The Castle Builders | Episode 1: Masters & Masons | FD Ancient History

Castles. Citadels of world heritage. All over Europe, millions flock to see these masterpieces in stone. They are drawn by the astonishing scale of construction and by a sense of a lost world of heroism and chivalry. But castles are more than magnificent monuments to a past that's dead and gone. They hold the key to understanding a crucial period in the growth of our civilisation. In this series, we're on a journey to discover how castles were built and why they were constructed the way they were. How that changed over the centuries and why they still have a grip on our imagination today. We'll meet the castle builders, the labourers and masons who did the hard work, the geniuses of design who imagined these medieval megastructures, the structural engineers who turned them into reality and the kings and barons who commissioned them and lived in them. We'll show how the big history of the Middle Ages, the wars of France and England, shaped the castle. And how, in a thousand bloody sieges and battles, the castle changed the course of that history. If you want to understand how the modern world was constructed, you need to understand the castle builders. How do you build on a massive scale? And how was it done centuries ago without the aid of modern machines and computing power? Any major construction project is something little short of a miracle, a breathtaking combination of ingenuity, craft, organisation and hard labour. It takes determination, skill, planning and lots and lots of money. The same was true a thousand years ago. The technology may have moved on, but for the castle builders, the basic challenges were the same. These people are engineers and they've got to have the knowledge to make these things stay up. What the physics behind these buildings, now I dare say they're not writing equations down, but they must know exactly what works. In this episode, we'll see how some of the great castles of Europe were built, how the ideas and techniques behind their construction changed and developed in a few short centuries. How kings and barons found the resources and manpower to start building castles, and why they spent fortunes on finishing them. By building this great castle with multi-coloured towers, it has mythic and legendary importance. And how all of this happened on a huge scale, at a frenetic pace, and often in the heart of hostile territory. So you might have to think of what it must be like to try and establish something like Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The result? Some of the world's most beautiful and iconic structures, objects of admiration and wonder centuries later, buildings that have stood the test of time. It's this odd combination, isn't it? On the one hand, fine living and domesticity, and where did the king eat his dinner? And on the other hand, ultra-violence. For millennia, humans have built in stone. And even before the Romans came, saw and conquered Northern Europe, the stone ramparts of the hillfort gave shelter and comfort to a thousand local tribes. The hillforts were power bases for their territorial ambitions, and places of safety to raise their families. In a world of brutal raids and invasions, an impregnable defensive fortress has obvious advantages. That's why the Romans raised stone forts to protect their legions as they pushed the boundaries of their empire wider and wider. And why they built walls to define and defend the extremities of the world they conquered. But it wasn't until the 11th century that the European castle, as we now think of it, began to take shape. A castle is primarily to defend a lord or a noble or a king, his family and his household, and also to command the territory of which he's the owner. And in that way, it differs from a fort or fortress, which is there to protect a company of soldiers. The earliest castles were built from earth and timber. A huge mound of soil, a motte, was built up with a wooden tower on top. The motte was surrounded by a bailey, a larger defensive enclosure protected by a ditch and an earthen rampart. The thing that is most difficult for people in the 21st century to grasp is that early castles, 99% of them, are made of wood. The thousands of castles that are put up over Western Europe in the Middle Ages are earth and timber. This is the site of one of the first timber castles built in Britain. Forty metres across and eight metres high, it's known as hyndommen, meaning in Welsh simply old mound. But that scarcely does justice to the qualities of the modern bailey castles. They were much more sophisticated than they appear on the ground today. They would be elaborated with timber defences and contain significant timber buildings. They would look very sophisticated were we able to see them in their heyday. Hyndommen stands guard over a strategically important ford across the River Severn. It was built in 1070 by Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury. He named it Montgomery Castle after his home in Normandy. It was the Norman conquest which made the castle a