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To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise, which seems salient. And the strongest arguments against the myth

To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise, which seems salient. And the strongest arguments against the myth are that fighting on a staircase is bad no matter what (granted), and that certain, specific, famous staircases (like those in the Tower of London) were built counter-clockwise. To me, that's not a slam dunk case against the myth, it could be explained by there not being a centralized Castle Staircase Building Code across all Europe, over the course of 1000 years, which was not a misunderstanding I had anyway. I am unconvinced for now!

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
I'd imagine they were built in a direction without a ton of thought, and it's not really surprising to me that if you basically flip a coin - 70% of them landed one way. If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows would work - for example. If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc
- canadianfella 3y ago
  If it was up to a coin flip, it wouldn’t be 70 percent.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I am not a medieval stonemason but these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought. They did it with one specific thought it their mind I suspect, it was the way that they were most familiar with doing it so it was the fastest / easier / cheapest way to do it! The same reason any modern craftsman does quite a lot of things.
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    I'd like to see that 70% distribution mapped out against corner adjacency. As in, if I have a square room [ ] and I put a stairway on the right wall in the bottom corner there, there is a good chance I'm going to go counter clockwise, but if I put it on the right top, I'll go clockwise. I feel like the general flow of a room needs to be mapped out on this as well to get the full context.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought There are so many things that could bias this result. Maybe it's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps, north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin flips seems unimaginably small. More likely the first one happened to built that way and most others copied that until someone wondered if you couldn't go the other way instead. Or maybe it is connected to handedness in some other way (easier to draw the design? To lay the stone work? Traditions around who should pass who and how if somebody going up encounters somebody coming down? Who knows...)
  - Aerroon 3y ago
    I think it would be more likely that the staircase fit better going one direction than the other. Eg taking the most used path to the staircase and going straight onto the stairs vs having to do a 90 degree turn before you can step on the stairs.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      It seems unlikely that random chance would lead to a 70/30 ratio for "best fit" either, so that just seems to be moving the phenomenon that needs explanation to layouts around stairwells, which certainly weren't standardised in the medieval era. The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme
- kdmccormick 3y ago
  Flipping a coin 1000 times and getting >=700 heads has a ~1/10^24 probability. There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
  - bluGill 3y ago
    But just that in some direction maters for some reason (layout of the castle forced a direction and thus this works out to random chance?), and the rest was just what the mason felt like building (default to right handed?). You can come up with your own story about why direction would matter, and why for the rest there would/would not be a bias in direction. Then play with how random each one is to get the 70/30 percentage split.
afterburner 3y ago
The article is from the point of view of a responsible historian. There is no evidence of the myth being true. There are no sources in history suggesting it. It might be true. But there is no evidence that it is. Proving it false is another matter.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I don't know about that. They seemed to be definitively saying the staircases were not built to aid defenders, but didn't have strong evidence for that. If they'd said "there is no positive evidence that..." or "we have no reason to believe that..." then I'd agree with you, but what they wrote was: > Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage and > it’s not true. Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative evidence to support them. In fairness, their conclusion is more measured: > So in conclusion: there’s no evidence for this claim and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. But that's not the headline they went with.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    by default, it is untrue until sufficient evidence arises that it is true see also: Russell's teapot [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
    - calderknight 3y ago
      If there's no evidence about a situation, there's no evidence for any theory about the situation. There's no evidence for the proposition A. There's no evidence for the proposition not A. By your reasoning we have to believe that both these propositions are untrue: A and not A. This seems totally insane.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, that is not the case. A thing, whether the existence of a teapot floating in space, or an old architecture myth, is by default untrue until sufficient evidence arises showing it is true. This article is simply pointing out that such evidence doesn't exist in the staircase attacker theory. We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a thousand more. That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in statistics, A = "this staircase explanation has sufficient evidence to say it is true", not-A = "this staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence to conclude it is true". Not-A here is example of what is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null hypothesis is the default. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
empath-nirvana 3y ago
> To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern staircases are built in a particular direction?
marcellus23 3y ago
I think the slam dunk against the myth is simply that there's no evidence for it at all. If you have no primary sources or archaeological evidence, and the only "source" is tour guides, then there's no reason to believe it. It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjk166 3y ago
  There's no evidence for an alternative either. We simply don't have surviving documents that talk about the logic of why staircases were built that way, which is hardly surprising given that even nowadays when books are dramatically cheaper to produce, architects don't tend to write down the logic they use when designing the details of functional structures. The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly not proven to be false.
  - marcellus23 3y ago
    I don't see anything in your comment that contradicts what I said: > It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
    - jjk166 3y ago
      I was contradicting your first sentence. Your second is a non-sequitur.
      - marcellus23 3y ago
        > I was contradicting your first sentence. But you didn't. > Your second is a non-sequitur. How?
whall6 3y ago
I think all the article is arguing is not to just accept that explanation as fact. There is no conclusive evidence that this is the reason stairs were built this way.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bsder 3y ago
It's almost certainly because staircases were 1) hazardous as hell, 2) going down is way more dangerous than going up, 3) clockwise puts the dominant hand/foot on the side with the biggest width when descending. There was an article here on HN a while ago talking about how the stupidly designed staircases were responsible for the Victorian trope of "falling down a staircase to your death."--the ones for servants were especially poorly designed.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

