Towers and Households: Eating at Polanen Castle (original) (raw)

Little is known about medieval households in The Netherlands and much of what does exist is not related to tower houses. Written sources usually do not go further back than the late fourteenth century and even then they almost exclusively deal with administrative matters such as fiefs. The few excavations of tower houses that have occurred show a picture of the building history, but most of the time are insufficiently detailed to give insight into the occupation of a castle and certainly not of the household who lived and functioned within it. There is, however, one tower house in The Netherlands where the excavation gave insight into the use of the site and the differences in consumption between the owner and his family and the servants: Polanen Castle.