If you’ve ever visited a medieval castle – or read a book about them, or watched a TV show about them, or just have one of those friends who likes to come out with weird bits of trivia every now and then – then you’ll have heard this one before: the staircases in castles, it turns out, almost always ascend in a clockwise direction. And guess what? There’s apparently a really good reason for that.

So what is it?

Well, what I heard was…

Let’s start with the facts: it’s definitely true that medieval castles tend to have spiral staircases, most often going up in a clockwise direction. In fact, this setup is so much more prevalent that it made up around 70 percent of castles in England and Wales in one 2011 survey.

And, if we believe… well, just about every tour guide throughout Europe and North America, then that bias towards the clockwise direction is no coincidence. 

“The story goes that all spiral staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post,” explained James Wright, a buildings archaeologist and Archaeological Consultant at Triskele Heritage, back in 2020. 

“It is a particular favourite of tour guides,” he said; “[it] appears in castle guidebooks and interpretation panels, has been included in many popular texts, gets incorporated into television documentaries, is widely present in internet articles and is liberally recited by members of online discussion forums.”

As a factoid, it’s almost perfectly designed to stick in your mind. It’s niche, while being simple enough that even a kid could appreciate it. It survives basic testing: swing your right arm around as if wielding a sword, and – well, yeah, it would be more difficult if there were a big stone newel post to your right. And, well, it feels right, playing into our mental image of medieval life being fraught with castle battles and plate amor-clad knights sword-fighting among the crenellations.

Best of all, you’ve heard it from just about everyone who would know – your parents, tour guides, online “Did You Know?” lists – with pretty much zero competing theories to account for the prevalence of clockwise staircases.

There’s just one problem. “There does not seem to be a shred of truth behind it,” Wright wrote. 

So where did this myth come from? And what’s the real story?

Wait, what?

Yeah. Sorry to all you castle-heads out there, but there’s no conclusive evidence at all that this whole “fighting on the stairs” theory actually holds water. In fact, far from being the commonsense engineering solution it feels like, it arguably doesn’t make much sense at all.

“On the rare occasions when sieges did occur the chroniclers were keen to report them – disaster and death garnered readership in much the same way that it still does for modern media headline writers,” Wright explained. “Consequently, we know a fair bit about how sieges were ended, and it was never the desperate violent rout on the staircases that is so beloved of Hollywood films.” 

Yup: turns out medieval warfare was less Game of Thrones and more… well, that one episode of Game of Thrones where they had that long boring siege that eventually ended when the attackers bribed the other guy into surrendering. “The most common endings of sieges were starvation (Rochester, 1215; Kenilworth 1266), threats of punishment (Nottingham, 1194), bribery (Newark, 1218), blunders (Conwy 1401), or clever chicanery (Chateau Gaillard, 1204),” Wright pointed out. “If a rare siege resulted in fighting on the staircases then the game really was up.”

Even if a battle did end up reaching the “swinging at each other on the stairs” stage, it’s, well, debatable whether the direction of the staircase would be that decisive a factor. Keep in mind that a longsword – probably the most iconic of the medieval knight’s weaponry – would typically be at least 110 centimeters (43 inches) long including the hilt, and therefore quite a bit larger on its own than, say, the 70-centimeter (28-inch) wide staircase in the great tower of Goodrich Castle, regardless of your direction of travel.

“Such incredibly cramped spaces would not have allowed for the swinging of any weapons at all,” Wright noted, “and, if fighting had ever occurred (which it didn’t), short thrusting weapons may have been more practical.”

“There is also the possibility that an upwards attacker may have had the advantage due to the vulnerability of the legs and nether regions of the defender,” he added, “plus the uncertainty of balance caused by leaning over to fight in a downwards direction.”

And then, of course, there’s the smoking gun: that 70/30 split. If some 85-90 percent of people are right-handed, then why would anticlockwise staircases be so overrepresented? Why wouldn’t all staircases be clockwise?

Aha, I know this one! It’s because…

Nope, sorry. We’re gonna stop you right there. There’s no evidence that whatever noble family you’re thinking of right now (even if it’s the Kerrs) was somehow all congenitally left-handed, and that’s why their castle staircases go the other way. 

But the theory has to come from somewhere, right?

Of course! It’s just that, like so many other “facts” about medieval life, it comes from the Victorians.

“The earliest citation of the swordsman theory that I have been able to determine is in the writings of an English art critic by the name of Sir Theodore Andrea Cook,” Wright wrote. “Cook first incorporated the story in his 1902 essay on spiral staircases entitled The Shell of Leonardo.”

Was Cook a medievalist? A historian? A builder, or military officer, maybe? No – he was an artsy guy who loved fencing. His essay wasn’t a treatise on the tactical advantages of various staircase designs, but a love note to the aesthetics of spiral designs through history. And, most damningly of all, he actually outright says he thinks anticlockwise staircases are probably the more common and convenient setup. 

Clearly, Cook was not troubled by peer-review, is the point. And yet, from his few and fairly offhand remarks in one essay and book, a myth was born: “Within a decade the writer Guy Cadogan Rothery had repeated the swordsman theory and specifically referenced Cook in his bibliography,” Wright noted. “It was then absorbed into popular books on castles by the author Sidney Toy and by the mid-twentieth century it had become widespread accepted knowledge.”

So, what’s the truth?

Why, then, do so many medieval castles have clockwise spiral staircases? Well, it’s likely a practical decision, Wright believes: “The direction of the twist may be related to the practicality of carrying goods, the spatial considerations of access, or possibly even one-way systems of access,” he wrote. 

Ultimately, though, staircases in medieval times were exactly what they are today: primarily, a way to get from one floor to another. The reason why such a high proportion of them wend one way rather than the other may simply be a matter of taste or fashion – which in turn may explain why anticlockwise staircases seem to fall particularly out of favor in the 11th and 12th centuries, before becoming relatively popular during the mid-to-late 13th century.

“The spiral staircase […] could be a significant architectural device, and was used, like the straight stair at Castle Rising, to heighten grandeur, monumentality and theatrical drama,” reports one 2011 paper on the phenomenon. “It was also used to display wealth, and to demonstrate the patron’s knowledge and awareness of stylistic advances and innovative aesthetic features.”

So, why do medieval staircases usually rise in a clockwise direction? Probably just convention; maybe for design and space considerations; almost certainly not to help defend against invading armies in nail-biting mid-staircase battles.

Of course, that probably won’t stop people from believing it.

“The swordsman theory is a vastly popular story,” Wright admitted. “I do not doubt that the myth will continue to be recited.”