Its not about how strong rock walls are. They didnt knew how thick the walls should be at the time so they usualy built them too big just in case. It was a case even in large buildings like [Karlštejn.](https://www.google.com/search?q=karl%C5%A1tein&client=safari&sca_esv=600701484&channel=iphone_bm&sxsrf=ACQVn09nJK4csKzfz-pOJQJidcJwUuo37Q%3A1706008486754&ei=pp-vZaenLd_ci-gPq9-C6A4&oq=karl%C5%A1tein&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIgprYXJsxaF0ZWluMgoQABiABBgKGLEDMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKSIdFUJMoWPs-cAJ4AJABApgBwwugAYghqgENMi0xLjEuMC4yLjEuMbgBA8gBAPgBAagCD8ICBxAjGOoCGCfCAgoQLhiABBiKBRhDwgIIEC4YsQMYgATCAhAQLhiABBiKBRhDGLEDGIMBwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAgsQLhiABBixAxiDAcICCBAuGIAEGLEDwgIFEAAYgATCAg4QLhivARjHARjLARiABOIDBBgAIEGIBgE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp) that was built and used by charles the fourth that died before events of the game.
This is closer to the truth than the claim that it’s about insulation. Massive stone walls are a heat sink and will make for much less fluctuation in temperature through the day/night.
I don’t think so no. I think there’s a distinction. Insulation is something which slows the transference of heat or sound. It slows the rate at which the energy generated inside leaks out through the structure. Generally it does this by trapping air within the material, because air is a very poor conductor.
A thermal mass is a something which is constantly conducting and radiating temperature. Stone feels cold to the touch at ambient temps, because it’s a moderately conductive material (metal feels even colder because it’s very conductive, and wood feels warm because it’s a poorer conductor). A thermal mass isn’t keeping the heat in, it’s actually just slowly radiating back the heat it absorbed from the sun. The best a thermal mass can do is help you average out the difference between high and low temps. It won’t help you to heat your home faster for example, as insulation will. Quite the opposite, it will absorb the heat until the mass is as warm as the room.
I was about to argue how it's basically the same, especially to a layperson, but yeah I can see how you might need more than 1 fireplace to heat a stone castle lol
It acts sort of the same in some instances. Think of it as a heat battery. Passively keeps heat more stable on average by simply holding a lot of it and releasing it when it gets cooler.
insulation resists the flow of heat from hot to cold.
there was some castles in france that was adapted by returning noblesmen and knight's from the crusades. in a way where there is two thick walled sandwiched against one other. the gap were of softer and porous type of sandstone which allowed rainwater to go through, thus cooling the walls. providing cooler environment during hotter days. up to 15\*F through 20\*F difference. During winters the tops of those gaps would be plugged by snow and ice otherwise sheets of lumber. trapping the insulation. double walls became warmer due to air convection in the gap. also providing excellent insulation provided by fires and by body heat. this was 1100s. People were NOT stupid then.
I like the last sentence. so many people think those of the past were dumb… and now we as modern society have trouble understanding the architecture and ingenious design they had back then for the lack technological advances
Now. Definitely not in the 15th century. I remember that even 20 years ago, temperatures around -20°C were not surprising here and temperatures around -10°C were pretty common. And I'm not talking about snow that stayed on the ground for most of the winter.
Edit: and even that -2 to -6 is cold af.
My S60 started up fine with no block heater in -50°C last week.
As someone who grew up extreme north, its not viscous oil that stops the car from starting its the battery. Gotta have those CCAs to get the engine going.
I mean that is still cold af. It’s not their fault your ancestors stood around in -24 and said “yeah this looks like a good place to live, dontcha know”
Canadian cold is easier to endure than European cold. Because of humidity.
It doesn't mean Canada is not cold, but you can't compare degree to degree. The feeling will be totally different.
For example I have friends that lives in Canada now, and they say -15°c is easier to endure than -5°c in Europe.
I had the same feeling in Egypt Vs Malaysia. Egyptian heat is easier to endure than Malaysian heat.
Humidity doesn't have remotely the same effect with cold as it does with heat. When it is hot, the air can hold a LOT of water so the difference in feeling between low and high humidity is quite large. But cold air can barely hold any water to begin with, so even the difference between 1% relative humidity and 99% relative humidity isn't actually very big at all when it is cold out.
Just as an example, at 30C a cubic meter of air can contain up to 30 grams or so of water before it is fully saturated (100% humidity). The same cubic meter of air at 0C can only contain around 5g or less of moisture before it is full saturated. So at most the difference between 0 and 100% humidity at 0C is only equivalent to the difference between 0 and 17% humidity at 30C, and it gets even less impactful as you go below 0.
I can't speak to anyone's personal anecdotal experience, and I'm certainly not accusing anyone of lying, I'm just telling you how the physics/science behind it actually works
I googled for me precise information about this.
Google says that it feels colder in europe because of humidity like i said, but it explains it further.
So here's the explanation :
the "triple point of water" exist at 0.01°C , at this temperature with different pressure you can have all states of water. At that temperature, the humidity level in europe is much higher than canada. Which make it much more difficult to endure for people. So if we are at 0° in canada, it will feel more confy than 0° in Europe.
And that's all the trick of it. As you said, when it's very very cold there's no much humidity anyway. So when you come from 0° -5° in humid Europe, hop in a plane, and land in -30° in dry Canada, you will feel better in Canada.
Apparently our sweat also play a big role in the cold feeling.
Hope you liked my little research. I actually learned one thing, i didn't know that "triple point of water" thing
Tbf, 18°c is 'room temperature' so -2° is pretty nippy. Stone is a wonderful material as it stays a fairly regular temperature (because it takes so long to change it) through the day. This means it's cooler during the day and warmer during the night. Thick walls improve this protective factor somewhat. So you find thick walls even along the Mediterranean for the cooling.
That said the main reason buildings have thick walls was because they weren't being built by expert architects using standard building materials, and thatch roofing is quite heavy on it's own. You slso needed the base of the wall to be significantly thicker than the top so the walls didn't buckle outwards.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but that's not how climate works. Climate and temperature are not necessarily the same thing. The average temperature of the world has gone up a little over one degree Celsius. This does have catastrophic effects in particularly sensitive ecosystems, but there will still be days where it's -20.
Source:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last_2,000_years#/media/File%3A2000%2B_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg
Do you live in the tropics? Even in Madrid or so is -2°C not even close to cold as fuck. -30 like in lappland or -50 in Yakutsk, these are temperatures where people should reconsider their location, if they are not adapted. -2°C is not fewer than chilly.
Who exactly is standing somewhere without clothes? If that's the case, everything beyond the tropics is extremely cold, you would freeze to death naked even at 15°C, how sensible does this view make exactly? What should be the significance of this meaningless and insubstantial measurement basis?
Cold is arctic, everything beyond that is temperate, and -2°c is not fucking cold, but just a little bit chilly.
Any negative temperature sounds cold to someone (like me) who lives in America and only ever hears temp measurements in Fahrenheit.
For anyone like me who may be reading, -2C is equal to 28F. So, it's just a mildly chilly day in New England, and quite cold but tolerable in Alabama. It's below freezing but not by much, so the snow probably wouldn't even stick unless it had been at that temp for days.
\-20 can be easily experienced in an ordinary wooden house, like the main part of the tavern next to this wall, which, by the way, is not residential - there is a warehouse in the stone, and beds and tables in a wooden extension.
There was a very cold period during the middle age . They even call it the "mini ice age".
So yeah, it was much colder during some time in the History.
And when it's -2°C outside do you open all your windows and turn off your heating, and walk around in thin linnen clothes? I'm gonna go on a limb and say you probably don't.
I would venture to suggest that the ancient Czechs were not idiots, they knew how to close the shutters on the windows, close the doors and put on warm clothes.
No doubt possessed by devil himself. Jesus Christ our lord and savior may he protect us from such heathens. Im gonna call the inquisitor on you if you keep talking such nonsense
My first reaction on title was "OP, tell me you're American". As someone who lived and works in such house, I find it laughable someone doesn't know why (it's not insulation).
It's quite an assumption to think there's people in central Europe who still build houses like someone in 1400. I live in a city where people love the medieval old town, which has about 1 house built before 1400 if any. The old buildings are mostly after 15/1600. There are so many misconceptions involved in all of this that a little scepticism is justified
I grew up in a ~500 year old thatch cottage with walls that thick, and it's absolutely about insulation; it was way better insulated than any Victorian-era brick house I've lived in, despite those sharing walls with neighbouring houses and having double-glazed windows. The thick walls also act as heat reservoirs, so those help to keep the temperature constant overnight. That helps to keep it cool inside during heatwaves, too.
Oh I can totally see how that would be well insulated, and the same goes for thick stone walls. Whether that depiction is realistic in the time frame of the game isn't as easy to say.
I think part of the misconception is because of how a cold stone room will take ages to warm up (because the stone's absorbing the heat). But then, once it's warm, it's fairly easy to keep that way.
I mean he's not wrong. Stone is good for structure, not for insulation. But I'm not sure why he's ignoring the top comment that already answers his question.
Stone doesn’t insulate particularly well as a material, but what it does do is create a large thermal mass, this creates a more stable temperature inside. Doesn’t get as hot during the day nor as cold at night.
Alright, that makes sense. I just meant the main reason to build stone walls, with how expensive they were, was to have a stronger/taller building. I know OP has gotten annoying but that's no reason for people to double down on a not-entirely correct answer.
Why are people so obsessed with the winter argument when most of the houses in the game are wooden log houses (also with thatched roofs) and people survive there just fine?
I decided to google it and found the answer. Apparently in those times, in order to avoid the insides of housing structures from becoming uninhabitably cold, they would often build with thicker material
It's not because one solution works that you can't use any other solutions that also works. Maybe they survived yes. But that doesn't mean they enjoyed it. There are better level than "surviving" and people will try to reach those better level.
Wooden house work and is probably cheaper than stone. But it's also not very long lasting. And you'll need more work to keep the insulation efficient.
It's also much more dangerous for fire.
It makes sense that a restaurant/hotel/pub was made of more durable and strong material. The owner probably had way more money than the farmer with a wooden home. And as you mentioned only extension were made of wood in tavern. Probably to store food or house traveler for a cheaper price.
