Siege Weapons and Fortifications

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be leading the charge tonight, but I'll need some funny bone fortifications.

First up, a man for whom my every word is a delay of his orgasmic explosion in essay format, Cecil Something Italian.

No walls are gonna hold this back, Eli.

And also joining us tonight, two men who have had their fair share of boiling oil, he and Tom.

Okay, the hot pot has lots of leftover flavor.

They have to let you drink it if if you want to drink it.

Oh, get.

No, no, no, no, no.

I am not making hot oil jokes.

Not after Diddy.

No.

It's true.

It's true.

Before we begin tonight, I want to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Patrons, you are the fortifications against poverty that we huddle behind.

And the wall of your dollars will not fall to my...

son's child care bills.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will be bringing Cecil joy and ecstasy today.

Cecil's doing

clappies.

Clappies right now.

It is siege weapons and fortifications.

Can I get a, oh, oh, motherfucker.

Yeah.

And Cecil.

You didn't so much write this essay as you lived a life preparing for it.

Are you ready to let loose?

I have loaded my extended nerddom into this catapult and I will commence throwing it on the audience.

All right.

So tell us, Cecil, what are siege weapons and fortifications?

Well, as you guys and the audience know, I am a huge medieval warfare nerd.

I have, in fact, for many years participated in a medieval recreation society, dressed up like a 16th century noble, fought with steel swords, and basically played pretend for more weekends on my life than I can count.

I thought pretending to have 16th century values on the weekends was called church.

If Noah was here, he would have liked that one.

One particular site that is used every year has a half fort built out of wood.

It has crenellations, a main gate, a sally port.

I don't think you can say that one anymore, Cecil.

Yeah, you're supposed to seem right.

Two gate towers, corner towers, et cetera, et cetera.

So I have actually attacked a castle-like building on multiple occasions in war games.

So it is with great glee that I present today's topic on siege engines and fortifications.

All right, nice.

So Cecil, any advice for, you know, the average Joe if they're storming a castle as part of their normal everyday life?

No, what a weird question.

Let's start with fortifications and how forts work.

So Towns and castles were defended in ancient times.

Let's start first with the walls.

And who paid for those walls, Cecil?

Was it Mexico, Tom?

Was it Mexico?

The walls of the ancient fortification were varied and had different purposes.

The first type of wall is simple, probably made of wood or mud, some stones in there for good measure.

Stake walls were common, and they would...

They were used all the way up until colonial America, and these were called palisades.

Later and then onto the, into the Roman and the medieval period, they started using more mortar and stone.

And the higher the walls were, the better.

Okay.

These walls, in terms of angle, usually what, like 90 degrees to the ground on our case?

Don't rush him, Heath.

He's edging.

Sorry.

I'm so sorry, Cecil.

I'm Heath.

I never liked anything in my life.

Exactly.

Exactly.

What did you think in the book?

Did you like it?

No, let him build.

Let him cook, Ethan Wright.

Let him cook.

All right.

Improving on the wall itself is pretty easy, right?

You make another one.

They call it this.

You don't improve the first wall at all.

No, but you said first wall.

You make it

exactly the same.

Yeah, first wall is the same, but then you make another wall, a whole other wall, Tom, behind it.

This is called a double wall or a concentric wall.

The second wall is the double wall.

The second wall is the double.

Right.

You're fine.

Tom, I feel like you're kind of a fortification nerd too.

Now, I'm getting there.

I'm getting there.

I'm getting on board.

So this is a concentric wall.

And basically, you would put a small patch of land from one castle wall to the next.

And this is made so that when you were losing the first wall, you could retreat to the second wall.

And then there would be this very small and very dangerous patch of land that the invading troops would have to cover.

And this area is called a bailey.

And the soldiers, they probably wouldn't.

be able to hump their siege protection from the first wall over to the second and their troops would still have to get through or around the first wall.

So a lot of castles would have this as the outer wall and then a courtyard-type area, and then the inner fortifications.

Okay, it's like the pegging area when you play sting.

Wow.

Okay.

Uh, one, it shouldn't sting.

You're using not enough lube.

Two, Cecil, did they ever think of three walls?

Or did I just blow

times as

mines?

No, man.

Four, five, six walls.

And next on our tour is the Gillette Mach 3 Turbo Castle.

A major innovation before the French invented the chick Quattro.

One wall just makes your face sticky for some reason.

What's doing that?

I don't know what this is doing.

Need hot oil on one of them.

