Building A Medieval Castle Using Authentic Tools | Secrets Of The Castle | Timeline

castles dominated the medieval landscape and Britain has some of the finest in the world today most of decaying relics many of their secrets buried in time [Music] now historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Tom pin phone then Pete again are turning the clock back to relearn the secrets of the medieval castle builders this is the ultimate medieval technology the origin of our customs is distinctly French introduced to Britain at the time of the Norman conquest of 1066 [Music] here in the Burgundy region of France is get along castle the world's biggest archaeological experiment a 25 year project to build a castle from scratch using the same tools techniques and materials available in the 13th century it's a lot of hard work at coalface because this is industry for the next six months Ruth Peter and Tom will experience the daily rigors of medieval construction and everyday life how workers dressed 8 [Music] and the art of combat this is the story of how to build a medieval castle [Music] it's March Tom Ruth and Peter have traveled to Sam fashion a hundred miles south of Paris where get along Castle is being built there now 17 years into a 25 year project and over the next few months its most defining features the towers will take shape [Music] should dizzy the team are meeting members of get Allen's work force Master Mason fry our new chief and site administrator Sarah Preston oh this is amazing thank you so much we are cast in the making I'd like to introduce you first of all to fly up fly always our master Mason so he's gonna be guiding you throughout your stay here you oversee this entire project that is amazing that really is well it's really simple I just have to know very well of the castle but you almost like the puppet master you have the people work in the quarry that people working it's Mason's the carpenters you will control everyone well I prefer the major of a musical conductor we have to to be in the same time walking this is very important yes rhythm so it's like music well the fuel the conductor and you got the strings over there and the cushion over there and then Tiffany over there I can play a triangle building getting on is an enormous undertaking it will require some 30,000 tons of stone that must be quarried shaped and lifted into position without modern machines there are also teams of wood cutters and carpenters construction scaffolding roofing and doors blacksmiths making iron work and tools as well as tile makers and cartas in the 13th century English workers crossed the channel to hone their skills in France France is where architecture was happening castles churches we're looking at their built environment and thinking wow they're really good at that and we're importing all those ideas in to bring smoochie historians are very used to reading the theories behind how castles are made a hopefully it's an experimental archaeologist I can actually tests on those theories put them into practice 13th century life there's a lot of questions surrounding it that there aren't that many records so by the actual act of building this castle it's almost like creating a window through which we can observe what 13th century life might have been like [Music] building a medieval castle began with a wooden model so what is this model useful in medieval times they don't have a paper plan right so the use of wood model I guess this is way of the Lord saying this is what I want my castle to look like yes and enter Lord it came it changed things with the mother it seemed very easy I suppose a medieval building sites like you have here you can easily have over a hundred Masons they all can look at this and knowing angles they need to be doing in the and the wall that they're working on geralyn's design is typical of the 13th century many British castles such as Harley Conway Carnarvon have a similar layout castles were not only for defense they were show strength allured putting his stamp on the landscape inside the walls there were grand houses with great halls kitchens and even chapels a thick wall surrounded by a dry moat protects an inner courtyard which itself is protected by six towers [Music] Wow this is the great tower this is what thorium wants us to work on when completed the great tower will be almost 30 meters high providing a lookout for approaching enemies and with walls 4 meters thick it's the castles ultimate stronghold so if we if we were the wall or stand here I'm inside your inside that's four I mean that's massive it just brings home how when he tens of thousands of tons of stone will be in this castle when it's finished back then the only way of transporting stone over land was using horse-drawn carts minimizing the distance it had to be moved was paramount so like many castles of the time get-along is actually built in a quarry in the quarry we have the sandstone the primary building fabric we also have the sand and the water that can be used to make the mortar we have ochre which again can be used to making pigments we're on a clay lens here and the clay can be used for firing tiles roof tiles floor tiles and we're surrounded by forests which is source of timber it's a source of fuel that can keep the blacksmith's going almost everything we need to build a castle is just a stone's throw away [Music] the boys have put to work extracting blocks of sandstone under the watchful eye of a stonemason who's worked here for 16 years Clemence gira the first job premiere today people who yes it felt pretty cool on a PA our make this small style Clemens teaching the boys have to cut huge stones from the quarry into usable building Brooks using just a hammer a chisel and a wedge I don't think I'll give it a Gladys you it not me they're making this hole fit the wedge snugly but I'll see it Clemmie off with his years and years of experience knows exactly how to orientate this so the which goes into this one hole you hit it and that's gonna cause a fracture in there already pre-existing sediment lines and it'll split in half good we used to