The Repository Stone Record

Kenilworth, 1266: The Catapults Never Broke the Castle

September 16, 2026 · Runtime 9:32 · Watch on YouTube

In 2024, contractors laying a path outside Kenilworth Castle dug up a stone ball, and an archaeologist on site found seven more — up to 105 kilograms, all dated to the royal siege of 1266. It looks like proof of the great bombardment. The chronicle of that siege says the gates stood open from morning to evening, and no general assault was ever made.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Eight stones, found in 2024
  2. 1:04 The longest siege — and two ways to count it
  3. 2:42 Which side threw them?
  4. 3:21 The tower of two hundred crossbowmen
  5. 4:23 Gates open, no assault, no mining
  6. 5:48 The lake that decided it
  7. 6:59 Hollar's plan, 1656
  8. 7:52 How it actually ended
  9. 8:23 What the stones can and cannot say

Transcript

Eight stones, found in 2024 0:00

In twenty twenty-four, contractors laying a new path outside Kenilworth Castle dug up a stone ball. An archaeologist on site found seven more. The largest weighs a hundred and five kilograms, and all eight were dated to the siege of twelve sixty-six. It is an easy picture: a king pounding a rebel castle with catapults for half a year. The chronicle of that siege describes something else.

The stones are real, and they lie close to where they fell. But they cannot tell you which side threw them, and the castle they landed around was never broken. What kept a royal army outside those walls for six months is the one piece of evidence that is no longer there.

In twelve sixty-five, Kenilworth belonged to the rebellion. Simon de Montfort, the king's own brother-in-law, had custody of it. When he was killed at the battle of Evesham that August, his supporters kept the castle as their base. The following March, a royal messenger was sent back to the king with one hand cut off.

The longest siege — and two ways to count it 1:04

The royal army arrived in June, twelve sixty-six: Henry the Third, with his sons Edward and Edmund. English Heritage counts a hundred and seventy-two days, from the twenty-fifth of June to the thirteenth of December. Other accounts start on the twenty-first. Either way, it is usually called the longest siege in English history.

Inside, the garrison was large. Estimates usually put it at around twelve hundred people, a number that may include wives, children and servants. When they heard the king was coming, Rishanger says, they drove flocks, herds and weapons into the castle from the country around it.

The king brought an enormous arsenal. English Heritage lists sixty thousand crossbow bolts and nine siege engines. The chronicle printed under the name of William de Rishanger, a monk of Saint Albans, gives a different count: eleven stone-throwers, hurling stones into the castle day and night.

So the clean version writes itself. Nine engines, or eleven, throwing stone at a rebel castle for six months until it gave in. And in twenty twenty-four the ground seemed to confirm it: eight of those stones, lying close to the surface, outside the west walls.

They run from one kilogram to a hundred and five. English Heritage could date them at once, because the same kind of shot had turned up in an excavation at the castle in the nineteen sixties. And since they lay close to where they landed, the archaeologists could begin to work out where the siege camps might have stood.

Which side threw them? 2:42

Here is the first problem, and it is in English Heritage's own announcement. The garrison inside had siege engines too, and the stones were being fired from both sides. A ball lying outside the walls could be a royal shot that fell short, or a defender's shot that landed among the besiegers. The stone does not say which.

A second chronicle says the same thing, in verse. Robert of Gloucester, describing the summer of twelve sixty-six, sums the fighting up in a single line: with mangonels and engines, each upon the other cast. Stone went out from Kenilworth as well as in.

The tower of two hundred crossbowmen 3:21

And the most famous shot in the written record was not the king's. Rishanger describes a great wooden tower built on Prince Edmund's side, very costly, of astonishing height and width, fitted against the wall. Inside it, in separate compartments, stood two hundred crossbowmen or more.

Then comes his next sentence. A mangonel set up inside the castle did not stop until, by constant battering with stones, it had broken into the tower and wrecked it. The king built a second machine, so big it was called the Bear. A stone-thrower inside struck it so hard that it was out of action for a long time.

Today that tower is usually told as one lucky hit. The twenty twenty-four announcement puts it that way: destroyed by just one well-aimed missile. Rishanger, who describes the tower, says the opposite: a machine that kept on firing until the tower gave way. A siege gets retold around its single most dramatic stone.

Gates open, no assault, no mining 4:23

The second problem is bigger. The stones never took the castle. Rishanger says that from Pentecost to Martinmas the royal army never once made a general assault. And he adds a detail that sounds like a copying error: from morning until evening, the castle gates stood open.

It is not one monk's slip. Robert of Gloucester, writing his rhymed chronicle a generation later, says the same: the men inside would never close their gates. They rode out again and again, fought, took prisoners, and sold them back for ransom.

