Castle Builders - First Season

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 civilization.

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 laborers and masons who did the hard work.

The geniuses of design who imagined these

medieval mega-structures,

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, organization, and hard labor.

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 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 multicolored 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 trying to establish something like

Camp Bastion in Afghanistan.

The result:

some of the worlds 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 ultraviolet's.

For millenia,

humans have built in stone.

And even before the Romans came, saw and conquered

Northern Europe the stone ramparts of the hill fort

gave shelter and comfort to a thousand local tribes.

The hill forts 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's 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 a 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 mot, was built up with

a wooden tower on top.

The mot 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.

40 meters across and eight meters high,

it's known as Hen Domen.

Meaning in Welsh, simply, Old Mound.

But that scarcely does justice to the qualities

of the mot and bailey castles.

- They were much more sophisticated than they

appear on the ground today.

They would be elaborated with timber defenses

and contain significant timber buildings

they would look very sophisticated were we able to see them

in their hay-day.

- Hen Domen 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 mot and bailey castles.

- What was good about them was they're very quick

to construct.

You can construct a stronghold in alien

or enemy territory quickly.

And provide a point of defense

and a point of security for the people and the animals

that you brought with you.

The mot and bailey had given the Norman's

a strangle hold 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 line mortar.

And then you need the craftsmen trained in

putting all that together.

When the Normans came to England

there wasn't a long tradition of masonry building

but 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

for 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 color.

They're from caen stone imported across the channel

from Normandy.

Rochester Castle was actually built by an archbishop

of Canterbury, William of Corbett.

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

than 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