Forgotten Alive: The Horrifying Story of the Oubliette

“Pain should be the test of truth, as though truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch under torture.” - Cesare Beccaria

Imagine being taken prisoner inside a medieval castle. You are marched through corridors, down a staircase and eventually brought to a small opening in the floor. There is no conventional prison cell waiting for you below. There is no door, no window and possibly no staircase. Instead there is simply a hole disappearing into darkness. A rope is attached to you, or perhaps you are simply pushed, and eventually you find yourself at the bottom of a stone chamber with the only entrance several metres above your head. When the opening closes, the light disappears with it.

This is the oubliette, one of the most unsettling forms of imprisonment associated with medieval Europe. The name itself is almost perfect. It comes from the French oublier, meaning “to forget”. The traditional explanation is therefore that an oubliette was quite literally somewhere a prisoner could be forgotten. Unlike a conventional dungeon with a door through which guards entered and prisoners might eventually leave, an oubliette was normally entered through an opening in the ceiling. Once somebody was inside, getting out without assistance was almost impossible.

The classic oubliette was essentially a deep stone pit built into a castle, tower or fortification. Some were narrow vertical shafts, while others widened towards the bottom into what historians sometimes describe as bottle dungeons. This shape made escape even more difficult because a prisoner might be able to see the entrance directly above him but have absolutely no way of reaching it. Smooth or near-vertical stone walls offered little purchase, while the entrance could be covered by a wooden hatch or iron grille. Most prisons are designed around preventing somebody from passing through a door. An oubliette simply removed the door altogether.

The experience inside one would have been horrendous even if the prisoner was being deliberately kept alive. Many were underground or located within the foundations of towers, meaning they could be cold, damp and almost completely dark. Ventilation might consist of little more than the opening in the ceiling. Sanitation was virtually non-existent. A prisoner confined there for any substantial period could be surrounded by his own waste, vermin and stagnant water while depending entirely upon the people above for food and drinking water.

There was also the psychological effect. Medieval imprisonment was often a deeply uncertain experience anyway.

There was no assumption that every prisoner would receive a fixed sentence and walk free on a particular date. People might be detained while awaiting trial, until a ransom was paid, while political negotiations continued or simply until somebody powerful decided what to do with them. Put that person at the bottom of a dark pit and the uncertainty becomes considerably more disturbing. They did not know if food would be lowered the following day, whether somebody would return or even whether anyone outside the castle had been told where they were.

That uncertainty helped create the legend of the oubliette. According to the traditional story, troublesome prisoners could simply be lowered into the chamber, the hatch closed and their existence ignored. No executioner was needed because hunger, thirst, disease or exposure would eventually do the work. The prisoner had not technically been publicly executed. He had simply disappeared. It is a wonderfully sinister story, although there is good reason to be cautious about assuming that every surviving pit dungeon was routinely used in this way.

Real pit prisons unquestionably survive in medieval castles. Pevensey Castle contains a basement chamber that can only be entered through an opening in its roof and is generally identified as an oubliette used as a prison cell during the 1400s. Warkworth Castle also contains what has been described as an oubliette or pit dungeon within its great keep. These are physical structures, not inventions created by horror films or Victorian novelists, and they demonstrate that prisoners really could be confined in chambers accessible only from above.

One of the most notorious examples is at St Andrews Castle in Scotland. Its so-called bottle dungeon was cut directly into solid rock beneath the castle. The narrow entrance opens into a wider chamber below, producing precisely the sort of shape from which climbing out would have been exceptionally difficult. Historic records connect the castle with some extremely violent events during the Scottish Reformation. Protestant preacher George Wishart may have been imprisoned there before his execution in 1546, although this cannot be established with certainty. What is known is that after Cardinal David Beaton was murdered inside the castle later that year, his corpse was placed in the dungeon.

Pevensey provides another useful insight into the realities of medieval imprisonment because status mattered enormously. Important prisoners could be treated very differently from ordinary captives. The castle held people such as James I of Scotland and Joan of Navarre, Queen of England, but they were not simply thrown into the oubliette. Joan, who was accused of plotting the death of Henry V through witchcraft, was imprisoned in considerably greater comfort and retained servants and elements of aristocratic life. The darkest pits were far more likely to be reserved for people lower down the social hierarchy.

The reason historians are cautious about the more spectacular stories is that the architecture survives far better than the evidence describing precisely how every pit was used. A hole beneath a medieval tower may have served as a prison, but similar spaces could also have functioned as storage chambers, cisterns or other practical parts of a castle.

