftsmen. Tangibly, the absence of evidence for something can’t be magicked away by the “but what if they didn’t record it for a reason because it was a secret!?”. If there’s no evidence, there’s no evidence. You can ponder all day, but it still boils down to, bluntly: there is no evidence that conjecture is correct.
skwirl 5y ago
But if there's no evidence of something, the best you can say is that you don't know. And it's possible that the dominant orientation is just an accident, in which case they wouldn't even have a "reason" to document.
lordnacho 5y ago
70% is an election landslide, but I'm not sure it tells you that one kind of staircase is preferred over another. If the swordsman theory were correct, it ought to be higher. Either it is really important that you can defeat invaders on stairs, and handedness matters for this, or it's not that big a deal and we can let some other consideration decide, for instance the descending stairs hypothesis. So if was a big deal you'd think everyone would insist on having the stairs the right way, nearly 100%. If not there might be another weaker reason that leads to 70%.
- oaktrout 5y ago
  "70% is an election landslide, but I'm not sure it tells you that one kind of staircase is preferred over another." I think 70% definitely tells you what kind of staircase was preferred assuming there are enough staircases (and assuming that that clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise staircases had equal probability of surviving and being counted). Assume there are 40 staircases, and that 70% (28) are CW. The binomial distribution tells us that the probability of there being more than 27 staircases that run CW is less than 0.83% if staircase direction is chosen at random. Thus, the binomial distribution suggests that it is highly unlikely (<1%) that staircase direction was determined at random. If you want to play around with the binomial distribution: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D50+p%3D0.5+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+...
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I actually thought about this exact thing before I wrote my comment. What you forget is this is an adversarial situation you're dealing with. If it really mattered, nobody would leave it to a coin toss as to which way the staircases have to be. Much like in sports, every little edge counts. Yeah, it isn't chance that 70% of them are CW, but it also doesn't make sense that it's only 70%. The proper comparison is not a 50% cointoss, which is how you might think about some elections, it's a 100% world where every castle maker would tell their apprentices about this important CW swordfighting idea, and people who forget this are castigated for building an obvious weakness into their design. The only reason it would be somewhat lopsided, but not decisively, is if there was some mild reason why people preferred one over the other, which is what your numbers actually suggest. Something like the "easier to walk down" hypothesis might make sense here, where for instance the CCW staircases are accounted for by aesthetic considerations like symmetry.
phkahler 5y ago
>> if 70% of these staircases wound clockwise, they clearly favoured this orientation. If 70% of surviving staircases are clockwise and they were built in similar numbers then there is clearly an advantage to the clockwise orientation. If they were not built in similar numbers, then its on the author to find a specific reason rather than simply reject the conventional wisdom on the subject. You don't disprove something like this by pointing to a lack of evidence. You do it by finding compelling evidence for an alternative.
- anonAndOn 5y ago
  Aren't ~70% of humans right hand dominant? Maybe the local builder just built what the customer wanted.
  - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
    Right hand rule applied to spiral staircases.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "If 70% of surviving staircases are clockwise and they were built in similar numbers then there is clearly an advantage to the clockwise orientation." Archeology of 21st century man definitely states that 70% of adults used to eat burgers, then there is clearly an advantage to putting a piece of meat between two slices of bread. The bread must br protecting meat from rain and wildlife. People who put meat on top of bread have clearly died out in the evolutionary game. Even the few surviving specimen of men that put meat on top of bread, always cover it with cheese to confuse predators.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    I can attest to the bread working. In the late 20th century the extra grip and mobility the bread surrounding the meat (you could even say it 'sandwhiched' the meat) provided definitely helped me protect it from local wildlife (and by local wildlife I mean my siblings).
  - 5y ago
jameshart 5y ago
Presumably we also find masonry spiral stairs in contemporary churches, cathedrals, bell towers, monasteries, storage cellars, etc. - do these structures (which one assumes have very different threat models to a castle) exhibit similar bias? Romans built spiral staircases as well - did they favor a particular direction? What about other cultures unrelated to European castle building traditions? Honestly, though, if you’ve ever worked on a construction project you would know: even if you had a record of a papal decree mandating that all staircases must turn to the right, multiple books documenting how to build staircases with a right turn and warning against left-turning designs, and original castle drawings showing the architect marked explicitly that the staircase must turn right, it would not be surprising to find that 30% of staircases turn left just because the contractor installed it backwards.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  Contractors might have their own individual preferences too. "This is my contractor John Mason, who likes to build right handed stairs." "And this is his son Mason Johnson, who hates his dad so he builds left handed stairs"
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Or, I guess, upside down.

q1w2 5y ago

> ...we'd expect to have contemporary documentation of it. Are there many surviving documents outlining the reasoning surrounding each design choice?

jameshart 5y ago
LOL I mean, you're lucky when you go looking in version control on a software project from the last couple of years if the documentation surrounding a reason for a design choice is anything more than 'fixed bug'. Expecting more detailed change control documentation from mediaeval castlebuilders seems optimistic.
laserlight 5y ago
And especially the most obvious ones?

shatnersbassoon 5y ago

I think the documentation for medieval military architecture choices is extremely sparse. Most of the writers were monks, they weren't so interested in military matters. The author is making an "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" error.

cedilla 5y ago
In general, sources from the middle ages aren't as sparse as people like to think. He isn't making that kind of error. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim. Otherwise any sort of weakly plausible reason for choosing the staircase direction would be true because there is "only" absence of evidence. Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either.
- shatnersbassoon 5y ago
  -> Absence of evidence here means that while you can't rule it out, you can't positively state it either. Right, so calling it a "myth", as in the headline, is incorrect. That would imply that you know it to be false. The author is taking the lack of evidence to mean that it can't be true. And as for the burden of proof, as with any hypothesis, anyone is welcome to try to falsify it. I just don't believe that the evidence here has done that.
bluGill 5y ago
Military reasons the primary reason we study history. There is the hope that by studying the wars of the past you can learn something - a tactic, strategy, or something else that you can apply to a future battle and win. Some rich person might get interested in something else from time to time and fund the study of that, but nobles always funded military history because it was one of the few ways you could learn if something worked without doing it in a war yourself. We think of monks as the only literate people in the past, but that was far from true. The common person might not have known how to read (I've seen good arguments they did a little, but I'm not qualified to evaluate them) but the rich did, and they hired scholars who could read to study things that were important to them. Any rich person who didn't have scholars studying military matters wouldn't last long in war as many seemingly obvious ideas don't work in real battles.