Guédelon castle

 In the Puisaye region of French Burgundy, they are building a thirteenth-century castle. Its name is Guédelon.

 The project began in 1995 as an attempt to build a castle using medieval techniques.  Nearly thirty years later, they hope they are close to finishing, and they have learned a tremendous amount in the process about how castles were built in the thirteenth century.  The builders call this "experimental archaeology."

The process began with studying real castles.  Although all medieval castles have been modified over the centuries (and many are now in ruins), close analysis can show how (one simple example) walls were built with careful stonework for the inner and outer sides, and an inside filled with rubble.  A lot of medieval buildings still have builders' marks on stones or beams, giving additional clues to their construction.

Added to this are medieval manuscripts which portray castles and other buildings under construction.  There are even a few handbooks from the late Middle Ages giving cryptic instructions.  The modern French builders' guilds, the ones who repair old buildings, have retained a lot of useful information over the centuries.

But in essence the builders at Guédelon are reverse engineering a castle, trying something and seeing if it works to produce something that looks real.  Any thought someone might have had in 1995 when they started, that the simple folk of the thirteenth century would not have had the sophistication of modern builders, was quickly dispelled.  Medieval builders didn't have our machines, but they knew exactly what they were doing and what would work.

Timbers (mostly oak) are cut with medieval style axes and saws, and stones are chiseled and shaped with medieval style chisels.  The sandstone from which most of the castle is being built is locally quarried, and the limestone, used for fancy vaulting and decorative carvings, comes from just a short distance away.  Most of the oakwood is from nearby.  This reflects what real thirteenth-century builders would have had to do, get as much local as they could because of the enormous transportation costs of heavy materials in a pre-truck world.

Over the last quarter century, a lot of people interested in historical reconstruction have come to learn and work at Guédelon. The builders reconstructing Notre Dame in Paris, after the fire, are trying to restore the timbers and roof to something like the thirteenth-century original, and many of the workers had been trained in medieval techniques at Guédelon.

Guédelon welcomes visitors.  You can visit during the summer months, for only 14 euros each (less for children).  They are eager for people to see their work and to teach them about medieval techniques.  I would guess that once the castle is finished they will be able to rent it out as a movie set, because it will (of course) look like a thirteenth-century castle looked in the thirteenth century.  European movies set in the Middle Ages often use real castles as a backdrop, but they have to shoot carefully (or use CG special effects) to avoid the ruined bits (Hollywood movies tend to go in for the unconvincing stage set).

The project has an extensive website (in French and English) giving the story of how they decided to build a medieval castle in the twenty-first century and illustrating construction methods, available here.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on castles and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

It's castle time

Europe is scattered with ruined castles.  In the Middle Ages, there were a lot more (a great many have been disassembled or have just disintegrated), and they weren't in ruins.  Medieval aristocrats loved to build castles.  They first appeared around the year 1000 (after 1066 in England) and continued throughout the Middle Ages, indeed up to the seventeenth century in some areas (like Scotland), but lost much of their military significance after the development of gunpowder in the late Middle Ages.

This is Fouchard castle, in Auvergne, in pretty good shape now, as all castles would have been then.

Building a castle was not trivial.  They were solid stone, meaning built from literally millions of stones.  Initially they were made from field stones, ones just picked up, but during the twelfth century there was increased interest in quarried stones, square and smooth.  But even if the inner and outer surfaces of the wall were quarried stone, the space in between was filled with rubble, small stones and gravel.

Below is an eleventh-century castle wall (Brancion castle, Burgundy) built of field stone, with a thirteenth-century tower of quarried stone at the end--castles were constantly being updated.  Squared stones were also used around the window.

The effort of building a castle is underscored by the fact that a lot of them were built in essentially inaccessible spots.  Aristocrats would see a steep cliff, a high peak, even a volcanic cone, and cry, "It's castle time!"  This meant that water was often a serious issue, because they had to collect rain water and/or carry it up an extremely steep hill.

For example, here is a tower of the castle of Saint Ulrich, in Alsace, perched on a rock on a mountaintop--you can see open air dropping away beyond.  It's built of quarried stone that would have been carried up the mountain on mules.

Here's the view from the tower, to give you a sense of how high up it is.

Although castles were highly defensible, in practice many were not attacked for years, even generations.  They made their own quiet statement, "Don't even think about it."  And of course no aristocrat would have been able to hold his head up if he was not lord of a powerful castle.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on castles during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.