Ripped By mstoll
We're at Guédelon Castle, which is where we're filming our new series.
I'm David Upshall, I'm Executive Producer of the series.
I've produced on all the farm series that preceded this,
from Tales From The Green Valley, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm...
and, most recently, Tudor Monastery Farm.
We've changed things a little, as you can see.
We thought we'd try and apply all the skills that we've learnt from farming
to a new precinct,
and we were lucky enough to find this amazing castle project happening.
Instead of having to bring to life an old castle,
we've got a brand new one being built almost for our benefit,
but that's a story that goes a way back.
This is Sarah Preston, who is the Administrator at Guédelon,
who we were very lucky to meet.
I think you were my first point of contact.
I was the first point of contact for David.
It's quite ironic, because obviously I'm here in a French castle,
so I'm an English member of staff working in an early-13th century French castle,
which we can just about get away with.
I've been working here since 2006.
I initially came as a tour guide and I've slowly been able to build up my part over the years
and we've had this amazing opportunity this year to work with Lion Television,
filming this castle in the making.
This is experimental archaeology, we're building a castle from the ground up, from scratch,
using the different tools, techniques and materials of the early-13th century,
in order to better understand how medieval castle builders would have worked.
So what is this model used for?
In medieval times, they don't have a paper plan.
So they used a wood model.
I guess this is the way of the lord saying,
"This is what I want my castle to look like."
Yes, and the lord, he can change things with the model.
It's very easy for him!
In French terms, this is a Philippian castle.
So this is the type of castle that was built during the late-12th, early-13th century.
It was a standard plan imposed by King Philippe Augustus.
So he was "the builder king". He built thousands of castles throughout his reign.
We're no longer in Philippe's reign, we move forward in history.
We started in 1229, and this is our 17th year of construction, so we're now in year 1245.
This is actually the reign of Saint Louis, but we're still building the same type of castle.
So it's a fairly small castle, with a quadrangular courtyard, cylindrical corner towers,
heavily defended gatehouse...
But we're in a period of peace and prosperity.
In French history, this is a good time to be alive.
So this castle is not being built for defence.
A castle like this is primarily a display of status, wealth and power.
It's a home, which combines the functions of fortification - you never know.
And it's also using the language of military architecture to impress people who come by.
But essentially, this is a fortified home,
which is an economic centre and really a display of power.
Crucially, this is not a royal castle.
This was a decision we had to take at the beginning.
The owner of a castle like this is not a duke,
he's not a count, he's not a prince.
He's a low-ranking nobleman,
who will not have, necessarily, the financial means to install things like a drawbridge.
So there won't be a drawbridge at Guédelon, because this is a low-ranking, modest lord.
From our point of view, it's a great opportunity.
We're not only moving to a new area outside of farming,
but we're looking at a new period, a far earlier period than we've dealt with before.
Which is a challenge, because written texts
that give you a really accurate picture of day-to-day life
don't really arrive until Tudor times,
and we're several hundred years before that.
So, in a lot of ways,
the only way you can work out how people lived and what they did
is by doing and by deduction from doing.
So we'll know what was growing around people,
what ingredients they'd have had to hand.
But to work out what they would actually have cooked and the way they'd have eaten it
is something we have to kind of reach out a little bit to do through experimentation.
We have our three presenters from Tudor Monastery Farm -
Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold,
who are applying their skills to castle building.
I think it's been a great experience for them, it's very different.
"Come to France," you said. "It'll be fun," you said.
I had pictures of wine, cheese, lazy days on the beach.
We've got the first two, we're missing the third one.
Day one on the site, we find ourselves at the top of the Great Tower,
in the double hamster wheel, or the squirrel cages, as they call them here,
treading along, bringing up half a ton of stone.
Probably the only time, actually, I felt a strain on our friendship,
was trying to work in tandem in a forced way.
I thought you were starting to go too fast, you thought it was me going too fast.
These things are an absolute godsend, aren't they?
They are the machine of the medieval building site,
bringing up all the stone for the walls.
You think, we've got 500kg of weight we're pulling up,
and yet we manoeuvre it so easily the two of us,
my strength, your ballast.
Some real jeopardy, I didn't like being that high up.
I've got good imagination, I could just see the whole thing toppling off the tower
and us hurtling to our deaths.
The last thing I would've seen before I died was you, and that's not something I wanted to see.
We got through it. It really did depend who was doing our brake work, didn't it?
Philippe was the standout guy for us.
Brave man. Easy work.
Our friendship was on the line for a while there.
But, you know, we got through it.
Every day, we're learning something new about ourselves.
We're in these situations where, if they say, "Get in the squirrel cage," we've just got to do it.
- Man up. - Man up, yeah.
Well, man off the side at one stage, but, yeah. No, it was good.
Slowly, slowly. Yeah.
This whole experience has been something of a departure for us.
Instead of trying to take something old and bring it back to life,
this is creating something from scratch.
And joining somebody else's project.
This has been going on here for 17 years already and they've got another ten years to go.
