How Do You Build A Castle With Medieval Tools? | Secrets Of The Castle | Chronicle

castles dominated the medieval landscape and britain has some of the finest in the world today most are decaying relics many of their secrets buried in time [Music] now historian ruth goodman and archaeologists tom pinphone and peter ginn are turning the clock back to re-learn the secrets of the medieval castle builders this is the ultimate medieval technology the origin of our castles is distinctly french introduced to britain at the time of the norman conquest of 1066 [Music] [Applause] [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 you can really smell your food 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 san francis a hundred miles south of paris where getalong castle is being built they're now 17 years into a 25-year project and over the next few months its most defining features the towers will take shape it's just something else look at those things up there oh my goodness makes you dizzy the team are meeting members of gedelon's workforce master mason floy yamanuchi and site administrator sarah preston this is amazing well thank you so much for coming so fast see our castle in the making i'd like to introduce you first of all to florian florio is our master mason so he's going to 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 the castle but you're almost like the puppet master you have the people working the quarry the people working as masons the carpenters you've got to control everyone well i prefer the image of a musical conductor we have to to be in the same time working this is very important yeah the rhythm so it's like music well if you're the conductor and you've got the strings over there and the cushion over there and the timpani over there i can play a triangle building getalon is an enormous undertaking it will require some 30 000 tons of stone that must be quarried shaped and lifted into position without modern machinery there are also teams of woodcutters and carpenters constructing scaffolding roofing and doors blacksmiths making ironwork and tools as well as tilemakers and cartes in the 13th century english workers crossed the channel to hone their skills in france france is where architecture is 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 into britain it's military historian you're very used to reading the theories behind how castles are made but hopefully it's an experimental archaeologist i can actually test some of those theories put them into practice [Music] 13th century life there's a lot of questions surrounding it 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 used for in medieval times they don't have a paper plan right so they used to have a wood model well i guess this is way of the lord saying this is what i want my castle to look like yes and and the lord it can change things uh with the model it's very easy for him i suppose a medieval building sites uh like you have here you can easily have over a hundred masons they all can look at this and know the angles they need to be doing and the and the wall that they're working on getalon's design is typical of the 13th century many british castles such as harloth conway and carnarvon have a similar layout castles were not only for defense they were a show of strength a lord 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 wow this is the great tower this is what florian 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 four meters thick it's the castle's ultimate stronghold so if we if we were the wall if i stand here i'm inside you're inside that's four i mean that's massive it just brings home how many 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 cars minimizing the distance it had to be moved was paramount so like many castles of the time getalong 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 for 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 forest which is a source of timber it's a source of fuel so it can keep the blacksmiths going almost everything we need to build a castle is just a stone's throw away the boys are put to work extracting blocks of sandstone under the watchful eye of a stone mason who's worked here for 16 years clement gerard the first job premiere yeah the boys how to cut huge stones from the quarry into usable building blocks using just a hammer a chisel and a wedge i don't think i've got the skills to do this i'll give it a go i'm glad it's you and not me so making this hole to fit the wedge snugly but obviously clermont with his years and years of experience knows exactly how to orientate this so the wedge goes into this one hole you hit it and that's going to cause a fracture in the already pre-existing sediment lines and it will split in half is it good music good music good music and now a slave gemma yeah 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 listen good perfect i see this is a good iron 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 we've got three categories of stone here the pif the path and the puff got the pair for this sort of black high iron content sandstone and that's used for the major load-bearing parts of the castle the path this more reddish sandstone and the soft one the puff sort of very yellowy crumbly sandstone it's almost like we're shopping for stone really isn't it we're coming out here we're looking at the colors and we can actually get what we want for 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 were the workers in the woods surrounding the castle ruth setting up home [Music] building a cattle 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 the 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 [Music] space oh look marvellous off cut limestone this will do perfect the centerpiece of every medieval home was the fireplace the