be able to finish one music good music good music and now sledgehammer wow you can just see the fracture starting to appear this is not about brute force it's about listening it's about looking precision engineering perfect I see this is a good island toy the hardness of the sandstone varies considerably depending on its iron content the more iron the harder the stone so the medieval Mason had a system of grading it got three categories are stoned here the pit for the path and the pouf got a path this sort of black high iron content sandstone and that's used for the major load-bearing parts of the castle the path is more reddish sandstone and the soft one the puff sort of very yellowy crumbly sandstone yes I was shopping for stone root isn't it with coming out here we're looking at the colors and we can actually get what we want the particular task we're about to do these stones will form the main building blocks of the castle just as important as the stone with the workers [Music] in the woods surrounding the castle Ruth setting up home [Music] building a castle involves such a lot of people and they've all got to live somewhere so you get a sort of temporary community setting up at the edge of the building site as all these different people come and go with their various skills and naturally over time that begins to become a bit more permanent a village in the making indeed many villages right across Europe in Britain as well as in France can actually trace their origin to being camps for workers on a building site this small hovel is typical of a workers home on a medieval building site workers cottages somewhere like this were always going to be thrown up in a hurry and fairly sort of basic but then so were those of most 13th century people and this is our everything this is all there is here is our kitchen our living room our sleeping quarters just this one single space the centerpiece of every medieval home was the fireplace the fire was not just used for cooking it also provided heat and light in grand houses obviously they sort of like cobbled this whole area but we know from lots of archaeological digs the ordinary houses it's just a patch on the ground and also I use a couple of bigger stones to balance pops on a bit [Music] the cottage needs somewhere to store the staple foods of wheat and buy the Ruth is calling on English carpenter Simon done to make it greener I'm guessing that making furniture in the 13th century was rather different from what a modern cabinet maker would do Oh certainly certainly very different from what anybody would do now or even in the last couple of hundred years you're limited by the materials and the tools available in the 13th century saws were expensive so carpenters used them only when absolutely necessary instead wood was split using wooden wedges yeah and then turn it over gosh this is faster than soaring isn't it absolutely there we go that's into Simon splits the wood again to produce planks so you know I mean that piece particularly is a really good piece of plank yeah it's pretty flat you can work with it and that's a couple of minutes I mean I hate to think how long that would take to a sawn the rough planks must now be smoothed off this is a side axe it's just ground on one one edge so it's flat on the other so you can just trim up the surface of it you can more or less use an axe like a plane once all the planks are made the ark is assembled without nails or glue pegs your basic thing for joining furniture together instead of nails yes [Music] so there are some things you do need a sort will just cut the year pegs off to size right there's no glue or anything in here it's just the word holding Zords together anyway [Music] so you happy with that they're gonna do the job it'll do the job home isn't home without a grain art absolutely not [Applause] water was another vital resource to the building of a castle and hundreds of gallons would have been used every day to make more - alone so castles were always built near a plentiful supply Tom and Peter have been sent to repair the castles well to hoist the bucket it needs a new rope and pulley we can make rope I reckon was 10 meters down give or take a meter but I suspect they sunk this to a depth where they're never gonna run out of water exactly he's crucial for defense it's crucial for life inside the car so once the castles operational you need to have that constant supply and obviously we need it now for our building Peters commissioning a pulley from woodturner Gary Baker for the first stage is to select a log yeah and the pulleys gonna be in historic okay so you could just cut a life section for a log and just do that as a pulley that would never work really problem with the end grain yeah it shrinks at different levels and it's just gonna split up live so we're gonna follow the grain this way we're just gonna rough chop it what's the wood that you were using this is a ash now she's very a very dry wood and therefore when it dries it doesn't doesn't move that much it's not gonna warp and crack a mandrill is hammered into the center of the roughly shipped wood so it can be turned on a pole lays pole legs like this have been used both in England and France since before the 10th century so it's just a pedal pulling the string around the mandrel yeah a flexible pole pole basically all it does is lift pedal back up the roughly shaped ash is turned to make a cylinder watching you that's really really toxic it is it is it's like the gymnasium maybe you would you mazey but you do get fit as well as a pulley they'll need a rope for the well rope is essential on a medieval building site to lift loads and bind scaffolding Tom's commissioning a rope for the well from the castles rope maker even a Ola first he lays hem peons along the Rope wall to form four strands each with 14 yarns I can definitely see why this is called a rope walk always him to do is walk up and down for this 50-meter Opie's as she walked half a mile was extraordinary the four strands are now complete next they must be twisted together first stage of the twisting will actually reduce the length