The Castle Builders: Masters & Masons - How Medieval Castles Were Built | Free Documentary History

castles citadels of world heritage [Music] all over europe millions flock to see these masterpieces in stone they are drawn by the astonishing scale of construction and by a sense of a lost world of heroism and chivalry [Applause] but castles are more than magnificent monuments to a past that's dead and gone they hold the key to understanding a crucial period in the growth of our civilization in this series we're on a journey to discover how castles were built and why they were constructed the way they were [Applause] how that changed over the centuries [Music] and why they still have a grip on our imagination today we'll meet the castle builders the laborers and masons who did the hard work [Music] the geniuses of design who imagined these medieval megastructures the structural engineers who turned them into reality and the kings and barons who commissioned them and lived in them we'll show how the big history of the middle ages the wars of france and england shape the castle and how in a thousand bloody sieges and battles the castle changed the course of that history [Applause] if you want to understand how the modern world was constructed you need to understand the castle [Music] [Music] builders how do you build on a massive scale and how was it done centuries ago without the aid of modern machines and computing power any major construction project is something little short of a miracle a breathtaking combination of ingenuity craft organization and hard labor it takes determination skill planning and lots and lots of money the same was true a thousand years ago the technology may have moved on but for the castle builders the basic challenges were the same these people are engineers and they've got to have the knowledge to make these things stay up what the physics behind these buildings now i dare say they're not writing equations down but they must know exactly what works in this episode we'll see how some of the great castles of europe were built how the ideas and techniques behind their construction changed and developed in a few short centuries [Music] how kings and barons found the resources and manpower to start building castles and why they spent fortunes on finishing them by building this great castle with multi-coloured towers it has mythic and legendary importance and how all of this happened on a huge scale at a frenetic pace and often in the heart of hostile territory so you might have to think of what it must be like to try and establish something like cambastian in in afghanistan the result some of the world's most beautiful and iconic structures objects of admiration and wonder centuries later buildings that have stood the test of time it's this odd combination isn't it on the one hand fine living and domesticity and where did the king eat his dinner and on the other hand ultra violence for millennia humans have built in stone and even before the romans came saw and conquered northern europe the stone ramparts of the hill fort gave shelter and comfort to a thousand local tribes [Music] the hill forts were power bases for their territorial ambitions and places of safety to raise their families [Music] in a world of brutal raids and invasions an impregnable defensive fortress has obvious advantages that's why the romans raised stone forts to protect their legions as they push the boundaries of their empire wider and wider and why they built walls to define and defend the extremities of the world they conquered but it wasn't until the 11th century that the european castle as we now think of it began to take shape castle is primarily to defend a lord or a noble or a king his family and his household and also to command the territory of which he's the owner and in that way it differs from a fort or fortress which is there to protect a company of soldiers the earliest castles were built from earth and timber a huge mound of soil a mott was built up with a wooden tower on top the mott was surrounded by a bailey a larger defensive enclosure protected by a ditch and an earthen rampart the thing that is most difficult for people in the 21st century to grasp is that early castles 99 of them are made of wood the thousands of castles that are put up over western europe in the middle ages are earth and timber this is the site of one of the first timber castles built in britain forty meters across and eight meters high it's known as hen domin meaning in welsh simply old mound but that scarcely does justice to the qualities of the modern bailey castles they were much more sophisticated than they appear on the ground today they would be elaborated with timber defenses and contain uh significant timber buildings they would look very sophisticated where we're able to see them in their heyday hane doman stands guard over a strategically important ford across the river seven it was built in 1070 by roger earl of shrewsbury he named it montgomery castle after his home in normandy it was the norman conquest which made the castle a significant feature of the english countryside england before 1066 was a land without castles they have horses but they don't ride them into battle and nor do they have castles and it's those two things in combination cavalry forces but most especially castles that give the normans the cutting edge the advantage the castle was the norman way of taking control all over england william the conqueror's knights began to throw up hundreds of modern bailey castles [Music] what was good about them is they're very quick to construct you can construct a stronghold in alien or enemy territory quickly [Applause] and provide a point of defense and a point of security for the people and the animals that you brought with you the modern bailey had given the normans a stranglehold on england the next crucial innovation was the stone keep a defensive stronghold at the heart of the castle but masonry threw up its own challenges for the castle builders you need to be able to obtain the raw materials quarry the stone fell the timber create the lime mortar and then you needed craftsman trained in putting all that together [Music] when the normans came to england