posted 06-29-2000 02:37 PM           

Most gatehouses of any size have a porters room at ground level where a porter can meet callers. In his book Dover Castle Jonathan Coad quotea a 13C document about the rules for a porter

The porters at the gate shall not suffer any persons to enter, until they have taken particular notice of them, and if they be strangers they shall not step within the sill of the wicket, but one of the Porters is to call the Constable, and in his absence, his lieutenant; but every person seeking admittance is to receive civil treatment ... The gates are never to be left during the day to the care of any persons but the porters, and they are always to have the wicket secured with bolts. After the bridge is drawn up and the great gates shut, they are not to be opened until the rising of the sun.

This suggest that a casually visitor would not be admitted at night. To emphasis this point even the King would have difficulties entering his own castle at night as the following quote from the same book suggests.

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The peripatetic nature of medieval royal courts too, meant that Dover castle was frequently visited by the monarch. The thirteenth-century Statutes of the castle indicate that sometimes there was little warning of such royal descents:

If the king arrives unexpectedly in the night, the great gates shall not be opened to him, but he shall go to the postern called the King’s Gate [now Fitzwilliam Gate], towards the north and there the Constable and those who accompany him, may admit the king and a certain number of his suite. When the king is admitted he has the command, and in the morning, when it is full day, he may admit the remainder of his company.

So if your horseman arrived at Dover castle and shouted up at a guard he would be told to go away until the morning - the need to remind the porter to be civil suggests that the common practice may not have been that polite. (I've assuming it's a man a lone women might be admited but on the assumption she was a prostitute, known to the guard and there for business reasons. A Lady would not concievable be alone.)

However, the medieval period was a long time, castles were of many sizes owned by many people of different personalities so there was definately no standard practice. I imagine that some quite large castles had a porter who slept in the room by the gatehouse and who was the only guard whilst the lord was not in residence (All big nobles had several homes and castles and they moved around these).
So to your story. Would your visitor be meet by a sentry at the gate? (in one of those nice sentry boxes) - almost certainly not. Would there be guard on the wall to shout down to him? - possibly for a large royal castle or a large baronial castle in unsettled times. More likely he'd have to shout and hope to wake someone but even then he would be likely to told to 'go away' (or words to that effect) and return in the morning. (Medieval people wore good thick clothing, were not used to central heating even the wealthy were used to uncomfortable sleeping so sleeping out at night would not present a problem.) So for your visitor to gain entry to a castle in the middle of the night he had better have a very convincing story. Even if he gains entry he is unlikely to get in through the main gate but will enter by either a small side door (a postern) or a small door in the main gate (a wicket) and his horse would have to remain outside until morning. Since horses are expensive and since the crime rate was high he'd better have a good reason for risking his horse.

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posted 06-29-2000 02:54 PM           

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posted 06-30-2000 03:10 AM           

In practice your messenger would be a nobleman (you wouldn't entrust a message to anyone else) possible the son of a mighty baron. The number of might noble families in England was fairly small so most of the nobles knew each other by sight. Therefore, your messanger would possibly be known to the constable of the castle (The constable was the person in charge of a castle in the lords absence and would be the person responsible for the defence of the castle when the lord was present - He would almost certainly be the younger son of a baron who did not inherit his fathers lands and had to find a position suitable to his status). The messanger may well have been chosen because he knew or was even related to the constable. He still has to get the porter/guards to wake the constable (actually I think he'd have to convince the guard to wake the sergeant, the sergeant to wake the constable and the constable to let him in). We live in a world where we have instant communication and expect instant responses. The medieval world was different and this sort of urgency may well not have been part of it, so the whole process of entering the castle may well have taken an hour or more

If the message was coming from a lord to the king he may well send the message with a son of his or with a squire, who would be the son of another lord, living with that lord to learn how to be a lord. I doubt that a message of any importance would be sent with just one person in a time of war so I'd actually expect a small band of knights to go with the message.

In times of war a king or lord could call on knights to come to serve him and the knights would be expected to bring some soldiers with them so more troops were available. However, what you want to do with these troops is make an army to defeat your enemy so you still keep the forces in castles fairly low (The military point of a castle is that it is the best way to use a very few troops to slow the advance of an invading army). If your castle is the rallying point for the kings army then it will be well defended and would probably have a camp of soldiers outside the walls (few castles are large enough for an army to be housed entirely in the castle) otherwise it will still have a relatively small garrison although probably more alert and attracting attention would not be so difficult, although gaiing admission might remain difficult.

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And as I rode by Dalton-Hall Beneath the turrets high, A maiden on the castle-wall Was singing merrily: The Outlaw by Sir Walter Scott
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