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.
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!
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...
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)
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.
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
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).
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.
Readit News
https://archive.org/details/secrets-of-the-castle
Edit: spelling
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!
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)
https://youtu.be/drvX9huKowA
http://www.dupontcastle.com/
Sadly, I thing age and the scope of the project has caught up to him and his wife.
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.
Oh wow I would have never guessed that.
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
To me it has more of a Sagrada Família vibe than medieval castle
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_id%C3%A9al
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!
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).
https://lovelandcastle.com/
https://lovelandcastle.com/
Reading through that website is...a trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_Medieval_Fortress