Before beginning to build a castle it was important to find a suitable site upon which to build. The ideal site would have a good water supply nearby, which was essential for the castle defences, as a ditch filled with water would present more of an obstacle to the enemy than an empty one. Water was also needed for the castle community. They would use it for drinking, cooking, farming and feeding the animals. The survival of the castle inhabitants would depend on a sufficient water supply.

Almeley Castle Ditch

The water for the castle was normally supplied in one of two ways: the first was by means of digging well, the underground water flow normally occurring naturally. The second was by means of a tank or cistern within the castle enclosure. This was sometimes in the form of a hole dug in the ground and lined with leather to make it waterproof. It would most probably have a roof and sides to keep animals out and help keep it fresh. However, with stagnant water there were always health risks from typhoid and dysentery.

A good castle site would provide natural defences, such as on the spur of a hill or the head of a valley. It was also beneficial if it was in open land as this provided fewer places for the enemy to hide and gave less chance for a surprise attack. Good vision from a castle was also important for communication. Castles would often communicate with each other by means of beacons (small fires) and messengers. The further you could see from a castle the sooner you could receive messages and act upon them.

Goodrich Castle near Ross is a very good example of a castle that has been well placed. It is on a crag of rock above a river, which not only gives it good defensive vision but also means that supplies could be brought in easily to the close vicinity of the castle.

Another example of a well sited castle is the one at Clifford in the northwest of the county. The mound for the castle has been cut out into a spur of ground making it higher than the surrounding ground to the west, south and north and a person with good eyesight could see clearly for a distance of about 10-15 miles. There is a naturally sharp slope on the north side that leads directly down to the river. The river would have provided protection from attack, transport (by rafting and towing) and a place to cross. On the west is an area that was probably marsh, which would have also protected this side of the castle from attack. On the east is a leveled area of land, which would have held the bailey buildings.

It was important that a supply of materials for the construction of the castle could be found nearby. As there was not the technology for moving materials long distances; supplies could only be brought in more easily if the castle was on a river, such as at Goodrich Castle, where the gray conglomerate for the keep is thought to have been brought up from the Forest of Dean. Castles were often built near woods with the trees being felled and cleared to provide timber and create the defensive open space.

The number of people and the skill required varied greatly between stone and timber castles.

A timber castle would employ only the minimum of builders to construct and required very little skill, as it was a simple design. A ‘skeleton’ of the castle was erected as a timber frame. The joints of the frame were slotted together with mortise and tenon joints and a cylindrical peg placed through them both to hold it together. The panels of the frame would then be infilled with wooden stakes and covered with wattle and daub, which was a mixture of manure, straw, mud and horsehair.

The inhabitants of villages are likely to have had experience in basic carpentry, thatching, wattle and daub etc as they could not afford skilled labour to build their own dwellings, but it is unlikely that they possessed the skills required to construct stone castles.

Stone castles required a great deal more planning, labour and skill. An Architect was employed to design and plan the castle; he would be highly skilled and would have probably worked on several different castles. The architects would most likely be Norman, as the native English had neither the knowledge, nor the skill to build a castle.

A Master mason was employed to oversee the planning and building of the castle; he would also organise the accounts, as the construction of a castle required a great deal of expenditure. Most probably the money for wages would have been paid to the Master mason for him to distribute. He would have decided how much each worker was entitled to depending on his experience.

The Master masons chief responsibility was to establish the number of men and quantity of materials needed and also to decide on the plans and the order of operations. He was the equivalent of a modern day Project Manager. It is likely that the Master mason gained his experience from overseeing smaller projects before advancing onto larger undertakings such as castles.

The stone for the castle structure was cut into blocks from the quarry by a group of skilled men called Hewers.

The stone would then go to Stonemasons who would carve the blocks into the right shape and size and add any decoration that was needed. They would cut the arrow-slit windows and the blocks to frame the doorways. This was a highly skilled job without much room for error.

