Castles were another very expensive project and I mean expensive!!!! The castles had to be made by hand so there had to be hundreds of workers plus there had to be a whole lot of bricks plus they had to dig the moat and get water to fill it. Well here is a castle to give you an idea of what a medieval castle looks like. This is what a castle looks like today. And this is a real medieval castle.
This is a castle called Good Wrench. It is in medieval England. It used to be a real castle that a real king or lord stayed in! The picture of the modern day castle above this picture is kind of a sketch just do you'd know.
This is what a knight might have looked like on his horse with a lance. He has armor on his horse to protect it and he is also wearing armor. I have heard that a knight's most important tool is his horse. It was very expensive to get a very good war horse. A horse's armor was called a bard--a light piece of tin or steel plates. Armor was so hard to get on it could take hours to put on a suit of armor.
One popular myth in the middle ages was dragons. Some knights were said to have slain (killed) dragons in the middle ages. Many knights that went on a journey and never returned were thought by some to have been devoured by dragons. Tales like the book called The Red Cross Knight show that dragons used to devour cities and take over whole countrysides until a brave knight comes to slay the dragon. No one knows exactly if dragons were real or just myths. If a knight did ever fight a dragon he would have to have a lot of armor like a helmet and a breastplate...well here's an example so you can see for yourself what a real dragon fighting knight would wear.
If a knight ever fought any kind of battle he would have to be heavily armored like the knight above. This is just a suit of armor but a knight may have really wore it in the middle ages. This suit of armor might have even been in a war!!! We cannot tell because the owner would be dead by now because the middle ages took place about 200 years ago or it could be longer I am not sure but I know it was to long ago for anybody from that time to be alive! Back in the middle ages a knight also had to wear steel gloves to protect his hands. Here is an example of a real knight's gloves.
These gloves were probably used by a real knight in the middle ages. Knights also had a lot of different helmets as well they could have vizors or could not have vizors it depends how rich the knight was because a good helmet that had a vizor would cost a lot of gold to get made but a small helm like this one would be pretty cheap.
This is a light helm because it has no vizor. All it does is cover the top of your head. Peasants called serfs might have wore a helmet like this one if they were ever called to war.
When a peasant fought in a war he might be given one of these to fight with. This is a warhammer. A big hammer made of steel to bash people with. They used to make warhammers so strong that they could bust a steel shield.
More information on the Middle Ages / back to fourth grade page