significant feature of the English countryside. England before 1066 was a land without castles. They have horses but they don't ride them into battle and nor do they have castles. And it's those two things in combination, cavalry forces, but most especially castles, that give the Normans the cutting edge, the advantage. The castle was the Norman way of taking control. All over England, William the Conqueror's knights began to throw up hundreds of modern bailey castles. What was good about them is they're very quick to construct. You can construct a stronghold in alien or enemy territory quickly and provide a point of defence and a point of security for the people and the animals that you brought with you. The modern bailey had given the Normans a stranglehold on England. The next crucial innovation was the stone keep, a defensive stronghold at the heart of the castle. But masonry threw up its own challenges for the castle builders. You need to be able to obtain the raw materials, quarry the stone, fell the timber, create the lime mortar. And then you needed craftsmen trained in putting all that together. When the Normans came to England, there wasn't a long tradition of masonry building. There were churches but most of the houses were built of timber and earth. So these skills had to be either brought over or developed. The Normans were very happy to import the sophisticated skills in masonry they needed to construct robust defensive structures on a grand scale. This is Rochester Castle in Kent, one of the earliest and best examples of the stone keep. The keep is the imposing central feature of the castle. It shelters a basement and three floors as well as galleries and battlements. The grandest of the rooms were on the second floor with a mezzanine to give them extra height. The spine wall is pierced to form an arcade of four round headed arches. The accommodation could be reached by spiral staircases in two opposite corners of the keep and there were vaulted ceilings and fireplaces and passageways to access the battlements. The exterior walls get their rough appearance from the irregular rubble used to build them. Kentish ragstone, a hard grey limestone quarried locally. But the angles of the buttresses, doors and windows are yellow in colour. They're from cairnstone, imported across the Channel from Normandy. Rochester Castle was actually built by an Archbishop of Canterbury, William of Corbeil. A Prince Bishop, a Baron in his own right, it was William who completed the construction of Canterbury Cathedral. But he was also a castle builder. And if there was any doubt that the princes of the church were also keenly interested in temporal power, then Rochester Castle is the plainest possible statement of intent. Rochester's primary function is purely practical. It's a secure fortress. But even this early example declares that the castle has a symbolic purpose too. At almost 35 metres high, the lime-washed keep would have declared its power and authority over all the surrounding countryside. The interior of a castle too could be used to proclaim the might and glory of its builder. Not far from Rochester in Kent is the Great Tower of Dover Castle. It was the last of the great square keeps built in England after the Norman Conquest. A royal palace of King Henry II, it's recently been restored to look as it might have done in the 1180s. The King's Chamber was his private apartment. It was shared with servants and senior officials, and it was where the business of government was carried out. The King's Hall was a place of meeting and assembly, used for ceremonies and feasts. It proclaimed that if the King was on his throne, all was right with the world. An army of servants in the kitchen below would have kept the King and his guests well fed. The entertainment was certainly lavish. But the spaciousness and grandeur of the living quarters shouldn't blind us to the fact that Dover was a castle that needed defending strongly. Known as the key to England, it was attacked by French armies and rebellious barons. A military stronghold and an official residence, Dover accommodates both functions of a castle with a grace that belies how difficult it is to integrate the two. It's this odd combination, isn't it? On the one hand, fine living and domesticity and where did the King eat his dinner? And on the other hand, ultra-violence. You've got boiling oil and catapults and sieges. If you combine a fortress and a stately home, it's a very difficult proposition. Because if you want a fortress, you've got to have thick walls and small windows and keep people out. And if you want a stately home, you've got to have lots of light and luxury and big windows. And so it's a very difficult balancing act, creating a building that is at the same time homely and warlike. Few castles blend beauty and strength as perfectly as this one. Chateau Gaillard was built here in the valley of the Seine in Normandy by one of the great kings of European history. Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart, was the hero king of the Crusades and of the tales of Robin Hood. The son of Henry II who built Dover, Richard inherited the title of Duke of Normandy from his father. He was determined to assert his authority against the king of France to secure his territories and his lines of communication. Begun in 1196, the chateau was to be a structure entirely new to 12th century France. Surrounded by a ditch 12 metres deep, it was a tear-shaped fortification. Its ingenious design of sheer, round towers made it almost impossible to attack with projectiles. Urged on by Richard himself, an army of labourers worked tirelessly, putting in two and a half million shifts of work, racing against time, weather and the imminent attack of the French. To ensure a supply of water for the castle, two wells were to be built. The wells were so deep and dark that the diggers had to excavate the stone by torchlight, panting under the strain of oxygen deprivation as the breathable air was burned away by the flames that lit their work. Richard's budget stretched to 12.7 million ducats, many hundreds of millions today and a huge percentage of a medieval economy. Richard himself took personal charge of construction, and historians think of him as the architect of its unique design. Before two years had passed, Chateau Gaillard was complete. The king could glory in a prodigious achievement, and this is what Richard saw. His revolutionary, miracle castle. So beautiful he called it his one-year-old daughter. So strong, it gave him command and control over the key river route below. Visionary determination was one thing, but castles could not be built without the craft skills of masters and masons. And to appreciate their work properly, it's time to move to another theatre of conflict. The kings of England also faced a challenge on their western flank, from the rebellious Welsh. The castle was central to the power struggle which ensued. Within a quarter of a century of the conquest, the Normans had built the great tower of Chepstow Castle on the River Wye. They now controlled the gateway to South Wales. Soon, the Normans had forced their way along the southern Welsh coast, and everywhere they went, they built castles. From Cardiff to Kidwelly, and as far west as Pembroke. The castles gave the Normans control of the coastal strip, the so-called Welsh Marches. Wales was to become a country with more castles per square mile than any other. But the border between these marches and the native-held uplands of Wales proper was contested territory. Wales was a very different prospect from the Anglo-Saxon lands that the Normans had conquered so rapidly. It would take the Normans 200 years to subdue the Welsh. The mountainous terrain was ideal for guerrilla-style resistance. And unlike England, Wales was divided into many competing kingdoms. Defeating one Welsh leader was no guarantee that any of the others would fall into line. Young warlords like the Lord Rees played the Normans at their own game. By using cavalry and building stone castles of their own, right across south-west Wales, the Lord Rees claws back power from the Norman marcher lords. His 12th century De Highbarth glitters with a network of lime-washed castles, power bases for the native Welsh. The Lord Rees has shown that it is possible to arrest the forward march of the Normans. And their own trump card, the castle, is key to stopping them. A century later, Llywelyn ap Griffith, Llywelyn the Last, compels the Normans to recognise that he is Prince of Wales. Llywelyn has castles of his own, castles like Dolbadarn, where the native Welsh round tower is used as a centrepiece of defensive architecture. Llywelyn is strong in his mountain fastnesses, so strong that he can strike a deal with the English king. On 29th September 1267, Llywelyn meets Henry III at a ford on the border between England and Wales. It's a formal meeting place to ratify a formal agreement, the Treaty of Montgomery. It grants Llywelyn power and authority over Wales. Providing he pays homage to the English king, Llywelyn is free to extend his rule. Castles like Castell Llywere, built by his grandfather Llywelyn the Great, give him control over areas of Wales far beyond Snowdonia itself. From his strongholds in Gwynedd, Llywelyn raids Norman territory in the south. The young Norman lord, Gilbert de Clare, Gilbert the Red, is willing to break new ground to meet this threat. He diverts a river to create artificial lakes. It's all part of an enterprising plan to build one of the largest castles in the whole of Europe. It's the first castle in Britain designed to be defended by walls within walls. Its scale is imposing even today. He didn't choose to build Caerphilly on top of a hill or on a mountain. He didn't choose a naturally defendable position. He wanted to lay out a new form of elaborate castle in which there were multiple layers of defence. Every time he passed an obstacle, he faced another obstacle. So you'd go through one gatehouse and be faced with another gatehouse. You'd cross one drawbridge and be faced with a portcullis and a pair of doors. And each time you approached one of these structures, you were under fire from the adjacent towers and curtain