there wasn't a long tradition of masonry building but there were churches but most of the houses were built of timber and earth [Music] so these skills had to be either brought over or developed the normans were very happy to import the sophisticated skills in masonry they needed to construct robust defensive structures on a grand scale this is rochester castle in kent one of the earliest and best examples of the stone keep the keep is the imposing central feature of the castle it shelters a basement and three floors as well as galleries and battlements the grandest of the rooms were on the second floor with a mezzanine to give them extra height the spine wall is pierced to form an arcade of four round-headed arches the accommodation could be reached by spiral staircases in two opposite corners of the keep and there were vaulted ceilings and fireplaces and passageways to access the battlements the exterior walls get their rough appearance from the irregular rubble used to build them [Music] kentish ragstone a hard grey limestone quarried locally but the angles of the buttresses doors and windows are yellow in color they're from khan stone imported across the channel from normandy rochester castle was actually built by an archbishop of canterbury william of cour bay [Music] a prince bishop a baron in his own right it was william who completed the construction of canterbury cathedral but he was also a castle builder and if there was any doubt that the princes of the church were also keenly interested in temporal power then rochester castle is the plainest possible statement of intent rochester's primary function is purely practical it's a secure fortress but even this early example declares that the castle has a symbolic purpose too at almost 35 meters high the limewashed keep would have declared its power and authority over all the surrounding countryside [Music] the interior of a castle too could be used to proclaim the might and glory of its builder not far from rochester in kent is the great tower of dover castle it was the last of the great square keeps built in england after the norman conquest [Music] a royal palace of king henry ii it's recently been restored to look as it might have done in the 1180s the king's chamber was his private [Music] apartment it was shared with servants and senior officials and it was where the business of government was carried out [Music] the king's hall was a place of meeting and assembly used for ceremonies and feasts [Music] it proclaimed that if the king was on his throne all was right with the world an army of servants in the kitchen below would have kept the king and his guests well fed the entertainment was certainly lavish but the spaciousness and grandeur of the living quarters shouldn't blind us to the fact that dover was a castle that needed defending strongly known as the key to england it was attacked by french armies and rebellious barons a military stronghold and an official residence dover accommodates both functions of a castle with a grace that belies how difficult it is to integrate the two [Music] it's this odd combination isn't it on the one hand fine living and domesticity and where did the king eat his dinner and on the other hand ultra violence you know you've got boiling oil and catapults and sieges if you combine a fortress and a stately home it's a very difficult proposition because you know if you want a fortress you've got to have thick walls and small windows and keep people out and if you want a stately home you've got to have lots of light and luxury and big windows and so it's a very difficult balancing act creating a building that is at the same time homely and war-like [Music] few castles blend beauty and strength as perfectly as this one [Applause] chateau gaia was built here in the valley of the seine in normandy by one of the great kings of european history richard the first of england richard the lionheart was the hero king of the crusades and of the tales of robin hood the son of henry ii who built dover richard inherited the title of duke of normandy from his father he was determined to assert his authority against the king of france to secure his territories and his lines of communication francis [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] begun in 1196 the chateau was to be a structure entirely new to 12th century france surrounded by a ditch 12 meters deep it was a tear-shaped fortification its ingenious design of sheer round towers made it almost impossible to attack with [Music] projectiles urged on by richard himself an army of laborers worked tirelessly putting in two and a half million shifts of work racing against time weather and the imminent attack of the french to ensure a supply of water for the castle two wells were dug down to the river level 100 meters below the wells were so deep and dark that the diggers had to excavate the stone by torchlight panting under the strain of oxygen deprivation as the breathable air was burned away by the flames that lit their work richard's budget stretched to 12.7 million ducats many hundreds of millions today and a huge percentage of a medieval economy richard himself took personal charge of construction and historians think of him as the architect of its unique design before two years had passed chateau gaia was complete the king could glory in a prodigious [Music] achievement [Music] and this is what richard saw his revolutionary miracle castle so beautiful he called it his one-year-old daughter so strong it gave him command and control over the key river route below [Music] visionary determination was one thing but castles could not be built without the craft skills of masters and masons and to appreciate their work properly it's time to move to another theater of conflict the kings of england also faced a challenge on their western flank from the rebellious welsh the castle was central to the power struggle which ensued within a quarter of a century of the conquest the normans had built the great tower of chepstow castle on the river y they now controlled the gateway to south wales soon the normans had forced their way along the southern welsh coast and everywhere they went they built castles from cardiff to kidwelly