The Repository Stone Record

Spiral Staircases Do Not Turn for a Right-Handed Swordsman

September 13, 2026 · Runtime 8:59 · Watch on YouTube

Ask why a castle's spiral stair turns the way it does, and you get the same answer almost everywhere: clockwise, so a right-handed defender coming down has his sword arm free, and an attacker climbing up has his sword arm boxed in against the central post. About a third of the staircases that survive turn the other way — some of them in castles raised in the middle of an active war, by the crown's own military engineer.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 The claim everyone repeats
  2. 1:23 Neil Guy checks the staircases
  3. 2:21 Four castles, raised mid-war
  4. 2:56 Beaumaris turns the wrong way
  5. 4:22 The fencer who wrote it down
  6. 4:59 Cook's own sentence, in full
  7. 6:10 How a hedge became a rule
  8. 7:27 What the word 'always' does not survive
  9. 8:16 The method, for the next tower you enter

Transcript

The claim everyone repeats 0:00

Ask why a castle's spiral stair turns the way it does, and you will get the same answer almost everywhere. Clockwise, so a right-handed defender coming down has his sword arm free, and a man climbing up to attack him has his sword arm boxed in against the post. It is one of the most repeated facts in castle guiding. About a third of the stairs that survive turn the other way.

Some of the staircases that turn the wrong way are in castles raised in the middle of an active war, by the crown's own military engineer. And the claim itself has a birth certificate: a named author, an exact year, and a printed trail you can follow from there straight into today's guidebooks.

Here is the reasoning behind it. Climb a stair that winds clockwise and the central post, the newel, sits on your left hand the whole way up. A defender coming down that same stair has the newel on his right, his sword hand, with an open wall in front of him. An attacker climbing up has his sword arm pinned against the post, with barely room to raise it above his waist.

It is a clean piece of reasoning, and it is not stupid. One design choice, a fixed geometry, and it works for the entire life of the building. That is exactly the kind of explanation that survives for a century without anyone checking it against an actual staircase.

Neil Guy checks the staircases 1:23

Someone did check. Neil Guy, for the Castle Studies Group, went through the newel stairs that still stand in English and Welsh castles and recorded which way each one turns. About a third of them wind anticlockwise — the wrong way, if the sword-arm theory is a rule and not just a tendency.

Guy counted direction as a climber experiences it: the way your own body turns going up, not the way a plan looks on paper. That distinction matters, because a plan drawn from above can read backwards from what your hands and feet actually do inside the tower.

Norwich. The Tower of London. Newark. Helmsley. Richmond. Caerphilly. Conwy. Beaumaris. Caernarfon. Nine castles, all documented, all turning against the theory that is supposed to explain every one of them.

Four castles, raised mid-war 2:21

And four of those nine were not built in peacetime and adjusted later. Caerphilly, Conwy, Beaumaris and Caernarfon went up during Edward the First's conquest of Wales, while the war that was supposed to justify the design was still being fought.

And the direction problem is not only a thirteenth century one. Norwich and the Tower of London turn the same way, and both were raised in the first decades after the Norman Conquest — two hundred years before Beaumaris, under a different king, a different war, and a different generation of masons entirely.

Beaumaris turns the wrong way 2:56

Beaumaris is on that list. This channel has already read a document from that building site: the letter of February, twelve ninety-six, in which the king's own architect, Master James of St George, explains a budget overrun to the Exchequer.

James of St George was the crown's chief military engineer for that entire war. If a stair turning the wrong way is a defensive liability, he built one into the most expensive castle of the whole building programme, with the war it was meant to defend against still going on outside the walls.

Beaumaris was not started in some general climate of war. Construction began in the spring of twelve ninety-five, immediately after royal troops reoccupied Anglesey following an uprising that had just killed the island's sheriff. The first summer's wage bill alone ran to about two hundred and seventy pounds a week.

That is the test a universal rule has to pass. Not 'does it usually happen this way' — a master builder under royal orders, with a live threat outside the gate, is exactly where a real defensive principle should hold without exception. Beaumaris is where it does not.

So the physical evidence does not hold up. The second problem is where the claim came from in the first place, and it turns out to have a name and a year attached to it, which is unusual for something repeated as timeless military wisdom.

The fencer who wrote it down 4:22

In nineteen oh two, a champion fencer named Theodore Andrea Cook published an essay called The Shell of Leonardo. Cook had captained the English fencing team at two world championships, and made his living as the editor of a sporting paper called The Field.

The following year he reprinted the essay as a chapter of a book whose full title promises something else entirely: a study of spiral shapes in nature, based on the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Its special reference is the open staircase at the chateau of Blois — a decorative Renaissance stair built for a king, not a castle built for a siege.

Cook's own sentence, in full 4:59

The sword-arm passage is a short aside inside that book. Here is Cook's own sentence, exactly as he wrote it in nineteen oh three. It is worth observing, however, at this stage of our inquiry, that while it was easier and more natural for a right-handed architect to draw plans for a staircase with a right-handed spiral, this 'leiotropic' formation is not invariably better. For a man ascending it and turning perpetually to the left would always have his right hand free to attack the defenders, and the garrison coming down would expose their left hands on the outside.