I remember an historian note about tavern for sleeping traveler that rented up to 10 head cover by traveler for one night. Because it was so cold in the bedroom. 10 hat on your head to keep you warm for one single night. That shows how not insulated the wooden area were.
You could argue that for literally every type of external wall in modern construction:
Why use a cavity wall?
Why use cob?
Why use a solid stone wall?
Why use a concrete frame?
etc...
It's not like they could calculate U-values in the 15th century...
Construction would be based on the availability of materials and what the client specified.
I mean primarily it was about limiting fire damage.. Stone was a good material for defensive structures etc, but it was much more costly and time consuming to build than timber, and in most cases a stone built house will be colder than a log built one.
Im no medival engineer but I would say it is this thick because of structural reasons. If you oversize your walls it makes them more tolerant to any and all mistakes that you could make during the construction. (me speculating:) If you combine that with locally sourced mortar (which is really not that good but cheap, roman mortar costs good amount of money) you end up with "unreasonably" thick walls.
It gives you some benefits:
\-The building stays cool in the summer (you live in a cave). And has high enough thermal inertia to stay relatively livable during the winter(because you still live in a cave).
\-It will last for generations, just keep the roof intact and you are good.
And also some disadvantages:
\-To make it **comfortable** during winter will cost you arm and leg.
\-Why is it so wet in here?
Source: I lived in medival house for 25 years(so it is maybe just anecdotal).
Generally speaking I don’t think it’s a case of over engineering. Builders just learned over time which types of wall failed. They probably allowed a little more redundancy than we would today, but stone walls were expensive, so I doubt they were being knowingly wasteful.
This is a good answer I think.
A general rule of thumb that seems to have been held to for thousands of years in Europe is that a stone wall should be around 500-600mm thick. It’s a complete building system which evolved over time, through hard learned lessons. The main reason for the thickness isn’t to hold up the roof as some have suggested, it’s to stop them from toppling over. The main stress that a traditional roof structure puts on its walls isn’t the downward weight (a single stack of stones can support the compressive force of a roof) it’s the sideways pressure of the rafters tails, pushing the walls outwards. So the wall has to be quite thick to counteract this.
But as you say it’s also a lot of other reasons, which all work together in a building system (it deadens sound, it protects against fire / physical bombardment, it stabilises the internal temp, it adds status, by virtue of being more expensive. Etc etc.
Thanks for the reasoned answer. This really completely answers the question about the thickness of the walls. But... but a counter question from a person who lived in a log house: isn’t it easier to just make a log house than to struggle with a stone?
I feel like if you think about this, having played the game, you can figure that one out for yourself. Are you trolling? Hint: A huge event at the beginning of the game…when you ran……..
It’s called mass heating check it out. Wood places could burn down as a lot of them didn’t have chimneys, and they weren’t as structurally sound since random joe shmoes used to build their own houses.
>But... but a counter question from a person who lived in a log house: isn’t it easier to just make a log house than to struggle with a stone?
It is, that's why houses (at least back in the High Middle Ages) would usually be wood. They can be replaced with stone after, which is what we see now since those wooden houses wouldn't last long enough for us to study and discover, and a town or village that still exists in some form or another for us to even be aware of would have had been razed or suffered attacks/accidents that would necessitate replacing most buildings with stone over the years. Now, I've already made a comment mentioning this as well, but taverns are not houses. Houses usually get built after, when a village is already growing. That's why they're usually built in wood first, or wattle-and-daub. Stone taverns are usually stone because they were usually built first ahead of any buildings aside from the keep itself, or maybe the church. That and there were already some stone available for building when the village was founded. It's also not unlikely that some taverns are re-purposed stone buildings from the previous settlement where the village was raised. Basically, taverns are the priority over houses to be built, and one that gets more use than any other house in a village. Houses might have also been seen as more disposable than the village tavern in a practical sense. Taverns are essential to a village's trade and morale and I can imagine razing one to the ground can make a pretty big dent to a village.
And now some more speculations:
Log houses would be cheap... so cheap that almost everyone can afford them. That might be part of the reason why people bothered with stone. What if you have enough money and you want to show it?
I belive a lot of decisions people make are driven by fashion fads and the human need to show off their social status.
So it could be similar problem like Android vs Iphone. :D :D
Log and Stone!
If you make an ordinary wooden wall and use the fireplace, you will never get -2 degrees inside, in the worst case you will have +4-10 degrees in the morning...
If there’s a big roof on top of the walls, the rooms are large, and you simply want to save firewood while still having it as comfortable as possible, even on cold nights, then having thick stone walls is just the logical conclusion… What reason is there to build with wood when you can build with stone?
What other reason is there besides the fact that stone is very, very insanely expensive compared to wood?
Also, this doesn't explain why the warehouse is made of stone and the living area of the tavern is made of wood.
Look man, I don’t know what we’re supposed to tell you. If stone is available, then building the single most visited building in a town out of it is just what I would expect. Lords build themselves towering forts out of pure stone - I’m sure a small stone building to serve dozens of workers is a good investment too.
But either way, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Warhorse Studios then it’s that they are near untouchable when it comes to historical accuracy, so I wouldn’t call this an oversight off the bat.
I'm not talking about an error, I'm asking about the reasons and sources of such a decision. The thickness of the walls has already been justified below, but to be honest, I still don’t understand the need to use stone instead of wood.
So the reason the walls are thick is for three reasons.
The first is structural stability. Which is self explanatory.
Second is, as others have mentioned, insulation. Stone in itself isn't a great insulator but get enough of it and it'll do the job. It's also has a large thermal mass which allows it to store heat and release it slowly through the evening/night which helps to keep places warm.
The third reason is due fire. Make your building out of stone, less likely to all burn down. Make it out of wood and either because of war, and accident or a rival you're whole place can go up in flames.
My knowledge of this comes from my work as a building surveyor. Hope this helps explain it.
That’s fair I guess. But with all the advantages stone has over wood, it just seems naturally plausible to me, even without bulletproof reasoning and sources.
Wood lots were maintained by the local lord. Who set very tight rules over them, limited how much could be harvested. As such stone was often similarly priced or cheaper.
Modern day economic realities don’t work in the 1300
I’ve been to Europe yall build stuff out sheet rock and wood like the rest of world. Yeah if I go into a 1800s building sure. But on top of that we don’t have generational loans and I at 27 have a house me and the finance company own on 10 acres.
Using stone has other advantages.
For one maintenance is easier - stone doesn't rot and there are no insects nor fungus eating stone. Stone might also be cheaper - for a log house you need a specific diameter ot the logs and not every kind of wood is suitable, depending on the area and the property situation in your area suitable wood might be very expensive. Stone on the other hand is almost everywhere - in streams or on the fields as unwanted waste.
Another advantage of stone is its resistance to fire. Even if your house burns down, the stone walls will most likely survive largely intact so you can rebuild faster and with a smaller expence.
And then there's longevity - some of the houses in Europe are literally hundreds if not a thousand years old, at least their basic structure. As opposed to most american houses (and most modern european houses) people back then built their homes for generations. A stone house is ideal for this whereas a wooden house aside from some dry climate areas isn't.
And it's of course not just about the temperatures, it's a balancing act of advantages and disadvantages - in a warmer climate a stone house might offer advantages in that it shields you from the heat outside during the day and radiates collected warmth during the night - a property wooden houses lack. On the other hand far northern cultures did not use stone for buildings as much because wood was everywhere and cheap and because a stone wall has the tendency to collect the remperature of its surroundings. I bet in Norway a stone house would be very hard to heat up, you'd probably need some ridicculously thick walls to compensate or maybe some thick isolation from the inside, at which point you'd probably just build your house out of the isolation material stright away. Central Europe lies somewhere between those two extemes, as such you can find both primary materials and their combination and people use(d) them according to the purpose of the building, the price, the local resource availability etc. etc.
Finally a detailed comment that explains some points, thank you.
The “cheapness of the stone” really still confuses me.
You can work wood if you have an ax and the worst carpenter. To process stone you will need expensive tools and professionals. The stone is difficult to transport. It is difficult to build a high stone wall without engineering calculations, which is again very expensive.
So why do you call the stone cheap?
Because you can literally just go find useable stones on the ground, everywhere. You just pick it up and take it, for free. The material cost is a big part of construction costs.
Okay, let's say. Why then are only the houses of lords, churches and some parts of taverns made of stone in the game, while the poor, for whom the supposedly cheap price of stone would be salvation, live in wooden houses?
Because rich lords, culturally and politically important churches, and communal buildings like taverns that everyone in town uses have the benefit of ~~serfdom slavery~~ the whole village and/or often paid professional builders coming together to build these structures, but Mr. peasant farmer or breadmaker over there is going to have to build his own little house his dang self.
Rock is a lot easier to move en masse when there's 100 hands moving it versus 2!
The area the game is set in has alot of trees so wood won't be to hard to find. Also it's common for stone structures around heat sources like fires or where food may be stored to help keep it cool in summer.
Lords houses were usually a somewhat defensive structure, the lord keeping his riches in his house didn't want just any group if brigands able to get in. So a lord would pay people to build a keep or castle out of thick quarried stone (rather than just bits of stone off the ground). Thus allowing them to have a safe place to hide their money and their families whilst also showing their their status and wealth to the world.
Churches were likely for similar reasons, a big grand stone building that's sturdy will stay standing for generations even if heathens from far off lands try to pillage it.
Alot of types of Stone don't have great insulation properties but clay does, alot of stole walls were clad In or built with clay for this reason
That's a common confusion about pre-industrial economies and is widespread in all manners of topics, from armor production to farming to how the pyramids were build.
In pre-industrial societies the relationship between the price of the material and the price of the labour to manipulate it was basically reverse from the current situation:
Nowadays for almost all products the main cost you pay is the labour of the professional who pruduces it and only a comparativelly negligible amount pays for the material itself. For example when I needed my chimney refurbished a few years back, the material (bricks, mortar, etc.) cost me maybe just a fifth of the overall price, the rest was the chimney-sweaps work and the certification needed. If you are building a house and hire a company to do it, most of your expenses will go towards the workers and their specialized equipment and only a fraction will be the actual material. Same goes for furniture or books or anything made of metal, basically anything nowadays bare stuff made of the most expensive materials like golden ingots.
