The springald

The springald might look like a bit like a bunk-bed but medieval soldiers took it very seriously indeed. These ‘terrible machines of war’, as one historian described them, ‘shot huge missiles which no armour could resist’.
A close relative of the crossbow, the springald was the most powerful weapon of its type in the middle ages. The slow rate of fire – it can take two minutes to make ready - is made up for with ferocious power and lethal accuracy. When wound up and ready to shoot, the massive force held in the frame of the springald is released by the tug of a cord. A springald could easily drive a 4ft bolt straight through the body of a man and out the other side. In fact, in 1304 one is known to have impaled four or five men at once!

In 1313 when trouble was brewing, as it often did, between the king and the barons, five springalds were made to be mounted on the roof of St Thomas’s Tower to defend the Tower of London. With a reputed maximum range of a quarter of a mile, but more often operating at close range for greater precision, these deadly weapons put anyone approaching the Tower in serious trouble.

The perrier

The perrier, a stone-thrower, is one of the least complicated medieval siege engines, comprising a simple frame and a mighty 17ft throwing arm with a sling. The perrier’s energy is supplied entirely by its operators. With a downward heave on the ropes our visitors can hurl a water balloon 50 metres, and with greater force a perrier can easily throw a rock the size of a grapefruit hundreds of metres. Our perrier is operated by four people but history records perriers large enough to need as many as 16 men pulling on the ropes!
Its relatively simple design made the perrier an ideal weapon for both attack and defence. Attackers could build one quickly, provided they could find a straight enough tree trunk for the throwing arm, and use them to damage castle walls and bombard the defenders therein.

Defenders used them to launch stones from their walls, often targeting the enemy’s own siege engines. In 1192 Richard I’s government spent more than £100 building similar stone-throwers to defend the walls of the Tower of London – more than £50,000 in today’s money.

Click here to see the making of the siege engines in our slideshow