Royal Siege Encampment & Fortress Assault Diorama
A.D. 1386: The Siege of Château de Rochecote. In the high middle ages, taking an entrenched stone fortress required complex military logistics, specialized artisans, and massive siege engineering.
Hundreds of colorful canvas pavilions housed knights and nobility, distinguished by family heraldry, lion gonfalons, and personal badges. Inside the King's Pavilion, illuminators and military marshals drafted detailed parchment relief maps marking moat depths and wall masonry thickness.
Armorer smithies and bowyer workshops were essential. Armorers continually ground halberds, billhooks, and pollaxes on revolving water-troughs to pierce brigandine and mail. Bowyers seasoned ash wood staves, binding bodkin arrowheads with heated pitch and fletching goose feathers with animal glue.
Towering four stories high on massive iron-bound timber wheels, the Belfry allowed assault troops to cross directly onto castle battlements via a hinged drawbridge. The front timbers were protected against fire arrows by wet, vinegar-soaked rawhides and horsehair blankets.
Sappers advanced toward the moat within zig-zagging trenches to avoid enfilading fire from castle crossbows. They protected their works using gabions—woven wicker cylinders packed with packed earth—and wheeled mantlet shields.
Counterweight trebuchets used pivoting counterpoise boxes packed with 10 to 15 tons of stone ballast to fling 200-pound granite boulders or Greek fire pitch over hundreds of yards to fracture stone merlons and hoardings.