Ida's Historical Peek at the Dungeon Quiz

Answer: The Great Keep (main tower)

The word dungeon comes from the French word for "lord" - "don-jon". It referred to the the Great Keep, a freestanding, central fortified tower in a castle complex. It was the inner tower or stronghold of the castle. It was originally not meant for use in keeping prisoners; only later did this association develop, around the 11th-13th centuries. Before that, as it was the most fortified place of the castle, it was where the nobles lived. Over time, however, the families moved to nicer areas of the castles, rooms with warmth and comfort. Valuable possessions were kept in the Great Keep, and eventually, prisoners.

As more time passed, the term moved further away from its original meaning. By the 14th century, "dungeon" had come to refer prison cells beneath the castle keep, in cold, damp storerooms, or indeed almost any undesirable place within the castle.

Answer: oubliette

Again this is a French derivation. Another term for it is cachot. This may be closest to what most moderns think of as a dungeon: a dark, damp, underground prison. But the prisoners often did not access it by walking down stairs. Prisoners were lowered by rope through a trap door in the ceiling. Ofttimes the cell was so narrow they had to remain standing.

Here, they were left to rot, starve, or possibly drown when groundwater would seep in. Not all dungeons were oubliettes; this was reserved for prisoners to be left for dead, forgotten.

The term did not come into use until late in the Middle Ages, in the 14th century.

Answer: musket

A bottle dungeon was a deep underground prison, with a narrow "bottle neck" through which prisoners entered into a globular chamber.

The little ease was a tiny room hollowed out from the stone in the castle wall. These were often so small that prisoners could not turn around or even lie or sit down comfortably.

The original dungeon, or don-jon, was indeed a stone tower, tall enough to keep prisoners from escaping. Interestingly, over time the term "dungeon" moved from referring to the highest places in the castle to the lowest places.

Muskets did not exist in the Middle Ages.

Answer: False

Castles emerged in the 9th and 10th centuries as motte-and-bailey castles, meaning raised earthwork in an enclosed courtyard surrounded by a ditch and palisade (stakewall). Only later were stone castles built, and these sometimes held held prisoners in the 'donjon', or Great Keep (castle stronghold or tower).

Incarceration was not a typical punishment during the Middle Ages, especially the Early Middle Ages (5th-10th centuries). There was, however, often kidnapping for ransom. Those who were kidnapped (especially children) were not generally kept imprisoned in one room but had the run of the castle and the grounds, although they could not leave.

Answer: political prisoners

During much of the Middle Ages, medieval dungeons held political prisoners, rivals to the king or a lord, generally to die. Not so for common criminals, generally, who were publicly punished. They might be locked in stocks, for example, which were low wooden frames with holes into which prisoners put their feet. Or they might have their heads in arms locked in pillories (similar to stocks), or they might be flogged. If a common criminal were kept in a medieval dungeon, or any other sort of prison, it would normally be for a fairly short period, until his trial.

The idea of political prisoners developed in the High Middle Ages (roughly the 11th through 13th centuries) more so than the Early Middle Ages (5th-10th centuries). Sometimes they were confined because they were a threat to nobility or royalty, and sometimes they were ransomed. Additionally, women might be sent to convents rather than be confined at the castle.

Only later did dungeons become sites of torture and, for example, places for holding 'conversos' (converts from Judaism) during the Spanish Inquisition, established in 1480.

Answer: Noblewomen

Jailers could also be police officers, officials of any sort, crusaders back home from saving the Holy Land, or even thugs and mercenaries. Sometimes jailers were ironworkers who made the very chains and bars that shackled the prisoners. But they were almost never women, noble or otherwise.

Answer: sold into slavery

Here's a good example of all three alternatives. In 1306, King Edward I of England defeated Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Methven. Edward then set out to punish Robert's female relatives (his wife, two sisters, and his daughter). He sent the daughter Marjorie and one sister to different convents, placed the wife Elizabeth under house arrest at a country house in Yorkshire, and put the other sister, Mary Bruce, in a wooden cage at Roxburgh Castle.

Whilst slavery did exist in the Middle Ages, it was not something that European women of royal or noble birth were generally subjected to.

Answer: Mamertine Prison

Built by Ancus Marcius, fourth king of Rome (r. 640-616 BC), Mamertine Prison was in (or beneath) the Forum Romanum. Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, died here after a failed rebellion against Rome. The 6th king of Rome, Servius Tullius (r. 578-535 BC) added a door through which the dead prisoners were cast into the Tiber River.

