One of the special pleasures in any medieval game is getting to field a trebuchet. In an era where warfare was largely a contest of who can keep people swinging their unfriendliest sticks around the longest before they get hungry enough to leave, there’s a sort of giddiness that comes with being the guy who’s weaponized the higher art of applied physics to fling half-ton boulders better than any run-of-the-mill onager could ever hope to.
Sadly, there have in fact been real human beings who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of those boulders over the years, and as reported earlier this week by Science, researchers have identified a skeleton they believe could very well be the first confirmed trebuchet casualty in the archaeological record.
The skeleton in question is Skeleton 150, one of a number of skeletons dating back to the 1300s that were unearthed during excavations beneath the chapel of Stirling Castle in Scotland in 1997. Skeleton 150 was one of five whose bones bore the evidence—cut marks, puncture wounds, blunt force trauma—of having died violently.
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The injuries that Skeleton 150 had sustained were particularly interesting to University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry, who later examined the remains in cooperation with Historic Environment Scotland and presented her findings at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting.
Because the five battle-damaged skeletons had been buried beneath the castle chapel rather than outside its walls as would have been typical, Buckberry concluded they might have died during the sieges Stirling Castle endured—and ultimately fell to—at the close of the 13th century. A strategic keystone for Scottish forces, the castle was a coveted prize, eventually succumbing to the armies of Edward I at the end of a prolonged siege in 1304.
Skeleton 150, however, was extremely battle-damaged. The warrior’s bones had suffered over 160 fractures, including a ruined leg, a massive, jagged break through the shoulder, roughly five dozen unusual breaks throughout the ribs, and 61 distinct fractures across the skull. This was not a man who tumbled off a horse, or even a parapet.
This was a soldier who was all but exploded.
“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 told Science. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?”
There aren’t many candidates for what could cause this kind of damage during the time period, so I’ll give you a hint: It was probably something flung by a trebuchet, the counter-weighted siege engine that first appeared in Europe about a century prior. And the English who laid siege to Stirling Castle in 1304 fielded a particularly nasty one: Called the Loup-de-Guerre, or “The War Wolf,” the massive weapon was considered the largest trebuchet ever built. One account of the siege, compiled in the Flores Historiarum, says its missiles “pierced the two outer walls … like an arrow through cloth.”
That sort of impact is unfortunate for anyone just on the other side of those walls, as Skeleton 150’s breaks “indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” Buckberry said. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”
A gruesome end, and a tragic way to be remembered by history. Ah, well—at least nobody captured the moment in a Bannerlord clip.
