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There is a great documentary series with three archeologists by the BBC about medieval castles featuring Guédelon as a real live example from around 2014. I really enjoyed watching this and highly recommend it.
https://archive.org/details/secrets-of-the-castle
Edit: spelling
Great show. If you liked it, Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn has made several shows together along with another archeologist, Alex Langlands, which I think are even better.
Of these, I think my favourite is Victorian Farm (2009), where the gang has to bring a real Victorian-era farm back into working order and then live like the Victorian farmers did. Unlike the castle show, it benefits from the gang having to research and learn the old ways on their own, whereas the castle is a big project where they're being taught or directed by the crew who's already working there.
The other shows — Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, Tales from the Green Valley, etc. — are all thoroughly excellent.
A minor point, but Goodman is not an archeologist or historian, but she's very good!
I watched the Tudor Monastery Farm show first by random chance and also liked it a lot. Thanks for all the recommendations!
I liked this show over the castle one they did.
A bit offtopic. Is it possible to cast these videos somehow from the browser to a TV? I know it's possible to download them, but I am wondering if it's possible to stream them to the TV instead...
That's what Chromecast has been for, for over a decade. I understand that's going to stop working(?) soon, and am very sad.
They're on youtube
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc9JhVp9B6Crpfu7asBwJZAY8...
If you have a Chromecast on your tv, you can generally just cast a whole tab using chrome. But the frame rate will be awful and I don't think audio gets cast.
If there isn't a cast button within the video player itself, i would download them, and then use something local to cast the actual video content to your tv (vlc has this feature)
Does your TV let you use it as a wireless display? I've found that to work as basically HDMI without cables, which is nice.
Not restricted to medieval castles, but this documentary on large moats was fascinating:
For further reading, I submit to you the toils of one man on a mission in West Virginia
Sadly, I thing age and the scope of the project has caught up to him and his wife.
Impressive project. I remember watching a video documentary about this some years ago.
I was there when I was a child, maybe 15 years ago. It's amazing to see such a project still running after so many years.
I remember that you could see all the trades explaining how they used to work back in medieval times. Very enlightening.
This article makes me want to go back and see the progress.
> Glasswork, the team learned, swallowed up half the cost of building a cathedral.
Oh wow I would have never guessed that.
Interesting. I know some glassblowers, but they use modern propane systems of course.
A friend spent a weekend (including Sat night, all night) trying to get a beehive glass furnace to turn some sand and ?phosphorus? into glass. He was only able to get it hot enought to make "proto-glass" pellets.
I'm guess the fuel costs in the middle ages were astronomical for making plate glass. You have to blow it large enough to form a reasonable cylinder, cut the cylinder while hot, and flatting the walls into a sheet. The tail and head are waste products. All done with forced-air charcoal (where humans are doing the forcing), which had to be made first in sufficient quantities.
Related
How to Build a Medieval Castle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518800 30-jan-2017 57 comments
Guédelon Castle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844118 11-apr-2020 40 comments
Made me think of one of my favorite books as a kid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_(Macaulay_book), loved getting to pass them on to my own kids.
somewhere in the US, a man built a stone castle single handedly, useing whatever tools he could get, so not historicaly accurate, but the insights into what can be done would be valid, started in the 70's?, 60's, and last I heard had found a sucessor to continue construction
I know a man who built a stone barn from salvaged granite foundation block's, and have watched an very large amish timber frame barn go up, by hapenstance on a back road in Pennsylvania, and have a bit of stone and timber frame experience myself, so seeing stuff like this makes my hands itchy.....abandoned quaries bieng plentiful
Bishop Castle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Castle
To me it has more of a Sagrada Família vibe than medieval castle
Bear in mind in Europe tons of buildings merged both Medieval and a Modern (Englightened) era as progress happened. For instance, the style of the buildings in the the old town of Salamanca, which is obviously not 100% medieval.
There's something similar in France, built by a lone poor mailman on his off time over a period of ~33 years. Now that I'm reading about it, it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia entry (!). Which is a shame, it's arguably incredibly beautiful and definitely a unique piece or architecture/art.
It really brings to the forefront that the hard part isn’t usually the building - it’s figuring out how to build with what is available and can be sourced locally - often within tens of feet.
We’re so used to shipping pine boards from the Pacific Northwest to the high desert we don’t even stop to consider there may be another option.
Fun fact: concrete is so heavy and so time dependent that it’s one of the few things that is still almost always VERY local; you probably have a home of cement mixers closer than you think!
I think my first worry would be how to figure out if the ground will support the immense weight of a one-off stone structure. I guess karsty/rocky areas are a safer choice than run-of-the-mill New England yard where you hit water table in 2 feet of digging
These are so common in England they have a name: follies.
Typically named after (often Victorian) idle playboy who built them, and often with no attempt made to conceal their origins; they are only as "medieval" as the tastes of the playboy ran (so, more Tennyson than Terry Jones).
Loveland Castle outside of Cincinnati has a story like that:
Loveland Castle is just outside of Cincinnati. I visited many times growing up in the 80s and 90s.