Later generations looked into dark holes beneath ancient ruins and sometimes supplied considerably more exciting explanations than the surviving documentation justified.

The word itself provides another clue. Oubliette existed in medieval French, but its familiar use in English became popular much later. Sir Walter Scott helped introduce the term to English-speaking readers through his 1819 novel Ivanhoe, in which a character awakens bound inside a dark underground chamber and identifies it as an oubliette. Scott's enormously successful historical novels had a major influence on how 19th-century readers imagined the Middle Ages, and later writers enthusiastically expanded upon the idea.

Victor Hugo was among those who helped develop the image further. In his novel Ninety-Three he described an oubliette beneath an old fortress and confidently suggested that such chambers were a standard feature of medieval keeps. It was wonderful Gothic literature but considerably less reliable as architectural history. The Victorian fascination with medieval cruelty did much to create the version of the Middle Ages we still see in films today: castles filled with torture chambers, racks, iron maidens, secret passages and forgotten prisoners screaming beneath the floor.

The oubliette occupies an interesting position somewhere between history and later mythology. Pit dungeons existed. Prisoners really were held in them. Some surviving examples genuinely have no conventional entrance at ground level. Medieval authorities were perfectly capable of keeping people in dreadful conditions and sometimes allowing prisoners to die in captivity. What we cannot confidently say is that every castle had a specially designed chamber whose normal purpose was to drop people inside and intentionally starve them until everyone forgot their names.

In some ways, the less sensational explanation remains horrifying enough. Consider the logistics of simply keeping somebody alive in one. Food had to be lowered from above. Water had to be provided. If the prisoner became ill, reaching them was difficult. Human waste accumulated unless some method existed for removing it. Light might disappear completely when the hatch was closed. Depending upon the depth of the chamber, conversation with another person could consist largely of voices coming from somewhere far above.

The prisoner was therefore completely dependent upon his gaoler. The walls did not necessarily need chains because there was nowhere to go. A conventional prisoner might attack a guard when his cell door opened. An oubliette prisoner could be fed from above without anyone ever needing to enter the chamber. There was no lock to pick if there was no door, no guard to overpower if the guard never came inside, and no obvious escape route if the entrance was several metres above your head.

Bottle-shaped dungeons made the problem even worse. Their narrow necks opened into broader chambers underneath, meaning a prisoner standing at the bottom might be in a space considerably wider than the entrance above. Climbing directly upwards required somehow reaching that narrow opening first, often without ropes, ladders or anything substantial to grip. Even if somebody could climb part of the way, the opening above could simply be covered or locked.

There are stories of oubliettes containing spikes, blades or piles of human bones belonging to generations of forgotten prisoners. These should be treated with considerable scepticism. Castles have attracted gruesome folklore for centuries, and an unexplained underground chamber provides ideal conditions for such stories to develop. Human remains discovered in a pit do not automatically prove that prisoners were deliberately dropped onto spikes or starved there.

The genuine horror was usually much simpler. Darkness, isolation, cold, hunger and complete helplessness required no elaborate machinery. This is also what distinguishes the oubliette from many devices traditionally described as instruments of torture. The rack needed somebody to operate it. A thumbscrew needed somebody turning it. An oubliette could inflict suffering merely by existing. Put somebody inside, close the hatch and the architecture did the rest.

It is easy to understand why stories about these chambers became so powerful. There is something instinctively frightening about being trapped underground while ordinary life continues only a few metres above you. People could walk across the floor overhead. Guards could talk, eat and sleep within the same castle. Outside, markets continued, bells rang and seasons changed. The prisoner might hear fragments of that life but remain completely separated from it.

Perhaps this is why the name remains more disturbing than simply calling it a pit dungeon. Prison suggests that somebody intends to keep track of you. Oubliette suggests something else entirely: forgetfulness. Whether medieval rulers routinely used these chambers to make unwanted people disappear is far less certain than later writers would have us believe, but castles such as Pevensey, Warkworth and St Andrews demonstrate that prisoners really could find themselves confined inside deep chambers entered from above.

For the unfortunate person standing at the bottom, the historical distinction probably mattered very little. They were underground, the only entrance was above their head and the only people capable of letting them out were the same people who had put them there. Whether they had been officially sentenced to be forgotten or merely imprisoned in conditions where being forgotten was possible, the result could have felt exactly the same.