How to Build a Medieval Castle

Summary

Sometimes it takes a village to raise a window. Between 2015 and 2017, skilled masons meticulously carved and beveled arches and four-lobed flourishes for a Gothic-style stone window frame in Guédelon Castle’s ornate Chapel Tower. All that remained was to install some glass. But there was a problem, and the carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, basket weavers, historians, and archaeologists who work on-site were all enlisted to figure it out. Eight years later, the matter of what to put in the window of a medieval castle has nearly been resolved…maybe. Luckily, the team of 40 professional builders and craftspeople at Guédelon Castle love a conundrum. The castle, located in an abandoned quarry in the Puisaye region of Burgundy, 100 miles southeast of Paris, is the site of one of the world’s most comprehensive and longest-running experimental archaeology projects. In this kind of undertaking, archaeologists partner with skilled laborers to test hypotheses about how people worked, lived, and built in the past, filling gaps in academic knowledge through real-world trials. The project launched in 1998 with a straightforward mandate: Build a thirteenth-century castle using only thirteenth-century tools, techniques, and materials. Medieval archaeologists would provide guidance. And the hope was that every obstacle would reveal something that historians, architectural researchers, archaeologists, and castellologues, or scholars who specialize in studying castles, didn’t know. “At Guédelon, we’re looking for what disappeared in traditional archaeology,” says Florian Renucci, the master mason and longtime site director at Guédelon, who was formerly a researcher at Sorbonne University. “Experimental archaeology means bringing to life what workers can do. We’re always looking, hearing, feeling. Now, with our work, the castle can speak.” Guédelon Castle, in the Puisaye region of north-central France, represents a modern effort to build a thirteenth-century castle using only constru...