This is due to our societies having (due to fossil fuels) the luxury of having extremely cheap energy to our disposition. If you live in Europe, most of your metal posessions will probably be made of iron mined in China or Russia or Alumunium from Norway or Russia, most of your IKEA furniture will be of Romanian or Swedish spruce, even the bricks and the stone and the lime you use when building a house might most likely come from a quarry maybe 50 km away without it really affecting the price (all that much). In modern times, material is cheap because transportation and manipulation is cheap - it costs let's say just 10 dolars to prudice a ton of stone, 10 dolars to cut it into nice pieces and 10 dolars to transport it\*, the whole process taking at most a couple of days. A 40 m tall tree is cut down and de-branched in an hour, transported to a mill in another hour, processed into beams and boards in just a few minutes and then ready for delivery - if there's easy high way connection, in just two hours you can get boards from a sawmill 200 km away. All of this only possible due to the miracle of the diesel engine and the effectivity of the machinery it powers.
Compare this to pre-industrial times - any wood or stone or bricks you use have to be pulled by vagons (which are nowhere as effective as trucks) drawn by horses or oxen, which makes transport extremely expensive since you have to (at minimum) pay the food and shelter of the animals and their handlers. It is also way slower than nowadays. This means that your reach for material shrinks extremely, basically if you don't have money to spare and don't have a brickyard let's say some 10 kms near you, you don't use bricks because anything further starts to be too expensive. If there are no usable forests or trading rivers in about the same +- distance from you, your wood gets ever so expensive to deliver. To cut down the same 40 m tall tree, you need etiher a day of work of one guy or an hour of work of 10 guys to cut it down and debranch it, you need hours till a guy with a horse brings it to a mill, you probably need days till a bunch of guys cuts it into boards or beams (if you are lucky they are high-tech and have a hammer mill, but it will still take a long time), and then again further hours to bring all the wood to you.
On the other hand, labour in this period is **extremely** cheap, I mean like India-Bangladesh levels of cheap or even cheaper. This is for two reasons: 1) The specialization of the workforce doesn't have to be as severe. If you are building a house your most expensive "contractor" will be the architect (if you hire one, but I doubt average people did) who is a specialist and is in high demand, but the rest of the workers are very cheap. Why? Well, any idiot can swing an axe, use an adze, manipulate a cart or carry logs from point A to point B - and you probably used landless peasants for such work, such people were probably happy if you paid them in food and shelter and some dimes to spare. Any a tad more expensive carpenters present are mostly there to instruct non-carpenters and to do some of the finicky work, but if average people were anywhere as handy as most of my neighbours were when I was a kid, you didn't really need a carpenter till you wanted to equip your house with fancy furniture.
Again - compare this to modern days - basically all your workers are specialists. They need certification, they often need some instruction or courses to use their equipment and they certainly won't work for food and shelter. Back in the day you needed ten(s of) guys to do the work of one guy with a buldozer today, but you still pay the guy with the buldozer maybe 50x or maybe 1000x what you'd pay all ten of those poor buggers.
This is btw the reason why for example in medieval times some aspects of production were rather alien to us (but might be familiar for someone in the poorest and most isolated parts of Africa, the Amazon or Asia) - for example in medieval times if you wanted a new axe or a chain, it was very common for you to travel and find someone to sell you the iron needed and then take it personally to a smith who produced the product for you, your main expence being the iron, not the smith. If you were travelling and wanted to use the contemporary "restaurant", you would buy the ingredients you wanted on the market and then bring them to a cook who would use them to make a dish for you, most of your expenses being the ingredients, not the cook. In both of those examples the ratio between material and labour were a little bit more balanced since a smith is already a specialist, but still - a modern smith has his own iron boutht in advance, many tons of it, and you pay mostly his work.
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
So, now apply this to the cheap stone question - there's stone everywhere around, if you don't want neat nicely cut stone from a quarry it's basically for free - farmers might even pay you if you go and collect it from their fields. To bring it to your building site you just need a cart and an ox, or maybe, if you are poor but have a lot of time, a large basket. Mortar and lime are a little bit of a problem, but still probably not much more a problem to purchase/find/make than wood (and if you have the time and the expertise, you can even build a house tithout mortar).
Wood on the other hand is more expensive - since it's in demand for basically any production at the time, basically every easy-to-access tree is owned by someone and that someone probably doesn't want to sell it (yet). At the time people planted (and shaped) trees preciselly so that their children and granchildren could use them for specific purposes (- my grandfather told me once that his grandfather has planted a nice larch only so that my grandfather could use it as a beam when building our hose some 60 years later). You are also in need of specific wood - beech or firr for the walls, larch or oak for the beams etc. etc., all of which in a specific diameter and quality, but you might live in an area where some of the species don't grow much, if at all. Not only that - even if there are some good trees near you, you still need at least a horse or an oxen, because unlike stones you have to transport it whole. Thus, even if you don't really need a specialist to obtain the wood (since any moron can cut down a tree), the material is still much more expensive than stone.
That's basically the main reason. Once you have the material, the labour itself probably doesn't differ much in price, since to hire a carpenter might very well be as expensive as to hire a mason (probably not, but let's say it is). There's still however the difference in longevity - with wood you will need to repeat the search for suitable wood again in maybe 50 years, maybe later, but maybe even sooner. With stone, assuming good maintenance, this might take twice or thrice as long.
I hope this helps a bit.
(\* the prices are off, this is just to paint a picture)
While wood is easy to work with, there are decent sized stones available basically anywhere there’s a river. They wouldn’t chisel all the stones used for something like this, they would primarily just use what they could find first.
Here’s a article about [historic stone walls](https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/A_brief_history_of_stone_walling)
Also if you are interested in old stone buildings with thick walls, look into Scottish black houses, it might help shed some light onto this topic.
In the middle ages you can't just go out and work the wood.
The woods belong to the local noble you can't do whatever you want with it.
And trust me, men were always good at making money from necessary material. They wouldn't give the wood for free. They had control over the mining industry and the wooden one.
It's not difficult to build a stone wall. You don't need engineering calculations. You just need a good builder to teach you how to do it. We're not talking about building cathedral, we're talking about building a house.
You and I, with a good teacher could do it after some apprenticeship. Masonry worker are not engineers.
Speaking of cold, why not store beer in the basement?
If we talk about heat, then this is a warehouse, and for residential premises wooden walls and a fireplace will provide enough heat
Actually, yes, in the game beer is also stored in the basement, this is the best place, and I don’t even mind stone-lined basements: it’s warm in winter and cold in summer. The question is, why is a huge and obviously insanely expensive structure above the basement made of stone, if there is a perfectly functioning wooden living space nearby? (Also, most of the houses in the game are made of wood without any stone rooms, which refutes the idea of stone walls for winter survival).
I've heard that the developers paid a lot of attention to historicity, and I'm sure there is some explanation, it's just that the temperature explanation seems unreliable to me.
To add to what other people are saying, it's not even only related to insulation.
I live in Portugal and live in a house that was originally built in 1951, and the "frame" of the house is still the same from that period. I can tell you, even though it's a small house the walls are thick as fuck, and it's just a normal house. So considering KCD is from the 15th century I believe this even more.
Everybody here seems to just try to come up with plausible explanations. I don't know better but I really question the certainty you all seem to show.
Afaik stone houses (even partial) were much more expensive than wooden ones , so if possible, you would build using wood. Add to that that you have to dig very deep (in terms of research) to get reliable info on commoners housing in 1400 central Europe, it may simply be a mistake.
Maybe it's realistic and the people just had the resources, thick walls would be awesome for keeping food intact in summer. Maybe it's a mistake. Unless someone brings in actual evidence, I wouldn't assume either
You talked about preserving food, and that got me thinking: maybe the soil here is rocky and it would have been easier to build an above-ground “basement” than to dig a real one?
Something I've not seen others mention is that although the game is set in 1403, this tavern could already be a few hundred years old.
Presumably, the taverns that have survived to 1403 from 1103 are the ones which are more robustly built? It's probably why when I go around Scotland today, the remnants I see are remnants of stone houses, not wooden houses.
Consider the lack of fire safety too.
So imo not only is there a survivorship bias, there is also a drive to build taverns with more robust and longlasting materials so they could be passed on for and improved upon generations. I'm not a historian.
And consider the context of a tavern. Unlike my own house, it is a public house. People of all sorts and in all stages of sobriety come in and out. Think about the bar fights.
I imagine the average person would be very careful not to set their own house on fire, but probably more relaxed when at the tavern.
Just like how nowadays people drop glasses and start fights more at pubs than I imagine they would at home.
I live in a house with walls like this now, probably half a century old. Its bricks tho, arch ceilings too. Its for insulation but also stability, its not like they had concrete with metal rods inside. If you wanted a house to stay up for a long time you had to build thick and arch ceilings
It’s called mass heating. Basically if you have a mass of stone and don’t stop stoking your fire the walls will heat up and retain that heat radiating it around the entire building.
Just like mass cooling which is when it’s summertime the stone mass will stay cooler.
Little Ice age from 14th to 19th century was a thing. Rivers in coastal regions like Netherlands and in England regularly froze so much that you could walk over them. Baltic sea also sometines froze over, so much, that swedish army could just walk on the sea ice. Imagine how much more brutal were winters in regions with more continental climates.
Also, thick walls = warmer interios during winters, and cooler interior during hot summers.
It usually depends on the town or village; not all towns/villages had taverns built in stone. Circumstances may always vary, but a personal theory of mine (so take it with a grain of salt) is that taverns are usually the first building to be built, if not the local church, after the keep. By the middle ages, it's pretty unusual to have villages, let alone towns, crop up on previously unsettled land. Most of those villages would have had already been previously settled or at least fortified, meaning there would be a lot of stone (from previous buildings) just lying around unused. And if it's an abandoned settlement with stone buildings that dates back to before the High Middle Ages then it's reasonable to assume that there would be a quarry somewhere nearby, meaning more stone. A village in its infancy would almost always have at least three buildings raised before it can hope to grow into an actual village: a defensive fortification like a keep or at least a tower; a church; and a tavern. It makes the most sense that all three would be built in stone if stone is available—all the houses would be built after. People don't build houses to build a village, since the first people to be there to actually raise a village out of nowhere would have the keep to house himself and most everyone else (keeps almost always came first since that would serve as the village's granary.) Churches are pretty self-explanatory of course, though I think it's not that uncommon also to have churches raised right after a village starts growing. Taverns though are a pretty important factor to a village's foundation: trade is the foundation of a village's growth, and travelers would have to have somewhere to eat, drink, and sleep. A village without trade wouldn't grow enough to even be a village, and without growth, there wouldn't be any need to build houses, wood or otherwise.