Next, you would want to have what they call a rampart or a wall wide enough for you to mount a defense on.

Now, in earlier times, they would have just flattened off areas or tops of hills or mounds, but later they would build wide walls with a fortified smaller wall at the top of your main wall.

This low wall is called a parapet, and it would have what are called on it crenellations.

These are gaps where soldiers can fire projectiles while remaining in partial cover.

These walls can also have arrow slits in them, which are small slits from the outside, but from the inside, they're much wider, allowing the archer to get a broad range from inside while still maintaining cover.

Okay, it sounds like a lot of war history was kind of like a snowball fight for a while.

I bet Cecil had kick-ass snow forts.

Chicagoans will also recognize this description as being pretty much identical to the brutalist architecture of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And for the same reason.

Famously one of the ugliest campuses in America.

University of Illinois.

You're so gross.

Podcast listener.

It's amazing.

Fucking hideous.

These walls might also have machiculations, which are little areas that have protected openings that jut out from the wall.

Now, these would be places where you could assault the invading troops with all kinds of things.

They have a list in Wikipedia, but some are disputed.

So here it is.

Quote, stones or other material such as boiling water, hot sand, quick lime, or boiling cooking oil.

And quote, our snowball fights when I was a kid got heated.

Now, the boiling oil thing is documented, I guess, in a few battles, but it wasn't common.

Rocks were the most common.

Boiling water was also used, but oil was more difficult to do as a tactic.

Hot sand was really devious as sand would get in all the same crevices as water, but spread over a large area.

And the tiniest bit of hot sand would still burn and irritate.

But really, just rocks just made the most sense.

They do a lot of damage while having to do a more complicated system for moving large amounts of hot liquid or hot sand up a wall or having just ridiculous size fires on top to heat heat up that material.

Yeah, a bunch of guys scaling the wall and flip-flops.

Put the sand away, boys.

They know our weakness.

Oh,

you brought a red pail and a shovel.

We're done for.

Do you ever try to walk home after you put your shoes back on and socks back on, but there's still a little bit left?

I actually liked that feeling.

What is

happening?

Because I was experiencing childhood.

I was aware

that these were the times I was going going to feel okay.

What?

Dude, what's so much to unpack this?

Just Jesus.

You just described one of your favorite childhood moments.

I just want to be clear, as the sensation of having sand inside of your socks.

And then you take him off and it goes, poof.

Cecil, you were saying that.

So you're walking around sandpapering the fucking skin off the back of your heel and you're like, yes, this is childhood.

Yeah.

Tell another fun story.

Something you can do.

I don't have anymore.

Cecil's talking about ramparts.

Yeah, let's get back to rampart.

All right.

So let me circle back to this though.

So now these ramparts would often be stretched between fortified towers.

So the rampart walls in between would be called curtain walls.

And these would connect towers that often punctuated the end of the walls.

Now, these towers allowed for all the defensive architectural engineering I mentioned earlier.

These fortified towers allowed for people to stand in them and defend the wall from two directions along each of the walls that intersected it.

Now, some of these towers would be called flanking towers.

This is where the tower itself is built out much farther than the wall.

And this allows for people inside to attack invaders on their side as they're against the wall.

Occasionally, they would have these areas of the wall that would jut out in the same way that a flanking tower would.

And these were called bastions.

Now, these fortified towers, walls, and bastions would sometimes be made sort of as a semicircle or as a cylinder on the outside to help deflect the damage from a straight-on projectile hit.

A lot of people thought having MC Esher design our fortifications was silly, but it's working out just fine, let me tell you.

All right, Bill, you attack from the top, bottom.

I'll approach from the undertop.

We'll rendezvous at the central middle side point under the basement roof.

And we'll draw each other into an existence while we're shaking hands.

Perfect.

Now, the most vulnerable spot on a wall is the gate.

So a lot of engineering went into the gate.

Gates themselves had fortified doors with ways to bar the doors.

Often, they would have multiple sets of doors too.

Funneling troops in through a small area of a gate is actually a great way to defend.

And they would often have a wide wall.

And the gate above the ceiling behind the gate, there would be these murder holes.

And these would be holes large enough where you could drop rocks or stab spears through.

And then they would try to attack the invaders as they crossed this space between the doors and waiting for the next door to fall.

Yeah.

And a fun fact, the version used by the famous King Bowser had the big rocks with a human face on them that would get angry when you came close.

Another popular technique was a very slow-moving fire stick.

It would rotate through a big part of the

frame of reality and you had to like time it.