these strands by about 10% that's about 1.5 meters so estimating that's about there when the traveller hits this mark Yvonne knows the Rope has been twisted the optimum number of times very slowly the travellers moving in but with each turn that Yvonne does we get something I see as being rope Gary's turning the cylinder into a pulley by cutting a groove in its rim [Music] take it off so smooth and so fast stop the yarns have been twisted to form strands then the strands are twisted in the opposite direction to form the finished rope [Music] to make the strands to twist the yarns in one direction to make the rope twist the strands against each other that way you create that tension that torsion it stops them unravel that's supercool economy se passe [Music] just read this through before you haul it up now Ruthie Peter can fit the pulley and rope to the well in the castles courtyard you know traditionally this is where people gossip barely standing around the well well Tilly's standing around the water cooler drop it down yeah [Music] [Music] on a medieval construction site the majority of the water is used to make mortar to fix the quarried sandstone in place okay the production of the daily batch is supervised by the policeman gold item we need 25 baskets of his son 25 and 50 oh this one motor makers at a vital role to play in the building of the castle as the strength of the entire construction rested on their mixture formulas were closely guarded secrets and passed down from master to the apprentice due to the huge amounts of sand required to build this castle they try and source as much as possible from the local area and luckily and the quarry right there means you've got a huge amount of sand on tap lime is the key ingredient that adea's the stones to one another it's made by heating limestone to 900 degrees and then mixing it with water to create slaked lime good that's very nice piece of it right now I think the experience is showing for the French guys they're really putting me to shame it's it's enjoyable work though I actually do feel like I'm now a bit more connected and castle [Applause] feel I can clean but you actually speak to some let's just get on and work and like you seems to roll around and every bit of building material you can 6yo it's just just natural magnetism you intend all that gray hair is actually lime water is actually just stressful working [Applause] [Music] today's batch of Malta and sandstone were destined for the great tower so far it's reached a height at 18 meters but when complete it will be 30 meters high the materials are hoisted to the top using a treadmill winch the forerunner of the modern crane it takes two people to power it and can lift over half a pound these things are an absolute godsend aren't they they are the machine of a medieval building site bringing up all the stone for the awards you think got 500k Taniya wait we're pulling up yet we maneuver it so easily the service my strength your ballast look there it is this is the ultimate medieval technology to lower the cargo onto the tower the boys simply walk in the other direction okay so walk slowly [Music] so this is our stone the sandstone from the quarry and it will be graded into three Lots and another pitter-pat for the buffer oh that's path medium the piff they're very very hard sandstone that is used for facing for the structure for the external walls whereas the path and the puff as she used to infill the walls tie it all together philippe de large began his career as a builder over 40 years ago for the last 10 years he's worked at get along where he's perfected his skills as a stonemason you are going to lay the mortar but not crush prepared just like this if you were bricklaying do you do that with flat surface but stone has go in and the mortar has go up into the stone so don't don't flatten okay one of the biggest challenges is ensuring the walls are absolutely straight the integrity of the entire tower depends on it the solution is simplicity itself a lead weight on the end of a string known as a plumb line on the scaffolding here you'll notice is about a two inch gap so you can get your plumb line down there and make sure the walls absolutely straight because if it's not towers starts going like that it will start going like that most of these medieval tools and techniques have been around for millennia and are still used on building sites today just doing the rubble infill to the wall so I've got the facing stone if if the hard stone and that is laid horizontally so the grain runs as it is in the ground if you imagine a book if you lay a book horizontally you stand on it it was put your weight whereas if you layer but vertically understanding it it will collapse however the infill back actually gets laid vertically so the grain is going in the opposite direction and that's because they're all stacked against each other and they push against each other around the tower making this absolutely solid all the tricks of the trade where's that more Sir Peter already in the wall top already [Music] these I'm hoping are the secret ingredient to transform what is frankly a muddy hole into somewhere country to live medieval sources tell us cottage floors were strewn with rushes for just how they were laid is a bit of a mystery what I think might be the answer is to keep it in bundles and lay them in a sort of herringbone fashion across the whole floor it's the temperature difference between putting your hand there and putting your hand there is astonishing that is cold and wet nasty that is wrong every few weeks Ruth will lay down new bundles of rushes I think that when I get the fresh ones on top what will happen is that the damp earth underneath will as these crushed down will gradually compost leaving you on top of new fresh reeds well away from that all dry and clean and warm that's the theory nobody really knows quite how this works we'll see [Music] back at the castle slowly and surely the great tower is taking shape but before they can build up the walls any further a doorway into its third floor room must be installed but some limestone