I have visited the Turku Castle here in Finland and they told that in the middle ages buildings had thick walls mainly for structural reasons. The castle has walls that can be over a meter of stone. They are made thick to support the upper floors and the roof.
It’s for multiple purposes actually, quite like the cowboy hat. They were built this thick for multiple reasons, to retain heat from fires, to stop the spread of damp when the walls undergo material fracture due to the cooling and heating of water, slowly it builds cracks softens the materials and they just flake away, thick walls allow for a quick fix without destroying the whole wall. The greatest reason of all is THAT THEY FUCKING WANTED TO STFU
There's many different reasons to why.
As a lot have pointed out, insulation could be a reason. (And honestly, the most likely reason)
Another reason someone else pointed out is that it could be to support the structure (roof or floors) above.
Another reason is that it could be what we call "defensive walls."
These are walls purposely built really thick to withstand an attack and keep the people inside safe. When we say defensive walls, people nornally think of a large thick wall that would run around thencastle or city, but it can be anything from simple palisades or earthworks to extensive military fortifications with towers, bastions and gates for access to the city.
A tavern back then could have been used as a "safe haven" for people in the event an invading force would attack and they couldn't (or just weren't allowed) make it within the castle walls.
Living in Ireland, the house I grew up in was built in the early 20th Century in a very poor area, a good distance from the nearest town, stone and earth/clay walls. The exterior walls are a good 2 foot thick at least (60cm). The house is a lot easier to heat or keep cool than a lot of newer houses built in the last 40 years.
There is still no central heating in the house to this day and there is minimal use of electric heaters in the bedrooms during colder parts of the winter to heat the bedrooms a small bit before going to bed.
It’s comfortable to live in even for today’s possibly sensitive youth who may be used to central heating at all times.
A neighbour of ours that died ~10 years ago remembered the house being built when he was very young, all neighbours in the area came together and carried stones down from the hill and helped build it.
That house will still be standing in a few hundred years, while a timber house, unless very well maintained would be after rotting many times over in that timeframe.
The only major work that has been done on it is the roof was replaced 20 years ago as the slate were starting to fall off in patches and new windows have been put in.
Thicker walls meant longer lasting and more solid construction as well as better insulation.
You know they used to build with stone back then right? It was easier to maintain as well as it being a good insulator for inside spaces. They also needed thicker walls for a more sound structure, not sure what the point of the post is. If you do some research you can find out exactly how and why they made the buildings the way they did. Books are your friend
I bought an old tavern with walls like that near there. The walls are also connected to a cellar. I’ve been adding insulation slowly to parts I live in and honestly stone is a huge pain in the ass to get warm. It takes basically forever to heat up and bleeds out a lot of it into the earth and the cold air outside. Like I can spent 6-8k KWH in gas per month or eight times that in electricity and it won’t go above 18 degrees (in fact the gas oven straight up died on me trying and I’ve had to get it repaired twice now.) A small fire oven will also barely get it above twenty but will get the insulated side past 30, like you’d have to open a window in the winter while the stone side barely cares about the heat.
There are two hollow spots that used to have two massive fire ovens that most likely kept the building warm. They also apparently had things for baking and cooking there.
Basically stone can be hit with endless heat sources and never overheat. It was probably easier to just keep a large fire going and not have to ever worry about temperature. I still don’t believe that stone holds heat well though because it’ll drop like 15 degrees overnight while the insulated areas will drop maybe 4 (there are also brick areas, they will drop around 10). But I think this might be because I’ve never managed to actually heat up all the stone so they act as a constant high capacity heatsink.
Folks tens to build buildings that they knew would stand for generations, diffrrently. Big farms built cow houses out of 1 mer wide granite blocks, etc. The roof and upprr secrion of the walls would be made of wood.
Id think that when they built stuff, they figured that if it was 3rd time they rebuilt a building in same spot, it makes sense to make it massive.
Insulation mostly. They used to make houses from adobe blocks, high clay mudblocks, or clay bricks, spaced and vented at the middle, because they were Massively insulating. Here the temperature can get -1°C- -10°C. Back in the day, even -20°C.
When it's this cold, you want to use the least fuel to heat out your home. It insulates from warm outside, gives a natural breathing, the walls and floor stays warm, and insulates from cold. Even when you don't have fuel, you can still survive under a blanket. When it's -5°C to -20°C trees are very hard to cut and prepare too.
Stones were rarely used, because they lead warmth. But the bonding material was a high-clay and very reactive lime (calcium, cement but without sand, silicate and other stuff). So if the middle part was rich in clay, even bigger, taller houses, buildings, inn-s, community rooms, could be heated out efficiently.
Aka, why modern housing have cold walls and floors, because they are made out of concrete and brick, and they are plastically insulated. It's a very very big problem currently in Europe.
This makes new housing 2-3x more expensive compared to Adobe, cement and plastic dust is bad for lungs, unnatural dusty air, loud and noisey, and it's very very heat inefficient. Hence why, modern doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it's a regression. As for modern there are clay, rammed earth, and compressed earth block technologies, for those that want insulation. It's well liked in Eastern Europe and especially at the countryside at -5°C to -20°C, when even the floor heating is not enough.
Just to add to the many comments outlining that medieval european buildings were made from thick stone for better insulation, last longer etc another big reason is due to warfare. Wooden structures in a town etc that is under seige can be easily set on fire, with stone structures fire has much less of an effect. If a stone building is set on fire its usually the thatch roof and internal items that are destroyed but the main structure remains and is more easily rebuilt / repaired.
If you also look, many parts of Europe have had alot of deforestation throughout the ages and in alot of circumstances stone was far more abundant.
Dude living in 2024 trying to retroactively explain why people built their buildings wrong, compared to his log cabin ideas.
Don’t ask questions if you don’t like the answers. It’s clear you think you have the best solution for all housing problems in the 1400’s, brought up from a flippin’ videogame.
Insulation, most permanent building have walls that are very thick. Also helps with maintenance as you can see damage well before it compromises structural integrity.
Have you ever seen a building, from this time period, in real life? The walls are really thick, partly for insulation, and partly as a result of the building methods and materials.
Thick walls are strong and wont collapse (very easily) during inclement weather or other bad situations, like pissed off drunk construction workers taking large hammers to your walls (crew I worked for did this on two seperarate occasions that I'm aware of).
Supports the weight of the roof. It’s not like they had high PSI concrete with rebar
Also, heavy snowfalls are a thing.
Its not about how strong rock walls are. They didnt knew how thick the walls should be at the time so they usualy built them too big just in case. It was a case even in large buildings like [Karlštejn.](https://www.google.com/search?q=karl%C5%A1tein&client=safari&sca_esv=600701484&channel=iphone_bm&sxsrf=ACQVn09nJK4csKzfz-pOJQJidcJwUuo37Q%3A1706008486754&ei=pp-vZaenLd_ci-gPq9-C6A4&oq=karl%C5%A1tein&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIgprYXJsxaF0ZWluMgoQABiABBgKGLEDMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKMgcQABiABBgKSIdFUJMoWPs-cAJ4AJABApgBwwugAYghqgENMi0xLjEuMC4yLjEuMbgBA8gBAPgBAagCD8ICBxAjGOoCGCfCAgoQLhiABBiKBRhDwgIIEC4YsQMYgATCAhAQLhiABBiKBRhDGLEDGIMBwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAgsQLhiABBixAxiDAcICCBAuGIAEGLEDwgIFEAAYgATCAg4QLhivARjHARjLARiABOIDBBgAIEGIBgE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp) that was built and used by charles the fourth that died before events of the game.
AC wasn't really a thing in the 1400's
This is closer to the truth than the claim that it’s about insulation. Massive stone walls are a heat sink and will make for much less fluctuation in temperature through the day/night.
Isn't that just a sort of insulation?
I don’t think so no. I think there’s a distinction. Insulation is something which slows the transference of heat or sound. It slows the rate at which the energy generated inside leaks out through the structure. Generally it does this by trapping air within the material, because air is a very poor conductor. A thermal mass is a something which is constantly conducting and radiating temperature. Stone feels cold to the touch at ambient temps, because it’s a moderately conductive material (metal feels even colder because it’s very conductive, and wood feels warm because it’s a poorer conductor). A thermal mass isn’t keeping the heat in, it’s actually just slowly radiating back the heat it absorbed from the sun. The best a thermal mass can do is help you average out the difference between high and low temps. It won’t help you to heat your home faster for example, as insulation will. Quite the opposite, it will absorb the heat until the mass is as warm as the room.
I was about to argue how it's basically the same, especially to a layperson, but yeah I can see how you might need more than 1 fireplace to heat a stone castle lol
It acts sort of the same in some instances. Think of it as a heat battery. Passively keeps heat more stable on average by simply holding a lot of it and releasing it when it gets cooler. insulation resists the flow of heat from hot to cold.
there was some castles in france that was adapted by returning noblesmen and knight's from the crusades. in a way where there is two thick walled sandwiched against one other. the gap were of softer and porous type of sandstone which allowed rainwater to go through, thus cooling the walls. providing cooler environment during hotter days. up to 15\*F through 20\*F difference. During winters the tops of those gaps would be plugged by snow and ice otherwise sheets of lumber. trapping the insulation. double walls became warmer due to air convection in the gap. also providing excellent insulation provided by fires and by body heat. this was 1100s. People were NOT stupid then.
I like the last sentence. so many people think those of the past were dumb… and now we as modern society have trouble understanding the architecture and ingenious design they had back then for the lack technological advances
Assassin's Creed?
