Trier is Getting Renovated (Ok, not the real Trier. My Trier.) So I Had to Learn About Medieval Construction
My beloved Karl cannot get a castle without wanting to renovate it, especially as he just got handed a castle that had been neglected for seven years. This neglect happened after the Medieval equivalent of a meth addict threw up a weird arrangement of defensive towers right over the bake ovens. The place needed to be fixed.
Also, his cat, Nebella, needs her own cattery, and it would be so nice to have pipes take hot water directly to the kitchen.
This forced me to learn a few things about medieval construction.
- Masons had their own little lodge from which to do their planning.
- Scaffolding took the form of mortar and tenon construction built into the building that you were putting up. Basically, you would position a plank on the top of the wall and hammer it onto the post in the ground. Then you put the next layer of the wall up from that plank.
- A full castle would require 2 to 3 million hours of manual labor. A whole fortress, if you assume 2,700 men working 10-hour days, would take 4 months to build. Fortunately, Karl is building considerably less, but the cistern is only half done by the end of the story, and he’s had about a month and a half to do it. The garden walls are condensed in half very quickly though.
Sources:
Timeline — Secrets of the Castle YouTube Documentary
Medevialist.net ‘How to Build a Medieval Fortress — the Construction of Hildagsburg’
If you want more of me blathering:
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