has been shaped by the Masons it's gonna go to the great tower for the doorway into that top room we're just using this crane as directed by a filly using this simple lever system one man can lift four times his own weight its then raised up the tower using the treadwheel crane but would you this was the thing that built castles and this was the thing that made men feel quite seasick whilst on dry land like myself before the stones are fitted a pinnacle is set into the stone from which the door will be hung it's held firmly in place using molten lead what they've done is they've built this reservoir out to clay and that way you can pull the lead in it's not gonna drain off and don't waste the valuable resources you know the Masons have just one chance to get this right as the lead sets almost instantly once it hits the cold stone getting it wrong might mean the whole stone having to be replaced well it's brand-new it's fantastic it's amazing to think in a building of this size how little metal is actually used but where it is used it is essential now the stones can be set in place on a layer of mortar it's essential that they're perfectly aligned so the forerunner of the spirit level the Masons level is used Roman Britain medieval France or even a modern-day building site these are tools and techniques that every builder would have been familiar with these have been honed over centuries of use it is timeless it really is it's the good now yeah I'm gonna need a square here says it's all it's all good it's ready to further next door now the stone lintel that will top the doorway can be fitted this is very very delicate flow this is an extremely heavy stone possibly the heaviest stone you've made so far and that's a serious bit of kit and it it struggles to lift this it's so heavy I think we're right on the weight limit maneuvering this heavy stone with the simple crane is tricky one slip and serious damage could be done to both the lintel and the surrounding stonework yeah i felt quite vulnerable then i gotta be honest stonemasonry like so many medieval jobs was heavy work so a well-fed workforce was essential to prepare food in the cottage roof needs cooking vessels today pots and pans are metal but in the Middle Ages they were often claimed Ruth is calling on the services of English Potter Jim new bolt what would people think about cooking with with pottery I mean I think it's people scared of it the idea of it now but it used to be the way of cooking I mean it's the oldest form of cooking utensil of any sort even your iron ones are called cooking pots there's the clue first Jim makes the basic cooking pot on the wheel he then fits handles so it can be lifted on and off the fire and what I'm doing is extruding the clay so it means that as you pull the handle it creates the grain so it's gonna be stronger than if it was just squash together together clay is heavy and difficult to transport so Potter's sourced it from as near to home as possible where'd you get your clay from landfill is closed there's a side of the road as you possibly can that's a pothole one way you could lose a wagon and team for parts it's a pothole you pull over to let another wagon passing glance past next Jim reshapes the base of the pot so what shape is best then for fire for cook pots on the fire big round bottoms right you want to no sharp corners no no it means that the heat moves around the outside of the pot and then with a sharp blade of knife we start taking off the edge there as long as the pots made evenly it'll work somewhere then you can have problems around that flaring it out the round bottom means it won't sit on a flat surface so the medieval part often had legs there's the the cook pot the hovel is now fully equipped and ready to sustain the workers this is perhaps the most important thing in it this is our larger our fridge or pantry our food supply a brain arc there it is this is the mainstay of our diet this is our main food it's the starch the bulk and it's also the source of any beer or ale we might drink and the lid is not attached because it goes that way up and it becomes my daughter off when I need to make bread it's really clever in math and there are all sorts of food supplies hanging about and hanging is the operative word because I don't want anything on the floor where mice and rats can get it so hanging it either from the walls like the vegetables in Nets or from the underside of the roof keeps them safe away from all the crawling vermin and the smoke as it percolates its way out keeps away flies you can think of this space not just as a living space but as a storage space [Music] after a day's work the boys have returned to put Ruth's experimental rush floor to the test you've spent all day working on the castle you're tired just come back I mean this is insulating its cushioning it's it's it's not as bad as you think is it I mean when they say they haven't got a bed and that's that's it you just get a blanket and this is what you sleep on it sounds a bit horrendous but it's not it's all right it is a tiny space though to live it completely life just one little space like this isn't it yes the whole family I much right well you say it's a tiny space Olivia entire life I mean it I'd rather be in a small space like this and get the heat point and also how much time you're gonna spend in here really like the safety thing like a sitting room the TV and a big sofa who's gonna relax in there we're gonna be working most of the time and you've got all your jobs and tasks to do so that's sort of like rest and relaxation isn't as important salut they don't clink today that's about the only thing I've got against drinking bowls they don't clink [Music] it's morning and the team are getting ready for work knowing what ordinary medieval people wore is a challenge but fortunately a few items of clothing have survived most useful garments were survived because they were actively kept because they were the clothes of saints they have been preserved in churches right across Europe so this yellow dress that I'm wearing this is something that has been derived from