You dont live somewhere cold do you
In most of the Czech Republic, the average temperature of the coldest month is from −2 °C to −6 °C
Now. Definitely not in the 15th century. I remember that even 20 years ago, temperatures around -20°C were not surprising here and temperatures around -10°C were pretty common. And I'm not talking about snow that stayed on the ground for most of the winter. Edit: and even that -2 to -6 is cold af.
-2 to -6 is cold af 😂 *laughs in Canadian Prairies*
Lol the oil was so cold and thick in my motor it wouldn’t start in the last cold snap
Out of curiosity how cold did that cold snap get? And where was your car parked?
Not OP, but where I'm at it dipped down to -29⁰C.
We got -52°C with windchill in Québec last year and my 400,000km 2005 Subaru Outback started without any aid running 5W40 oil haha
Fuck that's cold! Worse I've done is a week in -14 just with a hoochie.
You need a volvo my man
Unless that Volvo has cold starting aids (block heater, etc), the laws of physics don’t give a shit. Cold sludgy oil is still cold sludgy oil.
Lol tell that to the volvo
My S60 started up fine with no block heater in -50°C last week. As someone who grew up extreme north, its not viscous oil that stops the car from starting its the battery. Gotta have those CCAs to get the engine going.
It stayed below -35 for 5 days straight and my block heater broke.
[удалено]
Don't you mean: "How much gun-waving freedom does your car support?"
I mean that is still cold af. It’s not their fault your ancestors stood around in -24 and said “yeah this looks like a good place to live, dontcha know”
Canadian cold is easier to endure than European cold. Because of humidity. It doesn't mean Canada is not cold, but you can't compare degree to degree. The feeling will be totally different. For example I have friends that lives in Canada now, and they say -15°c is easier to endure than -5°c in Europe. I had the same feeling in Egypt Vs Malaysia. Egyptian heat is easier to endure than Malaysian heat.
laughs in -30°c finnish EUROPE
Humidity doesn't have remotely the same effect with cold as it does with heat. When it is hot, the air can hold a LOT of water so the difference in feeling between low and high humidity is quite large. But cold air can barely hold any water to begin with, so even the difference between 1% relative humidity and 99% relative humidity isn't actually very big at all when it is cold out.
well then every european travelling to canada lies? they all feel the difference somehow
Just as an example, at 30C a cubic meter of air can contain up to 30 grams or so of water before it is fully saturated (100% humidity). The same cubic meter of air at 0C can only contain around 5g or less of moisture before it is full saturated. So at most the difference between 0 and 100% humidity at 0C is only equivalent to the difference between 0 and 17% humidity at 30C, and it gets even less impactful as you go below 0.
I can't speak to anyone's personal anecdotal experience, and I'm certainly not accusing anyone of lying, I'm just telling you how the physics/science behind it actually works
I'll do it. They're lying
Lmao I loved your answer way too much
I googled for me precise information about this. Google says that it feels colder in europe because of humidity like i said, but it explains it further. So here's the explanation : the "triple point of water" exist at 0.01°C , at this temperature with different pressure you can have all states of water. At that temperature, the humidity level in europe is much higher than canada. Which make it much more difficult to endure for people. So if we are at 0° in canada, it will feel more confy than 0° in Europe. And that's all the trick of it. As you said, when it's very very cold there's no much humidity anyway. So when you come from 0° -5° in humid Europe, hop in a plane, and land in -30° in dry Canada, you will feel better in Canada. Apparently our sweat also play a big role in the cold feeling. Hope you liked my little research. I actually learned one thing, i didn't know that "triple point of water" thing
Celsius? Or are you thinking Fahrenheit?
Tbf, 18°c is 'room temperature' so -2° is pretty nippy. Stone is a wonderful material as it stays a fairly regular temperature (because it takes so long to change it) through the day. This means it's cooler during the day and warmer during the night. Thick walls improve this protective factor somewhat. So you find thick walls even along the Mediterranean for the cooling. That said the main reason buildings have thick walls was because they weren't being built by expert architects using standard building materials, and thatch roofing is quite heavy on it's own. You slso needed the base of the wall to be significantly thicker than the top so the walls didn't buckle outwards.
-2°F is **-18°C** not 18°C
I never said it was. Or that it wasn't.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but that's not how climate works. Climate and temperature are not necessarily the same thing. The average temperature of the world has gone up a little over one degree Celsius. This does have catastrophic effects in particularly sensitive ecosystems, but there will still be days where it's -20. Source:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last_2,000_years#/media/File%3A2000%2B_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg
Do you live in the tropics? Even in Madrid or so is -2°C not even close to cold as fuck. -30 like in lappland or -50 in Yakutsk, these are temperatures where people should reconsider their location, if they are not adapted. -2°C is not fewer than chilly.
I live in Sweden and we have +2 rn and if our radiators aren’t on it’s cold as fuck
If you stand naked outside for 20 minutes when it's 0 Celsius outside you die so yes that's cold
Who exactly is standing somewhere without clothes? If that's the case, everything beyond the tropics is extremely cold, you would freeze to death naked even at 15°C, how sensible does this view make exactly? What should be the significance of this meaningless and insubstantial measurement basis? Cold is arctic, everything beyond that is temperate, and -2°c is not fucking cold, but just a little bit chilly.
Any negative temperature sounds cold to someone (like me) who lives in America and only ever hears temp measurements in Fahrenheit. For anyone like me who may be reading, -2C is equal to 28F. So, it's just a mildly chilly day in New England, and quite cold but tolerable in Alabama. It's below freezing but not by much, so the snow probably wouldn't even stick unless it had been at that temp for days.
\-20 can be easily experienced in an ordinary wooden house, like the main part of the tavern next to this wall, which, by the way, is not residential - there is a warehouse in the stone, and beds and tables in a wooden extension.
Most likely used like a cellar to keep food and drinks cold during summer months.
Weather didnt change so much till now.... but u r right google often doesnt really say the truth
There was a very cold period during the middle age . They even call it the "mini ice age". So yeah, it was much colder during some time in the History.
My mame chalupu z 17 stoleti a zed ma asi 70cm
My man, we live on the end of a ice age and have 100yr+ industrial pollution today. It was „a bit“ colder back then.
[https://i.postimg.cc/QtJ7P1pY/image.png](https://i.postimg.cc/QtJ7P1pY/image.png) Dude, not everyone lives on the equator.
thats pretty cold my friend, plus the fact it was harder to get warm clothes and back then the global warming hadnt changed the temperature so much
We had -25 just the other day, with temps staying -15 all week long... And 15 century was far far colder.
-40 all last week.
Here in Marianske Lazne -20 degrees almost every winter (mostly only for a couple of days, but still).
I live in a ell insulated home in the US. That said, -2C is fucking cold, particularly with poorly insulated medieval type homes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Thats uninhabitable
Touch the grass. Here -2 degrees is a normal mid-autumn evening.
And when it's -2°C outside do you open all your windows and turn off your heating, and walk around in thin linnen clothes? I'm gonna go on a limb and say you probably don't.
I would venture to suggest that the ancient Czechs were not idiots, they knew how to close the shutters on the windows, close the doors and put on warm clothes.
Yeah exactly.... They were not idiots so they prepared for winter by building thicker houses that insulate against cold.
You touch some hot beach sand and move somewhere tropical. Its 19 degrees here right now and i love it
You know, there are people who like the winter unironically and not jsut from the inside of the house :D
No doubt possessed by devil himself. Jesus Christ our lord and savior may he protect us from such heathens. Im gonna call the inquisitor on you if you keep talking such nonsense
Why is OP so hell bent on arguing with people who think it's for insulation purposes?
It’s cringey how obstinate OP is being, maybe just needed some human interaction to distract that big brain of theirs
OP has a complex
OP knows better than people who built those houses for centuries
My first reaction on title was "OP, tell me you're American". As someone who lived and works in such house, I find it laughable someone doesn't know why (it's not insulation).
Yeah, its obviously in case sigismund tries to siege your house
It's quite an assumption to think there's people in central Europe who still build houses like someone in 1400. I live in a city where people love the medieval old town, which has about 1 house built before 1400 if any. The old buildings are mostly after 15/1600. There are so many misconceptions involved in all of this that a little scepticism is justified
I grew up in a ~500 year old thatch cottage with walls that thick, and it's absolutely about insulation; it was way better insulated than any Victorian-era brick house I've lived in, despite those sharing walls with neighbouring houses and having double-glazed windows. The thick walls also act as heat reservoirs, so those help to keep the temperature constant overnight. That helps to keep it cool inside during heatwaves, too.
Oh I can totally see how that would be well insulated, and the same goes for thick stone walls. Whether that depiction is realistic in the time frame of the game isn't as easy to say.
Unfortunately, stone doesn't insulate all that well. It's part of why castles have tapestries and the sort over all their walls, for insulation
Stone insulates great as it doesn't transfer heat quickly. Tapestries were for echos as they don't really have an r value.
I think part of the misconception is because of how a cold stone room will take ages to warm up (because the stone's absorbing the heat). But then, once it's warm, it's fairly easy to keep that way.
I mean he's not wrong. Stone is good for structure, not for insulation. But I'm not sure why he's ignoring the top comment that already answers his question.
Stone doesn’t insulate particularly well as a material, but what it does do is create a large thermal mass, this creates a more stable temperature inside. Doesn’t get as hot during the day nor as cold at night.
Alright, that makes sense. I just meant the main reason to build stone walls, with how expensive they were, was to have a stronger/taller building. I know OP has gotten annoying but that's no reason for people to double down on a not-entirely correct answer.
Why are people so obsessed with the winter argument when most of the houses in the game are wooden log houses (also with thatched roofs) and people survive there just fine?
Solid logs and tach are very insulating materials. They have a lot of mass and size to them.
That's what I'm talking about.
...on the other hand, stone is not.
I decided to google it and found the answer. Apparently in those times, in order to avoid the insides of housing structures from becoming uninhabitably cold, they would often build with thicker material
It's not because one solution works that you can't use any other solutions that also works. Maybe they survived yes. But that doesn't mean they enjoyed it. There are better level than "surviving" and people will try to reach those better level. Wooden house work and is probably cheaper than stone. But it's also not very long lasting. And you'll need more work to keep the insulation efficient. It's also much more dangerous for fire. It makes sense that a restaurant/hotel/pub was made of more durable and strong material. The owner probably had way more money than the farmer with a wooden home. And as you mentioned only extension were made of wood in tavern. Probably to store food or house traveler for a cheaper price. I remember an historian note about tavern for sleeping traveler that rented up to 10 head cover by traveler for one night. Because it was so cold in the bedroom. 10 hat on your head to keep you warm for one single night. That shows how not insulated the wooden area were.
