Medieval Dungeons Were Absolutely Brutal

The Brutal Reality of Medieval Dungeons

A sheath of unthreshed wheat and a single piece of raw bacon. According to a French chronicle written within living memory of the event, that was the only food placed in the cell at Corfe Castle in the summer of 1210 before the door was locked on a noble woman named Maud de Braose and her grown son William.

King John gave the order personally. Eleven days later, the door was opened and both of them were dead. The chronicler describes exactly how they were found, and the description has been sitting in the record ever since, refusing to soften.

“Maud was upright between her son’s legs, her head fallen back against his chest,” the chronicler wrote. “William sat slumped against the wall and from the state of the bodies he had died first, probably days before she did, meaning she spent her own final days locked in a sealed stone room with the corpse of her child in total darkness, breathing the air of his decay.”

A body shut in an unventilated cell in an English summer does not wait politely. Within a day or two it bloats, blackens, and begins to weep. The gases of putrefaction thickening until the room is something you inhale rather than somewhere you sit, and Maud, dying of hunger and thirst, had no corner of that cell far enough away to escape any of it.

Then comes the last detail, written flatly with no attempt at decoration. When they lifted her, they found she had eaten the flesh from her dead son’s cheeks, and the marks left no other reading. A starving body will override nearly everything a mind holds sacred before it consents to die, and hers had—there in the dark, working at the face she had once washed when he was a baby.

She was somewhere around 70 years old. A grandmother, one of the most formidable women of the Anglo-Norman world, a woman who had once personally organized the defense of a castle under siege, and she starved to death in the dark next to her child in a room with a locked door on the orders of a king she had known socially for decades.

That account comes from the Histoire, produced in circles close to people who knew the family, and the story traveled. Five years on, when the barons of England cornered John and forced Magna Carta out of him, the clause about no free man being seized or imprisoned except by lawful judgment of his peers had actual corpses standing behind it.

Maud’s was one of them. Men who drafted that document had dined with her.

Maud’s crime, if you can call it that, was a sentence spoken out loud. Royal officers had come to collect her sons as hostages—standard practice when John doubted a baron’s loyalty—and she refused them to their faces. She said in front of witnesses that she would not hand her children over to a man who had murdered his own nephew.

Every person in that room knew exactly who she meant, and every person at court had spent seven careful years not saying it. Her husband, one of John’s oldest companions, reportedly went pale and tried to talk over her. Too late. The words were out, and John never forgot words like those.

The family ran, Ireland first, then a desperate crossing towards Scotland where Maud and William were captured in Galloway by a local lord who sold them back to the king. Her husband slipped away to France and died there the following year, so ruined and so broken that the exiled Archbishop of Canterbury buried him out of charity in Paris.

Maud, negotiating for her life from custody, offered John a ransom of 40,000 marks, a sum that would have strained the treasury of a small kingdom. He accepted the offer, kept the prisoners anyway, and when the money predictably failed to appear in full, the door at Corfe closed.

Nobody recorded whether she understood when it shut that it would never open for her again. The wheat and the bacon suggest somebody wanted her to spend her last days understanding exactly that. Raw grain and raw pork are food you cannot really eat. Whoever put them in the cell was making a point and the point took 11 days to finish.

11 days is long enough for every stage. Thirst does the early damage. The tongue swelling and cracking, the lips splitting open, the head pounding as the body wrings itself dry. Hunger works slower and crueler. The gut cramps around nothing for a while, and then the body turns on itself, burning through its own fat, then its own muscle, the heart included, since the heart is muscle like any other, and starvation eats it along with the rest. Vision dims. The dying grow calm and strange near the end—past hunger, past speech—a detail that turns up again and again in accounts of siege and famine from this period.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, William stopped and his mother did not, and she still had days remaining.

Corfe had done this work for John before. Back in 1202 at the Battle of Mirabeau in France, he had pulled off the one genuinely brilliant military stroke of his life and captured his 15-year-old nephew, Arthur of Brittany, along with a couple of hundred knights who had sided with the boy against him.

Arthur had a claim to the English throne at least as good as John’s, arguably better, and half of France was fighting in his name. The prisoners were chained and carted off to castles in Normandy and England, and contemporaries noted with disgust that John displayed some of them shackled in ox carts like animals going to market. 22 of the noblest of them ended up at Corfe and by the following year 22 of them were dead.

