Beat The Ancestors on Medieval Cranes

On Monday the team on Channel 5’s Beat the Ancestors will attempt to build and improve upon the design for a medieval crane. According to the blurb in the Radio Times

‘Dick Strawbridge challenges a team of engineers to re-create a vast crane of the kind used to build Salisbury Cathedral in the 13th Century’.

Beat the Ancestors is a strange mixture of Scrapheap Challenge and the living history experiments from Time Team. Every week a team of engineers, including a lady special effects technician, are given the task of recreating an historical machine, and then improving the design. In one of the earliest programmes they were required to build a piece of late medieval artillery. This consisted of a number of small cannons fixed into a single gun carriage. These were all fired at once to create a lethal barrage. The crane was invented in ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC, and was introduced into medieval Europe from Egypt in the 12th century during the Crusades. The example in Salisbury Cathedral has survived because its physically built into the structure of the Cathedral itself. It’s hidden in the roof.

The programme should be worth watching. It never ceases to amaze me how technologically advanced the Middle Ages were. I’ve blogged before about how medieval scholars, such as Roger Bacon, knew about diving helmets, and these may even have been used by medieval divers on the bottoms of rivers. Windmills were used not only to grind corn, but also to forge metal, full cloth, and pump out mines and drain marshy land. Spectacles were invented in the last decades of the thirteenth century, and printing was used to decorate cloth in Provence as early as the 12th century. It was also used to print the capital letters in manuscripts produced at the monastery in Regensburg. There is therefore plenty of material for the team to explore in future episodes.

Channel 5 has produced some very good programmes on archaeology and history, which is surprising given how the channel is owned by the pornographer Richard Desmond, and how much of it really is aimed at the lowest common denominator. If you have an interest in historic technology and industrial history and archaeology, Beat the Ancestors can be interesting viewing. The programme’s on Mondays, Channel 5, at seven o’clock in the evening.