fire was not just used for cooking it also provided heat and light in ground 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 pots on a bit [Music] the cottage needs somewhere to store the staple foods of wheat and barley hi simon oh hello ruth how you doing i'm good i'm good i'm thinking about a grain so ruth is calling on english carpenter simon dunn to make a grain arc i'm guessing that uh 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 uh tools available in the 13th century saws were expensive so carpenters used them only when absolutely necessary instead wood was split using wooden wedges whoa wow look at that split all the way around down to there yeah and then turn it over and work a bit further down gosh this is faster than soaring isn't it oh absolutely there we go starts in two 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 sauna the rough planks must now be smoothed off this is a side axe um it's just ground on one one edge so it's flat on the other so you can just trim up the surface a bit 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 so instead of next pegs instead of nails yes [Music] so there are some things you do need a saw for so we'll just cut the pegs off to size right there's no glue or anything in here so it's just just it's just the wood holding the wood together and it's wood together it's not going anywhere [Music] so are you happy with that though i'm happy with it you're gonna do the job it'll do the job home isn't home without a grain art absolutely not water was another vital resource for the building of a castle and hundreds of gallons would have been used every day to make more to alarm 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 how do you reckon that is we're going to make rope i reckon it's 10 meters down give or take a meter but i suspect they sunk this to a depth where they're never going to run out of water exactly it's crucial for defense it's crucial for life inside the castle once the castle is operational you need to have that constant supply and obviously we need it now for our building i'm on pulley peter's commissioning a pulley from woodturner gary baker well the first stage is to select uh a log yeah and the pulley's gonna be in this direction okay so you couldn't just cut a life section through a log and just do that as a pulley that would never work the problem with the end grain yeah it shrinks at different levels and it's just gonna split apart so we're going to follow the grain this way we're just going to rough chop it what's the wood that you're using this is a ash ash is very a very dry wood and therefore when it dries it doesn't doesn't move that much it's not going to warp and crack a mandrel is hammered into the centre of the roughly shaped wood so it can be turned on a pole lathe pole lathes 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 onto a flexible pole and a pole basically all it does is lift the pedal back up [Music] the roughly shaped ash is turned to make a cylinder [Music] i have to say uh watching you that is really really hypnotic but it looks natural it is it is the it's like the gymnasium maybe evil gymnasium 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 weld from the castle's rope maker ivan first he lays hemp yarns along the rope walk to form four strands each with 14 yards i can definitely see why this is called a rope walk all we can do is walk up and down for this 15 meter rope he's actually walked half a mile which is extraordinary the four strands are now complete next they must be twisted together the first stage of the twisting will actually reduce the length of these strands by about 10 so that's about 1.5 meters so i'm estimating that's about there when the traveler hits this mark yvonne knows the rope has been twisted the optimum number of times really slowly the traveler's moving in but with each turn that yvonne does we get something that i see as being rope [Music] gary's turning the cylinder into a pulley by cutting a groove in its rim [Music] just take it off we go it's so smooth and so fast [Music] 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 you twist the yarns in one direction to make the rope twist the strands against each other that way you create that tension and that torsion and it stops them unraveling [Music] if i thread this through before you haul it up now ruth and peter can fit the pulley and rope to the well in the castle's courtyard you know traditionally this is where people gossip don't you standing round the whale well still is standing around the water cooler drop it down yeah [Music] long way down okay [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 fabrice mango all right i'm winning 25 baskets of this sand twenty-five and fifty of this one mortar makers had a vital role to play in the building of a castle as the strength of the entire construction rested on their mixture formulas were closely guarded secrets and passed down from master to 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 having the quarry right there means you've got a huge amount of sand on tap lime is the key ingredient that adheres the stones to one another it's made by heating limestone to 900 degrees and then mixing it with water to create slaked lime that looks very nice peter right now i think the uh experience is showing for the french guys they're really putting me to shame it's uh it's enjoyable work though i actually do feel like i'm now a bit more connected to the castle [Applause] do nothing clean don't you i can't speak to some of us just get on and work and like you he seems to roll around and every bit of building material you can suits you though it's just just that natural magnetism you intend all that gray hair is actually lime water oh dear he's actually just stretched from working [Music] today's