The annals kept at Margam Abbey in Wales say plainly that they were starved. One version has them seizing the keep in a doomed escape attempt and being simply left there, sealed in by the garrison until hunger did the garrison’s work for it. 22 men starving in one space is its own particular hell because they do not go together.

The wounded and the slight fail first, and the strong get to watch, unable to bury anything, living on for days or weeks in a chamber, filling steadily with their dead friends, reading the order of the queue in each other’s collapsing faces. Whoever lasted longest ended among men he had feasted and fought beside. All of them now swelling in the heat, in air nobody outside the door could have stood to breathe.

Knights of great houses, men whose families would have paid richly to ransom them, which was the entire economic logic of taking noble prisoners in this period. John let the money go so the men could die. People at the time found that genuinely shocking and they were not easily shocked.

Arthur himself was taken first to Falaise. Ralph of Coggeshall, an abbot writing within a few years of these events, records that John sent men there with orders to blind and castrate the boy on the theory that a mutilated claimant could never wear a crown. The procedure those men carried in their heads was standard practice, and standard meant a heated iron pressed into the open eyes until they burst and cooked, and a knife for the rest, done fast, with the patient pinned down by as many hands as the thrashing required.

Men and boys died of it routinely from the shock, from blood loss, from the infections that rode a dirty blade into the body, and anyone giving such an order knew the odds and considered them part of the appeal. The Castellan, Hubert de Burgh, refused to let it happen, and Coggeshall describes Arthur weeping and struggling as he grasped what the visitors had come to do to him.

That refusal probably bought the boy a few months. He was moved to the castle at Rouen, and at Easter 1203, he disappeared from the record entirely. 16 years old, a duke, a crowned claimant with armies in the field, and he simply stops existing in any document anywhere. The Margam annals again are the source willing to say what happened, and their account has a horrible specificity to it.

“After dinner on the Thursday before Easter,” the text says, “drunk and possessed by the devil, John killed the boy with his own hand, tied a heavy stone to the body and threw it in the Seine.”

A fisherman later dragged it up in his net. The corpse was recognized and monks buried it quietly at a nearby priory, in the annalist’s phrase, “for fear of the tyrant.”

You are allowed to wonder how a Welsh abbey came by details that precise and the answer folds this whole story shut like a trap. Margam’s patrons were the Braose family. William de Braose, Maud’s husband, was at Rouen with the king that Easter, one of the very few men who could have known, which means the woman starved at Corfe with her son in 1210 was almost certainly killed for knowing and repeating the exact story her family’s abbey wrote down.

John destroyed her for the sentence, and the sentence survived him.

One more prisoner from Mirabeau deserves a moment here because her fate is quieter than any of these and somehow worse to sit with. Arthur had an older sister, Eleanor of Brittany. She was taken in 1202 as well, in her late teens, beautiful by every report, with a claim to the throne that ran through the same blood as her brother’s.

No cell full of rotting food for her, no midnight murder. She was simply never let go. 39 years in English custody, moved between castles—Corfe among them, later Bristol—with robes and servants and wine, and occasionally delicacies sent from the king’s own table as a mark of favor. Also with a permanent guard. No husband ever permitted, no children ever possible, no charge ever laid, no trial ever held, and no release until her body left Bristol Castle in 1241.

She outlived John by a quarter of a century, and his son kept her locked up all the same because her bloodline never stopped being dangerous. No matter how gray she went at Corfe, she reportedly lived in comfortable apartments with her damsels, while somewhere below her, the knights who had fought for her brother starved.

Whether she knew what was happening under her floor, no record says. The dungeon does not always need darkness and chains. Sometimes it looks like a well-furnished room you will die of old age inside, one slow decade at a time.

The rooms themselves deserve a closer look because the spaces these people died in rarely match the picture the word “dungeon” calls up. The word itself started out meaning almost the opposite of what it means now. Donjon in medieval French was the great tower of a castle—the tallest, strongest, best-appointed part of the whole complex where the lord kept his hall and his treasure and his family.

