Talk:Murder hole

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Military history: Fortifications / Technology / Medieval Start‑class

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Murder holes[edit]

I have heard the stories about molten lead just as everyone else has, but I am somewhat skeptical. Molten lead actually seems somewhat impractical to me:

For a start, it is much more expensive than even boiling oil, maybe 1/10 the price of silver at the time. For the amount of lead you would need to burn up your attackers, you could probably just bribe them to go away;
Secondly, out of the materials commonly described as being used, it is the only one with a freezing point much higher than boiling water (specifically, about 347 °C). Thus it would tend to freeze in the holes and clog them. Other materials like animal greases, wax and pitch might also freeze if they weren't pre-heated strongly enough, but you could later unclog the holes with boiling water. With lead, once the hole was clogged and surrounded by all that cold stone, it would be almost impossible to remove;
Thirdly, I have found historical references to the use of wax, pitch and oil (see Talk:Trebuchet/Archive 1#History or Anachronology?), and it seems inherently obvious that boiling water or hot sand would be used if there were no alternatives, but I have not found any contemporary references to molten lead.

Another issue us that large vats of molten lead are a disaster waiting to happen, due to the Leidenfrost effect.

Note that we have already quite rightly expressed skepticism about how often common was the use of boiling oil, but the arguments about it go double for lead. With much more practical alternatives available, I am rather skeptical. Can anyone find a genuine reference or should we mark this dubious? -- Securiger 09:29, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have been bold. -- ALoan (Talk) 21:08, 12 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hyphen[edit]

Is the term usually hyphenated? Every time I've come across it elsewhere it was two separate words, unhyphenated. Thinking of moving it unless people object. --Nscheffey^(T/C) 17:32, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure it's that big a deal, so go for it. I don't have any of my books at hand, but seeing it hyphenated doesn't seem that odd to me. Lordjim13 10:48, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Citations needed for "There is little evidence..."[edit]

There is little evidence for the widely held belief that boiling oil and molten lead was used for this purpose.

Well, if there is evidence, it should be cited. But how can we cite a lack of evidence? If there is no evidence to be found, there would be nothing to cite. Dforest (talk) 08:44, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed it. See the referenced notes at Early thermal weapons (which I made form the inaccurate boiling oil. Gwinva (talk) 00:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]