The castle mentality

We live in an age of mad alpha-male despots. Maybe we always did, but at the moment among others we think of the North Korean weird man, and the American President with his instinct for smashing through the values which people around him have come to value.... respect, conservation of resources, sensitivity, community.  Trump in particular reminds me very strongly of King Henry VIII, another one who was willing to tear down the old certainties in pursuit of a vision which benefitted him above anyone else.  I even detect a sort of facial or expressional resemblance among these three men - a flat-faced, blank stare, belligerent. They are cruel, sadistic, frightening.

They are all human but very different from me and I find it hard to imagine what it must be like to 'be' like one of them.   Walking round inside a castle is the nearest thing I can think of to experience the sort of mindset they probably have - hard, defensive, perhaps paranoid, aggressive.

Castles are very strange things. They stayed in fashion among the warrior classes of Europe for a long time, and there were hundreds if not thousands of them. They were built strongly of course which is why a lot of them survive, and they've been altered and knocked about a lot too, but they do give us an insight into how people thought about the world in the early to middle medieval ages. 

For a start, castles were usually built on hill tops. That's ok for defence (and we have already considered the benefits of high vantage points), but you always have the problem of getting up there (lugging all that stone if you need more to build the walls etc), and the problem of enough water for your fighting men to drink if you are under siege.   Castle wells are always interesting. The well at Bamburgh in Northumberland is memorable - somehow they excavated down to fresh water, hundreds of feet through solid rock, right beside the sea. 

And castles were hard, awkward places - steep stairs, draughty, military. OK for stomping about in your armour and keeping watch, but not so good for domestic matters - the work and experience of women and children and cooks and and gardeners etc was the last thing on the list. 

Without looking anything up, it strikes me that there was a huge splurge of stone castle-building (and cathedral-building) right across Europe in the second half of the 1100s, and that was presumably based on some sort of economic surplus which released the labour force to be available for stone-work, and that was presumably based on an improvement in the climatic conditions - fine weather, warmer years, more harvests, less sickness and starvation, stronger bigger peasants, etc. 

Our travels in Spain have taken us to city after city with these massive installations - castles, forts, cathedrals, basilicas.... and we find them of course in France and England and Italy.....

Ponferrada, sitting as it does in the centre of a huge basin surrounded by mountain ranges is an attractive place and perfect for a castle, right beside the river Sil. The present edifice is gorgeous to look at with castellations, towers, drawbridges, turrets, flags etc, and a great tourist attraction. It covers a vast area with a very large open courtyard. It was owned and embellished by successive kings and warlords, held by the Templars long enough for it to qualify now as a research institution into Templar history, and to attract a lot of funding for rebuilding and so on... The area known as the Old Palace is now a modern wooden thing, not at all medieval-looking, but useful for practical purposes.  The signage is adequate but intermittent. The viewpoints from various walls are marvellous. It was interesting to see that the famous battlements - the castellations - were perhaps not left naked as we usually see them today, but held roofwork - either individually or all along, and there are photos from many other castles to prove it. This reminded me of a book owned by Norma Pleasance which shows how the Coliseum in Rome was not a bare open cylinder as we see it today, but held a huge canvas tent above it, to shade the crowd.  Nice.

The men who built and lived in and used and fought for these castles had a very odd view of the world, according to me.  They worried about being safe enough. They spent huge amounts of money etc on their own defence and possessions. They cut themselves off from most of the people around them - being in command, killing, thinking a lot about death and heredity. They walked round those battlements and stared out. They risked falling down the hard stone stairs. They all died.

Right beside the castle, which by the way, has free entry on Wednesdays, is a little Baroque house which now houses Spain's finest Radio Museum. This mostly consists of a marvellous collection of 'wireless' receivers from the 20s through to the 70s and into the digital age. There are one or two mixer desks, some microphones, a couple of tape recorders including a Uher just like the one which I myself lugged around as a radio reporter in the 1970s.  It's a lovely collection and worth a visit for the sheer design qualities which were lavished on the great twentieth century technology.  The radios channelled the words and actions of despots - and 'news' was a broadcast thing, the changes in war technology and battles, all talked about and heard in homes across the land.   But radios also brought music and laughter and people sat around together listening, sharing. 

Quite different things.