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Early castles

The earliest castles were built nearly a thousand years ago. We have some really old castles here in Northern Ireland in places like Carrickfergus and Dundrum. These were built by the Normans.

The Normans were people from Normandy in France who came to Ireland over 800 years ago. They were looking for land and power. They built huge castles to show how important they were, and to have safe places where they could live and train their soldiers.

They intended to stay here for good. It doesn’t sound very fair, but in those days if you had enough money and soldiers you could do what you wanted!

There are over 40 castles in Northern Ireland that you can go and see and learn about. It wasn’t just the Normans who build castles on this island - lots of different types of people built castles after the Normans.

Carrickfergus Castle is one of the best kept ancient castles in Europe. It was built by a man called John de Courcy. He arrived in Ireland in 1171 with 300 soldiers and 22 knights. He built monasteries and churches all over County Down.

Knights

Trainee knights started at around the age of seven, they were called pages.

Instead of learning reading, writing and arithmetic they studied hawking, hunting and horsemanship.

It wasn’t all that much fun being page.

Although they lived in fancy big castles, these would have been very cold and dirty.

There were animals everywhere, so it was probably a bit smelly too. And you really would not have liked the toilets!

The beds weren’t as comfy the one you’re used to, and there were no showers, no TVs and no computer games (although pages were actually trained in how to play board games).

Hawking

Back in those days, hawking was one of the knights' favourite activities.

It took a lot of effort to train hawks for hunting. Knights had to find young hawks in their nests. It was important to get the hawk used to humans from an early age.

The knight trained the hawk to sit on his fist by feeding it small amounts of food from his hand. The hawk was then trained to fly to the knight’s fist to take food.

The hawk was trained to fly around the area without taking any prey. Once it returned to the knight’s fist, the hawk ate the food as a reward.

Some forms of training were very cruel and the knight didn’t always treat the hawk very well.

What was life like in an Irish castle?

Back in medieval times, if you were a lord or lady and owned a castle, you might have enjoyed a solar. This is a fancy word to describe a room that gets a lot of sun.

If you owned one of these sunny rooms, people would know you were very wealthy and powerful.

The beds in the solar had leather and rope that supported fluffy feather mattresses. Some had animal furs for blankets.

The solar would have had its own fireplace, where the lord and lady could stay warm and enjoy the view.

There were a lot of people living in small spaces in medieval times, so to have these big beautiful chambers was a luxury.

Of course, castles would have had many servants. Some would even be allowed to sleep in the same room as the lord and his family - but not on the same fluffy feather mattress of course!