Moats

[Prince Cobra]

Evening all

Not sure if this is the right section to post this, but here goes.

I was siegeing a castle yesterday, and seeing all those men with ladders and siege towers trundling along on tiny wheels made me wonder; what DID they do when they seiged a castle with a moat?

Obviously they could starve them out, but how would you get a victory by force? I mean, boats seems the logical answer, but then how do you get up the walls from them boats? Surely any troops in them would be (haha) sitting ducks to the defenders.

My apologies in advance is some poor, over worked Moderator has to move this thread.

Pete

Interesting question... First, moat with water: Problem where this water comes from. Most probably from a river. Decision: build a barrier* to stop the river or to make it flow in different place. Then you start digging the walls.




Sea: ships
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* can not remember the exact word in English

[rajpoot]

can not remember the exact word in English

Dyke? Dam?

BTW, talking about a fort with a moat, wouldn't trying to dry the moat out take a very long time? I mean I was under the impression that prolonged sieges were carried out only incases of large impregnable cities etc. The smaller forts and castles as found in England were taken by storming....?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Dyke? Dam?

BTW, talking about a fort with a moat, wouldn't trying to dry the moat out take a very long time? I mean I was under the impression that prolonged sieges were carried out only incases of large impregnable cities etc. The smaller forts and castles as found in England were taken by storming....?

Weren't most moats dry though? Which makes the problem a bit easier. just fill it in. And with a moat full of water again just fill it in, or perhaps block the source if that's feasible...

[Prince Cobra]

Dyke? Dam?

BTW, talking about a fort with a moat, wouldn't trying to dry the moat out take a very long time? I mean I was under the impression that prolonged sieges were carried out only incases of large impregnable cities etc. The smaller forts and castles as found in England were taken by storming....?

Thanks, the word was dyke.

Weren't most moats dry though? Which makes the problem a bit easier. just fill it in. And with a moat full of water again just fill it in, or perhaps block the source if that's feasible...

___________

Btw, I've just remember something that was practised on Bulgarian soil by the Byzantines. Whilst besieging a formidable Bulgarian fortress, they built a dyke. Then started digging the walls. When it was obvious this would not work, the Byzantines simply destroyed the dyke. There was already too much water behind the dam and once the river flowed the walls of the city were destroyed

[TinCow]

Yes, most moats were dry. Tunnelling and undermining was a popular method of dealing with all fortifications, even if they had a dry moat. Wet moats were often intentionally designed to thwart tunnelling (in addition to the other difficulties they posed) as attempts to tunnel under the moat would often result in a flooded and unusable tunnel. However, wet moats were rare because, as noted above, the water had to come from somewhere. You needed to be near a river or lake of some kind, or in the extreme example of places like Mont Saint-Michel, on a tiny island. Wet moats were indeed far more difficult to overcome than dry moats, but then again most sieges were resolved by attrition, not direct assault, so starvation remained just as effective as it was against dry moat targets.

[Mangudai]

Usually the siegers would use mantlets to protect themselves while filling a moat with dirt. If anybody is feeling ambitious, Wikipedia needs an entry for mantlets. I always pictured something like a covered battering ram without the ram.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantlet