Secrets of the Castle with Ruth, Peter and Tom - Season 1

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold turn the clock back as they learn how to build a medieval castle using the tools, techniques and materials available in the 13th century.

Although Britain has some of the finest remaining castles of the medieval period, many of their secrets have been lost in time.

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.

It becomes clear that all the stone, wood, mortar, dyes, food and water required for the castle needed to be sourced from the surrounding landscape - transporting heavy goods in the 13th century was expensive. One of the most important resources on a medieval building site was water, so Peter visits a wood turner to make a pulley, and Tom makes a rope to hoist the bucket from the well. As they enjoy a simple meal of barley and vegetable pottage, they reflect that there are no easy jobs in the medieval age!

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold turn the clock back as they learn how to build a medieval castle using the tools, techniques and materials available in the 13th century.

This time the team are defending the castle. Ruth, Tom and Peter explore the art of medieval combat and the building of the castle's defensive structures.

The 13th century was part of the golden age of castle building. Driven by the legacy of bloody crusades and vicious dynastic struggles, it was an era when castle design and architecture were adapting as quickly as the battle strategies and tactics devised to bring them down.

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. Ruth discovers that the job of making nails was largely regarded as women's work.

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold turn the clock back as they learn how to build a medieval castle using the tools, techniques and materials available in the 13th century.

Ruth, Peter and Tom enter the surprisingly colourful world of medieval interior design.

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.

Tom makes tiles - a process that begins with mining clay, before processing and shaping it. The tiles are then fired in a kiln. Four thousand tiles are fired at a time, requiring temperatures of over 1,000 degrees. It's a three-day process - and a tense one. If things don't go to plan, months of work will be wasted.

It's estimated that over 80,000 tiles will be needed for the roofs and floors of Guedelon Castle.

The team delves deeper into the secrets of the skilled communities who built medieval castles. The stonemasons working on the castle walls are dependent upon blacksmiths, whose metalwork was magical to the medieval mindset, and upon carpenters employing sophisticated geometry.

Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold discover the ways in which every aspect of construction at Guédelon Castle requires the masons, blacksmiths and carpenters to coordinate their efforts - from making and sharpening tools to processing wood and securing timber scaffolding on the castle walls.

A water mill has been built, complete with sluice gates and a network of waterways to power it. Water mills were hugely important to medieval communities. Producing flour for a loaf of bread required up to two hours of grinding grain by hand. But one mill could produce as much flour as around 40 people grinding by hand, thereby eliminating the daily grind. In England, as early as 1080, there were 5,624 watermills according to the Domesday Book. But there are major teething problems with the Guédelon mill, which Peter and Tom are helping to fix.

A wooden walkway is also being constructed to connect the Chapel Tower with the Great Hall. The team follows every step of the process - from cutting down trees and shaping the wood through to the complex task of measuring up, before finally bringing the cut timbers into place around the stone walls of the tower.

Ruth rewards the team with a pike supper - a medieval delicacy - and Tom uses flour ground at the mill for his very first attempt at making bread.

As their time at Guédelon Castle in France draws to an end, the team looks at the castle's place in the wider medieval world.

Thirteenth-century Europe was a busy, developing, connected place, where work, trade, pilgrimages and crusades gave people the opportunity to travel across the continent and beyond.

Peter visits Vezeley Abbey - where Richard the Lionheart set off on the Third Crusade from - to examine first-hand some of the influences that were shaping the stone architecture of the period. Back at Guedelon, he helps build an ornate entrance to the chapel inspired by ideas from distant lands. Ruth looks at pilgrimage, the means by which anyone, regardless of class, age or gender, could travel afar.

Tom works on a new door for the castle kitchen, vital for protecting all the valuable spices kept inside (some worth more than gold), and Ruth makes an exotic treat from eastern luxuries. She also explores the textiles trade, colouring silk with expensive handmade dyes, making gold thread, and bringing them together to create immaculate embroidery, one of the few tradecrafts where women were the boss.

The team comes together to help construct one of the castle's most ambitious projects to date, the spectacular limestone window for the chapel. They stand on top of the tower as the keystone is eased into place - it's the perfect spot to end their medieval adventure.