Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A fortified tower (also defensive tower or castle tower or, in context, just tower) is one of the defensive structures used in fortifications, such as castles, along with defensive walls such as curtain walls. Castle towers can have a variety of different shapes and fulfil different functions.
Contemporary medieval writers used various terms for the buildings we would today call keeps. In Latin, they are variously described as turris, turris castri or magna turris – a tower, a castle tower, or a great tower. [7] The 12th-century French came to term them a donjon, from the Latin dominarium "lordship", linking the keep and feudal ...
Beaumaris Castle in Wales was built in the late 13th century and is an example of concentric castles which developed in the late medieval period. Badajoz Castle of Topoľčany in Slovakia Medieval fortification refers to medieval military methods that cover the development of fortification construction and use in Europe , roughly from the fall ...
York Castle is a fortified complex in the city of York, England. It consists of a sequence of castles, prisons, law courts and other buildings, which were built over the last nine centuries on the south side of the River Foss. The now ruined keep of the medieval Norman castle is commonly referred to as Clifford's Tower.
Scotland has many fine examples of medieval tower houses, including Drum Castle, Craigievar Castle and Castle Fraser, and in the unstable Scottish Marches along the border between England and Scotland the peel tower was the typical residence of the wealthy, with others being built by the government. In 17th century Scotland these castles became ...
The Tower of London, officially His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, is a historic citadel and castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London, England. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets , which is separated from the eastern edge of the square mile of the City of London by the open ...
Tower houses, which are closely related to castles and include pele towers, were defended towers that were permanent residences built in the 14th to 17th centuries. Especially common in Ireland and Scotland, they could be up to five storeys high and succeeded common enclosure castles and were built by a greater social range of people.
In medieval castles, the area surrounded by a curtain wall, with or without towers, is known as the bailey. [4] The outermost walls with their integrated bastions and wall towers together make up the enceinte or main defensive line enclosing the site.