walls. And then he wanted to surround that with areas of water that could keep potential attackers and their siege engines away. The key person in Gilbert's project is his master mason. Like a modern architect, he designs the building. But he's a craftsman himself and understands how other craftsmen work. A skilled military engineer, he contracts all the other workers. Next to the master mason, the principal workers are the freemasons. Expert stone cutters and sculptors, they're working at the sharp end of the logistical challenge. Every single stone there has been hacked out by hand from a quarry, pre-mechanised age, so all done manually with hand tools. And then transported, in some cases, over ridiculous distances. You don't have proper roads, you don't have proper vehicles to go on those proper roads. And you rely on river transport and tracks to get this stuff to one place in enormous quantities. Absolutely enormous quantities. Then you start building. The castle builders are engaged in a massive project, which makes the minutiae of their work even more impressive to the trained eye. It's just that meticulous detail and the thousands and thousands, again, probably hundreds of thousands of hours that have been expended just creating those fine details. Door edges, the window frames, the archways. The devil is in the detail. But as the walls rise higher, someone needs to keep an eye on the big picture and to solve the major architectural problems which the site throws up. We have these huge spur buttresses which merge with the walls to either side. They're all built out of single pieces of graduating size. The sheer ingenuity. We need to carry this wall into a parapet that juts over it by a few inches. And we'll have one piece of stone that actually carries that job. And we'll have several of them in graduating size moving down the line of this wall. And somebody is cutting these to order, to a plan, and they're putting them all together by hand. You've got to have the masons with the capability of doing that work. And also somebody actually capable of designing this thing and giving them effectively what you'd call a spec in modern days. Work begins at Caerphilly Castle on the 11th of April 1268. And the master mason's genius means the major work on the core of the castle is completed within three short years. Gilbert's workers have earned their payday. Their astonishing achievement will stand for centuries. It's a tribute to their physical and intellectual prowess. They've got to have the knowledge to make these things stay up. What the physics behind these buildings? Now I dare say they're not writing equations down, but they must have plans, they must know exactly what works. So they've been brought in, whoever Gilbert's architect and engineers were, brought in for that purpose because they've achieved the same elsewhere. Caerphilly reasserts Norman control over lowland Wales. But it's not the end of this power struggle. Faced with an unassailable bastion like Caerphilly, Llywelyn ap Griffith is pushed back north to his strongholds in Snowdonia. There's a new English king, Edward I, Edward Longshanks. Edward begins to build castles of his own around the coasts of northern Wales. He's a vigorous king, and in a hurry to impose his rule over all of Britain. When Llywelyn refuses to pay homage, Edward sends in the troops. And there's worse to come. In 1282, Llywelyn's wife Eleanor dies in childbirth, leaving him with no male heir. With little left to lose, Llywelyn decides to join his brother in a desperate uprising against the English. A month later, Wales will have lost its leader. Run through in a chance encounter with an English knight, the Prince of Wales is dead. Edward decides to press home his advantage. The upshot? The completion of Edward's so-called Ring of Iron around north Wales. It's the most ambitious programme of castle building anywhere in medieval Europe. And all the more remarkable, because the workforce recruited from all over England is being sent into remote and still extremely hostile territory. So you might have to think of what it must be like to try and establish somewhere like Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. You're sending people out to work in very difficult circumstances, in an area where there weren't necessarily materials available, or tools. All of that would have to be brought in. To drive the enterprise forward, Edward established an office of the King's Works in Conwy, on the northern coast of Wales. His key recruit was a master mason he'd come across in Savoy, as he was returning over land from the Crusades to claim his throne. James of St George became master of the King's Works in Wales. His distinctive signature is to be found in detail after architectural detail in all of Edward's great Welsh castles. Some key talents coalesced around Master James. There was his engineer, his military engineer, Bertrand de Saultoux. His principal carpenter, Philip Senter. And Stephen the painter, his chief decorative artist. The locations identified for the castles had one thing in common, they could be supplied