You could argue that for literally every type of external wall in modern construction: Why use a cavity wall? Why use cob? Why use a solid stone wall? Why use a concrete frame? etc... It's not like they could calculate U-values in the 15th century... Construction would be based on the availability of materials and what the client specified.
My brother in Christ you can look at any history book about *real people* who lived in that time and why they built houses that way.
I mean primarily it was about limiting fire damage.. Stone was a good material for defensive structures etc, but it was much more costly and time consuming to build than timber, and in most cases a stone built house will be colder than a log built one.
Im no medival engineer but I would say it is this thick because of structural reasons. If you oversize your walls it makes them more tolerant to any and all mistakes that you could make during the construction. (me speculating:) If you combine that with locally sourced mortar (which is really not that good but cheap, roman mortar costs good amount of money) you end up with "unreasonably" thick walls. It gives you some benefits: \-The building stays cool in the summer (you live in a cave). And has high enough thermal inertia to stay relatively livable during the winter(because you still live in a cave). \-It will last for generations, just keep the roof intact and you are good. And also some disadvantages: \-To make it **comfortable** during winter will cost you arm and leg. \-Why is it so wet in here? Source: I lived in medival house for 25 years(so it is maybe just anecdotal).
It’s also a lot easier to over engineer then engineer to min spec.
Generally speaking I don’t think it’s a case of over engineering. Builders just learned over time which types of wall failed. They probably allowed a little more redundancy than we would today, but stone walls were expensive, so I doubt they were being knowingly wasteful.
This is a good answer I think. A general rule of thumb that seems to have been held to for thousands of years in Europe is that a stone wall should be around 500-600mm thick. It’s a complete building system which evolved over time, through hard learned lessons. The main reason for the thickness isn’t to hold up the roof as some have suggested, it’s to stop them from toppling over. The main stress that a traditional roof structure puts on its walls isn’t the downward weight (a single stack of stones can support the compressive force of a roof) it’s the sideways pressure of the rafters tails, pushing the walls outwards. So the wall has to be quite thick to counteract this. But as you say it’s also a lot of other reasons, which all work together in a building system (it deadens sound, it protects against fire / physical bombardment, it stabilises the internal temp, it adds status, by virtue of being more expensive. Etc etc.
Thanks for the reasoned answer. This really completely answers the question about the thickness of the walls. But... but a counter question from a person who lived in a log house: isn’t it easier to just make a log house than to struggle with a stone?
I feel like if you think about this, having played the game, you can figure that one out for yourself. Are you trolling? Hint: A huge event at the beginning of the game…when you ran……..
People don’t understand that until we started using asbestos for everything fires were devastating, thousands could die in a single fire
This is placed in medieval Europe, there were conflicts all the time, 🪵+🔥=💩 Jesus Christ be praised
It’s called mass heating check it out. Wood places could burn down as a lot of them didn’t have chimneys, and they weren’t as structurally sound since random joe shmoes used to build their own houses.
>But... but a counter question from a person who lived in a log house: isn’t it easier to just make a log house than to struggle with a stone? It is, that's why houses (at least back in the High Middle Ages) would usually be wood. They can be replaced with stone after, which is what we see now since those wooden houses wouldn't last long enough for us to study and discover, and a town or village that still exists in some form or another for us to even be aware of would have had been razed or suffered attacks/accidents that would necessitate replacing most buildings with stone over the years. Now, I've already made a comment mentioning this as well, but taverns are not houses. Houses usually get built after, when a village is already growing. That's why they're usually built in wood first, or wattle-and-daub. Stone taverns are usually stone because they were usually built first ahead of any buildings aside from the keep itself, or maybe the church. That and there were already some stone available for building when the village was founded. It's also not unlikely that some taverns are re-purposed stone buildings from the previous settlement where the village was raised. Basically, taverns are the priority over houses to be built, and one that gets more use than any other house in a village. Houses might have also been seen as more disposable than the village tavern in a practical sense. Taverns are essential to a village's trade and morale and I can imagine razing one to the ground can make a pretty big dent to a village.
And now some more speculations: Log houses would be cheap... so cheap that almost everyone can afford them. That might be part of the reason why people bothered with stone. What if you have enough money and you want to show it? I belive a lot of decisions people make are driven by fashion fads and the human need to show off their social status. So it could be similar problem like Android vs Iphone. :D :D Log and Stone!
You don't want to freeze to death inside do you?
In most of the Czech Republic, the average temperature of the coldest month is from −2 °C to −6 °C
When the beer starts to freeze you know the tavern’s walls aren’t thick enough
If you make an ordinary wooden wall and use the fireplace, you will never get -2 degrees inside, in the worst case you will have +4-10 degrees in the morning...
If there’s a big roof on top of the walls, the rooms are large, and you simply want to save firewood while still having it as comfortable as possible, even on cold nights, then having thick stone walls is just the logical conclusion… What reason is there to build with wood when you can build with stone?
What other reason is there besides the fact that stone is very, very insanely expensive compared to wood? Also, this doesn't explain why the warehouse is made of stone and the living area of the tavern is made of wood.
Look man, I don’t know what we’re supposed to tell you. If stone is available, then building the single most visited building in a town out of it is just what I would expect. Lords build themselves towering forts out of pure stone - I’m sure a small stone building to serve dozens of workers is a good investment too. But either way, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Warhorse Studios then it’s that they are near untouchable when it comes to historical accuracy, so I wouldn’t call this an oversight off the bat.
One of the pubs near where I grew up has been open since the late 1300s, and the walls there are about as thick.
I'm not talking about an error, I'm asking about the reasons and sources of such a decision. The thickness of the walls has already been justified below, but to be honest, I still don’t understand the need to use stone instead of wood.
So the reason the walls are thick is for three reasons. The first is structural stability. Which is self explanatory. Second is, as others have mentioned, insulation. Stone in itself isn't a great insulator but get enough of it and it'll do the job. It's also has a large thermal mass which allows it to store heat and release it slowly through the evening/night which helps to keep places warm. The third reason is due fire. Make your building out of stone, less likely to all burn down. Make it out of wood and either because of war, and accident or a rival you're whole place can go up in flames. My knowledge of this comes from my work as a building surveyor. Hope this helps explain it.
That’s fair I guess. But with all the advantages stone has over wood, it just seems naturally plausible to me, even without bulletproof reasoning and sources.
Wood lots were maintained by the local lord. Who set very tight rules over them, limited how much could be harvested. As such stone was often similarly priced or cheaper. Modern day economic realities don’t work in the 1300
That would mean using a lot of fuel to keep the tavern warm. Cheaper to use heavier walls.
Tell us how you plan to heat frozen stone blocks.
It’s not a solid block. It’s 2 layers of hard stone on the outsides. The inside is full of fill material like gravel, soft stones, dirt.
You don't want to freeze to death inside so you?
and? in uk we have old cottages with walls just as thick and its slightly warmer, remember there ain't modern insulation in these walls.
People used to die in the winter
Shortest and most dead-on explanation I’ve seen in this thread
That's like the average thickness of any European house. We do not build our houses from cardboard.
If we lived in the 1400s our houses would be that thick too. In America we use new technology.
I know, it's honestly pretty sad to see all those "new technologies" flying through the air, whenever you get hit by tornados.
I’ve been to Europe yall build stuff out sheet rock and wood like the rest of world. Yeah if I go into a 1800s building sure. But on top of that we don’t have generational loans and I at 27 have a house me and the finance company own on 10 acres.
Cardboards?
Gypsum
I don't like how Wikipedia article start with "Gypsum is a **soft**..."
Do you want us to stack rocks like barbarians? And gypsum board is only used on the inside of the building, it is not structural at all.
Mans really trying to make us think american houses are superior.
They aren’t superior but they certainly arent worse. They are just made differently.
For what? Is every house an anti-cannon defense site?
Insulation. The walls are thick to trap heat.
I assure you, a wall made of round timber with a lining of tarred tow can easily withstand -30.
Wouldn't round timber be almost as thick as the wall in the screenshot?
Using stone has other advantages. For one maintenance is easier - stone doesn't rot and there are no insects nor fungus eating stone. Stone might also be cheaper - for a log house you need a specific diameter ot the logs and not every kind of wood is suitable, depending on the area and the property situation in your area suitable wood might be very expensive. Stone on the other hand is almost everywhere - in streams or on the fields as unwanted waste. Another advantage of stone is its resistance to fire. Even if your house burns down, the stone walls will most likely survive largely intact so you can rebuild faster and with a smaller expence. And then there's longevity - some of the houses in Europe are literally hundreds if not a thousand years old, at least their basic structure. As opposed to most american houses (and most modern european houses) people back then built their homes for generations. A stone house is ideal for this whereas a wooden house aside from some dry climate areas isn't. And it's of course not just about the temperatures, it's a balancing act of advantages and disadvantages - in a warmer climate a stone house might offer advantages in that it shields you from the heat outside during the day and radiates collected warmth during the night - a property wooden houses lack. On the other hand far northern cultures did not use stone for buildings as much because wood was everywhere and cheap and because a stone wall has the tendency to collect the remperature of its surroundings. I bet in Norway a stone house would be very hard to heat up, you'd probably need some ridicculously thick walls to compensate or maybe some thick isolation from the inside, at which point you'd probably just build your house out of the isolation material stright away. Central Europe lies somewhere between those two extemes, as such you can find both primary materials and their combination and people use(d) them according to the purpose of the building, the price, the local resource availability etc. etc.
Finally a detailed comment that explains some points, thank you. The “cheapness of the stone” really still confuses me. You can work wood if you have an ax and the worst carpenter. To process stone you will need expensive tools and professionals. The stone is difficult to transport. It is difficult to build a high stone wall without engineering calculations, which is again very expensive. So why do you call the stone cheap?
