Very few of us have ever set foot near a gen­uine medieval cas­tle, espe­cial­ly if we don’t hap­pen to live in Europe. Yet prac­ti­cal­ly all of us still, here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, refer with some fre­quen­cy to their com­po­nents in our every­day speech. When we invoke moats, draw­bridges, dun­geons, and even cat­a­pults, we almost always do so metaphor­i­cal­ly — assum­ing we’re not active mem­bers of a his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ation soci­ety — yet we also have no prob­lem see­ing them before our mind’s eye with what feels like per­fect clar­i­ty. The dif­fi­cul­ty comes if we attempt to inte­grate all of those images, absorbed hap­haz­ard­ly from folk tales and pop­u­lar cul­ture, into a func­tion­ing whole. The fact of the mat­ter is that peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages real­ly did live and work in cas­tles, and occa­sion­al­ly had to defend them, or indeed attack them. Using a 3D-ren­dered repli­ca con­struct­ed to reflect how those struc­tures were built in the frag­ment­ed Europe of the eleventh through four­teenth cen­turies after the fall of the Car­olin­gian Empire, the Decon­struct­ed video above explains …