Fire stick came off.

Came off.

They should have used revolving doors.

Everybody'd run in and just run right out.

Fuck, you didn't.

They all get stuck because they're all trying to push through at the same time.

Protecting the door was sometimes a porticolis or a several.

Now, these were gates and they were held high on tracks above the hall.

And a single guard could cut a rope or pull a lever and the gate would fall into place.

This would allow for things to be shot through them, like

thrusting weapons or arrows.

And they might also have spikes sticking outward on the porticolis to help protect the gate from invaders.

Often, these would be used in a set of two.

They'd have a hall separating two gates.

You could allow some troops to enter and then close the closest gate and then drop a gate behind the group of soldiers, effectively trapping them in the hall without reinforcements.

You could just go in and kill all those troops that were inside that little area.

Okay, guys.

Now, the downside, of course, is we live in a time when a hangnail will give you sepsis.

That's locked in.

Let's definitely try our hand fighting our way past, what do they call it?

A murder holes, butcher gates, and slaughter walls.

It's going to go well.

Also, we smell really bad.

We sway.

Anyone mentioned that we stay?

It's terrible.

I talked about it extensively last week.

Now, often outside of the walls of the castle were moats or dry moats.

The fact that a ditch in either dry or wet moats led up to your wall made your wall taller.

and harder to scale.

It also made it so that anything wheeled like battery rams or siege weapons would have to a much harder time getting to the gate or to the wall itself.

And the change in terrain or slope also caused uneven footing and slowed down anyone traversing it.

So crossing that area would be slow and you'd make a really nice target just sort of picking your way down a slope.

Now, this slope on the inner and outer sides was called a scarp and a counter scarp.

Oh man, those slopes are fun if you have a refrigerator box.

You know what I mean?

You roll down.

And if it's not a war, I mean,

If you're a kid, it's weapon.

You know, there's sand in your socks.

Exactly.

Plus, it's hard to stay caught up in the glory of battle when you're doing that little down-the-hill scooch walk you got in there.

We were talking about everyone else.

They're all like Trump walking down a small ramp.

Yeah, exactly.

The drawbridge was something that was used to both.

cross the moat as a bridge during times of peace and then it was lifted up and into place it became an outer gate in times of war it also basically cut off any real easy way to cross a moat to the gate and thus protected the weakest point on the wall outside of the walls would sometimes have these barricades of sharpened sticks these were called cheval de frise i don't know if i'm pronouncing that correctly could be frisee i'm not sure uh they look like a collection of sharp stakes and with all the points pointing up okay i like that a place called frisia that's where those are from they think they invented spiky stuff like as a barrel

named it after themselves.

I came up with Zis.

Yeah.

These Chevelle de Fries, they're mostly a cavalry deterrent, but they're also heavy, very sharp barricades, and they're often used to funnel troops to places where they can be more easily dealt with.

These were also used in water to stop watercraft from coming closer, and they were hidden under the water so they could injure someone or sink a craft that was crossing it.

All right.

Well, so far, fortifications seem mostly to be inspired by unpleasant things at the beach.

So while I read ahead to see if Sunburn and Jellyfish are coming up, we'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing.

You don't have some amazing memories of sunburns and jellyfish as a child.

I actually do have an amazing

feel alive as a child.

I do.

It's a Jason Schinder poem about Sunburn.

Into the breach, man!

Into the breach!

Ha ha!

Shit!

Trapped.

Yeah.

Sorry, I was kind of hoping to get more than just you, though.

Nah, fight me, you coward.

I just relax, dude.

I'll come down in a second.

I just gotta...

Fuck.

Hey, Chris.

Yeah, Dave, what's up?

I cut the gate rope too early and I've got like one guy down here.

I shall fight you all to the death.

Yeah, man, we heard you.

Thank you.

So like, what do I do?

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, you could, like, pull it, right?

No, man, I cut the rope.

I mean, the part that you didn't cut?

Nah, I got it right, like, right at the top.

Ah, shit.

Yeah, plus,

that top part, it's, like, slippery now because Alan got shot up here.

Oh, no, Alan died?

It's really sad.

That is really sad i i'm not actually sort of square with it yet so do you have like

how do you have another rope like on me for glory dude what is kind of busy right now man relax sorry relax anyway

no i i don't have another rope right of course i just

oh we got rocks Do you want to just rock the one guy?

Feels like a waste of rocks.

Waste of rocks, exactly.

Also, if they break through, we're not going to have anything to pour in them because we use it on this one guy.