Prisoners of value were often held up there precisely because it was secure. Over the centuries, the word slid downward, floor by floor, until in English it meant the worst room in the building instead of the best one—language following the prisoners down the stairs, more or less.

Actual medieval castle prisons turn up in odd places when archaeologists go looking. Gate houses were popular since that was where the garrison lived and a captive could be watched around the clock. Tower basements, undercrofts, storage cellars—all pressed into service when a raid brought in more men than expected. And then, cut down into the rock beneath a number of castles, you find the pits.

A round or bottle-shaped shaft entered through a hole in a floor above. No stairs, no door, no window, no latrine. A prisoner went in on a rope, and everything that came after depended entirely on whether anyone above remembered to lower food. The French gave those pits a name that has done a lot of heavy lifting since: oubliette, from oublier, “to forget”—the little forgetting place.

The word starts appearing in French sources in the late medieval period and then had a spectacular second career in the 1800s when novelists and castle tour guides fell in love with it and every dark hole in every ruin in Europe got promoted to an oubliette with a dozen skeletons at the bottom.

Some of those holes were almost certainly grain stores, ice pits, or cess pits. Cool, dry, secure chambers are useful for keeping things other than people. What complicates the tidy version is that some of them have iron staples and chain fittings set into the rock, and some of them produced human bones when they were cleared, and a hole works perfectly well for grain in one century and a man in the next.

The honest answer is that a shaft with no door tells you very little about itself, and you are left staring into it, deciding what you think it was for. Warwick Castle has one of the famous English examples. A cramped chamber reached through a hatch off the corner of its main dungeon in Caesar’s Tower. A space where a grown man could neither stand upright nor stretch out flat. The main dungeon around it leaves less to the imagination. Prisoners scratched writing into those walls that is still there, including work attributed to a captive royalist soldier held there centuries later. And the room itself is a stone box that daylight has never entered. Whatever the hatch chamber began as, men were unquestionably kept in the room beside it and the graffiti is their handwriting.

Ireland offers the version of this story people tend not to believe until they look it up. Leap Castle in County Offaly, seat of the O’Carroll clan—a family whose internal politics ran hot even by Irish standards. In 1532, one O’Carroll brother, a priest, was saying mass for the family in the castle’s upper chapel when another brother burst in and killed him with a sword in front of the altar, in front of their own relatives, mid-service.

The room has been called the “Bloody Chapel” ever since. Off one corner of that chapel, there is a drop, a narrow shaft falling away into the thickness of the wall. And the account passed down through the castle’s later owners says that around 1910, workmen hired to clear it out hauled up cartload after cartload of human bones—three full cartloads by the family’s telling—along with a pocket watch dating from the 1800s resting among them.

The same tradition holds that wooden spikes were set at the bottom of the shaft so that a person shoved through the opening above had a decent chance of being impaled in the dark, the wood punching up through bowel or lung, and then left. A spike through the torso rarely kills quickly. It holds a person pinned and leaking in the blackness for however many hours or days the wound takes, on a floor made of everyone dropped in before—the rotted and the recent together, with the sounds of the chapel arriving faintly down the shaft, and the last people who would ever hear that voice standing in it, choosing not to answer.

The bones themselves were carted away and dispersed, so nobody can count or date them now, and the story rests on the word of the people who owned the castle when the shaft was emptied. Even discounted heavily for a century of retelling, an opening in a chapel floor with human remains at the bottom of it is the sort of thing a family does not usually invent about its own house.

Scotland built the type specimen, though, at St. Andrews Castle on the cliff edge where the sea air comes straight off the North Sea. There is a pit hewn out of the living rock beneath the Northwest Tower shaped exactly like a bottle. A narrow neck at the top just wide enough for a body on a rope, opening out below into a chamber roughly seven meters down and several meters across at the floor.

Solid stone on every side. No light has ever reached the bottom of it. Not once, not for a moment in all the centuries it has existed. Prisoners were lowered through the neck and the rope was drawn back up. And that was the entire mechanism of the place. No bars to test, no door to work at, no guard to bribe because the architecture itself was the jailer.

It was also the latrine, the bed, and the dining room, since everything a prisoner’s body produced stayed at the bottom of the bottle with him, and everything he ate came down on the same rope through the same hole into a chamber whose floor grew fouler by the week, and whose air had nowhere to go.