So we've been able to just sort of sneak in
and have a look at an enormous and very exciting experiment in progress.
Workers' cottages, somewhere like this,
were always gonna be thrown up in a hurry and fairly sort of basic.
But then, so were those of most 13th-century people.
Ruth's had a great time setting up home in a hovel,
and learning how to deal with the cooking methods, the costume
and clothing of that period,
looking at the kind of fine detail, actually, of the way people lived inside a castle -
how you decorated a castle,
how you made paint for a castle,
as well as all the obvious kind of construction elements.
Lovely though these earth colours are,
I think perhaps my favourite of all the 13th-century paints and pigments
is one that you won't see on the main story.
It's very, very poisonous,
and a really great example of cutting-edge chemistry in the 13th century.
That's the making of the sort of greeny-blues that you sometimes see as little highlights -
you never see huge masses of it.
Little highlights here and there in images of the period.
It's a copper acetate.
So you make it - and this is described in a text from even before the 13th century,
in a 12th-century text -
by taking little pieces of copper and suspending them in a jar above vinegar.
And then the whole jar is put in a dung heap, sealed up,
so that the warmth of the composting dung will quietly vaporise the vinegar.
And those vapours will rise onto the copper, and you'll get that greeny-blue.
Have you ever seen a copper roof?
They always get that green colour,
and that is exactly the same chemical action going on.
Acids on copper makes a copper acetate - it seems sensible enough.
And that is the most vivid of bluey-turquoisey greens.
And you just scrape it off and paint with it.
I think the two approaches have married really well -
the approach of the show and the approach at Guédelon.
We're trying to do the same thing in different areas.
We're building in order to better understand.
If Ruth, for example, wants to know what it was like to put rushes on the hovel floor,
she's not going to write about it, she'll actually carry out that experiment.
So she'll go as far as finding the rushes, cutting them, transporting them and laying them down,
and then seeing several months later what the effect in the house is like.
The two approaches have really come together beautifully.
It's been a real pleasure working with you guys.
It's that great thing.
It seems initially like a big leap, going from farming to castle building.
But actually, they're kind of...
The common theme, what we've always been aiming at,
is finding out what lived-in life was actually like for ordinary people.
What would it have been like for the likes of you and me?
Actually, it's not that different,
in terms of we're in a different place, but we're still looking at the same things
and checking the same boxes.
Here are some of my top medieval cleaning tips.
For a start, for the washing up.
Got a greasy mark on your things? If you've just been frying some bacon and you can't shift it,
what you need is a handful of wood ash, straight out of the fire.
Cut your grease - no time at all.
And if your house is particularly dusty,
put aside your birch broom besom.
That will only pick up the leaves and the twigs and so forth.
If you've got dust to deal with, what you need is a broom made of broom.
That's why the plant's called that.
It's brilliant for getting in all those little cracks,
and moving the stuff your big besom won't touch.
Peter and Tom have had a great time joining in with the workforce here.
There's between 50 and 70 people working here at Guédelon.
They're an incredible workforce of stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths.
And have you enjoyed using the side axe on the logs?
Yeah, actually... normally, I do enjoy working a lot with axes, as you well know.
But this time round, it's been quite challenging.
The side axe is a completely different way of working.
I'm amazed you still have your kneecaps and fingers.
And the rest!
This is the weirdest axe I've ever used.
The balance is all off.
You've got a cutting edge and a flat side and that helps to cut,
but also force some of these fibres apart.
If you put the axe down like this, you can actually see the pole is slightly tilted.
That allows you to work along the wood nice and close.
But because you're holding it here, there's no risk to your knuckles or fingers as you work.
But what it comes down to, and what I'm having trouble with, is that fine tuning.
I know what I want to do, I can see what's marked out for me.
But, I'll be honest, it's not always happening that way.
It's actually been a different way of learning.
Tudor Monastery Farm, I think some of the axe work was actually very simple.
You come here and look at what they're trying to achieve...
There's no saws. I mean, who comes to a building site without a saw?
Everything is hewn by axes, pretty much.
There's the odd H-frame saw for doing little bits, but it's all axe, axe, axe.
And all these timbers here are just...
Hundreds of them, and it's all done by a small team of people.
The other thing I've noticed is the experience of the people here.
Some of the guys have only been here for three years or so,
but they're doing the stuff day in, day out.
So when we turn up, we think we've got a bit of experience doing X or Y,
but they're like, "Do it this way if we build a castle.
Because we've learned the hard way. We tried that, it didn't work.
We tried again, that didn't work.
Done it this way, it works."
I used to think you had really strong forearms.
You know, a really tight grip.
- Where are you going with this? - Everyone here, they're so...
Cos they're using the tools every day for an entire year,
and then year on year, they are just so strong.
There isn't a single jam jar in this area that can't be opened on the site.
I suppose Guédelon, a castle by its very nature, it's defensive in its architecture.
It's set out in Philippe Augustus's sort of medieval plan, that sort of defensive castle plan.
You are a military historian.
I think the real step up for me from Tudor Monastery Farm
is the fact that there is so much defence running through this series.
