medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Hi Andrew,
You wrote:
>This raises an interesting question, and one I know nothing about. If
torches mounted on walls are ahistorical, what did they do instead?
Candles? Just carry their own light?
The thing is this: what Hollywood (like) movies show us are many corridors
where actors run or sneak through on their way to closed off rooms and halls
in castles, preferably after dark. In reality there were not many corridors
in castles: rooms and halls tended to run into eachother via doors or at
least openings, and these were rarely closed off. Outer doors and gates,
alright, but inner areas, no, not until very late during the Middle Ages
when privacy became an issue. Besides people went to bed early (except for
feastdays or -nights) and did not need much extra lighting. Dark areas, as
is shown on the website Terri pointed us to, were lighted by either oil
lamps or candles and, in Nederland at least, such areas (like cellars,
backrooms, long halls where not much daylight could penetrate) had little
recesses built in the walls where a candle or oil lamp could be placed. And
these could be taken from room to room, as they were movable. Outside
lighting while walking in the dark was provided by candles in lanterns made
of metal, with horn, vellum or glass 'windows'. Of course a rushlight (burns
very fast) can be used for lighting outside, when on your way to the bog
f.i., if it's not raining or snowing. On all other occasions your eyes are
able to adjust to the dark very easily, even our modern eyes. Our world is
heavily over-lighted anyway.
For festive occasions people used torches made of long rolls of burnable
material like hemp, pitch, wax or linen drenched in oil, bound or stuck
around wooden sticks. These burned only for a short while uness they were
long and consisted of more than one roll, as can be seen in the Tournament
Book of the Bon Roy René.
Hollywood castle corridors had to be lighted or else the viewers were not
able to see if any action took place there, so some ingenious property man
or art director must have come up with the idea that lighting with hanging
torches could provide the necessary brightness with an extra spot on the
thing itself because even a torch did not provide enough illumination to be
caught on camera in the pre-war era or fifties and sixties. Nowadays digital
cameras are better that way. The practical result of hanging up a real torch
is that this also burns out quickly and its dregs fall to the floor (except
for the infamous paraffine garden torches all others drip and leave very
dangerous burning bits on the floor beneath it) creating a sticky situation.
To prevent having to replace the torches every half hour or so, most sets
with torches provide gas through pipes at the back. Others use ingenious
long burning devices thought up by pyrotechnics experts.
BTW; you'll not find torch brackets in castles still standing now, unless
maybe they've been done up by Viollet-le-Duc or his followers.
Oh, and in normal medieval houses, if there were corridors (which was rare
until the very end of the MA), there were no torchbrackes either.
Henk
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