Cold rock pulls heat out of a living body day and night without ever stopping. So men down there shivered themselves gaunt in their own filth. Joints seizing, skin ulcerating wherever it pressed the stone, minds softening at the edges from blackness, silence, and the daily question of whether the rope would come down at all.

Men held down there could hear the sea. That may have been the worst feature of the whole design: an open horizon roaring away a few meters of rock above your head, close enough to listen to for the rest of your life.

The “bottle dungeon” earned its darkest chapter in 1546. That March, the Protestant preacher George Wishart was held at the castle by Cardinal David Beaton, the most powerful churchman in Scotland, before being burned to death in front of the walls with bags of gunpowder tied to his body—powder meant to shorten the ordeal that instead flared and tore at him without granting the quick end, leaving the fire to work through him slowly, while the cardinal reportedly watched from cushions set up at a window in the ramparts.

Two months later, a band of feud-lairds got inside the castle disguised as stonemasons and murdered Beaton in his own chamber, stabbing him repeatedly, while by one account he cried out that he was a priest. They hung his corpse from the castle wall by an arm and a leg—from the very window he was said to have watched the burning from—so the town below could get a long look at him. And then, since they intended to hold the castle and a rotting cardinal is inconvenient in a siege, they preserved the body in salt, packed it into a barrel, and dropped it into the bottle dungeon.

The pit that had held his prisoners spent the better part of a year holding him, pickled in brine in the dark at the bottom of his own castle, while the men who killed him ate their meals over his head. John Knox, who joined the garrison during the siege and later wrote the whole episode up with obvious relish, remarked that the cardinal was kept there to await whatever funeral his brother bishops might eventually get around to preparing.

Knox himself ended that siege as a French galley slave chained to an oar for 19 months. So the castle handed out misery in every direction before it was through.

Pits like the one at St. Andrews were scattered all over Europe, and the French crown put its own strongholds to uses every bit as grim, though with more paperwork attached. The most infamous French case begins, of all places, with two embroidered purses.

In 1314, Isabella, Queen of England and daughter of the French king Philip the Fair, noticed something during a family visit. Purses she had given as gifts to her sisters-in-law, the wives of her brothers, were hanging from the belts of two young Norman knights at court, the brothers Gaultier and Philippe d’Aunay.

She told her father. Philip put the knights under quiet watch, and what the watch turned up detonated the French royal family. The knights had allegedly been carrying on affairs with two of the king’s daughters-in-law, Marguerite of Burgundy, wife of the heir to the throne, and Blanche of Burgundy, wife of his youngest son, with the meetings said to have taken place at an old guard tower on the Seine in Paris called the Tour de Nesle. A third princess, Jeanne, was accused of knowing and keeping quiet.

For the d’Aunay brothers, what followed under questioning barely needs describing because medieval interrogators facing an accusation touching the royal bloodline held nothing back. Both men confessed. Then in April 1314, they were executed in public at Pontoise in a manner the chronicles lay out step by step.

They were flayed alive, the skin cut and peeled from living muscle a strip at a time before the crowd. The executioners working without hurry because the sentence required thoroughness. The two men remaining conscious inside bodies turning red and glistening as the covering came off them. Their genitals were cut away, and several accounts specify, thrown to the dogs—punishment aimed precisely at the offending flesh, as that legal culture liked to arrange things—and some retellings have molten lead and boiling sulfur poured over what the knives had laid bare.

Their limbs were shattered across the scaffold with iron bars, the long bones snapping where they lay. And only after all of that came beheading, and what remained, dragged and broken, was hauled up on the gibbet by the armpits to hang for the crows. Two young men from minor gentry families, destroyed by the most powerful monarch in Europe, as slowly and instructively as his executioners could manage.

The princesses could not be treated that way—royal blood being royal blood—so for them the crown reached instead for stone. Marguerite and Blanche had their heads shaved in public, were dressed in rough penitential clothing, and were carted north to Château Gaillard, the massive fortress Richard the Lionheart had built on the cliffs above the Seine a century earlier.