Reading through that website is...a trip.
Is that the one where he moved large stones with small stones?
For do-it-yourselfers, there’s a partially completed medieval castle in Arkansas awaiting a buyer.
How cool would it be, if enough DIY craftspeople got together to buy it, build it, and then were able to live in it. And people would come to the castle to hire the craftspeople to build things for them.
And that's how I founded a massive entertainment park on just a couple million dollars. Plus investors.
As an European, I find Americans more fascinated about Medieval buildings than us. I can see medieval churches and such by just a 10 minutes subway trip into the old town of the capital with ease. Less than 1 eur with a travelling pass card.
It's just there, we see them without giving them too much care.
The same with squares with buildings showing up arcs in the first floor. They give you both a shadow and and a place to rest.
A pity the modern brutalist architecture wants these wiped out.
Still, liking them doesn't make must fascinating, but just useful and charming because of the slowed down ambient compared to modern cities. To me the modern US folklore and weird stuff (contraculture, UFO cults and such), scifi/hippie/hackers cross-polination are much more fascinating, because it's something 'modern' and 'weird', more machine bound than a utilitarian-but-pretty inspired design. Such as the Illuminatus trilogy.
Back to Europe, tons of medieval knowledge was still in use in small villages, such as knitting methods, homemade soap with cooking oil and so on. Oh, and lewd jokes/limericks, these were told and sang across centuries.
I grew up in a part of the US that was “settled” in the mid 19th century. The absolute oldest buildings are just now approaching 200 years old and there aren’t many of those even. From that perspective it’s astonishing to be able to see the work of someone’s hands from so long ago. Obviously there were native Americans here long before European settlement, but evidence of their presence has been so thoroughly erased that it feels like everything you see sprung up in the last century. Even our forests are new, as pretty much the entire state was clear cut by the start of the 20th century.
> Obviously there were native Americans here long before European settlement, but evidence of their presence has been so thoroughly erased
Most of what the native Americans built would be erased by now anyway. They mostly didn't build with stone or metals, but with wood that rots. Most European castles were built out of wood and there is not trace remaining other than town archives (if that) even though no deliberate effort was made to erase them.
Not to excuse the deliberate eraser of history, it happened and is bad. However don't get the wrong impression either, most wasn't deliberate history erasing. Most of it was natural decay, followed by this useless bit is in the way of progress - the natives did exactly the same thing to their old worn out structures.
Indeed, I find more fascinating discovering the "modern" tech used by the ancient civilations that took centuries to become widly known again.
If anything, they are great examples of what happens when civilations break down.
Indeed. Brutalist architectures would work well in Northern Europe, not much in the south when you have both hot summers and cold winters were heat AND cold spread over.
Thick brick/stone walls would protect you both from the heat in summer (down to 15 degrees colder as it's crazy as it sounds) and from chilly winters if you got a bunch of blankets.
Coincidentally I recently watched these videos about this topic. Both great channels!
3D Guide - How to Build the Perfect Medieval Castle https://youtu.be/Syjg6PHYFBo?si=JceRfeOks3hOVqWu
How to Lay Siege to a Medieval Fortress (1000-1300) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ7hTNoK-OA&t=1900s
How to Lay Siege to a Medieval Fortress:
Bring food. LOTS of it.
Wait.
(However, it's apparently easier to do it the fast way. Food storage in the field was quite difficult, and supply lines are vulnerable.)
With competent defenders, "the fast way" has a high failure rate. And even if successful, a high body count.
Or, if you're referring to gunpowder/cannon tactics - those are the reason for medieval-style fortifications falling out of favor, 1500 CE-ish.
Well constructed medevial fortresses imposed such a high cost on any attackers that were rarely attempts to assault them directly. There was almost always an easier way.
However if was a city or sometimes a large town, the calculus changes because the payoff was much higher. Also it may not have always been possible to wait the defenders out - because of relief armies and the troops getting restless and possibly deserting. An example in the "medevial" period (lets say ~1050-1453) where walls were directly attacked would be Jerusalem
One day an archeologist will ask: Why they heck they build a medieval castle in the 21. century.
And chat in a forum about it.
love it nevertheless.
Maybe, but more likely they will read the records from today (we are much better at archiving) and wish they could find someone to sponsor them to do the same. They will of course criticize something - that with some discovery we don't yet have - they know was done wrong.
There is a really good winery in Napa Valley, called Castello di Amorosa. Really good wine, and it is also built as a medieval castle. I bet there are more places like that around the world.
A major archaeology project went on in Mexico to excavate a pyramid.
Not a ziggurat-style Mayan temple.
An Egyptian pyramid. Built for the movie Cleopatra.
If AI doesn't destroy us but actually frees people from the need to work, then projects like this could really bloom. We all need a reason to get up in the morning, as well as being part of something bigger then ourselves -- this is a wonderful example of how that could look like.
It’s crazy they built these without electricity or fuel. Just hand tools!
I think you're missing a lot of the larger types of machines that were available, such as cranes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
And don't forget animal power was used for pulling or lifting.
Guédelon Castle