So, I made this thread asking about this in r/history, but the people in that thread have been telling me I should've/still should ask the question in here instead, to get some really in-depth, accurate answers to some of the questions I asked. I'm still not sure if this is violating any rules or not, so, if it is, I apologize, and obviously delete this accordingly.

They also told me I should've narrowed down "medieval" a bit more, since that's an enormous time span, and also maybe narrow the geographical region down a bit more.

So, I guess I'll go with 11th-13th century England/north-western Europe as the default time and place, since someone in that thread said that that era is considered to be the golden age of "Castles" in Europe.

I got a bit carried away with all the questions and whatnot, but here they are (if it's too much, obviously feel free to only answer some of them. And also feel free to answer about questions I didn't even think to ask, if you feel I missed any important questions that would've made for interesting answers):

• What was the population-demographic (of the castle) like? I.e. how many servants were there relative to the total population of the castle? What about clergy? Lookouts/guards? Nobility? Guests? Other? (especially in a large castle with as much as perhaps several hundred total people living in, or directly-associated to the castle on a daily basis)

• What kinds of foods might they have eaten (I realize this would vary depending on whether it was an English castle or Germanic or Frankish or whatever, and also from sub-region to sub-region), so, maybe that wasn't too good of a question, but still wonder about sort of the logistics of it, like if there were certain types of food that they generally preferred, due to being able to make large feast-like meals of it to serve the entire castle-population at once, for the main meal of the day, like gigantic vats of soup/stew, or huge roasts of large animals, or what, etc.

• What was the toilet/sewage system (if any) usually like? I.e. where/what-into did they poop and pee, and where/how did it get moved away from the castle (if at all). And did the protocols vary in regards to this depending on whether which hierarchical class the person belonged (nobility/clergy/military/peasant/guests/etc)

• Did they tend to have any daily, or weekly, or monthly, or whateverly "rituals" or "traditions" that were specific to castle-life, or maybe not specific just to castles, but of the era, that would normally have been going on in these castles on a fairly regular basis. I don't know what type of thing it might be, but maybe something weird and kind of formal/traditional that a time traveler would be all like "whoa wtf is going on up in hurrrr..." type of reaction when seeing it happen for the first time?

• Were there any well known types of superstitions particular to castles that tended to pervade in most large castles (i.e. "don't spill the candle wax on the hallway floor, or a ghost will haunt the corridors for 7 days and 7 nights thereafter" or some superstition-ey types of stuff like that, which were relevant to "castle life"? Preferably ones where the same exact or nearly-exact type of superstition existed in a whole bunch of different castles across a country/countries, as like a "castle thing", or something.

• Were there any activities or behaviors that were considered really bad manners or poor form to be doing inside a castle (and/or maybe stuff which most, or a significant-minority of them still did anyway, in secret, even though it was something you "weren't supposed to do" in a medieval castle in general)?

• What were the most common, or popular, or interesting forms of punishment that were used inside these types of castles (or different types depending on what hierarchical class the offender belonged to, maybe?) What would've been some common things people got punished for? What types of equipment or setups did they use? Did large portions of the castle population "participate" in the administering of the punishment, or just the guards, or a special punisher-guy (maybe the same guy as the executioner, if they had one?) etc?

• When did they tend to go to bed, and when did they tend to get up in the morning? (I assume it would depend on which hierarchical class they belonged to within the castle hierarchy, but not sure). Also, I assume that maybe they stayed up later on certain nights, like if they had an equivalent version of "Friday Nights" or something, or a very regularly-recurring holiday type of thing, where the night before it, they partied/stayed up later etc. I'm particularly curious about the LESS formal/annual-only types of bigtime "holidays" but more like, something more equivalent to a "friday night" in modern-day equivalency, (if there was such a thing/such an equivalent, that is)

• Would there have been lots of flags, or very large/tall flags/flagpoles on most of these castles? Or huge banners or coats of arms on the exterior and/or interior of these castles?