Rishanger adds that the defenders drove their herds out to pasture in full view of the army. When a wounded royal knight was captured and died inside, they laid him on a bier with candles around it and carried him out, so his friends on the king's side could take him home for burial.

When the papal legate excommunicated the garrison, they answered from the wall. In Robert's account, the castle's surgeon, Master Philip Porpoise, put on a white cope as a mock legate, and excommunicated the king, the legate, and all their men right back.

And one weapon was never used at all. Rishanger says nothing was attempted with miners or tunnels, the method that had brought down a corner of Rochester's great tower half a century before. He records the absence. He does not explain it.

The lake that decided it 5:48

The ground explains it, or it did. Between twelve ten and twelve sixteen, King John spent over a thousand pounds on Kenilworth. He dammed two brooks below the castle, and the water backed up into a lake covering around a hundred acres, along the south and west sides. The long causeway to the gate was the dam that held it in.

A lake does three things to a siege. Nobody can dig under it. Nobody can roll a tower across it. And it holds the throwing machines far back. English Heritage's guidebook account says the distance cut the royal trebuchets' effect so badly that heavier ones had to be sent for from London.

The king did try the water itself. Barges were hauled all the way from Chester, at great cost, Rishanger says, to attack the castle across the lake. They achieved nothing.

The lesson was not lost. Historians of the castle point out that Kenilworth's water defences influenced the next great castles built in Wales, above all Caerphilly, begun just two years after the siege, where the lakes are the defence.

Hollar's plan, 1656 6:59

The best picture of that water is nearly four hundred years old. Wenceslaus Hollar etched a plan of the castle for William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in sixteen fifty-six. On it, the pool runs down the whole west side and around the south, right to the foot of the wall.

Then the lake went. After the Civil War, Parliament ordered the castle slighted, in sixteen forty-nine, and the mere was drained. The local history society notes that nobody knows exactly when the dam was breached. Today the lake bed is meadow.

Which puts the twenty twenty-four stones in a different light. They were found outside the west walls, on the side Hollar drew with water running to the foot of the curtain. The loudest evidence of the siege lies at the edge of the evidence that decided it, and that part is gone.

How it actually ended 7:52

So how did it end? Not with stone. On the thirty-first of October, a royal commission issued the Dictum of Kenilworth: terms under which rebels could buy back their confiscated lands. The garrison still held out for six more weeks.

In the middle of December, with food running out and disease inside the walls, they surrendered, and marched out under safe conduct. Hunger did what nine engines, or eleven, never managed in six months of throwing.

What the stones can and cannot say 8:23

Here is what is left, once the story is taken apart. The stones are real, they are from twelve sixty-six, and they help place the camps. What they cannot do is tell you who threw them, or show you what kept a royal army standing in a field for half a year.

A siege read from its debris hears the loudest witness first. Stone survives. Water drains away, and a lake that held off a king leaves behind nothing but a flat field and a hatched line on a seventeenth-century plan.

Next time you walk up to a ruined castle, look at the low ground as well as the walls. At Kenilworth, the long raised path to the gate is the old dam, and the flat meadow beside it is where the defence actually was.

Next time, archaeology published this summer. In passages beneath Chester's Crown Court, a survey with laser scanners found a medieval wall almost three metres high, part of a thirteenth-century bridge over the castle ditch, in a place historians believed had been cleared in the seventeen hundreds. Chester is where those barges came from.

Description and sources

English Heritage's own announcement says the stones were being fired from both sides: the garrison had engines too. The most famous shot in the written record belongs to the defenders — a mangonel inside the castle that, in William de Rishanger's Latin, kept battering Prince Edmund's wooden tower of two hundred crossbowmen until it broke in (the modern retelling makes it one well-aimed missile). Robert of Gloucester sums the summer up in one line: mangonels and engines, each upon the other cast.

And the stones never took the castle. Rishanger records no general assault from Pentecost to Martinmas, no attempt at mining, and gates left open by day. What held the king off was water: King John's dam had backed up a lake of around a hundred acres along the south and west sides, which kept tunnels and towers out and the trebuchets too far back. Hollar's plan for Dugdale (1656) is the last picture of it; the mere was drained after the castle was slighted in 1649. The 2024 stones were found outside the west walls — the side Hollar drew with water to the foot of the curtain.

The siege ended with hunger and disease, six weeks after the Dictum of Kenilworth was issued on 31 October 1266.

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.

  • Photochrom Print Collection — 1890-1900 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Wenceslaus Hollar — 1656 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 10 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. Two frames are cropped details of Wenceslaus Hollar's 1656 plan and prospects. The diagrams and set-type quotations are code: drawings of the argument, not measured surveys.

#castles #medievalhistory #archaeology