There is a great documentary series with three archeologists by the BBC about medieval castles featuring Guédelon as a real live example from around 2014. I really enjoyed watching this and highly recommend it.
Great show. If you liked it, Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn has made several shows together along with another archeologist, Alex Langlands, which I think are even better.
Of these, I think my favourite is Victorian Farm (2009), where the gang has to bring a real Victorian-era farm back into working order and then live like the Victorian farmers did. Unlike the castle show, it benefits from the gang having to research and learn the old ways on their own, whereas the castle is a big project where they're being taught or directed by the crew who's already working there.
The other shows — Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, Tales from the Green Valley, etc. — are all thoroughly excellent.
A minor point, but Goodman is not an archeologist or historian, but she's very good!
That was the show that pointed out to me that Henry VIII had much bigger problems than divorce to deal with. By his reign the Crown owned about a third of England. And so did the Catholic Church.
Now maybe the story about him breaking with the Church over their stance on divorce wasn’t completely bullshit, but he was dealing with an existential threat to both the Crown and his family line and they were both being authored by the Church.
I had some questions about the history of land ownership of the crown and the church occasioned by this comment but I guess I found answers in an article after googling (wow, it's been a long time since that has happened, feels like 2006 all over again) so I made a post on the article I found
A Short, Angry History of Land in Britain, by Thom Forester
It's actually alarming how many of the things they did to screw the peasants out of opportunity and freedom echo "landmark" legislative actions and key regulatory trends in the 20th century US.
The Tudor show pointed out that the mills tended to be owned by the church and so you pretty much had to pay them in a fraction of the take. I knew being a peasant fucking sucked but I thought it was mostly the lords to blame. Not church too.
A bit offtopic. Is it possible to cast these videos somehow from the browser to a TV? I know it's possible to download them, but I am wondering if it's possible to stream them to the TV instead...
Yeah. I also wanted to rely on chromecast for this. But the chromecast button does not even show up when I open that page, so probably that page does not support that
You can still "cast tab" from Chrome. That's mostly what I use, to be honest. Some sites / streamers do a poor job implementing the cast functionality.
If you have a Chromecast on your tv, you can generally just cast a whole tab using chrome. But the frame rate will be awful and I don't think audio gets cast.
If there isn't a cast button within the video player itself, i would download them, and then use something local to cast the actual video content to your tv (vlc has this feature)
Of these, I think my favourite is Victorian Farm (2009), where the gang has to bring a real Victorian-era farm back into working order and then live like the Victorian farmers did. Unlike the castle show, it benefits from the gang having to research and learn the old ways on their own, whereas the castle is a big project where they're being taught or directed by the crew who's already working there.
The other shows — Tudor Monastery Farm, Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm, Tales from the Green Valley, etc. — are all thoroughly excellent.
A minor point, but Goodman is not an archeologist or historian, but she's very good!