directly from the sea. If the rebellious Welsh blockaded them by land, Edward could ship in men and supplies to lift the siege. There was Conwy itself, and further west, Caernarfon. And finally, designed as a perfect set of concentric defences, Beaumaris on Anglesey was the last to be built. Work had begun at Harlech in April 1283. Its massive Barbican towers and fortified path, the way to the sea below, made Harlech a definitive statement of medieval engineering. Today, Harlech is landlocked, looking out over land reclaimed from the sea. Back then, it stood directly above the shoreline. They've picked the site, haven't they? You can see it, and as with all of Edward's castles, they're very visible in one way or another. They must have been absolutely shocking things to behold for the local population. If you see the sea and the various major river channels as the highways of the age, these things were very, very visible. You would pass them as you headed along the coast or as you headed up waterways inland. You always have to remember that you've got water at the base of the rock that it's on. They really send a message across that this is it, we're here and we're not moving anywhere. The raw materials to build Harlech came from far and wide. Stone from Caernarfon, lime from Anglesey, timber from Flint, lead from Bristol and iron from the English Midlands. And the scale of the work was a wonder to behold. There were 950 men at the height of the building season involved in that one castle. It gives you some idea of the sort of logistics necessary to bring those people there, to feed them, to house them, to provide them with tools, materials and equipment to enable them to build these buildings at considerable speed and under the eyes of a recently conquered people. The castle building can't start or finish without the work of the carpenters. The timbers, you probably deforested an entire region, a third of the field just providing yourself with timber for flooring, scaffolding, I mean the scaffolding must have been a thing in itself. We're talking hundreds and thousands of metres of timber stacked up the sides of buildings, going round corners, just to put this great structure in place. Roofing, flooring, bridges, windows, temporary structures alone must have, well you could probably build a small village or a small town with them. Fitting out a multi-storey tower was a major project in itself. The final adornment was the decorative work. Artists used stencils and pouncing, a technique of pricking a pattern in paper and then forcing powder through the holes to leave an outline on the working surface below. The painted halls and chambers of the castle may have been seen only by a privileged few, but they proclaimed a king's wealth and pre-eminence to his barons and courtiers. These were great men who liked living in lavish surroundings, so you'd have plasterers and painters and people who could make and lay tiles and all the other very colourful things that made castles such a remarkable feature to those who came and visited. The work was exquisite, but the cost was astronomical. It dwarfed the spending on castles like Dover and Chateau Gaillard. It was enough to bankrupt a king, and very nearly did. Edward emptied his coffers and was forced to borrow heavily from foreign bankers and repeatedly to beg Parliament for funds. As rivers of pennies flowed into Wales to pay the workforce on these vast projects, the king demanded meticulous records of every item of expenditure. The thing that always strikes me is just the sheer opulence, the sheer cost, almost obscene wealth that's gone into building these things. The spend is out of all proportion really to almost anything else that's being built at the time. Struggling to keep within his budget, Master James faced dilemmas familiar to anyone who's ever engaged a builder. If you pay somebody by the day, they're never in a rush to finish. What's the incentive for them to finish? If you pay them by the piece, or by the task, you've got to have people working for you who can certify what they've done, so you're having to pay somebody else to measure what they've done. And if you pay someone a fixum contract, you spend all your time arguing over changes, additions and details. So you spend all your time arguing over the price. And so whichever way you choose, and whenever you've done this in the past or today, those are the choices that you face, and no method is necessarily better than the other, but you have to apply them in different circumstances. No matter how careful he was in choosing the most economical method of paying his workforce, Master James was under huge pressure to justify every line of expenditure. In case you should wonder where so much money could go in a week, he wrote to the King in 1296, we would have you know that we have needed 400 masons, 2,000 less skilled workmen, 100 carts, 60 wagons and 30 boats, 200 quarrymen, 30 smiths and carpenters. Edward could be the sternest of taskmasters. But the end result of all this labour pleased him. In 1290, the King appointed Master James as Constable of