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Thursday, September 11th, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and Changed the Middle Ages
Civilization moved past the use of castles long ago, but their imagery endures in popular culture. Even young children here in the twenty-twenties have an idea of what castles look like. But why do they look like that? Admittedly, that’s a bit of a trick question: the popular concept of castles tends to be inspired by medieval examples, but in historical fact, the design of castles changed substantially over time, albeit slowly at first. You can hear that process explained in the Get to the Point video above, which tells the story of “star forts,” the built response to the “technology that ended the Middle Ages.” You may be familiar with the concept of “motte and bailey,” now most widely understood as a metaphor for a certain debate tactic irritatingly prevalent on the internet. But it actually refers to a style of castle constructed in Europe between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, consisting of a fortified hilltop keep, or “motte,” with a less defensible walled courtyard, or “bailey,” below. In case of an attack, the battle could primarily take place down in the bailey, with retreats to the motte occurring when strategically necessary. The motte-and-bailey castle is a “great idea,” says the video’s narrator, provided “you don’t have cannons shooting at you.” Castles, he explains, “were a reflection of armies at the time: build a big wall, keep the barbarians out.” But once the cannon came on the scene, those once-practically impervious stone walls became a serious liability. That was definitively proven in 1453, when “the Ottomans famously battered down the great walls of Constantinople with their cannons. That brought an end not only to the 1500-year-old Roman Empire, but also to the Middle Ages as an era entirely.” In response, castle architects added dirt slopes, or glacis, at the edges, as well as circular bastions to deflect cannon fire at the corners — which, inconveniently, created “dead zones” in which enemy soldiers could hide, protected from any defenses launched from within the castle. The solution was to make the bastions triangular instead, and then to add further triangular structures between them. Seen from the side, castles became much lower and wider; from above, they grew ever pointier and more complex in shape. Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis of Vauban, an army officer under Louis XIV, became the acknowledged master of this form, the trace italienne. You may not know his name, but his designs made France “literally impossible to invade.” For sheer beauty, however, it would be hard to top the plans for star forts to defend Florence in the fifteen-twenties by a multi-talented artist named Michelangelo. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Related Content: Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More How to Build a 13th-Century Castle, Using Only Authentic Medieval Tools & Techniques A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
| 9:00a | The Earliest Known Appearance of the F‑Word (1310)
Photo by Paul Booth You value decorum, propriety, eloquence, you treasure le mot juste and agonize over diction as you compose polite but strongly-worded letters to the editor. But alas, my literate friend, you have the misfortune of living in the age of Twitter, Tumblr, et al., where the favored means of communication consists of readymade mimetic words and phrases, photos, videos, and animated gifs. World leaders trade insults like 5th graders—some of them do not know how to spell. Respected scientists and journalists debate anonymous strangers with cartoon avatars and work-unsafe pseudonyms. Some of them are robots. What to do? Embrace it. Insert well-placed profanities into your communiqués. Indulge in bawdiness and ribaldry. You may notice that you are doing no more than writers have done for centuries, from Rabelais to Shakespeare to Voltaire. Profanity has evolved right alongside, not apart from, literary history. T.S. Eliot, for example, knew how to go lowbrow with the best of them, and gets credit for the first recorded use of the word “bullshit.” As for another, even more frequently used epithet in 24-hour online commentary?—well, the word “F*ck” has a far longer history. Not long ago we alerted you to the first known use of the versatile obscenity in a 1528 marginal note scribbled in Cicero’s De Officiis by a monk cursing his abbot. Not long after this discovery, notes Medievalists.net, another scholar found the word in a 1475 poem called Flen flyys. This was thought to be the earliest appearance of “f*ck” as a purely sexual reference until medieval historian Paul Booth of Keele University discovered an instance dating over a hundred years earlier. Rather than within, or next to, a work of literature, however, the word appears in a set of 1310 English court records. And no, it is decidedly not a legal term. The documents concern the case of “a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele.” Used three times in the record, the name, says Booth, is probably not a joke made by the scribe but some kind of bizarre nickname, though one hopes not a description of the crime. “Either it refers to an inexperienced copulator, referring to someone trying to have sex with a navel,” says Booth, stating the obvious, “or it’s a rather extravagant explanation for a dimwit, someone so stupid they think that this is the way to have sex.” Our medieval gent had other problems as well. He was called to court three times within a year before being pronounced “outlawed,” which The Independent’s Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith suggests execution but probably refers to banishment. For the word to have such casually hilarious or insulting currency in the early 14th century, it must have come from an even earlier time. Indeed, “f*ck is a word of German origin,” notes Jesse Sheidlower, author of an etymological history called The F Word, “related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meaning such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’” (naturally). So, in other words, it’s just a word. But in this case it might have also been a weapon, Booth speculates, wielded “by a revengeful former girlfriend. Fourteenth-century revenge porn perhaps…” If that’s not evidence for you that the present may not be unlike the past, then maybe take note of the appearance of the word “twerk” in 1820. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017. Related Content: People Who Swear Are More Honest Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New University Study Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW) Stephen Fry, Language Enthusiast, Defends The “Unnecessary” Art Of Swearing Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness |
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