Long article without even the tiniest hint of evidence to support the claim that the easier to defend theory wasn't the reason why apparently there is a considerable imbalance in staircase direction.
The reality is that most of the time most castles were not involved in violence at all (outside of rough methods of keeping order I guess). Even if staircase fighting never ever happened, the imagination of heroically fending off invaders who made it that far in person could have easily been a clever pose, a tool of the trade for architects to give the impression of really knowing all the tricks. Claiming better defensibility would have made an even bigger impression on the future inhabitant than on tourists hundreds of years later. Because, assuming that the article is not wrong in this, the customer has just as little experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes.
Medieval snake-oil, claiming that it never happened should require better evidence than "you really would not want to ever let invaders get that far".
If it's a 30/70 distribution chances are that almost half of those 70 are just as random or motivated by more pressing concerns than the "wrong direction" 30, and of the remaining 40 that make up the imbalance, a certain amount will be habitual copies of conscious decisions for the snake-oil winding.
Yeah, whenever a tour guide brings up the defensive advantage story, chances are that this particular staircase wasn't really designed as defense-optimized but random/some other reason/habitual. But unless someone proposes a better explanation for the imbalance (I don't know, some pseudoreligious thing perhaps? Some echo from whatever way Romans preferred? Oncoming traffic etiquette, like climbing side steps toward the steep side, taking a break grabbing the stair's spine while the descending side slides past at the outer wall, and they'd both rather have their dominant hand wall-side?), it's a rather bold claim to call it a victorian era fabrication.
You have the burden of proof the wrong way around.
The earliest occurrence of this hypothesis was propounded by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903. That was not the Victorian Era, but was later. Cook was not a historian, but a sports writer and art critic. The book was _Spirals in Nature and Art_. And this hypothesis is a half-paragraph aside, with words like "would" and "probable", given with zero supporting evidence, and clearly one (as xe wrote "I think") that Cook originated.
The burden of proof is to prove that that is true, not to blithely assume that it is true and demand that there be evidence to prove it false.
Especially since Theodore Andrea Cook held that "right-handed spirals are more common in staircases". By "right-handed spiral", Cook actually meant anti-clockwise staircases (as can be seen from figure 29 in the book). Not even Cook believed the premise that has given rise to this 120-year-old myth. Cook wrote that anti-clockwise staircases were "more common" despite the fact that clockwise ones would have been better for this reason, a reason that xe invented from whole cloth without any support from how helical staircases even featured in any siege of any castle in history.
120 years of uncritical out of context repetition and augmentation later, here we are; with people demanding that the burden of proof lies with those who challenge something that was never proven in the first place, not expertly held, and not even held true by its own originator.
Is there some reason you're misgendering Theodore Andrea Cook? He's obviously masculine. Perhaps you're not aware that Andrea, like Shannon, Leslie, and many others, is also a masculine name?
I recommend Bret Devereaux's series on medieval fortifications, specifically the manpower problem [1]:
> While sapping (tunneling under and collapsing fortifications) remained in use, apart from filling in ditches, the mole-and-ramp style assaults of the ancient world are far less common, precisely because most armies (due to the aforementioned fragmentation combined with the increasing importance in warfare of a fairly small mounted elite) lacked both the organizational capacity and the raw numbers to do them.
Overall, medieval armies just didn't have the resources to siege for as long and as intensely as the Romans and other ancient armies did. Until the early modern period and gunpowder artillery, defenders in castles had a much bigger advantage over attackers so often attackers just didn't bother. They were more common than actual pitched battles though and most ended through surrender rather than successful assault.
The book Devereaux mentions Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages is a great resource for further reading - there's a whole chapter on sieges. It starts out describing how much worse the life for siegers often was compared to the besieged.
I hear about this imbalance for the first time, and reading about it for half an hour left an impression that no one tried hard to prove anything.
The very first thing that begs to be done is to plot this imbalance on a time axis to see was it kept constant over time, or maybe people made clockwise stairs at first and switched to counter-clockwise later.
But it is not the only possible correlation you can measure before assessing the hypothesis space. Does direction of a stair correlates with geography? With a number of times a castle changed his owner? With a size of a castle? ...
I'm pretty sure you can get some idea of it all by studying historical sources. But I see no evidence someone bothered to do it. All I see people speculate a lot.
In this situation, I believe the most reasonable will be to file the question as having no answer and to forget it as having no importance.
All those mythbuster sources seem to deliberately exaggerate a defensibility preference from a minor bias into a universal rule and then feel smug naming some counterexamples that would disprove a universal rule. But it was them who elevated a preference bias into a supposedly universal rule. Not even that supposedly first mention (beware! Universal claim, impossible to prove that it was never written before!) goes that far, at least not according to the retelling of the mythbusters.
the customer has just as little experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes
You’re talking about a customer who most likely received a rigorous sword fight training, and probably participated in numerous knight tourneys. And spent his life living in castles, walking up and down those stairs. And who most likely knew someone who had personally engaged in castle offense or defense (the world was a lot smaller back then). Somehow I think this customer would know a thing or two about defending castles.
You could be right about the sales tactics, but comparing a medieval castle owner and a 21st century tourist is a bit much.
That's the part where I was taking the claim of the article at face value, the claim that nobody would have ever considered the stairwell a possible site for violence to happen.
as I mentioned above, the idea that 'well if they got that far you already lost' comes off as video game logic. You don't have a reset button or save point to go back to, you die. So even if it gives you ridiculously thin odds, or even if those added odds are just perceived ... You do it. Much like the ww2 tankers who put sand bags on their tanks.
Do you see those tankers saying 'well, if we took a shell there, we already lost'
To paraphrase: We know how sieges ended and castles fell. We have written histories to consult. None of them ended with swordfights on staircases like Errol Flynn movies.
The reality is that most of the time most castles were not involved in violence at all (outside of rough methods of keeping order I guess). Even if staircase fighting never ever happened, the imagination of heroically fending off invaders who made it that far in person could have easily been a clever pose, a tool of the trade for architects to give the impression of really knowing all the tricks. Claiming better defensibility would have made an even bigger impression on the future inhabitant than on tourists hundreds of years later. Because, assuming that the article is not wrong in this, the customer has just as little experience fighting in a staircase as the tourist hordes.
Medieval snake-oil, claiming that it never happened should require better evidence than "you really would not want to ever let invaders get that far".
If it's a 30/70 distribution chances are that almost half of those 70 are just as random or motivated by more pressing concerns than the "wrong direction" 30, and of the remaining 40 that make up the imbalance, a certain amount will be habitual copies of conscious decisions for the snake-oil winding.
Yeah, whenever a tour guide brings up the defensive advantage story, chances are that this particular staircase wasn't really designed as defense-optimized but random/some other reason/habitual. But unless someone proposes a better explanation for the imbalance (I don't know, some pseudoreligious thing perhaps? Some echo from whatever way Romans preferred? Oncoming traffic etiquette, like climbing side steps toward the steep side, taking a break grabbing the stair's spine while the descending side slides past at the outer wall, and they'd both rather have their dominant hand wall-side?), it's a rather bold claim to call it a victorian era fabrication.