batch of mortar and sandstone are destined for the great tower so far it's reached a height of 18 meters but when complete it will be 30 meters high the materials are hoisted to the top using a treadmill winch [Music] the forerunner of the modern crane it takes two people to power it and can lift over half a time mean these things are an absolute godsend aren't they they are the machine of the medieval building site bringing up all the stone for the for the walls what do you think got 500 kg of weight we're pulling up yeah we maneuver it so easily the two of us my strength your ballast and 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 slowly [Music] so this is our stone the sandstone from the quarry and it will be graded into three lots isn't it a fifth of the path of the puff that's piff isn't it that's yeah that's hard that's path that's the medium and there'll be a puff in there somewhere hello side puff look at some of these the piff the very very hard sandstone that is used for facing for the structure for the external walls whereas the path and the puff that's used to infill the walls tie it all together philippe delage began his career as a builder over 40 years ago for the last 10 years he's worked at getalong where he's perfected his skills as a stonemason you are going to lay the mortar but don't crush yeah just like this if you're a bricklayer do you do that because it's got a flat surface but the stone has to go in and the mortar has to go up into the stone so don't don't flap it 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 plum line on the scaffolding here you'll notice there's about a two inch gap so you can get your plumb line down there and make sure the wall is absolutely straight because if it's not tower 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 yeah like that yeah just doing the rubble infill to the wall so we've got the facing stone the pif the hard stone and that is laid horizontally so the grain runs as it is in the of the ground which if you imagine a book if you lay a book horizontally you stand on it it'll support your weight whereas if you lower but vertically and you stand on 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 most mortar peter already in the wall tom already [Music] now these i'm hoping are the secret ingredient to transform what is frankly a muddy hole into somewhere comfy to live medieval sources tell us cottage floors were strewn with rushes but 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 look at that and the temperature difference between putting your hand there and putting your hand there is quite astonishing that is cold and wet nasty that is warm and dry and comfy 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 crush down we're 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 we've got some limestone that's been shaped by the masons it's going to go to the great tower for the doorway into that top room we're just using this crane as directed by philippe using this simple lever system one man can lift four times his own weight it's then raised up the tower using the tread wheel crane i can see it coming up here it comes [Music] how do you find it i'm as dizzy as you like it's a heart rate up yeah bit of a swag going 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 pintle is set into the stone from which the door will be hung it's held firmly in place using molten lead so 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 going to drain off and don't waste a valuable resource 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 that looks brand new it looks 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 absurd no yeah our medieval square here says it's all it's all good it's ready to for the next stone now the stone lintel that will top the doorway can be fitted this is very very delicate work this is an extremely heavy stone possibly the heaviest stone we've moved so far and that is 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 yes well done oh i felt quite vulnerable then i gotta be honest it's almost perfect stone masonry like so many medieval jobs was heavy work so a well-fed workforce was essential to prepare food in the cottage ruth needs cooking vessels today pots and pans are metal but in the middle ages they were often clay ruth is calling on the services of english potter jim newbolt when would people think about cooking with with pottery i mean i think people are scared of it the idea of it now but it used to be the way of cooking i mean it is the oldest form of of cooking utensil of any sauce even your iron ones are called cooking pots there's the clue first jim makes the basic cooking part 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 stretching it out so it means that as you pull the handle it creates the grain so it's going to be stronger than if it was just squashed together clay is heavy and difficult to transport so potters sourced it from as near to home as possible where'd you get your clothes from then from as close as the side of the road as you possibly can that's a pothole one where you could lose a wagon and team into it that's fabulous you pull over where you've dug clay for pots it's a pothole you pull over to let another wagon pass and glance past whoa next jim reshapes the base of the part 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 bladed knife we start taking off the edge there so long as the pots are made evenly it'll work better so if there's big thick lumps somewhere then you're going to have problems around that i'm flaring it out the round bottom means it won't sit on a flat surface so the medieval pot often had legs but there's the cook pot [Music] the hovel is now fully equipped and ready to sustain the workers this is perhaps the most important thing in it this is our ladder