• What were the lookout-posts/sentries/guards/military-security situations typically like (not during formal "war" time, but like, in more ordinary periods of castle life). Did they sound a horn, or ring a huge bell or something if an unexpected party of guests was approaching from off in the distance? Send a meeting-force to go "meet them at the gate"? Everyone in the castle freak out and become glued to the windows? Everyone be non-chalant/HAF about it like nbd? I feel like I need to know more about this whole aspect.

• Did a lot of these castles really actually have a moat and a drawbridge? And if they did, did they really put alligators/crocodiles and stuff like that into said moats? Or is that more of a fable-vibe type of thing and not how it usually was like in real life?

• Did they usually have pets (none? small amount-but-only-for-nobility? Tons, roaming all around?) inside or around the castle? I.e. dogs, cats, etc?

• Did most castles tend to have really bad issues with infestations a lot of the time (cockroaches, rodents, bedbugs, fleas, ticks, bats, etc)? And if so, was there any type of proactive measures they tended to try to take to avoid said infestations, or to try to mitigate them to some extent? Or, after-the-fact did they take any formal/semi-formal attempts at getting rid of said infestations once they occurred? Would most of the castle residents be so used to it that they tended to have a casual attitude about it, like not jump up and down and yell and shriek if a mouse ran across their lap while they were eating dinner or lying in bed, or was it something they spazzed about the same way we do nowadays?

• Did most large castles contain a "library" or "library-room"?

• What about other specific dedicated-room types of rooms? I.e. an indoor "theater" room, or dart-throwing room, or communal-bathing room, or cards/table-game playing room, or anything like that? And if they did, or if it was only for the upper-class members of the hierarchy, were there any smaller/crappier equivalent rooms/gathering-places for the members of the lower classes, where they hung out/did stuff all in a specific room (prior to going off to their sleeping quarters or whatever, or was that pretty much it for them, like they did any "stuff" they were gonna do, in said "sleeping quarters"?

• Was there much weed smoking going on in any, most, or all of these big European castles during the middle ages? What about any other drugs (other than alcohol, I mean). Psychedelic mushrooms maybe? Some natural plant-form of uppers, downers, or opiates maybe?

• What was the prostitute situation like in castles? Did any of them actually live inside the castle itself? Or did they just live nearby and come in as guests (or secretly get hurried in through the rear entrance, if it was considered shameful/taboo?), or were there not really any hookers in these sorts of castles for the most part?

• Not sure what my question in regards to homosexuality would even be, in regards to castles, other than just figuring that it would be even tougher for homosexuals to have their sex with it going unnoticed, given the physical confines/layout of the castle-setting, so, I guess if there was any interesting historical facts/theories about homosexual lifestyle within a large castle, I'd be curious to hear about it, or anything interesting there is to know about it in regards to castles during medieval times. (I assume it was considered taboo/not allowed, but no clue whether it was like EXTRA severely not allowed in a castle compared to the regular country outside the castle, or LESS severely not allowed/authority-figures "looked the other way" about it, or what the whole vibe tended to be like about it. (Also, if there was anything noteworthy to mention in terms of the differences between man-on-man homosexuality vs woman-on-woman homosexuality, in a castle, if this is relevant/noteworthy in some way maybe)

• Were there any specific sexual fetishes that seemed to occur at an unusually high rate (relative to the overall country population/culture in the overall land of the country rather than just specifically the castles themselves), as a result of living that "castle lifestyle"? Like, more bondage, or whipping, or I don't even know what exactly, but some sort of well known castle-specific sexual fetishes that were considered an open-secret in "castle culture" or something?

• What about general nudity? (Not just in a sexual context). Were the attitudes and/or everydayish-opportunities about males seeing other males naked, females seeing other females naked, and most importantly, males seeing females naked or females seeing males naked, in castle life, that were different in any way than non-castle life in the same regions in the same eras? Like, did the confined-quarters aspect of large amounts of people all living in the same building, have any notable effects in regards to nudity, and what they thought about it/how they handled it/what types of nudity-related scenarios were going down on the regular?