And the conditions there were, by the accounts that survive, deliberately punitive. Cells in the keep, exposed to the weather, cold that came off the river and through the stone all winter, the two of them held apart from any comfort or company their rank would normally command.

Marguerite had been the future queen of France. Within months, her husband was king as Louis X, and she was technically queen of France, shaven-headed in a freezing tower, an obstacle to her own husband’s remarriage. She died at Gaillard in August 1315, not yet 25. The timing was exquisitely convenient since Louis was married again within days of the news. And while some sources attribute her death to the cold and privation of the winter she had just endured, others passed along the word that circulated almost immediately that she had been strangled in her cell to clear the way. Either version leaves her dead in that tower at her husband’s pleasure, so the distinction mattered rather more to Louis than it ever could to her.

Blanche’s story is somehow bleaker for having no ending at all for so long. She stayed at Gaillard for years through her father-in-law’s death, through Marguerite’s death a few walls away, through the entire reign and death of Louis X. Word eventually reached the outside that her conditions had broken her down in every way a prison can. Her marriage was finally annulled in 1322 and she was allowed to exchange the fortress for a convent near Paris where she died in 1326, still only in her early 30s, having spent essentially her entire adult life as a prisoner of one kind or another.

Jeanne, the sister accused merely of silence, was held more gently at Dourdan, fought her case, and got out. She ended up a countess in her own right, and lived out a full life, the one member of that generation of Burgundian sisters the Tour de Nesle affair did not consume.

A century and a half later, the French crown refined castle imprisonment into something almost boutique, and the man responsible was Louis XI, a king with a spider’s patience and a collector’s interest in confinement. His favorite instrument sat inside the great keep at Loches in the Loire Valley, a castle whose lower levels had already been swallowing prisoners for generations.

Louis is remembered for the cages—iron and wood lattices, some reportedly around 8 ft square, in which a prisoner could be kept indefinitely, suspended or set in a cell with movement reduced to almost nothing. Court wit gave them a nickname, les fillettes, “the little girls.” And the sheer breeziness of that name tells you plenty about the atmosphere around Louis.

The memoirist Philippe de Commynes, who served Louis closely, wrote about the cages with the specific discomfort of a man who had seen them and then experienced them because after the king’s death, Commynes fell from favor and spent eight months locked in one himself.

He records a detail that has kept the story alive for five centuries. The man credited with helping devise the cages, or at least with improving them for the king, was Jean Balue, a cardinal of the church and one of Louis’s chief ministers. And when Balue was caught in treasonable correspondence in 1469, Louis had him imprisoned for 11 years—by long and persistent tradition—in the very style of cage he had helped perfect.

11 years for a cardinal in an iron box held by a king who reportedly liked to know his enemies were folded up somewhere specific while he worked. Balue was eventually released through papal pressure and, being the century’s great survivor, died rich in Rome. The cages kept their reputation without him.

Loches has one more prisoner worth sitting with. A man who had once been among the most glittering figures in Europe: Ludovico Sforza, called Il Moro, Duke of Milan, patron of Leonardo da Vinci, the man who commissioned The Last Supper. The French took him in 1500 when his Italian wars collapsed and, after earlier confinement elsewhere, he was moved to Loches around 1504 into a cell in the keep you can still walk into today.

What he did with his time down there is the reason people still visit it. Ludovico painted his prison. Across the walls and the vaulted ceiling, he worked stars and bands of color and twisting mottos, fragments of which survive, including words to the effect that he “arms himself with patience out of grief.” A duke who had employed Leonardo, decorating his own cell by hand in the half-dark, year after year.

He died there in May 1508. A story attached to his death, repeated ever since, says that shortly before the end he was finally granted a taste of liberty and that the shock of open air and sunlight after years in the dim keep felled him on the spot, so that his first steps toward freedom killed him faster than the cell had managed in four years. Take that one as the tradition it is. The painted ceiling, though, is simply there, still over the cell, the last commission of a great patron with an audience of no one.

Further north on its tidal island, Mont Saint-Michel ran a version of the same machinery inside a monastery. The abbey had monastic cells and then, under the later French kings, a notorious apparatus of state imprisonment, including its own famous iron and timber cage in which a prisoner could stand, crouch, and go slowly out of his mind while pilgrims climbed to mass overhead.

