One of the largest hall keep ground plans is at Colchester Castle, Essex, England (c. They follow many of the architectural principles of tower keeps with massive walls, small windows, they rest on a sloping plinth, and access is restricted by a moat or drawbridge and sometimes a forebuilding (see below). Lower keeps, that is with only one or two floors, are sometimes called hall keeps. The obvious point of a strong defensive retreat does not always match the relatively peaceful times in which some castle keeps were built. When the timber palisade on top of the motte was replaced by stone it acquired the new name of a shell keep. The whole was then surrounded by a ditch. A wooden tower was built on the motte - a natural or artificial hill - and, at the base, a bailey or courtyard was created by constructing an encircling wooden wall connected to the motte. The Normans were great builders of motte and bailey castles across northern France and England in the 11th century CE. Tower Keep - aka Great Tower or Donjon, a large stone tower of several floors built within the circuit walls of a castle which acted as the primary place of residence and last place of refuge in the case of attack.Īn early form of keep, in effect a keep without a curtain (surrounding) wall, was seen when the first simpler castles, the motte and bailey castles, evolved into the more familiar and complex all-stone castles.The term may also apply to a tower keep which has a single cross wall on each floor creating two rooms of unequal size. Hall Keep - a residential building of one or two floors in the courtyard of a castle.Shell Keep - where the wood palisade on the top of a motte and bailey castle was converted into stone.The term 'keep' may be applied to three different castle structures: As a lasting testimony to their integral strength, many tower keeps still survive today across Europe, where very often the rest of the castle buildings have long since disappeared. Expensive and slow to build, tower keeps were steadily replaced from the mid-13th century CE by larger round towers in the circuit wall which were designed to prevent the enemy from ever entering the castle courtyard or bailey. Inside the largest building a person in the Middle Ages likely ever saw in their lives was the Great Hall, castle chapel, and residential quarters. With its extra thick walls and protected entrance, the keep was generally the safest place in a castle during the siege warfare of the 11th and 12th century CE. The hall keep was a low building while the tower keep or donjon could have three or more floors and be topped by turrets and battlements. The keep, located within a courtyard and surrounded by a curtain wall, was the heart of a medieval castle.
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