and as far west as pembroke the castles gave the normans control of the coastal strip the so-called welsh marches wales was to become a country with more castles per square mile than any other but the border between these marches and the native held uplands of wales proper was contested territory wales was a very different prospect from the anglo-saxon lands that the normans had conquered so rapidly it would take the normans 200 years to subdue the welsh the mountainous terrain was ideal for guerrilla style resistance and unlike england wales was divided into many competing kingdoms defeating one welsh leader was no guarantee that any of the others would fall into line young warlords like the lord reece play the normans at their own game by using cavalry and building stone castles of their own right across southwest wales the lord reese claws back power from the norman marcher lords his 12th century day high bath glitters with a network of limewashed castles power bases for the native welsh the lord rhys has shown that it is possible to arrest the forward march of the normans and their own trump card the castle is key to stopping them [Applause] a century later floellen at griffith floellen the last compels the normans to recognize that he is prince of wales floellen has castles of his own castles like dolbadaam where the native welsh round tower is used as a centerpiece of defensive architecture cloellen is strong in his mountain fastnesses so strong that he can strike a deal with the english king on the 29th of september 1267 chloe meets henry iii at a ford on the border between england and wales it's a formal meeting place to ratify a formal agreement the treaty of montgomery it grants floellen power and authority over wales providing he pays homage to the english king clewellin is free to extend his rule castles like castetla built by his grandfather floellen the great give him control over areas of wales far beyond snowdonia itself from his strongholds in gwyneth floellen raids norman territory in the south the young norman lord gilbert declare gilbert the red is willing to break new ground to meet this threat he diverts a river to create artificial lakes it's all part of an enterprising plan to build one of the largest castles in the whole of europe it's the first castle in britain designed to be defended by walls within walls its scale is imposing even today [Applause] he didn't choose to build cafe on top of a hill on a mountain he didn't choose a naturally defendable position he wanted to lay out a new form of elaborate castle in which there were multiple layers of defense every time he passed an obstacle he faced another obstacle so you go through one gatehouse and be faced with another gay test you cross one drawbridge and be faced with a portcullis and a pair of doors and each time you approach one of these structures you are under fire from the adjacent towers and curtain walls and then you wanted to surround that with areas of water that could keep potential attackers and their siege engines away the key person in gilbert's project is his master mason like a modern architect he designs the building [Music] but he's a craftsman himself and understands how other craftsmen work a skilled military engineer he contracts all the other workers next to the master mason the principal workers are the freemasons expert stone cutters and sculptors they're working at the sharp end of the logistical challenge every single stone there has been hacked out by hand from a quarry pre-mechanized age so more than manually with hand tools and then transported in some cases over ridiculous distances don't have proper roads um you don't have proper vehicles to go on those proper roads and uv light on river transport and tracks to get this stuff to one place in enormous quantities absolutely enormous quantities then you start building the castle builders are engaged in a massive project which makes the minutiae of their work even more impressive to the trained eye and just that meticulous detail in the thousands and thousands again probably hundreds of thousands of hours that have been expended just creating those fine details door edges the window frames the archways the devil is in the detail but as the walls rise higher someone needs to keep an eye on the big picture and to solve the major architectural problems which the site throws up we have these huge spur buttresses which merge with the walls to either side them all built like a single pieces of graduating size the sheer ingenuity we need to carry this wall into a power put that juts over it by a few inches and we'll have one piece of stone that actually carries that job and have several i mean graduating size moving down the line of this wall and somebody is cutting these two order to a plan and they're putting them all together by hand [Music] you've got to have the masons with the capability of doing that work and also something actually designing this thing and giving them effectively what you call a spec in modern days work begins at chirophili castle on the 11th of april 1268 and the master mason's genius means the major work on the core of the castle is completed within three short years gilbert's workers have earned their payday their astonishing achievement will stand for centuries it's a tribute to their physical and intellectual prowess they've got to have the knowledge to make these things stay up what what the physics behind these buildings now i dare say they're not writing equations down but they must have plans they must know exactly what works so they've been bought in whoever gilbert's architect and engineers were bought in for that purpose because they've achieved the same elsewhere [Music] reasserts norman control over lowland wales but it's not the end of this power [Music] struggle faced with an unassailable bastion like cair philly floellen ap griffith is pushed back north to his strongholds in snowdonia there's a new english king edward the first edward longshanks edward begins to build castles of his own around the coasts of northern wales he's a vigorous king and in a hurry to impose his rule over all of britain when floellen refuses to pay homage edward sends in the troops and there's