The finished blocks would then be passed to the Rough masons who would lay the courses of the walls. This job was very similar to that of modern day bricklayers, the bricks were cemented in with mortar before another course was laid

The castle would also employ a number of other craftsmen. Carpenters were needed to make the doors, window shutters, palisade fencing, bailey buildings and roofs. The carpenters would have also made the scaffolding necessary for the erection of the castle. Highly skilled Smiths were needed to make the portcullis gates, hinges and bolts, as well as many of the tools involved in construction. Labourers were required to do the fetching and carrying as well as the more menial jobs such as digging the ditches and clearing rubble.

The site was first leveled and cleared and the size and shape of the building marked out using wooden pegs and string. The foundation trenches would then be dug. The trenches were first filled with a rubble and mortar mixture, then retaining walls were built on top to just below ground level and the space between them filled with more rubble and mortar. Castles usually contained two types of masonry, rubble and ashlar. Rubble was lumps of irregular shaped stone, which was used for walls that weren’t going to be seen as it was cheap and easy to lay. Ashlar was good quality regularly cut stone that was used for exterior walls and was more neatly laid and jointed. Compare the exterior and interior walls of Clifford Castle below.

The exterior wall of Clifford Castle (ashlar)	The inner wall of Clifford Castle (rubble)

The transport of stone and other building materials was a logistical problem for medieval master masons, if feasible a quarry was established as close to the site as possible. If a quarry could not be set up nearby then stone may have to have been obtained from independent quarry masters. With transport by road being slow, cumbersome and expensive the most ideal way to convey the stone to the site was to use navigable rivers and waterways. Transport was a major source of expenditure in castle building. At Caernarvon Castle in Wales the total amount spent on materials in 1285-6 was £151 5s 6 ½ d but the cost of transporting the materials came to £535 8s 8 ½ d over 3 ½ times the cost.

Mortar for the walls was prepared by burning limestone or chalk in kilns to produce quicklime. This quicklime was then mixed with water to produce lime putty to which sand was added. This mixture was then turned into mortar with the aid of a mechanical mixer, this was a circular well with a vertical centre post to which was attached a horizontal beam with paddles, when the beam was turned the paddles stirred the mixture into mortar.

Lime mortar was time consuming to build with. It takes a long time to go off (set) and because of this only a limited section could be built at a time before needing to wait for the mortar to set – sometimes up to a week. If you carried on building before the mortar was set then the weight of the walls would push the mortar out and there would be very little holding the wall together. Even today if you go right into the centre of a castle wall built 800 years ago you may find that the lime mortar hasn’t completely gone off.

Lime mortar also required certain weather conditions. If it was raining or damp the mortar could wash off or take longer to set, if it was too hot then the stones off the wall would need to be kept damp to stop them absorbing the moisture from the mortar and preventing it from sticking.

The stonecutters in medieval castles were supplied with patterns of the stone carving details from which to work. Using compasses and a square, the master mason drew all the patterns out in full size on specially prepared plaster floors. These designs were then used to create wooden templates, which were given to the stone cutters. The stone cutter would then square his block to size, draw the outline of the template on each end of the block, and then cut it to shape. Today stonemasons still use templates to mark out the design on the stone before carving the decoration, however, today templates are made out of hard-wearing plastic rather than wood, which is prone to rotting.

A modern stonemason and plastic template

	The tools of the modern stonemason have changed very little since the Medieval period. Stonemasons from Capps & Capps (currently working on Hereford Cathedral) still use simple, metal chisels, lump-hammers and pairs of compasses to carve the blocks, the only difference today being that often the chisels are tipped in titanium which makes them considerably more robust than those of a medieval mason. Today a stonemason undergoes a 7 year apprenticeship which teaches him all about the working and carving of stone. It is likely that the skills were learnt in much the same way in the Middle Ages, with a lot of the learning taking place on the job.
A modern mallet		modern chisels

The finished blocks of stone would have been quite heavy and the medieval builders developed several ways of lifting them into place on the wall. One way was to set up a system of jibs and pulleys where the turning of a wheel pulled a rope, which raised the stone. In larger castles these pulley systems could take the form of a treadmill attached to a large wheel which was turned by a man walking round inside of the wheel.

