How to Build a Medieval Castle | Hacker News Reader

How to Build a Medieval Castle

archaeology.org

244 pointsbenbreen76 comments

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!

That was the show that pointed out to me that Henry VIII had much bigger problems than divorce to deal with. By his reign the Crown owned about a third of England. And so did the Catholic Church.

Now maybe the story about him breaking with the Church over their stance on divorce wasn’t completely bullshit, but he was dealing with an existential threat to both the Crown and his family line and they were both being authored by the Church.

I had some questions about the history of land ownership of the crown and the church occasioned by this comment but I guess I found answers in an article after googling (wow, it's been a long time since that has happened, feels like 2006 all over again) so I made a post on the article I found

A Short, Angry History of Land in Britain, by Thom Forester

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950244

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950244

It's actually alarming how many of the things they did to screw the peasants out of opportunity and freedom echo "landmark" legislative actions and key regulatory trends in the 20th century US.

The Tudor show pointed out that the mills tended to be owned by the church and so you pretty much had to pay them in a fraction of the take. I knew being a peasant fucking sucked but I thought it was mostly the lords to blame. Not church too.

I mean the tales of Robin Hood go a lot into robbing the Church, indeed Friar Tuck is first met and accused of being bad because a rich friar until he proves his mettle.

Man it’s been a long time since I’ve watched Robin Hood, any flavor.

I was thinking more about reading, but sure, also the movies often show this.

That show was great but I think they missed an opportunity to tie the events it dramatizes into the broader geopolitical context that would greatly shape our civil wars.

In forcing "King Boats'n'hoes" to take his country and go it alone when he did and under the circumstances he did the pope kicked over one of the key dominoes in the line that leads to our modern balance of power. It's one of those pivotal moments in world history that only really happened the way it did due to the inclinations and personalities of the people involved.

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...

They're on youtube https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc9JhVp9B6Crpfu7asBwJZAY8...

Oh, thanks, good to know

That's what Chromecast has been for, for over a decade. I understand that's going to stop working(?) soon, and am very sad.

Yeah. I also wanted to rely on chromecast for this. But the chromecast button does not even show up when I open that page, so probably that page does not support that

You can still "cast tab" from Chrome. That's mostly what I use, to be honest. Some sites / streamers do a poor job implementing the cast functionality.

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.

I will take a look into this. That's a good idea indeed

Not restricted to medieval castles, but this documentary on large moats was fascinating:

https://youtu.be/drvX9huKowA

For further reading, I submit to you the toils of one man on a mission in West Virginia

http://www.dupontcastle.com/

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.

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

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

Some places the "When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England." quote is closer to the truth than you'd expect, but yes, "good strong land" is one of the keys to a long-lasting structure.

Building very slowly can alert you to issues there, but they didn't always catch them (Pisa for example).

Bishop Castle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Castle

To me it has more of a Sagrada Família vibe than medieval castle

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.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_id%C3%A9al

There's a section about the palace in the English Wikipedia article about the mailman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval#Palais_id%C3%...

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.

Is that the one where he moved large stones with small stones?

Loveland Castle outside of Cincinnati has a story like that:

https://lovelandcastle.com/

Loveland Castle is just outside of Cincinnati. I visited many times growing up in the 80s and 90s.

https://lovelandcastle.com/

Reading through that website is...a trip.

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).

For do-it-yourselfers, there’s a partially completed medieval castle in Arkansas awaiting a buyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_Medieval_Fortress

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.

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.

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.

I live in wiltshire, in the UK. There are lots of ancient hill forts. They were originally terraced earth + wooden pallisades + wood/mud buildings. All the wooden structures have long since decayed, but the earth structures still remain, if somewhat eroded. I guess there isn't much in the way of hills on the American plains though.

America is a lot bigger than the uk - it extends across the whole continent. so all gereraizations are false on some level. There are places where the natives left hills (mound buildres). However in general they were not building that way: wood is a lot easier to build withe than earth and usually good enough.

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.

Nope, I meant pre-gunpowder.

But as always, money can break any castle wall. But lobbing putrefied meat into wells, waiting out their stores, and so forth work.

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

I remember watching a video about a siege the Romans did, lasting a few years or so, where they built a whole friggin ramp up to the fortress, where otherwise they would only have had a thin path up, which would have been impossible to get siege towers and stuff up. Mind-blowing stuff.

Its quite fascinating and defensive innovations drove alot of interesting architechture. For example machiolations were a response to sapping being used especially by Saracen armies (who seemed to favor sapping more than Europeans) against the Crusaders.

Also the movement from square towers to round ones, once again as a defense for sapping, and displacing the tower from the wall or keep in order to be able to flank assaulters attempting an escalade.

The mastery of stone fortifications made walls nearly impregnable to breaches until cannons were developed, and even by then it was a dodgy proposiiton. For instance at Constantinople in 1453 the Turks had huge cannon which could damage the walls, yet it was not the reason the city fell. The defenders were able to repair the walls before the cannon could reload for a second shot. The reason Constantinople fell was a side gate was left open (either intentionally or accidentally) which allowed the Turks to pour through. There were alot of incidents like this such as the defenders of the Krak de Chevaliers (in modern day Syria) being duped into believing their commander had ordered their surrender

>Also the movement from square towers to round ones, once again as a defense for sapping

I thought the move to round towers was due to the increased effectiveness of canon.

Round towers and concentric design started to become popular in the 13th century which was well before cannon were useful. Cannon were not all that practical until the mid-15th century, which is when you started to see the "star" fort design, and the replacement of stone with earth and brick, lower walls that were more sloped.

You might be thinking of Masada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Masada?wprov=sfti1

Yes, that looks like the video I saw and the text seems to describe it.

After a three month siege in 1136, Exeter Castle finally had to surrender when they ran out of wine. O cruel fate.

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.

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.

"Medieval castle". Like the home of two friends near me, in Wexford PA. Quarter-scale replica of a real English castle.

Towers, parapets, (non-working) drawbridge (weighing tons, and already on its second timbering). Murder slits and a secret staircase...

Fully modern wiring, plumbing, and inner structure (faux stone facade). But a "medieval castle".

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.

They won't be able to read the records due to physical bit rot of any public archives making it through the narrow path to the future, and of course the absence of most material behind paywalls that won't be in any public archives that substantially survive. They'll get more from acid-free paper archives under mountains than anything digital I expect.

I am sure you're probably right on the last part. And that would be in very poor taste considering that one of the aim of Guedelon is to act as a research project and validate hypotheses.

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.

Er, do you have more details on that? From my understanding, Cleopatra (the 1963 film with Elizabeth Taylor) was filmed primarily in Italy and I don’t recall seeing any actual pyramids in it.

I think this was the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille version they are referring to.

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

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