worse to come in 1282 cloellen's wife eleanor dies in childbirth leaving him with no male heir with little left to lose floellen decides to join his brother in a desperate uprising against the english a month later wales will have lost its leader run through in a chance encounter with an english knight the prince of wales is dead [Music] edward decides to press home his advantage the upshot the completion of edward's so-called ring of iron around north wales it's the most ambitious program of castle building anywhere in medieval europe and all the more remarkable because the workforce recruited from all over england is being sent into remote and still extremely hostile territory so you might have to think of what it must be like to try and establish something like cambastian in in afghanistan you're sending people out to work in very difficult circumstances in an area where there weren't necessarily materials available or tools all of that would have to be brought in to drive the enterprise forward edward established an office of the king's works in connewy on the northern coast of wales his key recruit was a master mason he'd come across in savoy as he was returning over land from the crusades to claim his throne james of saint george became master of the king's works in wales his distinctive signature is to be found in detail after architectural detail in all of edward's great welsh castles [Music] some key talents coalesced around master james there was his ingeniator his military engineer bertrand dusoltu his principal carpenter philip center and stephen the painter his chief decorative artist the locations identified for the castles had one thing in common they could be supplied directly from the sea if the rebellious welsh blockaded them by land edward could ship in men and supplies to lift the siege there was conaway itself and further west karinavan and finally designed as a perfect set of concentric defenses beaumaris on anglesey was the last to be built work had begun at harlech in april 1283 its massive barbican towers and fortified path the way to the sea below made harleq a definitive statement of medieval [Music] engineering today harleq is landlocked looking out over land reclaimed from the sea [Music] back then it stood directly above the shoreline they've picked the site and they you can see it and as with all of edwards castles they're very visible in one way or another they must have been absolutely shocking things to behold for the local population if you see the sea and the various major river channels as the highways of the age these things were very very visible you would pass them as you headed along the coastals you headed up waterways in land um you always have to remember that you've got water at the base of the rock that it's on they really send a message across this is it we're here and we're not moving anywhere the raw materials to build harleq came from far and wide stone from karnavan lime from anglesey timber from flint led from bristol and iron from the english midlands and the scale of the work was a wonder to behold there were 950 men at the height of the building season involved in in that one castle gives you some idea of the sort of logistics necessary to bring those people there to feed them to house them to provide them with tools materials and equipment to enable them to build these buildings at considerable speed and under the eyes of a recently conquered people the castle building can't start or finish without the work of the carpenters the timbers you probably deforested an entire region and further afield just providing yourself with timber you know flooring scaffolding i mean the scaffolding must have been a thing in itself we're talking hundreds and thousands of meters of timber stacked at the sides of buildings coming in corners just to put this great structure in place flooring bridges windows temporary structures alone must have uh well you could probably build a small village or a small town with them fitting out a multi-storey tower was a major project in itself the final adornment was the decorative work artists use stencils and pouncing a technique of pricking a pattern in paper and then forcing powder through the holes to leave an outline on the working surface below [Music] boys the painted halls and chambers of the castle may have been seen only by a privileged few but they proclaimed a king's wealth and preeminence to his barons and courtiers these were great men who liked living in lavish surroundings so you'd have plasterers and painters and people who could make and lay tiles and all the other very colorful things that that made castles such a remarkable feature to those who came and visited the work was exquisite but the cost was astronomical it dwarfed the spending on castles like dover and chateau galle it was enough to bankrupt a king and very nearly did [Music] edward emptied his coffers and was forced to borrow heavily from foreign bankers and repeatedly to beg parliament for funds as rivers of pennies flowed into wales to pay the workforce on these vast projects the king demanded meticulous records of every item of expenditure the thing that always strikes him is just the sheer opulence the sheer cost almost obscene wealth that's gone into building these things the spend is out of all proportion really to almost anything else that's being built at the time struggling to keep within his budget master james face dilemmas familiar to anyone who's ever engaged a builder so if you pay somebody by the day they're never in a rush to finish what's the incentive for them to finish if you pay them by the piece or by the task you've got to have people working for you who can can certify what they've done so you're having to pay somebody else to measure what they've done and if you pay someone a fix some contract you spend all your time arguing over changes additions and details so you spend all your time arguing over the price and so whichever way you choose and whenever you you've done this in the past or today those are the choices that you face and no method is necessarily better than the other but you have to apply them in different circumstances [Music] no matter how careful he was in choosing the