Would oil barrels be used in castle sieges as a defense mechanism band if so, how would you actually use them?
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Water evaporates. If you boil a pot of water and then dump it over a wall a lot of the water will have evaporated by the time it hits the ground, meaning that there isn’t a huge amount of hot water left. What water does hit the ground continues evaporating and cools off within a few seconds.
Further protecting the people who got covered with the water is the fact that the human body is waterproof, so what water doesn’t evaporate stays on the outer layer of skin. It takes that water a long time to burn through to the lower layers of skin and cause really severe damage.
Oil doesn’t evaporate. If you dump searing hot oil over the wall then 100% of the oil makes it to the ground and it is just as hot as it was when it got dumped out of the pot. And unlike water, which rapidly cools off, the oil stays hot for a really long time.
To make matters even worse, the human body will absorb oil. So rather than just sitting on top of your skin and slowly burning through, the oil immediately permeates down into the deepest layers of skin – instantly frying your skin and then destroying the muscle underneath.
Its literally the difference between boiling food in water and boiling food in oil. Food boiled in water takes awhile to cook. Food boiled in oil almost instantly fries.
Dumping pots of heated oil over the walls to discourage attackers from climbing up was a tactic. Like a grease splatter from hell.
There were also fire-based options like rolling a barrel off a rampart and igniting the oil on the ground after it broke apart. Not many army want to charge through a wall of fire.
Actually oil was expensive and only used as a last resort. More common was throwing burning sand and pitch.
The idea is that when attackers are at the foot of the wall trying to batter a door or put a ladder, showering them with a burning medium (pitch clinging to the surface, sand going in armors) will cause enough burns to incapacitate the fighters.
Two ways of use were in place:
* just pour over the wall (typical for straight walls)
* throw a barrel (only works for walls with a sloped bottom). Barrel bounces off the bottom of the wall and hopefully shatters, projecting a full spread of burning medium ont enemies.
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