Was There Really a Pit to Forget Prisoners In? Mostly Not
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Guidebooks point out bottle-shaped pits beneath castle towers and describe prisoners lowered in and abandoned. Most of those pits were built to store things.
What the word claims
The term comes from a French verb meaning to forget and describes a pit with no door and no window, entered only through a hatch in the floor above, into which a prisoner was lowered and then ignored until they died. The word itself is the first problem, since it does not appear in medieval sources at all and enters written English only in the nineteenth century, at exactly the moment that castles were becoming tourist attractions and romantic writing about the Middle Ages was at its height. A feature named centuries after the buildings it supposedly appears in deserves scrutiny.
What the pits usually were
Excavation and reassessment point to far duller purposes:
- •Storage cellars, cool and dry and reached from above for security
- •Cisterns and wells, which are precisely this shape
- •Latrine shafts, discharging into a pit cleared periodically
- •The lower stage of a tower whose floors have gone
- •Space beneath a stair, accessible only from above
- •Genuinely a prison in a small number of cases
How real medieval imprisonment worked
Confinement in the period served purposes that make a forgetting pit economically irrational. Prisoners were held to await trial, to compel payment of a debt or a fine, or as hostages, and in the last two cases the whole point was that they remained alive and valuable, since a dead hostage is worth nothing and a dead debtor pays nothing. High-status captives were held in comfortable rooms and were an asset. Long sentences of imprisonment as a punishment were rare, since punishment was usually corporal, financial or capital, and maintaining a prisoner cost money that nobody wished to spend.
Where prisoners actually were held
Castles did hold prisoners and the arrangements are recorded, which makes the contrast instructive. A tower chamber with a barred window and a guarded door was the normal provision, and the accounts of several castles record payments for food, bedding and fuel for prisoners, which is direct evidence that they were expected to survive. Some were held in conditions of real severity, in damp basement rooms, and deaths from disease and neglect were common enough. Debtors were frequently permitted to move about within the castle and even to work. The picture that emerges is of confinement that was unpleasant, administratively recorded and paid for, rather than secret disposal.
Why the story persists
The image survives because it does useful work for several groups. It is memorable, and a guide with a dark story holds a group's attention better than one describing a cellar. It flatters the present by making the past uniformly cruel. It matches a nineteenth century view of the medieval world that has been thoroughly revised by historians and not at all in popular culture. And the architecture genuinely is sinister-looking, since a stone shaft entered from above is unsettling whatever it held. Castle guides and heritage organisations have quietly changed their interpretation boards over recent decades, and the pits are still pointed out.
The takeaway
The word appears in English only in the nineteenth century, when castles were becoming attractions and romantic medievalism was at its height, which is reason enough for caution. Reassessment identifies most such pits as cellars, cisterns, latrine shafts or the lower stage of a tower. Prisoners were held for ransom, debt or trial, where keeping them alive was the entire point.