Hence the term "cast into the dungeon". (Of course, this phrase came much, much later, after the medieval term don-jon, referring to the castle tower, became associated with imprisonment. Etymology and the history of changes in the meanings of words is often a messy business.)

Answer: Tower of London

Officially called Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, the Tower of London had many original purposes, as an armory, a residence, and a treasury. Generally the prisoners kept here were accused of treason, whether by trying to kill the monarch, helping rebels or foreign enemies, or merely speaking out against the monarch. It is no longer a prison but a tourist attraction, where visitors may view a display of medieval implements of torture and the Crown Jewels.

Did Richard Plantagenet have his brother, the Duke of Clarence, and his nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury Duke of York murdered? The Tudor historians and Shakespeare believed so, and so has been the dominant opinion, but the Richard III Society in England has set out to rehabilitate King Richard as a misunderstood and maligned figure.

Answer: Pontefract Castle

Built on an Anglo-Saxon graveyard, Pontefract Castle during the Wars of the Roses held hundreds of soldiers, many of whom met bloody ends. Hollowed out of the bedrock 35 feet below the castle is a vast array of pitch-dark dungeons where prisoners were kept for weeks at time. In 1311, Edward II had his cousin Thomas, Earl of Lancaster executed here. When Richard II was deposed in 1399 by Henry Bolingbroke, he was murdered whilst imprisoned at Pontefract as well.

Such was Pontefract's reputation that in Shakespeare's "Richard III", Earl Rivers says of the castle (then called Pomfret): "O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison! Fatal and ominous to noble peers".

Answer: Caernarfon Castle

During the rebellions in North Wales, King Edward I captured and imprisoned the leaders. As the rebellions were ongoing, he built new castles that had towers in which to keep all these prisoners, including Caernarfon Castle (also spelled Caernarvon), part of his great Iron Ring of Castles. Built in a hexagonal design, Caernarfon Castle was phenomenally expensive, with an impressive pair of gatehouses.

It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.

Answer: Bastille Saint-Antoine

The Bastille was originally built to defend Paris from invasion by England during the Hundred Years' War. Begun in 1357, construction mainly took place after 1370, when the eight towers protecting the Porte Saint-Antoine in eastern Paris were built. Louis XIV imprisoned French Protestants and other upper-class persons who displeased him in the Bastille. Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789.

The Committee of the Hôtel de Ville ordered its demolition. It (or perhaps its destruction) remains a symbol of French Republicanism.

Answer: Château de Chillon

A political dissident, François de Bonivard, a Genvois monk, was tied to the fifth pillar of the dungeon in 1530, where he was to stay for the rest of his life. However, in 1536, Chillon was captured and Bonivard was set free. Lord Byron (1788-1824) saw the 'romanticism' in this story and wrote a poem called "The Prisoner of Chillon" 1816.

Byron isn't the only writer inspired by the dungeon's damp darkness. American novelist Henry James also used Chillon in his book "Daisy Miller" (1878).

Answer: Warwick Castle

The castle sits on a bend in the River Avon near the town of Warwick. Thomas de Beauchamp, 11th Earl of Warwick, refortified the castle defenses in the 14th century. On the northeastern side a gatehouse was added, along with a tower on either side of the reconstructed wall, named Caesar's Tower and Guy's Tower. Caesar's Tower was also known as Poitiers Tower, as it held prisoners from the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. The ransoms from the prisoners helped pay for its construction! Both towers were machiolated, which means that there were floor openings through which stones could be dropped on attackers.

The Greville family were the Earls of Warwick and owned the castle from 1759 to 1978, when the Tussauds Group purchased Warwick Castle and made it and its dungeon a tourist trap. They run the site, especially the dungeon, rather like a theme park, with lots of props and an in-house torturer, for entertainment.

Answer: London Dungeon

It is like a theme park or a show. Tourists are taken through a church crypt and then the "Labyrinth of Lost Souls", a mirror maze with a skeleton and other spooky inhabitants. Moving on, visitors meet a "survivor" of the Great Plague of London (1665), and then enter a Pudding Lane bakery to learn about the Great Fire of London. Afterward, tourists visit a surgery where a barber rather ghoulishly operates on someone. Next comes the Torture Chamber, in which a torturer straps a visitor to a chair and then proceeds to demonstrate various torture devices upon him. (I am assuming this is all fake!) Then three visitors are put on trial, but all are condemned to Bedlam (an infamous madhouse), the next stop on the tour.

There are many more macabre sections, including one involving Jack the Ripper, the Victorian serial killer. We have moved really far from Roman prisons and medieval dungeons, but I thought this would be a fun way to end the course and to show how modernity has reconstructed the dungeon to include something far from its origins.