So, I guess we just

wait and then we pour the rocks on more people when they make it through.

Yeah, I guess so, when there's more.

Hey, uh, hey, enemy guy, yeah,

do you know the movie game?

The one that's like horse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you want to play?

Yeah, sure.

You guys play with challenges?

Of course we play with challenges.

You gotta play with challenges.

Otherwise, you just make sense.

Yeah, okay.

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So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an Organic Valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

And we're back.

When we left off, Cecil was describing nerdy castle stuff in pure orgasmic ecstasy.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to put a stop to that.

So tell us, Cecil, what's next?

Okay, so we spent the first part building the castle.

Let's break into it.

So first, let's talk about siege towers, or as they were called in the Middle Ages, a belfry.

This siege engine is essentially a tower on wheels.

It's often made of wood, and it's about the same height as the wall you're trying to siege.

It would certainly suck to make one roll up and be several feet too short.

Sure.

Measure twice.

Okay.

It feels like somebody on Cecil's cosplay team did exactly that thing recently, and Cecil started yelling at him.

I'm fucking pregnant.

Now, these towers would be full of soldiers, and they had arrow slits and murder holes too inside of the structure.

So inside would be spearmen or archers, and they would both basically be making things as dangerous as possible as it rolled up to the side of the castle wall.

And these were covered with wet animal hides as a flame retardant.

Okay, I love that the first idea for offense was: no, you're trying to break into my castle.

I know.

I'm the one on the castle.

It's just they've got like two murder holes violently scissoring together.

Note to self, look that up later.

Okay.

Way ahead of you, sea dog.

Way ahead of you.

Now, these could also house battering rams, which I'll cover in a minute.

But I want you to take a look at this image, which looks like a Persian Dalek attacking a castle wall.

It's a fantastic image.

It's amazing.

Now, this relief, which I will try to remember to put in the show notes, is from around 850 BCE.

These siege towers could be huge.

And one of them, the Heliopolis or Taker of Cities, was 130 feet tall or 40 meters.

They would be a great protected way for a group of soldiers to get to the top of a wall fast as they had ladders or stairs inside and often a drawbridge type opening at the top that allowed the troops to exit the tower onto the wall.

The very best way to thwart these, of course, is just to make the land leading up to your walls as uneven and as treacherous to pass as possible, which is why most forts are on hills or have big ditches in front of them.

Gravel driveway, men, retreat!

These guys just want it more.

I would quit as soon as I saw they had mowed the lawn before I got there.

Yeah.

Yeah, that grass looks dewy.

I am 100% going to slit.

My shoes are going to be wet for hours.

I have

shoes.

My shoes are going to be wet, and Eli's going to fondly remember that.

That's going to be ridiculous.

A fat kid crying in the middle of it,

blowing a dandelion is a metaphor nobody gets.

Next up is the battering ram.

Now, this was something that was either carried or it was rolled into place.

It was a large weight with a ramming end, and you could use it to smash either the gate or the walls of a castle in order to weaken and eventually break them.

Rams would be at the bottom of siege towers, or they could have like a protective canopy over the top of the device.

The ram itself was often just a large log with a cap of steel on the front of it.

Rams were sometimes used as handheld devices.

by troops where they would just pick them up and then they would use their bodies and their strength to generate the momentum for the hit.

Or they could be attached to a swing system where the troops would just pull it back and then use gravity to help push it forward as it swung back to its starting point.

Yeah.

And later in history, those swingy ones would be used for testing the ability of a mech suit to withstand a bear attack.

May I say?

May I say?

The pinnacle of their use.

Imagine if you had a whole bunch of guys in bear suits attacking a castle, though.

Amazing.

Amazing.

I feel like you already have imagined of that Caesar.

Some listener better draw that for us.

This is actually really interesting.

Battering rams could be foiled by dropping a soft thing in front of the ram as it was hitting the wall or door.

I guess a popular thing was to drop a bag of sawdust at the same time the arms sort of coming in for a hit.

It's like Bugs Bunny.

That's fucking awesome.

You know what's even better?

A bag of trampoline.

And then the ram, it would just fly back and hit you.

Exactly.

A variant of the battering ram is the siege hook, which is just a large hook on a pole that was propelled into the wall using either tension or torsion, and then it was pulled back.

Now, when it was removed, it would pull along parts of the wall with it.

The canopy for these rams was also used by sappers who would use this shelter to dig under the wall.

