Would a medieval city sat next to a castle or a keep have a wall around it?

by mcmanybucks

I'm doing this thing in minecraft, and my keep has a big wall around it with battlements, murderholes etc.. and I'm gonna add a village surrounding it, but I wasn't sure if the village would have the same type of wall.

the_direful_spring

There are cases where this was done in cities, Rougemont Castle was built into Exeter's city walls for example. Particularly common if there was an existing older set of originally Roman walls or the like which were then reinforced by castles in the medieval period. That isn't universally the case though with Old Sarum for example containing a castle at its centre and while its walls stand on iron age earth works the walls that surround the town in which the castle sits are medieval. A small village however would be much less likely to enjoy this kind of defences.

The expense of producing such walls means even in towns and cities large enough to get them typically you tend to see city walls of all but the wealthiest settlements being somewhat smaller than a large castle's curtain walls, the towers at a less frequent intervals and potentially smaller. Though this is somewhat less true in some parts of the east such as the famous city walls of Constantinople. Additionally where a castle would be built to maximise the difficulty of bringing siege weaponry up to it, built with steep slopes on as many sides as possible and using terrain such as rivers, its hard to ensure there are few viable approaches for a large settlement which is likely to be built on relatively flat ground though so you'd have to make do with earth works.

Even if the owner of the castle had enough money to have the entire length of the village surrounded by a wall the reason why they might not do so is that the disadvantage in this is that the garrison then has to defend a much greater length of wall. While the attacker has a slightly harder time fully encircling the position increasing the length of the wall that needs to be defended and the distance between any two positions likely to be assaulted somewhat makes the defender's job harder. Particularly if the attackers were to spend the time making a few different breaches or you aren't able to produce the wall around the village formidable enough that it can't be taken by escalate with ladders this increased distance means that while the attacker can potentially threaten multiple points on your defences the greater the length of those walls the harder it is to be able to concentrate the garrisons efforts against an assault. The defenders would also have to consider the fact that their supplies may not last as long if they were also having to feed the villagers trapped inside with them. So you can see why they might choose not to make such a wall.