too early to mid 13th century Saints st. Elizabeth from Germany and Saint Claire from Assisi in Italy so it's loose but you can you see look there is quite a lot of shaping to it you can see all these seams it's made very particularly to make the cloth hand nicely no matter what position your body's in I do have a belt however it's not to give you a waist but it's all about creating an attractive drape of cloth I tell isn't as comfy they have it everyone it is faintly ridiculous I think that medieval underwear is as big as this I think of C for Tommo that's probably an appropriate size but both myself and Ruth to fit into these I feel a bit like a pair of 1950s football shorts although in the light vaguely see-through and then we just got the phos single next hose at this stage well there it's very similar so kind of I suppose stockings and suspenders however if they were sewn onto the pants pretty soon you'd have a pair of trousers we can't see with the evolution of clothes comes from Ruth's head wear is inspired by the medieval Queen Eleanor lavake and as she got older she decided that her chin was sagging a bit and she wasn't looking quite as lovely as she did so she invented a bar bet which goes under the chin and onto the top of the head and pins there and then with a bar bet you'll always wear a Filat and this is finished it's just another band sewn into a circle when you wear that almost crown like on top it's a very 13th century look so that's it my French look [Music] today Tom and Peter have been summoned to the Masons Lodge for the next stage of their apprenticeship carving limestone so far they've been working with roughly hewn sandstone to build the castle walls but for more intricate features like arches windows and stairs limestone is preferred as its fine grain meant it was quicker and easier to carve first the boys use they're splitting skills to create rough limestone blocks under the supervision of stonemasons abdomen Abid now you can try the big one the rough block is moved into the Masons Lodge onto a platform known as a banker ready for the skilled job of shaping it how many 10 facing a stone was a basic skill that every stonemason would have heard first the edges are cut using a pitch yes yeah actually you have to do it in one time one time yeah swing you have to throw their like to follow three okay very good a stonemason would have learned under the watchful eye of the Master Mason I don't want to hear still Mason its rhythmical you can do stonemasons were paid a stone carved so the quicker they worked the more money they would earn these limestone blocks are for the chapel tower this year the team are hoping to build the walls up by six meters to complete the chapel room itself in the 13th century religion was central to daily life and nearly all castles had a chapel here we are well we are in this room yeah and we have to draw the niche in the east part of the room just in front of us yeah this drawing you have is it's very much a kind of stylized view but now's the stonemason you must precisely mark it out yes exactly we have it now to transform imagination during in youthful journey the niche is where the altar will be before any building is done the walls must be marked out with absolute precision okay this is a continuing curve of this wall the all tarnish must be in the east of the tower so Florian is marking out the east-west axis using an ingenious medieval tool I absolutely love this it's a horn would cut off the ends that's been tied to a piece of string which is way around an axle end it is encased in ochre powder I mean the same ochre that we find in the quarry when you pull the string up and snap it it hits the ground thus shedding the ochre and leaving an absolutely true straight line and these they've been around for millennia [Music] flip it over using just a rope dividers and the oak align the chapel's walls are marked out to reach this first floor chapel a limestone spiral staircase is being built to design it froa and Tom have come to the tracing floor next to the stonemasons Lodge the tracing flow was the nerve center of the medieval building site where the Master Mason drew full-scale plans using a compass the circumference of the spiral staircase is drawn actual size this is a apprentice job always the apprentice never the master foreign and kemar working out the central part of our staircase and out form the column that runs up connecting all stairs and now we're going to Joe 12-step for the medieval Mason geometry was the jewel in the crown of their art using just a compass angles and shapes could be accurately drawn to within a degrees with perfect symmetry here Florian divides the circle into six equal segments which are then subdivided to create twelve stones now we have the step we can try the step in the drawing first I mean this is a fantastic way to actually make sure before you start cutting stone wasting materials on line that they work you can see they're they're bigger than my foot length so that's workable now we need to finish one step because all the steps are the same frier needs to make just one template this is a precision job now you mess this up you're gonna mess up your stone in the castle so the last thing to do is basically just cut the template thank you very much got our template now placed on top of our large piece of stone we're marking it out with a bit of slate magic there it is now it's ready just could be just just guessing five ten minutes two or three days you can hear how good quality this stone is by the ringing sound when penny hits it and I think that's why to be honest I'm standing here and not has to be been allowed to do anything I like writing an apprenticeship for a stonemason would have been about seven years but to be honest as k1 says it's actually a lifetime you're always learning and Peter and I haven't been here long just so much to take in carving stone takes its toll on the tools and everyday there must be sharpened by blacksmith Martin Claudel is it true getting on if there's no blacksmith a for two days work stops yes walk stub because we have to fix a