Now, now. You can’t just call it un-comfy just because of that.
Compare it to a ‘comfy’ home in the same era, which has:
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Drafty wattle-and-daub walls and leaky thatch roof
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Smoke filled rooms
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Rats everywhere
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Flea-filled floors, walls, and ceiling
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Toilet is a hole in the ground outside
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In this case the movie version is closer to reality than your “realistic” version. Castles were not just built for defensibility. They have a strong representative aspect. Of course they made them as nice to live in as possible. The walls were covered in tapestries or wood panelling and many rooms were heated. For unheated rooms there were movable heaters (basically small portable fire pits).
Heres an example of a hall in a castle: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Très_Riches_Heures#/media/Datei:Les_Très_Riches_Heures_du_duc_de_Berry_Janvier.jpg
Castles were overwhelmingly built for defensibility until the 16th century, at which point you see more of a mixture of elements; and then fortresses emerging as predominantly military again in the 17th century. Royal lodgings and other such estates which would have had more amenities were generally not seriously fortified, and thus are not castles in any traditional sense.
You gave it exactly backwards. The castle is by definition the combination of residence and fortification. The purely military fortress only really developed after the medieval period.
Not at all. The notion of a purely military fortress in the sense of being primarily for the permanent garrisoning of troops only really developed after the medieval period.
Castles were overwhelmingly and in many polities exclusively built for defensive purposes, with the ability to reside in them being only an extension of that insofar as you can’t hold out against a siege if you can’t live there for at least a few nights. It’s why permission to build a castle in the first place is so often restricted by medieval law, requiring the direct assent of the monarch in most medieval polities.
I have extensive experience with castles and this does not mention they are very bouncy & come with slides
Sure the toilet is a hole in the wall, but it beats shitting in the moat.
Toilets inside the castle itself would empty into an internal cesspit, sure, but if the toilet was on the curtain walls, it probably empties into the moat anyway.
… don’t fall in.
The acoustics in those castles must be horrendous too. Just shit echoing all over the damn place
That’s what the tapestries are for
It must be warm inside to attract the rats
Just being slightly warmer will accomplish that; it can still be freezing.
Not to mention the presence of food stores.
Don’t forget that the benefit of being a noble was sleeping in a big group on a cloth covered sack of hay in some filthy flea-bitten body odor nest.
Your sack of hay is covered in cloth? Truly unbelievable luxury. We poor peasants oft cannot even afford a sack and must sleep on bare hay alone.
And, sure, you share it with other nobles. But at least you aren’t sharing it with the pigs as well.
The wall? Surely it was in the floor. It would he awkward as hell to shit through a hole in the wall.
Not so much the hole, admittedly, as the pit
