How long would it take to build a castle? How much money, men, and resources would you need to do so? What rank in the nobility should you be to own one?
How long would it take to build a castle? How much money, men, and resources would you need to do so...
Ayden Baker
Gabriel Perez
I suppose it's technically possible to ask a more open-ended question...
How big a castle do you what? What are you making it out of? Does it have fancy features? How fast do you want it built? Where are you building it? Etc. etc. etc.
Gabriel Parker
For a big one, I would guess about 5 years.
Matthew Cook
Look up Guedelon, it's a castle being built by archeologists and period craftsmen to see what's what in medieval construction.
Zachary James
>How long would it take to build a castle?
Years.
>How much money, men, and resources would you need to do so?
Stronghold Builder's Guide said about a million GP in 3ed.
>What rank in the nobility should you be to own one?
High-ranking lord, with permission from the king.
Why don't you go ask these questions of people who maintain actual castles? Such a thing exists in Britain, for what few castles weren't blown up after the Civil War.
Levi Cruz
Decades
Anthony Hughes
Depends on castle.
Easton Baker
They think it'll take 20 years, but they do have a smaller crew. The castle is about 10k square feet I think.
Christian Price
You could probably google this. There are people today who build castles old-school style so their sites/blogs should give you an idea of the time and resources it takes.
If you are looking for realism then also include that the castle has painted walls on the inside because that shit gets dark at night, yo.
Bentley Jackson
I always thought of castles as bigger than that. There are houses in my neighborhood that are larger than 10K feet.
Gavin Morales
They're more like a panic room.
David Ortiz
Well, there are castles bigger than that. Windsor castle is like 13 acres. But most are pretty small-ish.
Alexander Richardson
Windsor Castle was designed as a royal residence, though.
Dover Castle is huge, and even bigger when you count the tunnels underneath. Helps that it was built on shallow coastal soil nobody wanted.
Jayden Gomez
Windsor has had a lot of addition to it.
Adrian Carter
Large castles are far more expensive, and harder for a small force to defend. They don't need to be that big to serve the purpose of their owners and few would have the ability to fund something that size even if they wanted to.
Really large castles tend to be built by monarchs, extremely powerful aristocracy, Military Orders (The Teutonic Knights built the largest castle in Europe) and the like as part of national-scale strategies locking down whole regions. They need to be able to house and supply an army, since these castles are the most impressive and tend to survive you can lose sight of the fact that most castles were far smaller.
Nathaniel Lopez
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca
Based on my math (and pre-cut stone from a dungeon or something)
Calculating the Cost
For every 100 5'x5'x5' cubes of stone (~16,000 cubic feet of stone) going into your castle, you need:
1 year of time
and
100 laborers, who cost 5sp/month each or, 50gp per month total, or 600gp per year
10 masons, who cost 1gp per month each, or 10 gp per month total, or 120gp per year
1 master builder, who costs 5gp per month or 60 gp per year.
and
100gp per month, or 1,200gp per year, in incidental costs, food, temporary shelters, church services, specialists, smiths, roof tiles, firewood, and other horrible and tedious expenses.
For a grand total cost of 165gp per month, or 1,980gp per year.
You can adjust these values as needed to speed up construction or save money. The minimum time is 6 months.
I cover examples, other systems, etc. in the post.
Tyler Butler
It depends on how big the castle is.
Nolan Barnes
Depends entirely on the resources, materials, and design.
Private islands are virtually impossible as it requires an immense amount of labor to move boulders and dirt into place. Same for anything underground, mining is dirty, exhausting work and even with teams of slaves and oxen it's a huge task given that the only tools are hand tools. Masonry construction doesn't take as long, but the contractor will be spending most of his efforts on transportation then actually hoisting the material into place. Then there is the old standby of wood, which can go up in a matter of weeks and is easy to transport - although it is flammable.
Also, things like prestressed concrete rebar and steel don't exist which mean roofs and non-lobby floors are still made out of wood too. It is fully plausible for a "stone" castle to be gutted by fire.
Owen Rogers
Looks like about 3 years:
I dunno if he says how much it costs, but you can get a sense of the various manpower he hired.
>What rank in the nobility should you be to own one?
Probably above engineer or manager. Someone in the mahogany row range, CEO, CTO, COO, President, VP of whateverthefuck.
Oliver Moore
Most castles were little more than fortified watch towers, possibly with an exterior wall around them.
That said, what it's going to be used for is going to heavily influence how it's made and what it's going to cost. A nigh impregnable fortress meant to be garrisoned by a sizable standing force is going to be be built quite differently than one meant to be more decorative manor or one only meant to protect and administer a much smaller area.
On the note of construction, magic would make castles both easier to construct, depending on the setting, but also easier to bring down unless properly proofed against it.
Leo Foster
Aak any contractor and they all say the same thing:
2 weeks
Owen Reyes
He's using modern methods though. And he has windows too low. At least they're not on the first floor though. Still a pretty sweet house, but calling it a castle is just a little bit of a stretch as he's not building it with defensibility in mind. I suppose if he really wanted a modern castle he could design it to be defensible from a modern standpoint. That would actually be pretty cool.