When you think about it, you can read a book,
you can look at some pictures or illustrations,
but when you come here and you actually see how the arrow loops are all positioned,
where the towers are placed, how big one tower has to be...
that's when it all starts to make sense.
Arrow loops are a perfect example.
You've got one loop facing that way, next floor up, one facing that way.
Sort of offset, aren't they? You get a 360-degree view.
Guess there's only one thing to do.
Yeah, go for it.
Are you aiming for anything out there, or are you just?
- Just aiming for the gap, my friend. - Aiming for the gap.
Right, bolt's in, touching string.
I guess, from a defensive point of view, then,
something like that shooting out of the loop...
It's a bit of a fear factor, straightaway, isn't it?
The other thing is, though, you know, the arrow loop gives you...
Obviously, it gives you a bit of vision.
People can't see you. But one thing that's interesting, look. This is a medieval design.
I just think there is a certain convenience that that crossbow prod
is almost the same size as this arrow loop.
So essentially this, based on a medieval castle,
and the medieval crossbow,
whether or not they were ever fired out of these things...
That sits very nicely there.
So you think the prod could be a measurement?
Yeah, so you've got one crossbow there,
and one longbow there.
You'd defend a castle like this with 20 men.
You think that'd be impossible,
but you position them in the right place, and the way you build a castle allows you to do that.
Castle architecture.
Done.
One of the things I'm proudest of,
because Guédelon's been going on for 17 years before we got here,
is the way that our presenters and our team
have totally integrated with the Guédelon workforce.
And the director of the site, Maryline, said a really lovely thing a few days ago,
which is that when the public, when the visitors come here,
they don't realise Ruth, Tom and Peter are TV presenters.
They think they're part of the Guédelon workforce,
cos they're so integrated and involved in the process of the work here.
They have really thrown themselves in...
in the way they always do.
The thing I love about this show is, it's never an endurance test,
it's always approached as an opportunity to be relished.
You can tell Peter, Tom and Ruth just love doing that.
There was a funny story.
We left Peter limewashing one of the towers on his own.
Not only was he having to limewash the tower, he had to fend off questions from visitors.
So he'd spent all morning explaining in his pidgin-French what he was doing,
and was laboriously explaining to this couple what he was up to, and they said,
"It's OK, we're from England, you can talk to us in English."
So, yeah, they've been doing a sterling job,
not only building the castle but also interacting and talking to the visitors who come here.
You can come back when you like.
To build a castle, you must first build a community.
And we have become part of that community.
- Hopefully. - Hopefully.
We don't know what they say about us behind our backs.
Fat and pasty. Little and large.
- Tom and Jerry. - I'm little and pasty?
Laurel and Hardy.
Tintin. I don't know what that made you but...
Probably Snowy.
Or Captain Haddock.
That's probably more likely.
These guys have been doing this for 15 years.
They know how to get things like this up here.
But it's amazing what they can move,
without the use of what we'd call machines.
Essentially, the use of rollers, levers, inclined planes, pulleys...
...all made out of wood.
Wood and stone working together in perfect harmony.
A bit like me and Tommo.
Much of what we've been doing has been working on the Chapel Tower.
We've seen the walls come up, we've seen a niche being built,
the ornate windows being put in place.
However, if I was ever to return to site, the one thing I'd dearly love to get involved with,
the one thing I'd love to see,
is the centring being put on -
a huge wooden crown that covers the entirety of the Chapel Tower,
upon which the rib vault is placed,
these perfectly shaped stones.
And then, when all that stone is in place, the wood gets removed.
And it's a very, very emotional moment.
They do it for every room in every tower.
Because if it's gonna fall down,
it's gonna fall down in the first five minutes.
And so much labour, so much work, so many man hours have gone into creating that,
people are holding hands, tears are flowing, breaths are being held.
But if it stays up, it'll stay up for 1,000 years and more.
The way we've always filmed these has always been with a very small crew, little intrusion.
But I'm amazed our soundman has any hair left.
Because this is a tourist attraction and it has thousands of visitors in a single day.
Even on a rainy day, people are turning up.
I think that's something the UK can learn a lot from.
If you can actually make history like this come alive,
then people are gonna visit whatever happens.
Schoolchildren love it, parents love it,
elderly couples come round, like, almost on a romantic trip.
It's pretty special.
And so far, we haven't actually trashed the castle, we haven't ruined anything.
No one knows about that.
I know Guédelon's quite well known in France, even though not in England.
It's known as a visitor attraction,
but it's amazing to me that this is the first time anybody's actually come in behind the scenes
to explore how you do it and what goes into making it.
I think it's a great credit to British television
that it's a British production house that's come here and taken the time and the effort
to really enter into the fine detail.
In 17 years, we've had a lot of coverage on French television,
but nothing that's looked to really understand the spirit of the work we're doing here.
It's just been so exciting to see the way that this show has shared knowledge
and shared skills in a similar way to builders in the same period.
This period shows just how much England and France are interconnected
and how much our histories are shared histories.
Ripped By mstoll