our fridge our pantry our food supply a grain arc lovely in that there it is this is the mainstay of our diet this is our main food it's the the starch the bulk and it's also the source of any beer or whale we might drink and the lid is not attached because it goes that way up and it becomes my dough trough when i need to make bread it's really clever in that simple and then i've got 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 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 it's cushioning it's it's quite as bad as you think 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 a complete life just one little space like this isn't it yeah there's a whole family i'm much right well you say it's a tiny space to live your entire life i mean i'd rather be in a small space like this and get the heat in united states and also how much time are you going to spend in here really like these days you think like a sitting room with a tv and a big sofa because you're going to relax in there we're going to 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 it's less time for it speak for yourself cheers cheers salute they don't clink do they that's about the only thing i've got against drinking bowls they don't clink 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 youthful 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 two early to mid 13th century saints saint elizabeth from germany and saint clair from assisi in italy so it's loose but can you see look there is quite a lot of shaping to it you can see all these scenes it's made very particularly to make the cloth hang nicely no matter what position your body's in i'd have a belt however it's not to give you a waste but it's all about creating an attractive drape of cloth i tell it's the most comfy thing i've ever worn it is faintly ridiculous i think that medieval underwear is as big as this i think obviously for tommo that's probably an appropriate size but both myself and ruth could fit into these oh they feel a bit like a pair of 1950s football shorts although in the light vaguely see-through and then we just got the hose single leg hose at this stage but uh this is very similar to kind of i suppose stockings and suspenders however if they were sewn onto the pants pretty soon you'd have a pair of trousers and kind of see where the evolution of clothes comes from ruth's headway is inspired by the medieval queen eleanor of akitan 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 barbette which goes under the chin and onto the top of the head and pins there and then with a barbette you always wear a fillet and this is village it's just another band sewn into a circle and 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 mason's lodge for the next stage of their apprenticeship carving limestone so far they've been working with roughly human sandstone to build the castle walls but for more intricate features like arches windows and stairs limestone was preferred as its fine grain meant it was quicker and easier to carve we need for a trouble tower a lot of turn having 10 inches first the boys use their splitting skills to create rough limestone blocks under the supervision of stonemason abdelillah abid the wedges in now you can try the big one perfect i it okay very good the rough block is moved into the mason's lodge onto a platform known as a banker ready for the skilled job of shaping it how many 10 yeah very good decent remember facing a stone was a basic skill that every stone mason would have had first the edges are cut using a pitch and a hammer angle about there yes yeah actually you have to do it in one time one time yeah swing through you have to put over here like a follow through it's okay very good a stonemason would have learned under the watchful eye of the master mason i don't want to hear this this is a the bird is rhythmical or quick but it is always the same you can do very rhythmical you only think the rhythmical music rhythmical and a few minutes after it's finished okay [Music] stone masons were paid her 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 is very much a kind of uh stylized view but now as the stone mason you must precisely mark it out yes exactly we have now to transform imagination drawing 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 this is a continuing the curve of this wall the altar niche must be in the east of the tower so floyja is marking out the east-west axis using an ingenious medieval tool i absolutely love this it's a horn we cut off the ends that's been tied to a piece of string which is wound round an axle and 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 ochre line the chapel's walls are marked out to reach this first floor chapel a limestone spiral staircase is being built to design it floyja and tom have come to the tracing floor next to the stonemasons lodge the tracing floor 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 florin and clem are working out the central part of our staircase and that will form the column that runs up connecting all the stairs and now we're going to draw a 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 degree with perfect symmetry here florian divides the circle into six equal segments which are then subdivided to create 12 steps now we have the steps we can try the steps in the drawing first i mean this is a fantastic way to actually make sure before you start cutting stone wasting materials and time that they work you can see there 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 freyja needs to make just one template this is a precision job now you mess this up you're going to mess up your stone in the castle [Music] so the last thing to do is basically just cut the template [Music] thank you very much we've 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 