Notice what that sentence actually does. Cook does not say the clockwise stair is always the better design. He calls it 'not invariably better' and describes a case where turning the other way frees the right hand instead. He is arguing with himself in the same paragraph that made his name.

Part of the confusion is baked into the vocabulary itself. A 'right-handed spiral' can mean the direction you turn climbing it, the direction it looks from outside, or the direction a mathematician would trace it on paper. Writers after Cook did not all mean the same one.

How a hedge became a rule 6:10

None of that hedging survived the trip into the textbooks. In nineteen twelve, Guy Cadogan Rothery repeated the swordsman theory as settled fact, in a book called Staircases and Garden Steps, citing Cook by name.

And Sidney Toy folded it into the standard reference on castles for two generations of historians, in the editions of nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen fifty-four. After that it did not need a citation anymore. It was simply what a spiral stair was for.

The historian who reconstructed this chain is James Wright — the same researcher whose survey of Tattershall's brickwork carried the last episode. He traced the claim from Cook's aside, through Rothery and Toy, to the guidebooks still repeating it today.

Open almost any general castle guidebook printed after the nineteen fifties and the claim is there, presented as settled military history — with no footnote pointing back to a fencer's aside about a French palace staircase.

So here is what is actually left, once the story is taken apart. A spiral stair is real military architecture, and the direction it winds can matter in a fight. Cook was not wrong that an open wall helps a right-handed swordsman.

What the word 'always' does not survive 7:27

What does not survive contact with the evidence is the word 'always.' Roughly a third of the surviving stairs, and at least four raised under active royal warfare, turn the other way.

Nobody has shown that the ones which do turn clockwise were chosen for that reason. A mason's habit, the shape of the tower, which side of the newel a doorway had to line up with the hall it served — any of those explains a direction just as well, and none of them needs a swordsman at all.

A single elegant reason is the most dangerous kind of explanation a building can be given, because it is the one nobody feels the need to check. Cook checked nothing. He stated his own exception in the same paragraph that made the claim, and the exception got edited out somewhere between nineteen twelve and nineteen fifty-four.

The method, for the next tower you enter 8:16

Next time you are inside a tower with a newel stair, look up. Wind to your left as you climb and that is the textbook direction. Wind to your right, and you are standing inside one of the third that does not follow the rule everyone will tell you it obeys.

Next time, a siege with the evidence still on the ground. In twelve sixty-six an English king surrounded a castle for a hundred and seventy-two days, the longest siege in medieval England, and English Heritage has since found eight of the stones his catapults threw, lying almost exactly where they landed. That is a different kind of argument than this one — not what a text says, but where the debris actually fell.

Description and sources

The physical claim sounds clean: one design choice, a fixed geometry, and it works for the entire life of the building. Neil Guy, for the Castle Studies Group, checked it against the newel stairs that actually survive in English and Welsh castles, and found roughly a third winding anticlockwise — Norwich, the Tower of London, Newark, Helmsley, Richmond, Caerphilly, Conwy, Beaumaris, Caernarfon. Four of those nine were raised during Edward I's conquest of Wales, while the war the theory is supposed to explain was still being fought — Beaumaris among them, the same castle whose 1296 budget-overrun letter from Master James of St George, the crown's own military engineer, this channel has already read.

The claim's origin is just as checkable. In 1902 a champion fencer named Theodore Andrea Cook — captain of the English fencing team at two world championships, and editor of the sporting paper The Field — published an essay called The Shell of Leonardo, reprinted the following year as a chapter of Spirals in Nature and Art, a book about spiral shapes in nature whose special reference is a decorative Renaissance staircase at the chateau of Blois, not a castle built for a siege. Cook's own sentence about sword arms hedges, then describes the opposite case in the same paragraph. That hedge did not survive the trip through Guy Cadogan Rothery (1912) and Sidney Toy (1939, 1954) into the guidebooks still repeating the claim today.

What's left once the story is taken apart: the direction can matter in a fight, but nobody has shown the ones that do turn clockwise were chosen for that reason, rather than a mason's habit or a doorway's placement.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

How to Read a Castle, Vol. 01 — the method, the measured drawings and the documents behind the first two episodes

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/read-a-castle

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • Poliphilo — 2015 | Wikimedia Commons | CC0
  • Poliphilo — 2018 | Wikimedia Commons | CC0
  • Poliphilo — 2013 | Wikimedia Commons | CC0
  • VanBeem — 2008 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • The Council of the Royal Archaeological Institute — 2011 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Poliphilo — 2013 | Wikimedia Commons | CC0

... and 2 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Stone Record reads castles as documents — what the paperwork and the standing masonry actually say, against what gets repeated. Primary sources are linked above.

Every image is public-domain material from Wikimedia Commons, credited on screen — nothing is AI-generated. The staircase and diagram drawings are code: schematics of the argument, not measured surveys of any one tower's stonework.

#castles #medievalhistory #mythbusting