Now, the purpose of digging under the wall was not to just create a tunnel, but instead to dig out the foundation of a large section and then replace it with wood so so that it could all be set alight.

And as it burned, the foundation would fail as a whole.

And then this would bring down a large section of the wall in a single go.

Now, this is called undermining.

Okay, so

my job is to be a sap.

That seems, that seems, you know, okay, all right.

No, you know, I said I'd say yes to yes.

New leaf, okay, new leaf.

I'm in, I'm in, okay.

Like the attitude.

So what, what's my weapon?

Is that a,

is that a shovel?

Yeah, it's a shovel.

The other guy's got swords.

And I'm, I'm being negative.

Okay.

I'm being negative.

No, no, no, this is important.

You're more important.

Yes to yes.

Yes to a shovel.

Sure.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll just put on this red shirt then.

Let's away, team.

The catapult had a lot of variants and it was widely used to attack walls with large stones or shot.

Now, these devices convert a lot of tension or torsion energy into a single release of energy that throws some large object a distance with a great deal of force.

Often these had buckets on them and they would be used to fill with all kinds of objects.

In some sieges, they use these devices to hurl dead plague victims over walls and into castles.

And catapults were even used in World War I to throw grenades at a large distance.

Okay, that feels like a weird combination of time and resources that didn't result result in a thing that can shoot a bomb, right?

We got a lot of wood and 18 pieces of dental floss that all fit perfectly onto the end of these grenades.

I think we gotta make a catapult, guys.

We really gotta time this better because it takes a while to crank it and you pulled the pin too early last time.

Come on, we gotta

practice.

We gotta

at least three practices.

Now, the movies often show catapults attacking the inside of the walls of a castle from the outside, but they were primarily used to throw big, heavy things at walls themselves to do damage and eventually bring them down.

They weren't a troop weapon, and they were not used like a medieval cannons.

Some catapults had slings instead of buckets, but they all had a similar arm that was held in place on a hinge.

and it used some kind of stored energy to release it and throw the object.

Yeah, but you got to be careful with the sling version if you're a catapult guy, because it's so easy for that thing to get stuck and you're just going to have to fire like a giant flaming whatever just grabs in the sling drops right next to you

trebuchets were similar they had a sling on one end but instead of using tension to crank the arm and release it they would use either manpower or a large weight and gravity to get that arm moving now the first trebuchets were man-powered using one large pull on a swivel and then the other side would be a series of ropes attached to it and the soldiers would all pull in unison And the arm of the trebuchet would swing, and the sling attached to it would throw a payload.

We just don't appreciate levers like we used to.

We really don't.

Seriously though.

Treboches are awesome.

We used to fuck with levers.

Levers agreed, man.

We really need to appreciate them more in full.

Crummy, we don't, actually.

Boo.

Fulcrum.

Here we were.

We were doing a comedy podcast.

I liked it.

I liked it.

Here we were.

Fulcrum.

Later, they developed a counterweight trebuchet that would employ a very heavy bucket on one end, and then the other end would be the payload.

And they would release the counterweight, and the trebuchet would then throw the object placed in the sling.

Again, these weapons were often used against defenses, not personnel.

And they actually have tables in the wiki to show how far these can go.

And a 30,000 kilogram counterweight can throw a hundred kilogram stone 400 meters.

Okay, that's amazing.

But I feel like lots of catapult guys and trebuchet guys got in big trouble because, you know, they didn't know the math on that for sure.

They were just kind of guessing.

And then a boulder went like way short and just smushed their own teeth.

Standing there at the friend's funeral.

First off, trig is hard to do on the fly.

I feel like we don't talk about that enough.

Yeah, real, real great technology.

All you have to do, though, is play light as a feather, stiff as a board with a 60,000-pound counterweight and work does itself, really.

Another popular siege weapon was the ballista now this is a large crossbow sits on a mount the bow itself was cranked back like all high tension bows and then they would place large metal bolts or spikes into the device and these would shoot out with a great deal of force some of these ballistae could throw rocks or other material they sometimes use torsion and they could be encased in like a little cube or a small room that was protected so the troops inside could fire it with little hindrance.

Okay, that feels way too powerful.

Whoever came up with that first, that's like the first kid to get a super soaker when you're little and you're playing water.

Siege ladders were also.

Yeah, we're playing no ballistas today, right?

No punching faces, no ballistas.

Fucked up.

Siege ladders were also another way to get around large walls.

They were often carried into place and sometimes they had coverings to protect the people climbing.

so they would have less chance of getting hit from the side.