The cage’s best-documented victims belong to the centuries just after our period, including a Dutch journalist who criticized Louis XIV and spent years in it before dying inside. But the machinery he died in belonged to the medieval building and the medieval logic, an island fortress from which the sea itself cut off escape twice a day. The cage was finally broken up in 1777, having outlasted almost everyone who was ever put in it.

South of the Alps, one tower in Pisa holds what is probably the most famous starvation in all of medieval history, and it comes with a poem, a locked door, and a set of keys at the bottom of a river.

Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was one of the great men of Pisa in the 1280s. A naval commander and political operator who had clawed his way to control of the city through a decade of alliances that shifted whenever the wind did. He had commanded a wing of the Pisan fleet at the catastrophic Battle of Meloria against Genoa, where thousands of Pisan men were killed or captured, and his enemies never stopped whispering that his squadron had left the fight too early. Afterward, he ceded several Pisan fortresses to neighboring cities, buying peace or committing treason, depending entirely on which family you asked.

For a while, he ruled Pisa alongside the city’s archbishop, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, and then in the summer of 1288, Ruggieri turned on him. A mob was raised. Ugolino’s household was attacked. One of his illegitimate sons and a grandson were killed in the fighting. And the count was seized along with four members of his family: two sons, Gaddo and Uguccione, and two grandsons, Nino (nicknamed Brigata) and Anselmuccio. And the diminutive on that last name is doing painful work because Anselmuccio was a boy of about 15.

The five of them were locked in the Torre della Muda, a tower in the middle of Pisa that belonged to the Gualandi family and normally housed the city’s eagles during molting season. Muda means the mew, the molting cage—a bird cage in plain terms—and Pisa put a family in it. They stayed there through the autumn, through the winter, month after month, presumably fed just enough, presumably assuming that ransom or politics would eventually turn the lock the other way, because that was how these things usually ended for men of Ugolino’s rank.

In March of 1289, on the Archbishop’s orders, the door of the tower was nailed shut and the keys were thrown into the Arno. Contemporary chronicles record that detail specifically, the keys going into the river because the gesture said everything the sentence needed to say. No food from that hour and no water, since food and water came through the same door.

The city went about its business around the base of the tower for the following days, while five people died inside it by inches, and anyone passing within earshot that first week could presumably hear exactly what that sounds like: the crying of the two boys, the begging at the walls, then weaker sounds, then intervals of silence stretching until the silence was all that remained.

The young tend to go before the old in these situations, their bodies burning hotter and carrying less reserve. So the count very plausibly did exactly what Dante has him do and outlived every child in that room, going blind with hunger among the bodies as one by one they cooled. When the tower was finally opened, the bodies were carried out together and buried, and Pisans started calling the building the Torre della Fame, the Tower of Hunger.

It is still standing, tucked behind a wall off the Piazza dei Cavalieri, and people walk past it every day holding gelato.

The reason the whole world knows this story is that Dante put it in the Inferno in the 33rd Canto and produced possibly the most disturbing passage he ever wrote. Down in the frozen lake at the bottom of hell, the pilgrim finds two sinners locked together in the ice, one gnawing eternally on the skull of the other.

The gnawing one lifts his mouth, wipes it on the hair of the head he has been eating, and introduces himself as Count Ugolino. The skull belongs to Archbishop Ruggieri. Ugolino then tells the story of the tower from the inside, and Dante, writing within living memory with sources in Pisa, fills it with details that stick under the skin.

“The count dreaming in the tower of wolves and their cubs being hunted down with lean, eager hounds,” Dante wrote. “Waking to hear his children crying in their sleep for bread. The moment the family hears from below the sound of the tower door being nailed shut, and Ugolino looking into the faces of his sons without being able to speak.”

He describes biting both his hands out of grief and the children misreading it as hunger, offering him their own flesh, saying he had dressed them in this wretched flesh in the first place, so let him strip it from them. One by one, over the following days, he watches all four die, calling out to him. Blind by the end, he crawls over their bodies for two days, calling their names to corpses.

And then Dante gives him the line that scholars have been circling for seven centuries. The count saying that at last, “fasting had more power than grief.” Read one way, hunger finally killed him where sorrow could not.