Construction in the medieval period was often seasonal with building being undertaken during 6 months of the year when the weather was more conducive to working out of doors. Lime mortar has an extremely slow setting time, which would have meant that it was vulnerable to being washed away in bad weather. The slow setting time would have also meant that the height of construction in one day would have been limited as upper levels couldn’t be laid until the mortar had dried below, giving a stable base on which to work. Dr Warwick Rodwell (The Archaeology of the English Church, Batsford 1981) has estimated that medieval buildings were erected at a rate of 20-50cm a day.

It is difficult to say with any certainty how long it took to build any castle, as each one is different and the site, conditions and resources of the owner unique.

A timber castle could have been constructed in a matter of months from start to finish. The majority of the labour was required in the construction of the motte. Holden (1967) has estimated that a motte with a base diameter of 40m and a height of 5m would have taken 50 men 42 days to build if they were working a 10 hour day.

This is working on the assumption that one man equipped with simple digging tools could shift 0.42m3 (15 cubic foot) of soil in one hour. The speed of digging would greatly depend on the quality of the tools and the dryness of the earth, the wetter the ground the harder it would have been to dig. A man would also dig less in the afternoon, as he became tired so a days work may have not been much more than 2.4m cubed (80-90 cubic foot). This output would have also depended on the type of soil that was being dug, loamy and sandy soil is much easier to dig than soft rock or stiff clay.

In a timber castle a great deal of time would have been needed for carpenters to create the beams, floor-boarding and rafters. Spence Geddes (Estimating for Building and Civil Engineering Works, George Newnes Ltd, 1963) has attempted to put estimates on the time taken by a skilled carpenter to carry out these tasks. He estimates that a carpenter could produce 2.5 cubic foot of ceiling beams and joists in 1 hour, 24 square foot of floor boarding in 1 hour and 2 cubic foot of rafters in 1 hour. However it must be remembered that these approximations are for modern day carpenters using tools that were more sophisticated than those of a medieval carpenter.

Spence Geddes has also estimated the time taken by bricklayers and plasterers to perform their part of the work. To build a wall 14 inches thick and using a modern standard sized brick a bricklayer could lay 0.54 square yards in 1 hour. A medieval rough mason would have been using stones that were a lot larger than standard bricks. Although this would cut down some of the time, these blocks were heavier to lift into place and so any time made up by their size would have been lost because of their weight. A plasterer takes 1 hour to plaster 4 square yards of internal render with a hair and lime mortar and would take the same time to do a coat ½ inch thick on the external walls.

These estimations do not take into account the time taken to build the scaffolding so the builders could reach the higher levels, nor the time taken to resource and provide the materials. These are also only approximate guesses for the simple construction of the castle, the carving and finishing of the stone blocks would have taken a lot longer. In a discussion with Simon Hudson, a stonemason for Capps & Capps, (currently working on Hereford Cathedral) he has estimated that it would have taken 1 stonemason, working with 2 labourers, at least one month, if not more for the stonework in the picture on the right (from the chapel at Goodrich).

The column and arches on the left, which are found in the solar at Goodrich, are surprising in that Simon Hudson has approximated that each block of the column would have taken one day, whilst each voussoir (the curved blocks of the arches) would have taken up to 2 days. There may have been more than one carpenter working on it but Simon Hudson says that to get the blocks fitting together perfectly it would have been better for one man to have done it all.

To carve a simple block with accurate 90 degree angles such as the ones in the picture left may have taken a Hewer or Stonemason 1 day. Today blocks like these are cut by mechanical saw.

Accounts for expenditure recorded by the Exchequer are of some use on the topic of how long did it take to build, as they list the materials purchased and the salaries paid. However, much of the labour used in the castle construction would have been forced and unpaid and therefore no accurate record would have been kept of how many men and for how long.

MG