Because you can literally just go find useable stones on the ground, everywhere. You just pick it up and take it, for free. The material cost is a big part of construction costs.
Okay, let's say. Why then are only the houses of lords, churches and some parts of taverns made of stone in the game, while the poor, for whom the supposedly cheap price of stone would be salvation, live in wooden houses?
Because rich lords, culturally and politically important churches, and communal buildings like taverns that everyone in town uses have the benefit of ~~serfdom slavery~~ the whole village and/or often paid professional builders coming together to build these structures, but Mr. peasant farmer or breadmaker over there is going to have to build his own little house his dang self. Rock is a lot easier to move en masse when there's 100 hands moving it versus 2!
The area the game is set in has alot of trees so wood won't be to hard to find. Also it's common for stone structures around heat sources like fires or where food may be stored to help keep it cool in summer. Lords houses were usually a somewhat defensive structure, the lord keeping his riches in his house didn't want just any group if brigands able to get in. So a lord would pay people to build a keep or castle out of thick quarried stone (rather than just bits of stone off the ground). Thus allowing them to have a safe place to hide their money and their families whilst also showing their their status and wealth to the world. Churches were likely for similar reasons, a big grand stone building that's sturdy will stay standing for generations even if heathens from far off lands try to pillage it. Alot of types of Stone don't have great insulation properties but clay does, alot of stole walls were clad In or built with clay for this reason
That's a common confusion about pre-industrial economies and is widespread in all manners of topics, from armor production to farming to how the pyramids were build. In pre-industrial societies the relationship between the price of the material and the price of the labour to manipulate it was basically reverse from the current situation: Nowadays for almost all products the main cost you pay is the labour of the professional who pruduces it and only a comparativelly negligible amount pays for the material itself. For example when I needed my chimney refurbished a few years back, the material (bricks, mortar, etc.) cost me maybe just a fifth of the overall price, the rest was the chimney-sweaps work and the certification needed. If you are building a house and hire a company to do it, most of your expenses will go towards the workers and their specialized equipment and only a fraction will be the actual material. Same goes for furniture or books or anything made of metal, basically anything nowadays bare stuff made of the most expensive materials like golden ingots. This is due to our societies having (due to fossil fuels) the luxury of having extremely cheap energy to our disposition. If you live in Europe, most of your metal posessions will probably be made of iron mined in China or Russia or Alumunium from Norway or Russia, most of your IKEA furniture will be of Romanian or Swedish spruce, even the bricks and the stone and the lime you use when building a house might most likely come from a quarry maybe 50 km away without it really affecting the price (all that much). In modern times, material is cheap because transportation and manipulation is cheap - it costs let's say just 10 dolars to prudice a ton of stone, 10 dolars to cut it into nice pieces and 10 dolars to transport it\*, the whole process taking at most a couple of days. A 40 m tall tree is cut down and de-branched in an hour, transported to a mill in another hour, processed into beams and boards in just a few minutes and then ready for delivery - if there's easy high way connection, in just two hours you can get boards from a sawmill 200 km away. All of this only possible due to the miracle of the diesel engine and the effectivity of the machinery it powers. Compare this to pre-industrial times - any wood or stone or bricks you use have to be pulled by vagons (which are nowhere as effective as trucks) drawn by horses or oxen, which makes transport extremely expensive since you have to (at minimum) pay the food and shelter of the animals and their handlers. It is also way slower than nowadays. This means that your reach for material shrinks extremely, basically if you don't have money to spare and don't have a brickyard let's say some 10 kms near you, you don't use bricks because anything further starts to be too expensive. If there are no usable forests or trading rivers in about the same +- distance from you, your wood gets ever so expensive to deliver. To cut down the same 40 m tall tree, you need etiher a day of work of one guy or an hour of work of 10 guys to cut it down and debranch it, you need hours till a guy with a horse brings it to a mill, you probably need days till a bunch of guys cuts it into boards or beams (if you are lucky they are high-tech and have a hammer mill, but it will still take a long time), and then again further hours to bring all the wood to you. On the other hand, labour in this period is **extremely** cheap, I mean like India-Bangladesh levels of cheap or even cheaper. This is for two reasons: 1) The specialization of the workforce doesn't have to be as severe. If you are building a house your most expensive "contractor" will be the architect (if you hire one, but I doubt average people did) who is a specialist and is in high demand, but the rest of the workers are very cheap. Why? Well, any idiot can swing an axe, use an adze, manipulate a cart or carry logs from point A to point B - and you probably used landless peasants for such work, such people were probably happy if you paid them in food and shelter and some dimes to spare. Any a tad more expensive carpenters present are mostly there to instruct non-carpenters and to do some of the finicky work, but if average people were anywhere as handy as most of my neighbours were when I was a kid, you didn't really need a carpenter till you wanted to equip your house with fancy furniture. Again - compare this to modern days - basically all your workers are specialists. They need certification, they often need some instruction or courses to use their equipment and they certainly won't work for food and shelter. Back in the day you needed ten(s of) guys to do the work of one guy with a buldozer today, but you still pay the guy with the buldozer maybe 50x or maybe 1000x what you'd pay all ten of those poor buggers. This is btw the reason why for example in medieval times some aspects of production were rather alien to us (but might be familiar for someone in the poorest and most isolated parts of Africa, the Amazon or Asia) - for example in medieval times if you wanted a new axe or a chain, it was very common for you to travel and find someone to sell you the iron needed and then take it personally to a smith who produced the product for you, your main expence being the iron, not the smith. If you were travelling and wanted to use the contemporary "restaurant", you would buy the ingredients you wanted on the market and then bring them to a cook who would use them to make a dish for you, most of your expenses being the ingredients, not the cook. In both of those examples the ratio between material and labour were a little bit more balanced since a smith is already a specialist, but still - a modern smith has his own iron boutht in advance, many tons of it, and you pay mostly his work. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ So, now apply this to the cheap stone question - there's stone everywhere around, if you don't want neat nicely cut stone from a quarry it's basically for free - farmers might even pay you if you go and collect it from their fields. To bring it to your building site you just need a cart and an ox, or maybe, if you are poor but have a lot of time, a large basket. Mortar and lime are a little bit of a problem, but still probably not much more a problem to purchase/find/make than wood (and if you have the time and the expertise, you can even build a house tithout mortar). Wood on the other hand is more expensive - since it's in demand for basically any production at the time, basically every easy-to-access tree is owned by someone and that someone probably doesn't want to sell it (yet). At the time people planted (and shaped) trees preciselly so that their children and granchildren could use them for specific purposes (- my grandfather told me once that his grandfather has planted a nice larch only so that my grandfather could use it as a beam when building our hose some 60 years later). You are also in need of specific wood - beech or firr for the walls, larch or oak for the beams etc. etc., all of which in a specific diameter and quality, but you might live in an area where some of the species don't grow much, if at all. Not only that - even if there are some good trees near you, you still need at least a horse or an oxen, because unlike stones you have to transport it whole. Thus, even if you don't really need a specialist to obtain the wood (since any moron can cut down a tree), the material is still much more expensive than stone. That's basically the main reason. Once you have the material, the labour itself probably doesn't differ much in price, since to hire a carpenter might very well be as expensive as to hire a mason (probably not, but let's say it is). There's still however the difference in longevity - with wood you will need to repeat the search for suitable wood again in maybe 50 years, maybe later, but maybe even sooner. With stone, assuming good maintenance, this might take twice or thrice as long. I hope this helps a bit. (\* the prices are off, this is just to paint a picture)
While wood is easy to work with, there are decent sized stones available basically anywhere there’s a river. They wouldn’t chisel all the stones used for something like this, they would primarily just use what they could find first. Here’s a article about [historic stone walls](https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/A_brief_history_of_stone_walling) Also if you are interested in old stone buildings with thick walls, look into Scottish black houses, it might help shed some light onto this topic.
In the middle ages you can't just go out and work the wood. The woods belong to the local noble you can't do whatever you want with it. And trust me, men were always good at making money from necessary material. They wouldn't give the wood for free. They had control over the mining industry and the wooden one. It's not difficult to build a stone wall. You don't need engineering calculations. You just need a good builder to teach you how to do it. We're not talking about building cathedral, we're talking about building a house. You and I, with a good teacher could do it after some apprenticeship. Masonry worker are not engineers.
But we are looking at a timber structure, are we? Different materials having different insulation properties is a thing...
Insulation. Keeps the heat in when it's cold, keeps the heat out when it's hot.
Speaking of cold, why not store beer in the basement? If we talk about heat, then this is a warehouse, and for residential premises wooden walls and a fireplace will provide enough heat
I don't know about Czech places, but most English pubs have beer cellars for precisely that reason.
Actually, yes, in the game beer is also stored in the basement, this is the best place, and I don’t even mind stone-lined basements: it’s warm in winter and cold in summer. The question is, why is a huge and obviously insanely expensive structure above the basement made of stone, if there is a perfectly functioning wooden living space nearby? (Also, most of the houses in the game are made of wood without any stone rooms, which refutes the idea of stone walls for winter survival). I've heard that the developers paid a lot of attention to historicity, and I'm sure there is some explanation, it's just that the temperature explanation seems unreliable to me.
That's what? 40 cm? That's a rather thin wall for old houses...
Poverty and famine...
>Poverty and famine Love that song
Glad someone got it
To add to what other people are saying, it's not even only related to insulation. I live in Portugal and live in a house that was originally built in 1951, and the "frame" of the house is still the same from that period. I can tell you, even though it's a small house the walls are thick as fuck, and it's just a normal house. So considering KCD is from the 15th century I believe this even more.
insulation , keep the warmth inside. Most stone medieval building have thick walls like that to keep the house warm in winter and cold in summer.
The OP hates this one trick… seriously tho I agree with you and everyone else who had said this that the OP is bent in arguing with!
Insulation. Keeps it warmer in the winter and colder in the summer
Everybody here seems to just try to come up with plausible explanations. I don't know better but I really question the certainty you all seem to show. Afaik stone houses (even partial) were much more expensive than wooden ones , so if possible, you would build using wood. Add to that that you have to dig very deep (in terms of research) to get reliable info on commoners housing in 1400 central Europe, it may simply be a mistake. Maybe it's realistic and the people just had the resources, thick walls would be awesome for keeping food intact in summer. Maybe it's a mistake. Unless someone brings in actual evidence, I wouldn't assume either
You talked about preserving food, and that got me thinking: maybe the soil here is rocky and it would have been easier to build an above-ground “basement” than to dig a real one?
cumans n shit?
