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Carpal Tunnel
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be sure i have the key? from what i know about oubliettes, they didn't need a key.
these little rooms of forgetting, of oblivon, were dudgeons of the worst kind. a small room, (usually in a remote part of the castle) entered, when someone stepped on a trap door, that let them fall, 8 to 20 feet into a small room. even if they didn't break legs or arms in the fall, there was no way out, no window, nothing.. (sometimes, to make them more effective, the floor was covered with metal spikes.. the trap door was sealed, the floor covered with carpet, and everyone just "forgot" . in one oubliette, among the many bones was found a coin dated 1830, and a man's gold watch. mind you, they could have just fallen in at some time, san the owner.. but any information about the room was forgotten..
an oubliette was not like the gardarobe! it was much worse!
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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What about the portable towers that attackers moved into place against the castle walls to bridge the allure? Plutarch
Now this description is food for thought about how and of what such devices were wrought...
Light materials? Pine? And how high? At least it sounds as though the movers would have had some protection if they moved from within...
Hope to read more about this. It makes me think of Macbeth and that movable woods...
wwh: Fascinating reading about Humpty Dumpty the Dumped Hump of a Cannon...
Best regards,
Wumpty
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Carpal Tunnel
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About attacking castles. I wonder if Shakespeare in MacBeth:"he will never be defeated until Great
Birnam wood shall come against him to High Dunsinane Hill" may not be first mention in literature of camouflage.
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
first mention in literature of camouflage
That honour surely goes to the contraption which put a stop to the little fracas our esteemed New Yorker was the cause of.
Bingley
Bingley
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Dear Bingley: you baffle me. Since Shakespeare antedated New York considerably, how could any New Yorker claim priority? And I can think of no New Yorker who could be a candidate.
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wwh: Hint: ofTroy and Hint: Ancient Wooden Pantomime Horse containing an army of actors....
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Dear WW: If you are suggesting the Trojan Horse was an example of camouflage, that seems to be stretching the term pretty far. Camel flagging may be older than Macbeth, but I don't remember mention of it. I'm not even sure why it was important for the numbers of besiegers to be concealed, except to be a hint the weird women had been deceitful.The options of the defenders were limited, they could not send for re-inforcements. The basic purpose of camouflage is to escape detection. but can be extended to deception. such as building phony targets for enemy airforce to bomb. The Trojan Horse has some similarity to that
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Carpal Tunnel
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>Indefinite droit du seigneur might become tiresome.
Once a king, always a king, but once a knight is enough.
And an egg a day is an oeuf.
TEd
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It was the Trojan horse I was thinking of. But then after I posted I started having doubts about whether it was camouflage or just a deception and what the difference would be. And what is camel flagging?
Bingley
Bingley
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Dear Bingley: "Camel flag" was WWI American soldier attempt to read French camouflage. Hors d'oevres were horse doovers. They thought "elle est chérie" referred to an anatomical structure.
After thinking a while, it came to me that the Trojan Horse was a form of decoy, a deception to entice enemy into danger or make some other error. Israelis used unmanned planes as decoys to entice Syrian ground-to-air missile sites to fire, revealing their location to Israeli planes. The Soviets dropped toys for Afghan children to pick up, which then exploded. The word "decoy" has come a long way from Dutch word for trap for ducks.
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