Harlech Castle. What better reward for the architect than to live in the gatehouse he himself had created. The jewel amongst Edward's North Wales castles, and by today the most famous, is Caernarfon. One glance at Caernarfon and you see that it's different. It was clearly designed to be different from the start. It doesn't have round towers, it has these sort of strange polygonal towers. The stonework is beautifully cut, it has these striped bands of stone, so it looks different from the start. And it was apparent that it was designed to be not just a castle, but a palace. A symbolic presence, if you like, of royal authority in Gwynedd. In building Caernarfon Castle, Edward made a very deliberate attempt to conjure up the town's classical legacy as the home to a Roman legion a thousand years before. He builds it in a location where it has mythic and legendary importance. Caernarfon has legendary stories linked with the Emperor Constantine's father. His body was apparently found at Caernarfon and reinterred there under Edward I's orders. So by building this castle, which taps into the mythological stories about this great castle with multicoloured towers located on the mouth of a river, that positioning of Caernarfon aligns Edward with that whole mythological past as well as his political reality in the present. If proof was ever needed of how significant Caernarfon was for Edward I of England, we need look no further than the birth of his son and heir there in 1284. The story of his birth is one of these incidents from history where fact meets legend and myth. This idea of Edward sending his heavily pregnant wife, Eleanor, across what would have been a very difficult country in order for this birth to take place symbolically in Caernarfon. This poor woman, heavily pregnant, being sent over land to get to this castle and when she arrives there she finds a building site. They only started building the castle a year previously so clearly it's nothing like the castle we see today. In legend at least, his son's birth in this castle gave Edward the opportunity for a flamboyant piece of political theatre. The story goes that the king had heard that the Welsh aristocracy who'd survived his wars was still hankering after a new Prince of Wales to lead them. The Welsh Lord said that they would only accept a countryman, someone from their own land. So Edward said, I offer you my new son. He's born here in Wales and he speaks not a word of English. The tradition of the English monarch's eldest son being known as Prince of Wales continues to this day. Here at Caernarfon in 1969, Prince Charles became the latest to be invested with the title. I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb. One of our most popular pieces of film which we have on the site is actually the film of the 1969 investiture of Prince Charles and particularly popular with audiences from America. I must say they do like to see that and to walk where the Queen walked. And the thing I find interesting when I see it, knowing the site as I do, is the amount of work they must have done to put in all of the seating and other arrangements to sort of get everybody into the castle for that spectacular event seen around the world. Almost 750 years after it was built, Edward's castle has lost none of its power to impress visitors from afar. And it still divides opinion amongst the local Welsh population, which it was designed to dominate. Well, of course, as an architect, I have to say that it's, you know, that yes, I mean, it's a World Heritage site and it's a magnificent building. But some people won't actually put a foot over the threshold here because it is still a sign of oppression. Like it or not, Wales is recognised the world over as a land of castles. And there's no denying Caernarfon's place in that long history. The heartening thing for me now is that if you look at Caernarfon, Caernarfon now has become a community which is Welsh-speaking, which is vibrant. And it could almost be argued that we've almost taken over that symbol of oppression. Caernarfon, fit for a king. But like every castle, the people are part of its story too. The glories of medieval castles, their beauty and their opulence, burnished the status and mystique of royalty. The strength of these castles shielded the power of barons and overlords. They set in stone a feudal system which seems at odds with our more democratic age. But understood in a different light, these citadels have left a remarkable record of the work of the common people, the castle builders. I think it's something that really helps you to empathise with the people who built the things in the first place. The labour force, I suppose. Human hands have shaped these structures, huge towering things. Even if they survive just as a stubby ruin, there'll often be a detail, whether it's a mason making a mark on a piece of stone, a mason's mark. It's that sheer effort that always impresses. In our next episode, we'll see the great castles of Europe tested by siege and storm. Can the work of the castle builders withstand the onslaught it faces from the force of arms?