lot of stone masonry tools and if we don't do that they can't work first the worn down chisel is heated to 1,000 degrees to soften its tip to reach this temperature fellows blow air through the fire I love these fellows one goes up the other one goes down says it's constant air flow isn't it [Music] Martin draws the chisel to a point on the anvil then shamans it using a file but the chisel tip will be blunt again in no time unless it's hardened pardoning is one of the great discoveries of the ancient world achieved by heating the metal then quickly quenching it in water as it gets hot the metal changes color and this tells the blacksmith how hard it will be once quenched too soft and it won't cut too hard and it will shatter to carve stone it must get yellow hot the watchers for the colors appearing on surface and metal blue the red most importantly the straw yellow at the very end now it's ready for Mason's there are a few clues as to how ordinary people lived day to day in a medieval village but Ruth's piece together fragments of knowledge to work out how people did the most mundane of everyday tasks like washing up haven't got a scouring pad for the pad well this Tamir there's plenty of fresh for us I could use straw just as something to rub with now if we're going to deal with grease that's a different matter altogether sand will take the worst of it off but you know I mean no matter scrubbing with just some more mortar is going to shift the greaser to something you need a little bit of chemical help and for that I turned a wood ash just straight out the fire the wood ash combines with water to make caustic soda when it comes into contact with fat on the dishes it makes soap leaving the dishes spotlessly clean and full ash wipe it round with a bit of grass of straw rinse it out with hot water and you dare clean home easy peasy huh [Music] knowing what peasants ate in the 13th century is also a challenge but we do know what ingredients they had to hand Ruth has come to the castles garden to see what there is to harvest really do some TLC this patch of garden but nonetheless the fair few things are starting to sprout through which is a relief so I've got parsley coming through here and a number of other things that you might think of as weeds and indeed they are weeds that are edible there's a lot of land crest this little white flower on so that's quite bitter in flavor but you know anything to give a bit of bite plants that we know consider weeds would also have been used it's quite a lot of dandelions and nettles to which will help bulk it out wheat and barley were also essential ingredients flour was expensive so workers ground their own using a device that has been around for 10,000 years a rotary corn like this it's estimated to require about an hour to an hour and a half's work every day this is the daily grind you pop a handful of grain in the center barley in this case and off you go the posh EU were a more refined your food was and ordinary people often may do with food that was really quite coarse and you can see that in people's teeth when we've dug up archaeologically with the tools sharpened clamo has put the finishing touches to the step now comes the delicate task of transporting it to the chapel so your steps arriving hey your step the step is winched up the castle wall using only manpower break off [Music] [Music] [Music] once on top of the wall it's moved up the tower using an inclined plane one slip and the step could fall wasting three days worth [Music] these guys been doing this for 15 years they know how to get things like this up here but it's amazing what they can move without the use of what we call machines essential use of rollers levers inclined planes pulleys made out wood wooden stone working together perfect harmony that means each step must be absolutely level or else the staircase will veer to one side a Mason's level and plumb line are used to ensure it's perfectly positioned I suppose this staircase is still got quite a long way up to go isn't it and if this isn't absolutely perfect the first little bit of skew and that just gets magnified as you go up but carrying anything up here or god forbid fighting your way up here really difficult wouldn't it yeah Tom oh it's not stuck down there is it wait wait [Laughter] [Music] using the greens from the garden and the ground barley Ruth is cooking a medieval pottage in the clay pond a little bit of water in there I'm gonna start with my leeks this time of year nettles are still quite tender I wouldn't say that you're add Nettles for flavor particularly but they are quite good bulk they're one of the few things that grows in profusion at this time of year grain is added to create a porridge like dish [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we owe you back how was it today it's going very very well it's amazing how the whole thing is it's all in two dimensional layers but then you see yeah I mention appear such as the the doorway that we've been working on put the lintel on there suddenly Wow gives me a real feel to of just how much impact such places must have had on people you know if everybody's living in this sort of little tiny one-room half in the center low building and then there's that great thing out there it's it's a quite a shock to the system really isn't I mean it makes a huge impact once this is a period when these great like military buildings religious buildings stand up rise up and really make an impact on the landscape the team are also getting used to the simple medieval food this is a triumph this is an absolute triumph it's four barley and vegetables it's not bad you're a hungry man you've been pounding all day at the stone walking on the tread will anything is good to eat it's not exactly easy either grinding the darn stuff I bet it's just as hard workers pounding away all day at the in the stir in the quarry there's no easy jobs in the medieval age next time defending the castle with crossbows nice and architecture against the most powerful weapon of the age the trebuchet [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 2,102,454