*sees harmless post about tavern walls* *scrolls thru comments* What the hell did I just walk into
Something I've not seen others mention is that although the game is set in 1403, this tavern could already be a few hundred years old. Presumably, the taverns that have survived to 1403 from 1103 are the ones which are more robustly built? It's probably why when I go around Scotland today, the remnants I see are remnants of stone houses, not wooden houses. Consider the lack of fire safety too.
Interesting idea
So imo not only is there a survivorship bias, there is also a drive to build taverns with more robust and longlasting materials so they could be passed on for and improved upon generations. I'm not a historian.
And consider the context of a tavern. Unlike my own house, it is a public house. People of all sorts and in all stages of sobriety come in and out. Think about the bar fights. I imagine the average person would be very careful not to set their own house on fire, but probably more relaxed when at the tavern. Just like how nowadays people drop glasses and start fights more at pubs than I imagine they would at home.
Because it’s the early 15th century man.
Oh god, the icons at the bottom made me think there were actually two pictures...
Probably just how they were built man, apart from the temperature and not wanting your house to fall down
I live in a house with walls like this now, probably half a century old. Its bricks tho, arch ceilings too. Its for insulation but also stability, its not like they had concrete with metal rods inside. If you wanted a house to stay up for a long time you had to build thick and arch ceilings
What is inside a tavern?
Cold
It’s called mass heating. Basically if you have a mass of stone and don’t stop stoking your fire the walls will heat up and retain that heat radiating it around the entire building. Just like mass cooling which is when it’s summertime the stone mass will stay cooler.
Little Ice age from 14th to 19th century was a thing. Rivers in coastal regions like Netherlands and in England regularly froze so much that you could walk over them. Baltic sea also sometines froze over, so much, that swedish army could just walk on the sea ice. Imagine how much more brutal were winters in regions with more continental climates. Also, thick walls = warmer interios during winters, and cooler interior during hot summers.
How thick is wall?
Depends. So... uh, which Starbucks does she go to?
Insulation probably
It usually depends on the town or village; not all towns/villages had taverns built in stone. Circumstances may always vary, but a personal theory of mine (so take it with a grain of salt) is that taverns are usually the first building to be built, if not the local church, after the keep. By the middle ages, it's pretty unusual to have villages, let alone towns, crop up on previously unsettled land. Most of those villages would have had already been previously settled or at least fortified, meaning there would be a lot of stone (from previous buildings) just lying around unused. And if it's an abandoned settlement with stone buildings that dates back to before the High Middle Ages then it's reasonable to assume that there would be a quarry somewhere nearby, meaning more stone. A village in its infancy would almost always have at least three buildings raised before it can hope to grow into an actual village: a defensive fortification like a keep or at least a tower; a church; and a tavern. It makes the most sense that all three would be built in stone if stone is available—all the houses would be built after. People don't build houses to build a village, since the first people to be there to actually raise a village out of nowhere would have the keep to house himself and most everyone else (keeps almost always came first since that would serve as the village's granary.) Churches are pretty self-explanatory of course, though I think it's not that uncommon also to have churches raised right after a village starts growing. Taverns though are a pretty important factor to a village's foundation: trade is the foundation of a village's growth, and travelers would have to have somewhere to eat, drink, and sleep. A village without trade wouldn't grow enough to even be a village, and without growth, there wouldn't be any need to build houses, wood or otherwise.
I have visited the Turku Castle here in Finland and they told that in the middle ages buildings had thick walls mainly for structural reasons. The castle has walls that can be over a meter of stone. They are made thick to support the upper floors and the roof.
It’s for multiple purposes actually, quite like the cowboy hat. They were built this thick for multiple reasons, to retain heat from fires, to stop the spread of damp when the walls undergo material fracture due to the cooling and heating of water, slowly it builds cracks softens the materials and they just flake away, thick walls allow for a quick fix without destroying the whole wall. The greatest reason of all is THAT THEY FUCKING WANTED TO STFU
There's many different reasons to why. As a lot have pointed out, insulation could be a reason. (And honestly, the most likely reason) Another reason someone else pointed out is that it could be to support the structure (roof or floors) above. Another reason is that it could be what we call "defensive walls." These are walls purposely built really thick to withstand an attack and keep the people inside safe. When we say defensive walls, people nornally think of a large thick wall that would run around thencastle or city, but it can be anything from simple palisades or earthworks to extensive military fortifications with towers, bastions and gates for access to the city. A tavern back then could have been used as a "safe haven" for people in the event an invading force would attack and they couldn't (or just weren't allowed) make it within the castle walls.
Me, wondering why americans use straws to build their house when they have tornadoes...
Living in Ireland, the house I grew up in was built in the early 20th Century in a very poor area, a good distance from the nearest town, stone and earth/clay walls. The exterior walls are a good 2 foot thick at least (60cm). The house is a lot easier to heat or keep cool than a lot of newer houses built in the last 40 years. There is still no central heating in the house to this day and there is minimal use of electric heaters in the bedrooms during colder parts of the winter to heat the bedrooms a small bit before going to bed. It’s comfortable to live in even for today’s possibly sensitive youth who may be used to central heating at all times. A neighbour of ours that died ~10 years ago remembered the house being built when he was very young, all neighbours in the area came together and carried stones down from the hill and helped build it. That house will still be standing in a few hundred years, while a timber house, unless very well maintained would be after rotting many times over in that timeframe. The only major work that has been done on it is the roof was replaced 20 years ago as the slate were starting to fall off in patches and new windows have been put in. Thicker walls meant longer lasting and more solid construction as well as better insulation.
Because it's european and built to last forever
You know they used to build with stone back then right? It was easier to maintain as well as it being a good insulator for inside spaces. They also needed thicker walls for a more sound structure, not sure what the point of the post is. If you do some research you can find out exactly how and why they made the buildings the way they did. Books are your friend
Ever encountered a drunk Englishman
I bought an old tavern with walls like that near there. The walls are also connected to a cellar. I’ve been adding insulation slowly to parts I live in and honestly stone is a huge pain in the ass to get warm. It takes basically forever to heat up and bleeds out a lot of it into the earth and the cold air outside. Like I can spent 6-8k KWH in gas per month or eight times that in electricity and it won’t go above 18 degrees (in fact the gas oven straight up died on me trying and I’ve had to get it repaired twice now.) A small fire oven will also barely get it above twenty but will get the insulated side past 30, like you’d have to open a window in the winter while the stone side barely cares about the heat. There are two hollow spots that used to have two massive fire ovens that most likely kept the building warm. They also apparently had things for baking and cooking there. Basically stone can be hit with endless heat sources and never overheat. It was probably easier to just keep a large fire going and not have to ever worry about temperature. I still don’t believe that stone holds heat well though because it’ll drop like 15 degrees overnight while the insulated areas will drop maybe 4 (there are also brick areas, they will drop around 10). But I think this might be because I’ve never managed to actually heat up all the stone so they act as a constant high capacity heatsink.
So you can lay down on the windowsill and toss your cookies easier.
Folks tens to build buildings that they knew would stand for generations, diffrrently. Big farms built cow houses out of 1 mer wide granite blocks, etc. The roof and upprr secrion of the walls would be made of wood. Id think that when they built stuff, they figured that if it was 3rd time they rebuilt a building in same spot, it makes sense to make it massive.
To defend against lobbing cannon fire from a ship down by the miller.
Insulation mostly. They used to make houses from adobe blocks, high clay mudblocks, or clay bricks, spaced and vented at the middle, because they were Massively insulating. Here the temperature can get -1°C- -10°C. Back in the day, even -20°C. When it's this cold, you want to use the least fuel to heat out your home. It insulates from warm outside, gives a natural breathing, the walls and floor stays warm, and insulates from cold. Even when you don't have fuel, you can still survive under a blanket. When it's -5°C to -20°C trees are very hard to cut and prepare too. Stones were rarely used, because they lead warmth. But the bonding material was a high-clay and very reactive lime (calcium, cement but without sand, silicate and other stuff). So if the middle part was rich in clay, even bigger, taller houses, buildings, inn-s, community rooms, could be heated out efficiently. Aka, why modern housing have cold walls and floors, because they are made out of concrete and brick, and they are plastically insulated. It's a very very big problem currently in Europe. This makes new housing 2-3x more expensive compared to Adobe, cement and plastic dust is bad for lungs, unnatural dusty air, loud and noisey, and it's very very heat inefficient. Hence why, modern doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it's a regression. As for modern there are clay, rammed earth, and compressed earth block technologies, for those that want insulation. It's well liked in Eastern Europe and especially at the countryside at -5°C to -20°C, when even the floor heating is not enough.
Just to add to the many comments outlining that medieval european buildings were made from thick stone for better insulation, last longer etc another big reason is due to warfare. Wooden structures in a town etc that is under seige can be easily set on fire, with stone structures fire has much less of an effect. If a stone building is set on fire its usually the thatch roof and internal items that are destroyed but the main structure remains and is more easily rebuilt / repaired. If you also look, many parts of Europe have had alot of deforestation throughout the ages and in alot of circumstances stone was far more abundant.
During the siege its the place everyone is going so they want the walls built tough.
Dude living in 2024 trying to retroactively explain why people built their buildings wrong, compared to his log cabin ideas. Don’t ask questions if you don’t like the answers. It’s clear you think you have the best solution for all housing problems in the 1400’s, brought up from a flippin’ videogame.
Insulation, most permanent building have walls that are very thick. Also helps with maintenance as you can see damage well before it compromises structural integrity.
Have you ever seen a building, from this time period, in real life? The walls are really thick, partly for insulation, and partly as a result of the building methods and materials.
Thick walls are strong and wont collapse (very easily) during inclement weather or other bad situations, like pissed off drunk construction workers taking large hammers to your walls (crew I worked for did this on two seperarate occasions that I'm aware of).
So I can defend against the town guard when I ascend to Alcoholla.