Why did castles decline as a sanctuary against attack from outsiders?
In ‘Life in a Medieval Castle’ Frances and Joseph Gies write: ‘The decline in military importance of the castle, apparent in the fourteenth century and rapidly accelerated in the fifteenth, is associated, like that of the armored knight, with the introduction of gunpowder. In the closing stages of the Hundred Years War (1446-53), the old strongholds of western France that had withstood so many sieges fell with astonishing speed to the ponderous iron bombards, firing heavy stone canon-balls, of the French royal army. Yet the new weapons did not authomatically and by themselves destroy the value of the castles. Thick masonry walls could stand even against cannon-balls, and could furnish platforms for cannon of their own that would even enjoy certain advantages. Neither the castle nor the armoured knight was automatically eliminated from war by the new firepower, and in fact both continued to take part in war throughout the sixteenth century and even later. At Chepstow in the seventeenth