most economical method of paying his workforce master james was under huge pressure to justify every line of expenditure in case you should wonder where so much money could go in a week he wrote to the king in 1296 we would have you know that we have needed 400 masons 2 000 less skilled workmen 100 carts 60 wagons and 30 boats 200 quarrymen 30 smiths and carpenters [Music] edward could be the sternest of task masters [Music] but the end result of all this labor pleased him [Music] in 1290 the king appointed master james as constable of harlick castle what better reward for the architect than to live in the gatehouse he himself had created [Music] the jewel amongst edwards north wales castles and by today the most famous is kaiden one glance at carnarvon and you see that it's different it was clearly designed to be different from the start it doesn't have round towers it has these sort of strange polygonal towers the stonework is beautifully cut it has these striped bands of stones so it looks different from the start and it was apparent that it was designed to be not just a castle but a palace a symbolic presence if you like of royal authority in gwyneth in building kharnavan castle edward made a very deliberate attempt to conjure up the town's classical legacy as the home to a roman legion a thousand years before he built it in a location where it has mythic and legendary importance kanathan has legendary stories linked with the emperor constantine's father his body was apparently found at canarvan and reinterred there under edward the first's orders so by building this castle which taps into the mythological stories about this great castle with multi-coloured towers located on the mouth of a river that positioning of carnarvon aligns edward with that whole mythological past as well as his political reality in the presence [Music] if proof was ever needed of how significant kharanavan was for edward the first of england we need look no further than the birth of his son and heir there in 1284. [Music] the story of his birth is one of these incidents from history where fact meets legend and myth this idea of edward sending his what would have been heavily pregnant wife eleanor across what would have been very difficult country in order for this birth to take place symbolically in carnarvon this poor woman heavily pregnant being sent over land you know to get to this castle and when she arrives there she finds of course a building site they only started building the castle a year previously so clearly it's nothing like the castle we see today in legend at least his son's birth in this castle gave edward the opportunity for a flamboyant piece of political theater the story goes that the king had heard that the welsh aristocracy who'd survived his wars was still hankering after a new prince of wales to lead them the welsh lord said that they would only accept a countryman someone from their own land so edward said i offer you my new son he's born here in wales and he speaks not a word of english the tradition of the english monarch's eldest son being known as prince of wales continues to this day here at karnavan in 1969 prince charles became the latest to be invested with the title i charles prince of wales to become your liege man of life and limb one of our most popular pieces of film which we have on the site is actually the film of the 1969 investiture of prince charles and particularly popular with audiences from america i must say they do like to see that and to walk where the queen walked [Music] and the thing i find interesting when i see it knowing the sight as i do is the amount of work they must have done to put in all of the seating and other arrangements to sort of get everybody into the castle for that spectacular event seen around the world almost 750 years after it was built edwards castle has lost none of its power to impress visitors from afar and it still divides opinion amongst the local welsh population which it was designed to dominate well of course as an architect i have to say that it's you know that yes i mean it's a world heritage site and it's a magnificent building but some people won't actually put a foot over the threshold here because it is still a sign of a pr of oppression like it or not wales has recognized the world over as a land of castles and there's no denying kyren arvind's place in that long history the heart thing thing for me now is that if you look at canaryvon canarvon now has become a community which is well speaking which is vibrant and it could almost be anger that we've almost taken over that symbol of a pressure [Music] fit for a king but like every castle the people are part of its story too [Music] the glories of medieval castles their beauty and their opulence burnish the status and mystique of royalty [Music] the strength of these castles shielded the power of barons and overlords [Music] they set in stone a feudal system which seems at odds with our more democratic age but understood in a different light these citadels have left a remarkable record of the work of the common people the castle builders i think it's something that really helps you to empathize with the people who built the things in the first place the labor force i suppose human hands have shaped these structures huge towering things even if they survive just as a stubby ruin they'll often sometimes be a detail whether it's a mason making a mark on a piece of stone and mason's mark it's a sheer effort that always impresses in our next episode we'll see the great castles of europe tested by siege and storm can the work of the castle builders withstand the onslaughted faces from the force of arms [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 213,311

Rating: 4.8234105 out of 5

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, Castles, Castle Builders, Medieval History, Medieval Castles, Medieval Documentary, Castle Documentary, Guédelon Castle, Middle Ages, Castles of Europe, Middle Ages Documentary, How Was A Castle Built, Age of Empires, Stronghold, Stronghold Crusader, burg eltz, Windsor Castle, castle building, The Castle Builders

Id: gbwbi6uurG0

Length: 48min 28sec (2908 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020