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.
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!
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.
A Short, Angry History of Land in Britain, by Thom Forester
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.
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.
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)
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
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.)
Or, if you're referring to gunpowder/cannon tactics - those are the reason for medieval-style fortifications falling out of favor, 1500 CE-ish.
But as always, money can break any castle wall. But lobbing putrefied meat into wells, waiting out their stores, and so forth work.
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
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
I thought the move to round towers was due to the increased effectiveness of canon.
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
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!
Building very slowly can alert you to issues there, but they didn't always catch them (Pisa for example).
To me it has more of a Sagrada Família vibe than medieval castle
Reading through that website is...a trip.
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).
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.
If anything, they are great examples of what happens when civilations break down.
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.
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.
And chat in a forum about it.
love it nevertheless.
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".
Not a ziggurat-style Mayan temple.
An Egyptian pyramid. Built for the movie Cleopatra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
And don't forget animal power was used for pulling or lifting.
Sadly, I thing age and the scope of the project has caught up to him and his wife.
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.
weregiraffe•5mo ago