cynicalandglorious asked: Got anything on medieval locks, besides warded, pin-tumbler, and spring locks? Relatedly, any idea why every fantasy/medieval game has shitty inaccurate lockpicking (besides Oblivion, which knew what it was doing)?
Thank you so much, I’ve been trying to tackle this for ages. 🙂
But I must disagree with your assessment: unless Oblivion takes place after (an equivalent of) the Industrial Revolution, it didn’t know at all what it was doing. Coiled springs have no business whatsoever inside a medieval or even early modern lock. These are modern modern. (To my understanding. If anyone knows otherwise, gimme your sources and I’ll give you cookies.)
So let’s dive into
Historical Lockpicking (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Inaccuracy)
1. Locks
Every history of locks I’ve seen follows the same pattern: the Sumerians use rudimentary pin tumbler locks from 4000 BCE, and then the Egyptians improve them a bit. They’re not like the modern ones, they look like this:
Here’s a video that demonstrates how they worked. Then padlocks and warded locks appear in Rome and in China and in between, they’ll eventually end up like this.
And then crickets, until the late 18th century, when you begin to have all sorts of new locking mechanisms (and patents) in Britain and the US. This goes on for a while, until 1848 when the Yale lock is invented – the modern pin-and-tumbler that we all know and love, and is widely used to this day. Most of the lockpicking tools and tutorials you’ll find around here are about the Yale lock.
As far as I can tell, if you use the Middle Ages as your starting point for available technology in your setting, the warded lock really is the standard, most common lock around. Fancy locks are simply warded locks with more complex wards, which doesn’t necessarily make them more difficult to pick, it just makes them… fancier. And this went on before and after the Middle Ages, all the way until the modern period when new tech finally appears.
So it seems that you can have exciting methods of lockpicking or historically accurate methods of lockpicking – but you can’t have both. (Obviously, in fantasy settings, “historically accurate” translates to “if you want to evoke the tone and feel of a real life place in a specific era”.)
2. Lockpicking
And how did pre-modern burglars deal with locks? Well, methods of lockpicking included brute force, skeleton keys (warded locks are spectacularly vulnerable to those), or a bunch of different keys that you tried one by one and hoped.
How it works: On a key for a warded lock, the wards don’t actually do anything in the process of unlocking, they just allow the key to turn inside the lock. If you file off and cut away the wards, you are left with the bare basics – a skeleton key – which turns just fine, and works. So burglars carried a bunch of these for dealing with different locks, and simply had to use one with a similar enough length/size and general shape.
Security via locks was so bad in the Middle Ages, that in some cases people ignored them altogether: gates, instead of being chained with a padlock, could be closed with ropes or ribbons tied in complex knots. It was a child’s play to cut these, but not to untie and replace them unless you knew how. It was like a wax seal: zero security, it doesn’t actually prevent entry, but if somebody breaks in, you’ll know. So you can have guards around to deal with burglars, and rely on the knots for alerting you to unauthorised entries.
Copying keys was also a thing, because in 1394 London smiths were forbidden to make keys from an impression, “by reason of the mischiefs which have happened”.
Old Bailey records from the 1680s mention “pick-lock keys”, and although there’s no description, from the context I gather they are skeleton keys.
And also several Pick-lock Keys were found that would open all the House-doors, Trunks, Chests, and other fastenings in the house…
He had a Dark-Lanthorn, and a bunch of Pick-lock Keys…
as likewise a Pick-lock key, and a Chizel taken about her…
proved that he broke open the Chamber door with an Iron, after he had attempted to pick the Lock, and found it Bolted [source]
In 17th century France, a burglar was once sentenced to be branded with hot iron, and he was branded with the very keys he’d used in the burglary. [source] It’s not clear if they were skeleton keys or normal ones, but either way, the plural indicates that he carried more than one, and they were keys of some sort. Not lockpicks, or other tools.
Also check out Housebreakers and Burglars of Victorian London: although it’s about the modern era, it’s still useful because at the time the Yale lock hadn’t spread yet, and London was still full of the same type of locks that had been around for ages. And with the exception of skeleton keys (also called “picklocks” or “betties” at the time), all other burglar tools were for bypassing the lock, and entering through windows, roofs, the woodwork.
And what about the old pin tumbler lock, that’s been around for thousands of years? How did people pick that one? I’m afraid I don’t know. I’ve seen mentions of lockpicking – as opposed to the much more common use of brute force – and the general consensus is that it was an easy thing to do, but I’ve found no descriptions of how they were doing it, exactly. I could make conjectures, but sadly I have no evidence. (If you have evidence, please send them my way.)
3. Fantasy Lockpicking
So it turns out that modern-looking lockpicks are non-compatible with warded locks. (Though similar ones could be used for ye olde pin tumbler. Probably the hooks, not the rakes – but that’s just my guess.) And all the single-pin picking methods, this exciting mechanical puzzle you gotta solve, are for a type of lock that didn’t exist before 1848. Awww.
And we got a problem here. Most people choose to play a lockpicking thief because they want to be subtle, and/or because they dig puzzles. If you just wanted to bash chests and doors until they open, you’d play a warrior, right? And trying skeleton keys one by one until one of them fits doesn’t sound very exciting.
With that in mind, I’m not gonna hold a grudge for any fantasy game that uses historically inaccurate methods of lockpicking. There’s a reason for that, and it’s pretty important: better and more rewarding gameplay. If you were writing a novel, you’d have a reason to stick to accuracy. Still not an imperative, mind you, since most authors cherry-pick historical elements from all over and mix them with fictional ones, even if they begin from something specific. But games have a function that supersedes all that. Games exist to be played.
In D&D, we got even less need for historical accuracy: the setting isn’t assumed to reflect a specific time and place unless the DM decides to make enormous amounts of effort and make it so. Until then, the setting is a pseudo-medieval mish-mash, emphasis on “pseudo”. It’s fake. And that’s OK, because it’s fun. 🙂
Roguish 