I'd imagine they were built in a direction without a ton of thought, and it's not really surprising to me that if you basically flip a coin - 70% of them landed one way. If the staircase happens to be on one side of the building, it would be better to orient it one way - based on how the windows would work - for example. If the staircase is against another busy entryway - it might be better to have the stairs go one way or the other, etc

canadianfella 3y ago
If it was up to a coin flip, it wouldn’t be 70 percent.
idiotsecant 3y ago
I am not a medieval stonemason but these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought. They did it with one specific thought it their mind I suspect, it was the way that they were most familiar with doing it so it was the fastest / easier / cheapest way to do it! The same reason any modern craftsman does quite a lot of things.
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  I'd like to see that 70% distribution mapped out against corner adjacency. As in, if I have a square room [ ] and I put a stairway on the right wall in the bottom corner there, there is a good chance I'm going to go counter clockwise, but if I put it on the right top, I'll go clockwise. I feel like the general flow of a room needs to be mapped out on this as well to get the full context.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > these were lifelong craftsmen and I doubt they did it without a lot of thought There are so many things that could bias this result. Maybe it's easier to craft in one direction. Perhaps, north of the equator, castles tended to be constructed in certain orientations, with the windowless stairwells tending towards one side versus another. Altogether, there is no reason to prefer the myth over any of those hypotheses--they each have no evidence.
wizofaus 3y ago
If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin flips seems unimaginably small. More likely the first one happened to built that way and most others copied that until someone wondered if you couldn't go the other way instead. Or maybe it is connected to handedness in some other way (easier to draw the design? To lay the stone work? Traditions around who should pass who and how if somebody going up encounters somebody coming down? Who knows...)
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I think it would be more likely that the staircase fit better going one direction than the other. Eg taking the most used path to the staircase and going straight onto the stairs vs having to do a 90 degree turn before you can step on the stairs.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    It seems unlikely that random chance would lead to a 70/30 ratio for "best fit" either, so that just seems to be moving the phenomenon that needs explanation to layouts around stairwells, which certainly weren't standardised in the medieval era. The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme
kdmccormick 3y ago
Flipping a coin 1000 times and getting >=700 heads has a ~1/10^24 probability. There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
- bluGill 3y ago
  But just that in some direction maters for some reason (layout of the castle forced a direction and thus this works out to random chance?), and the rest was just what the mason felt like building (default to right handed?). You can come up with your own story about why direction would matter, and why for the rest there would/would not be a bias in direction. Then play with how random each one is to get the 70/30 percentage split.

afterburner 3y ago

The article is from the point of view of a responsible historian. There is no evidence of the myth being true. There are no sources in history suggesting it. It might be true. But there is no evidence that it is. Proving it false is another matter.

karaterobot 3y ago
I don't know about that. They seemed to be definitively saying the staircases were not built to aid defenders, but didn't have strong evidence for that. If they'd said "there is no positive evidence that..." or "we have no reason to believe that..." then I'd agree with you, but what they wrote was: > Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage and > it’s not true. Which seem like confident statements with no affirmative evidence to support them. In fairness, their conclusion is more measured: > So in conclusion: there’s no evidence for this claim and it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. But that's not the headline they went with.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  by default, it is untrue until sufficient evidence arises that it is true see also: Russell's teapot [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
  - calderknight 3y ago
    If there's no evidence about a situation, there's no evidence for any theory about the situation. There's no evidence for the proposition A. There's no evidence for the proposition not A. By your reasoning we have to believe that both these propositions are untrue: A and not A. This seems totally insane.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      As Russell's teapot [0] demonstrates, that is not the case. A thing, whether the existence of a teapot floating in space, or an old architecture myth, is by default untrue until sufficient evidence arises showing it is true. This article is simply pointing out that such evidence doesn't exist in the staircase attacker theory. We do not believe that maybe it is true this teapot exists, maybe not, simply because the initial hypothesis (that it is true in the first place) hasn't yet been falsified. If that were the case, I could make up a thousand improbable myths, and say they're all maybe true, maybe not, and we would have to treat them all as equally plausible until someone wastes their time trying to disprove all thousand, and then I could make up a thousand more. That is why the burden of proof of truth lies with the person asserting the truth of a teapot/staircase belief To add to your A vs. not-A problem, you are close to identifying the resolution, too: For an analogue in statistics, A = "this staircase explanation has sufficient evidence to say it is true", not-A = "this staircase explanation does not have sufficient evidence to conclude it is true". Not-A here is example of what is called the null hypothesis in statistics. The null hypothesis is the default. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

empath-nirvana 3y ago

> To be clear, this article does not attempt to explain why 70% of stairs were built clockwise I wonder if it's easier for right handed masons to build a staircase in a particular chirality. What percentage of modern staircases are built in a particular direction?

marcellus23 3y ago

I think the slam dunk against the myth is simply that there's no evidence for it at all. If you have no primary sources or archaeological evidence, and the only "source" is tour guides, then there's no reason to believe it. It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjk166 3y ago
There's no evidence for an alternative either. We simply don't have surviving documents that talk about the logic of why staircases were built that way, which is hardly surprising given that even nowadays when books are dramatically cheaper to produce, architects don't tend to write down the logic they use when designing the details of functional structures. The combat explanation fits the evidence as well as anything else. Perhaps it's not proven to be true, but it's certainly not proven to be false.
- marcellus23 3y ago
  I don't see anything in your comment that contradicts what I said: > It might be true or it might not, but talking about it as if it's definitely true is simply wrong.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    I was contradicting your first sentence. Your second is a non-sequitur.
    - marcellus23 3y ago
      > I was contradicting your first sentence. But you didn't. > Your second is a non-sequitur. How?

whall6 3y ago

I think all the article is arguing is not to just accept that explanation as fact. There is no conclusive evidence that this is the reason stairs were built this way.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bsder 3y ago

It's almost certainly because staircases were 1) hazardous as hell, 2) going down is way more dangerous than going up, 3) clockwise puts the dominant hand/foot on the side with the biggest width when descending. There was an article here on HN a while ago talking about how the stupidly designed staircases were responsible for the Victorian trope of "falling down a staircase to your death."--the ones for servants were especially poorly designed.