I'm just back from an enjoyable BAAS conference in Nottingham, having given my talk on Robert Frost and the First World War.
On the way there, I spent a day at Warwick Castle, where a foolhardy minstrel invited me to help wind up and fire the trebuchet. Nobody died. It was my Richard Holmes moment.
Apparently, a skilled marksman could angle a 20kg rock through a tiny window at a distance of several hundred yards. You'd get a shock if it was your bedroom it landed in. The rock which I helped to launch travelled 200 metres down a field, threatening only rabbits. And unlike the one in the video above, mine wasn't on fire.
Are there any poems about trebuchets? There should be. If there aren't, I'll write one myself.
The word trebuchet was so familiar to me that I kept thinking there had to be a poem about them. So, I hunted through some of my old poetry books and poked around the Internet but came up with nothing. Then I finally realized why I knew the word -- it is a common type font on computers!
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