Keywords: castles, Full length Documentaries, geometry, Medieval Documentary, Tom Pinfold, stories, stonemasons, Channel 4 documentary, Documentaries, medieval castle, Britain, France, Documentary, 13th century, history documentary, 2017 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, build, archaeologists, BBC documentary, medieval, Full Documentary, hand-carved, Peter Ginn, real, Secrets, Staircases, Historian, documentary history, History, TV Shows - Topic, Ruth Goodman, construct

Id: ydoRAbpWfCU

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018

Reddit Comments

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[u/bp332106]

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I love these guys so much! Tales from the Green Valley + Edwardian Farm + all the rest, so cozy.

[u/mrmax1984]

For everyone in here that enjoyed this and the other Farm series, the Guedelon group has a youtube channel in which they post weekly videos (during season). They're in French but have English subs.

[u/Caiur]

me and Ruth are going to run away together and get married and she'll cook me historical peasant's food and teach me about history every single day. (◕‿◕✿)

[u/cbleslie]

PSA, on the Curiosity Stream service, there is a French documentary "How to Build a Castle". that features this project. It's dubbed; and a bit dry, but overall interesting.

[u/Happy_Cranker]

Anything with this gang is worthy of binge-watching! It’s so inspiring, especially in these unsettling times.

[u/CaptinCheeseWheel]

there victorian farm series is also really good

[u/manhernandez295]

one thing that amazes me about this is just how educated people were back then. This day and age it's easier to pass information, and kids start learning more advanced things earlier and earlier. The amount of knowledge and pride back then is just outstanding, the apprenticeships; the work they did the knowledge passed down through the family/practice.