Secrets Of The Castle

Peter and Tom set to work straight away learning the skills of the medieval stonemasons to construct a beautiful spiral staircase. After digging stone out of the quarry they take it to the tracing floor, where every stone is marked out using the most closely guarded knowledge of the medieval castle builders: geometry. Then each step is hand carved, a three-day task, before being winched into place using the treadmill-powered crane. Meanwhile Ruth sets about equipping the simple wattle and daub hovel that is to be their base. She experiments by laying a rush floor, and she commissions clay cooking pots and an oak grain arc to store their wheat and barley. Medieval saws were incredibly expensive, so the arc is carved with an axe and assembled without nails.

The team look at the ingenious features medieval castle builders came up with to withstand attack from an ever more formidable array of 'siege engines'. They also explore the craft behind the weapons they had to resist, from launching medieval missiles with a trebuchet to making, and using, one of the most feared weapons of the age: the crossbow. Ruth has a go at making 'cloth armour' in the form of a gambeson, while Tom and Peter get to grips with constructing arrow loops, a key defensive feature of the castle walls. Plus Ruth discovers that the job of making nails was largely regarded as women's work.

Peter and Tom render and limewash the inside walls of a guard tower, transforming its dark stone walls into a bright space. Ruth makes medieval paints, which were used to decorate walls with ornate patterns. Most of the pigments are from ochre extracted from the earth, burning it creates darker tones. She decorates the castle bedchamber, using designs based on those recently discovered at an 11th-century church nearby. Peter gets to grips with the castle's indoor toilets. An integral feature of medieval castles, the toilets were known as garde-robes, a French word for wardrobe. Clothes would often be kept inside them because it was believed the smell of ammonia from urine kept parasites at bay.

Ruth, Peter and Tom discover the ways in which every aspect of construction requires the masons, blacksmiths and carpenters to co-ordinate their efforts - from making and sharpening tools, to processing wood, and securing timber scaffolding on the castle walls. As we’ll discover, water-mills were hugely important to medieval communities. Producing flour for their bread required up to 2 hours a day of grinding by hand. But one mill could produce as much flour as around 40 people grinding grain by hand, thereby freeing up man-power by eliminating 'the daily grind'. In England, as early as 1080, there were 5,624 watermills, according to the Domesday Book.