(Medieval music plays)
Shot of a man winding a large wheel attached to a trebuchet.
On-screen text reads, 'Trebuchets & Sieges'.
Shot of a man speaking to off-screen interviewer.
MAN:
It's… Well, this… There are two types of trebuchet. The… This is the more modern and sophisticated type. It's a counterweight one so it works by using gravity.
Shot of the men launching a watermelon with the large trebuchet.
MAN:
Whereas the simpler form is a traction one which has people pulling down on the arm, which is far more limited in terms of what it can throw and how far it can throw it. But these, you can just keep building them bigger and bigger and bigger.
Shot of a man speaking to off-screen interviewer.
MAN:
If you're actually trying to destroy things, normally we use this concrete. We've got an iron shot there, but I think this weekend we're mostly using watermelons 'cause they just look so good when they break.
Shot of a watermelon landing on the crowd and exploding.
MAN:
Probably stone, but there is the possibility that they're actually using lead shot as well which would be far more damaging when it struck something.
Photograph of a trebuchet being used in a tapestry.
MAN:
Well, there is a story from the siege of Stirling Castle when the English turned up and they're besieging the castle and things weren't going terribly well. And they got the engineers out and they built this trebuchet and presumably it took several days or longer to make it.
Shot of a man speaking to off-screen interviewer.
MAN:
And no-one was really putting much credit in it. The guys in the fortress weren't too concerned about it. And the first time they fired it, a large section of wall was demolished and everyone just walked out of the castle. One shot was all it needed and the siege was over. So they're a really, really effective piece of artillery. Yeah, there are pictures from the Crusades of them firing enemy heads back into a fortress or something and that's probably more psychological than anything else. I don't think many people would like to see heads of their friends coming back over the wall at them and landing in a pretty unceremonious way on the ground. Because the technology for building fortifications had become so good and it was pretty much impossible to get in there, the solution was siege warfare where you would just surround it and try and prevent anyone getting in or out to help and limit their food and water supplies until they were depleted and they just had to give up or starve. So that was really what a siege was. It was a waiting game.
Shot of the trebuchet launching a watermelon.
MAN:
I think the Siege of Antioch in the First Crusade lasted 18 months or something. There were 22 miles of walls around the city and there was actually more water and food inside the city for the besieged than for the crusading army outside. One of the things they would do in the 15th century once you started getting mercenary professional armies is because sieges were such a problem, it became common practice that if you surrendered rather than going to siege, they would let you live. But if they besieged wherever they were trying to get to and you resisted, they would kill everyone as a deterrent, because sieges were just too much effort. No-one wanted to have to go through it all.
Shot of a man speaking to off-screen interviewer.
MAN:
Yes, so terrain would be carefully selected to not only provide…
Shot of the man tightening ropes on the trebuchet.
MAN:
..a good defensible position, but also you would usually try and pick your terrain to give you a commanding position over a trade route so that you could tax any trade coming through so that you could afford to build the fortification in the first place.
Photographs of large, imposing castles.
MAN:
Erm… So if you've picked some terrain and it's on a river or a pass or somewhere that's easy to control and no-one can get above you, so it's quite safe, you'll build high walls and towers there so that you can be in a safer position than anyone attacking it. Then one of the other things they would do is set up the fortification to actually catch all of its rainwater and deposit it into gravel-filled cisterns inside the fortress so that you could store as much water in there as possible so if you were besieged and you didn't have a well, you wouldn't suffer loss of water too quickly.
Photographs of a trebuchet at Warwick Castle.
MAN:
If you were besieging a castle, you would probably turn up with some of the more critical parts, like the wheel for the winch and the ironwork that you would need. And then the rest of the timber would just be obtained locally. When they besieged Stirling Castle — going back to that one — there is an account that they confiscated all the lead from the church roofs in the city. And that was probably recycled to make the shot for the trebuchet. If you were inside the fortress, though, your timber reserves are much more limited. You've only got what's in storage. So they probably had a reasonable supply of timber in there for creating hoarding and things, which is extra defences up on the walls and for building siege engines inside to return fire. There are pictures in manuscripts showing an army laying siege to a fortress and they've got a trebuchet and then there's a trebuchet inside, so they're firing back. Because if you could hit the trebuchet with the same sort of projectile, you'd effectively destroy it and they'd have to pretty much start again. So it would be really quite productive if you could have one inside as well. It's pretty simple. You can see the arm. You've got that large axle which is where it pivots. And it's almost a one-to-four ratio on the arm. Then you have the counterweight hanging on that second axle, not actually on that wrecking bar — that's just a handle for carrying the arm around. And the experiments will show that if you have about a tonne of ballast — we haven't measured it, we just approximated — and about a 10kg weight, we're getting about 150m out of it. So that's the rough ratio. We'd like to make a bigger one and see if that holds true or not. It may drop off as it gets bigger — I don't know.
Shot of the trebuchet arm being released.
Shot of the arm flinging back and forth with the camera positioned on the end of the trebuchet.
(Medieval music plays)
On-screen text reads, 'Splash live! ABC'.
