What Is It: Donjon versus Dungeon

We all have a visual picture of a Medieval dungeon.  A dark, damp, cave-like cell with a rack for torturing prisoners and chains on the walls for keeping captives.  However, a donjon in Medieval terms was slightly less benign.

Donjon comes from the Old French word for a keep, the central tower of a fortified castle.  The keep could serve a variety of functions.  It might be a residence for royalty or nobility.  It could also be an arsenal, a guardhouse, a treasure house, and the last line of defense if a castle were undergoing a siege.  Secondary to these functions would be a few cells for holding prisoners.  Racks and other instruments of torture were more of a Renaissance development, though torture was a legal method of interrogation for both prisoners of war or criminals alike.  The secondary meaning of dungeon as being a darkened cell beneath a castle where prisoners were tortured, held captive and never heard from again evolved during the later Middle Ages and stems from a very specific type of cell found in some castles, though this, too is rare.

It was called an oubliette, from an Old French word meaning to forget or be forgotten.  These cells often did not have a conventional door.  Instead, a prisoner might be lowered into a pit-like room far below the castle and kept for as long as convenient or necessary.  Darkness, damp, cold and sensory deprivation were torture enough.  There wouldn't have needed to be rack or other torture instruments to make an oubliette a place nobody wanted to go.  The secondary meaning of dungeon versus donjon was well understood by the Tudor era, Anne Boleyn asking the jailer at the Tower, "Mr. Kingston, shall I go into a dungeon."  Both in terms of a dark and uncomfortable prison cell and a place where one could be forgotten about, forever, never mind torture.

Status prisoners were often held in conditions of some comfort, being allowed furniture, food, clothing and personal attendance.  More often than not, this was to prove that they were alive.  When allowances for a particular prisoner stop is generally a good benchmark as to when they might have died, though no indication of how.  Even though they were murdered or conveniently died off somehow, many Plantagenet men spent time as status prisoners.  They would not have been held in a dungeon, as we understand it, or even in a donjon, or main keep, but somewhere secure within a castle complex.