First confirmed trebuchet victim identified at Stirling Castle

A new examination of the skeletal remains of man killed seven centuries ago at Stirling Castle in Scotland has found his body was shattered by a blow from above that then pinned him to the ground. This is the first confirmed evidence of casualty inflicted by trebuchet.

Skeleton 150 was discovered in a 1997 excavation under Stirling Castle’s chapel. It was one of nine buried there in the early 1300s, anomalous burials for the period as bodies were usually buried outside the castle walls. Burial under the chapel suggests the survivors had to bury the dead inside the castle because they had no access to the outside. Of the nine bodies found there, five bore the marks of blunt and sharp-force trauma. The atypical burials and the severe injuries indicate they died during a siege, most likely the longest and most destructive one that took place in 1304.

Stirling Castle, a royal residence to Scottish kings since the early 12th century, is located on the main route to Edinburgh and overlooks a key strategic crossing of the River Forth. That put it in the crosshairs during conflicts with England, and the castle has been besieged at least eight times, including during the Wars of Scottish Independence (1296-1357).

Between 1296 when Edward I of England invaded Scotland and 1304 when Stirling was taken by Edward’s forces after a brutal three-month siege, it had changed hands five times. In 1304, it was in Scottish hands again, governed by Sir William Oliphant who held it was a small complement of 25 men. Even when all of the other castles had fallen and the Scottish nobles surrendered, Stirling resisted.

Edward decided to crush Stirling once and for all as a cautionary tale. In April, 1304, Edward ordered Scottish nobles to send soldiers, cavalry and supplies to support the siege of Stirling. He pulled materials to build siege engines from Newcastle and Scotland, stripping the lead roofs off of Scottish churches and confiscating all of the iron and boulders he could get from Glasgow. When the attack began, Edward had assembled the largest array of siege engines in English history. There were at least 13 catapults and trebuchets barraging the castle with massive stones and Greek fire.

For three months Stirling held tight against the assault. Edward ordered construction of the largest trebuchet ever built up to that point in full view of the besieged. He dubbed the beast War Wolf (Loup de Guerre), and when Oliphant saw it, he knew it was over. He surrendered, which did not suit Edward’s purpose, so War Wolf was deployed anyway, and flung a 300-pound stone which broke through the curtain wall and crushed the castle gatehouse. Contemporary chronicler Matthew Paris, who was a witness to events, described the projectile breaking through two massive defensive walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”

University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry and Historic Environment Scotland teamed up to examine the chapel bones.

Skeleton 150 stood out. Buckberry counted more than 160 separate fractures on the 165-centimeter-tall remains, including a skull smashed in 61 places, a deep, zigzag break to a shoulder, and nearly 60 strange, zigzagging breaks to the ribs. “It’s very clear the energy is going through the chest,” says Uppsala University biological anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who worked with Buckberry on the skeletal analysis. “The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards.”

The extensive injuries to the rest of the body—particularly the strange breaks on the rib cage and a shattered right leg—ruled out the most obvious possibility, a head-first fall from the castle’s walls. The shape and texture of the breaks eliminated trampling by horses and damage to the skeleton after burial.

To solve the mystery, Buckberry scoured the forensic and medical literature and searched through anatomical collections for equivalent injuries. “It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains,” Buckberry says. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304 [C.E.]?”

That would be a 300-pound boulder flung by a trebuchet.

* This article was originally published here