Château Gaillard, la fierté de Richard Cœur de Lion

The citadel of Château-Gaillard in Normandy, known to be impregnable, has been the pride of Richard Coeur de Lyon. The English sovereign has accomplished the feat of having it built in only two years. It constitutes the last wall destined to stop the march of Philip Auguste to Rome. He will have to wait for the end of a very long siege, in the spring of 1204, to succeed in seizing it. Because Château-Gaillard very early has the most effective attributes of a defense called active. The idea is that it must resist. So the fact already, for example, in Château-Gaillard, to replace the wooden walls with stone machicolations, which was at the time an innovation in the West, it was very new to do that. There were stone machicolations at the top of the tower on large arcades. And the walls were thicker, especially. So the walls of Château-Gaillard, for example, are very thick. There is a great mechanical resistance to the ballistic impact. And the planks had the vocation, in case of ballistic fire, not to give take. That is, a tip, it allows you to chase the projectile. And the small planks, the planked shapes, it's the same. It was to oppose a ballistic shot, something that could make the projectile ricochet. So have less impact. So there it is really a response, the thickening and the shapes. In the 12th and 13th centuries, simple cutting is no longer enough. With the Philippine architecture, the defense becomes active. Château-Fort can now protect all the land around it, because the men posted on its roundabout or ambushed in its guardhouse can actively defend the building thanks to the new defensive devices housed in the towers and the walls, and their ability to move on the curtains. Progress in the art of building has made the fortifications even more solid and difficult to approach. During the 13th century, the wooden towers, vulnerable to fire, gradually disappear to be replaced by encrusted constructions. The brothèches, a small rectangular front body or cut in half, and the machicoulis, a gallery of stones running on the top of the curtains. And to better protect the enclosure, from the middle of the 12th century, the towers were used as firing posts. The fundamental element of active defense is the archer tower. In a semi-circular tower, you also pierce flank archers and a frontal archer, but at the top floor, they are not pierced at the same place. Thus, you have a cover of the firing angles that leaves practically no dead angle because the superposition of the shots at different levels, in fan, allows the archer to defend almost all the angles of view from the tower in an active way. It's invented, or at least it's really set up from the last third of the 12th century and Philippe Auguste is going to systematize it. He's going to make a system out of it. The progress is such that the fortress can now be built in the plain, on flat and open ground. The Philippine architecture will influence the English rulers for several centuries. The Duvres castle, located on the British coast, ensures the defense of the port closest to France. Henri II Plantagenet makes it considerably larger between 1179 and 1188 by adjoining it a splendid palace dungeon. In eastern England, the castle of Bodiam, built in 1385 in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, takes over the archetypes of the French fortresses. It is built on a square base but does not have a tower.