The boys have been tasked by stonemason Fabrice Mangot with rendering the interior wall with lime mortar, the medieval equivalent of plaster.

We're gonna use two and a half buckets of sand and one lime and water and mix it in.

What we're looking for here is the right consistency.

Keep on adding a little bit of moisture.

Turn it in, turn it in.

A bit more.

It's okay.

And Tom is about to discover just how laborious the process is to make just one tile.

enough.

I'll be honest, it wasn't me that did most of it.

This is our medieval killing machine.

That's quite a long trigger there.

It's a long trigger.

Oh, wow.

And that's our ammunition, is it? OK.

Arrow in the groove.

If you can build a castle, you can fight a castle.

That's the arms race that's happening in our period, isn't it? The castles get more strong, more developed, more technical, and so the siege weapons become stronger, more powerful, more technical, each driving each other further and further onwards.

Arrow

in the groove.

It's on the string.

It's loaded.

That was terrible.

No, it wasn't.

It's made by heating limestone to 900 degrees and then mixing it with water to create slaked lime.

That looks very nice, Peter.

Right now, I think the experience is showing for the French guys that really put me to shame.

It's enjoyable work, though.

I actually do feel like I'm now a bit more connected to the castle.

You do like being clean, don't you? Like you always speak to, some of us just get on and work.

And like you, you seem to roll around in every bit of building material you can.

Thank

Steady.

[laughs] Yeah.

Well, this is the remains of our kiln.

It's just burnt down to ash.

I mean, our clay bowl at the bottom, I thought was gonna break up in the heat, but that's actually just gone solid.

That's amazing.

Look at the color.

At least one of us did.

It'll contain a fire to generate enough heat to turn the water into steam.

These stones are going to act as a radiator.

They're going to retain the heat of the fire.

I'm then gonna cover them with wet straw and wet grass, into which I will put, uh, the pieces of wood that I want to bend.

And the heat from those stones, that will heat up the moisture in that grass, and that'll turn into steam and force itself into the wood.

[gentle music] To make my fire, I've essentially built a chimney, and inside that, I'm gonna put a few oak shavings.

And around it, I'll put my, my, uh, wood upright, and the thing about the wood being upright is it will transport this heat up and just get that fire going.

[laughs]