A simple pole could easily push a ladder back away from a wall.

Once it passes verticality it's going to fall back so they were often supported on the ground with a device of some kind one particular version uh called an escalade which is basically a rolling staircase that unfolds and it gets closer to the walls people just climbed up that okay it feels like we're getting a little looney tunes here seesol are you gonna tell us about them drawing a big hole in the wall

next

All right, everybody in the red shirts and the coyotes.

You guys are on ladder duty.

Get up there.

It's just one guy with a ladder.

He climbs up it, then picks the ladder up, puts it in front of him, and he climbs up that piece.

And then he

keeps doing it.

There's also a ship version of this ladder thing called the Sambuka.

Now, this is where they would lash two ships together, and then it would extend a long ladder out the front of the boat on the bow.

Now, this ladder would be covered, and the boat would maneuver.

from the outer wall facing the water and the soldiers would use the ladder to climb up onto the battlements.

And it was used in ancient history, but it fell out of favor because the top of that ladder got moving in the waves.

So it was making it really difficult to scale.

Yeah, I can see how that would be bad for castle fights, but

we should 100% turn Sambuka duels into a televised sport.

I would watch the shit out of Sambuka Duel on ESPN8.

These are very weird.

It's like, hey, what if we stick a big dong on the front of a barge and just cum a bunch of dudes out of the top of it?

If you touch the base the right way, the guy's really poor.

It's crazy.

Now, I didn't cover all the tactics and such of a siege, and I may just do a siege tactics essay in the future, and that gets into how they actually plan for these, the psychological warfare, the supply maintenance, all the other factors.

Yeah, paint the walls bright pink so everyone thinks their castle's all girl and it really

lowers the morale.

Now, all of these amazing devices got thrown away when we finally started using gunpowder for cannons and for petards or small bombs that are used in sieges.

The power that a cannon brought to the table was just immense.

And you could stand far away, shoot the wall, it would come down, or you could just put a bomb in front of a door and blow it up.

And if you're caught in that explosion, you could be hoisted by your own petard.

After the invention of the cannon, walls for fortification became much smaller and thicker.

Taller walls were easy targets.

They also shifted back to more earth fortifications because they could absorb cannon fire much more readily than hard walls.

So while everything changed because of gunpowder, gunpowder, it kind of went back to where it was before the arms race of siege weapons and fortifications.

All right.

And Cecil, you have to summarize what you learned in one sentence.

What would it be?

Your escalate is in my palisade.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Let's do this.

Now, obviously, sieging these castles cost a great deal of money, lost lives, untold, terrible wounds.

Clearly, there had to be something really just great in the castle worthy of all of this bloodshed.

A

nope.

B, not really.

C, usually the castle itself was the prize.

D, which they just ruined by breaching it.

Or E,

those people all had it coming because they smelled bad.

You have such a grudge about these people, Tom.

But it is definitely E.

They definitely

bad.

They stunk so bad.

You're absolutely so much.

All right, Cecil.

With a subject this nerdy, listeners are probably wondering why Noah missed this episode.

A, due to his age, he remembers the real thing and finds the subject too triggering.

B,

we did a test record with him, but he wouldn't stop shouting trebuchet in excitement.

Or C, He's currently under siege in the castle known as Georgia from the invading army known as Weather.

Oh, oh,

yeah, that's true.

It's C.

Definitely he is under C.

C, I'm afraid.

Yes.

All right, Cecil, one more for you.

Whenever you storm a castle, you have a wide assortment of signature victory cries.

They're awesome.

But which one is my absolute favorite?

A

Kugat served, bitches.

B,

cause playing for keeps, motherfuckers.

Keeps.

Ah, keeps clever.

C, thank you.

C,

Larpe Diem.

C, fantastic.

I love Larpe Dium.

It's so brilliant.

It's got to be C.

That is correct.

Nicely done.

All right.

Well, Cecil, you got all of them right, which means you win.

All right.

Well, I'm going to pick Noah since he's not here to fight me on it.

Yeah, we'll get the AI fixed by then.

All right.

Well, for Cecil, Tom, and Heath, I'm Eli Boznik.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, Noah will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our podcast wherever your ears connect to the internet.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com forward slash citation pod and get bonus episodes as well as before-the-show shenanigans, or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

Uh,

remember the Titans: Donald Faison.

Oh, Clueless.

Donald Faison was in Clueless?

Yeah, he's the boyfriend.

That's right, he's the boyfriend.

Right, I forgot we were doing war.

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