kidding just just cutting five ten minutes two or three days two or three days you can hear how good quality this stone is by the ring sound when clemona hits it and i think that's why to be honest i'm standing here and not actually being allowed to do anything ah i lie alright righto an apprenticeship for a stonemason would have been about seven years but to be honest as caiman says it's actually a lifetime you're always learning and peter and i haven't been here long you know there's so much to take in carving stone takes its toll on the tools and every day they must be sharpened by blacksmith martin claudel is it true uh gedlon if there's no blacksmiths here for two days work stops yes work stop 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 1000 degrees to soften its tip to reach this temperature bellows blow air through the fire i love these bellows one goes up the other one goes down so it's constant airflow isn't it [Music] martin draws the chisel to a point on the envelope then sharpens it using a file but the chisel tip will be blunt again in no time unless it's hardened hardening 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 he watches for the colours appearing on the surface of the metal blue the red and most importantly the straw yellow at the very end now it's ready for the masons [Music] there are a few clues as to how ordinary people lived day to day in a medieval village but ruth's pieced together fragments of knowledge to work out how people did the most mundane of everyday tasks like washing up i haven't got a scouring pad but i've got sand for the pad well this time of year there's plenty of fresh grass i could use straw just as something to rub with now if i've got to deal with grease that's a different matter altogether sand will take the worst of it off but you know i mean no amount of scrubbing with just some warm water is going to shift the greaser to something you need a little bit of chemical help and for that i'll turn to 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 handful of ash wipe it around with a bit of grass or straw rinse it out with hot water and you get a clean pan easy peasy huh 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 castle's garden to see what there is to harvest could really do with some teal fevers patchy garden but nonetheless a 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 but are edible there's a lot of landcrest 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 now consider weeds would also have been used there's quite a lot of dandelions and nettles too 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 the quern this is the sound of the past a rotary quon like this was 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 posher you were the more refined your food was and ordinary people often made do with food that was really quite coarse and you can see that in people's teeth when we're dug up archaeologically with the tools sharpened clamor has put the finishing touches to the step now comes the delicate task of transporting it to the chapel looks like your steps arriving your step the step is winched up the castle wall using only manpower ready so break off [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 work [Music] these guys have been doing this for 15 years so they know how to get things like this up here but it's amazing what they can move without the use of what what we call machines but essentially the use of rollers levers incline planes we're pulleys out of wood wooden stone working together perfect harmony you got me in tommo do you want to nip down first ruth okay 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 has 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 it'd be really difficult wouldn't it yeah tommo's not stuck down there is it [Laughter] [Music] using the greens from the garden and the ground barley ruth is cooking a medieval pottage in the clay part so a little bit of water in there i'm going to start with my leeks this time of year nettles are still quite tender i wouldn't say that you add nettles for flavour particularly but they are quite good bulk they're one of the few things that grows in profusion at this time of year that's softened down a bit now grain is added to create a porridge like dish [Music] hello ruth oh you're 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 a third dimension appears such as the the doorway that we've been working on put the lintel on there suddenly wow gives me a real feel too 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 path in the center low building and then there's that funking 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 well this is a period when these great like military buildings religious buildings are starting to rise up and really make an impact on landscape the team are also getting used to the simple medieval food this is a triumph this is an absolute triumph it's for 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 wheel 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 in the quarry there's no easy jobs in the medieval age right around are they next time defending the castle with crossbows and architecture against the most powerful weapon of the age the trebuchet [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 21,979

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages, secrets of the castle episode 1, how to build a castle in minecraft, history experiment, experimental archaeology, experimental archaeology documentary, historical reconstruction, historical research, historical reenactment, historical research method, medieval buildings, medieval building techniques, medieval buildings minecraft, british history show

Id: 5wZYiJsC7A0

Length: 58min 33sec (3513 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021