What Happens If a Castle is Effectively Abandoned For a Hundred Years?

[jjhunter]

Thought experiment I'm hosting over at my journal, jjhunter: Come All Ye Castles, Ancient and Neglected

So: castles. Let's do a version of this thought experiment with a castle, say a château (-fort or otherwise) like the Château d'Ussé in France. If you take humans out of the picture for a hundred years, what happens to that building and the land immediately surrounding it? If we were to take snapshots of particular elements at 10, 20, 50, 100 years, what would that progression look like?

For those more historically than scientifically inclined, it would also be really helpful for me to have a better sense of what the year 0 / baseline conditions would be like right before the theoretical castle is abandoned. Assume that right up until the moment of abandonment, the castle is fully functional, and of a size to host / entertain visiting nobility. How might it be constructed? What species of plants and animals might be intentionally (or contrarily) present within the building and the immediate surrounding grounds? How many people might live or work there year-round? What's the climate like in the Centre region of France in the 16th - 17th centuries? Is it any difference from what the climate's like now?

Tangential, but related, research topic: what might people be eating in that region of France during the late 16th century? Where would I even start researching that?

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A/N: admins, can haz appropriate tags?

Comments

[devilc]

The History Channel show Life After People can help give you an idea of how quickly things get overrun in temperate climates. You should get an idea from the video clips of how water, wind, ice and plants work to tear things down.

The book The World Without Us will also help guide you.

As for the climate? Europe was in the grip of the Little Ice Age

[jjhunter]

The first two of those have already come up at the post proper, but wow, I had no idea re: the 'Little Ice Age' - that would have a significant impact on chemical rates of decay & so forth. Thank you so much for sharing; that's very helpful.

[watersword]

::digs out syllabus for the social and cultural history of food in Europe course I loved::

Reay Tannahill's Food in history is probably a good place to start! I remember I loved Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Tastes of paradise :a social history of spices, stimulants, and intoxicants, but I'm not sure how helpful it would be for your question; it's a really good read, though, and I bet the bibliography would be useful. If you have access to the Cambridge World History series, they have two volumes on the history of food, and I'm a pretty big fan of using that series as a scholarly version of Wikipedia.

I haven't actually read T. Sarah Peterson's Acquired taste: the French origins of modern cooking, but it looks like the closest thing to what you want, as she seems to be examining the French culinary transition of the mid-seventeenth century. And there's Renaissance food from Rabelais to Shakespeare : culinary readings and culinary histories, edited by Joan Fitzpatrick, which is a lot of primary sources AKA THE BEST THING EVER.

The World Without Us, mentioned above, is SUPER DEPRESSING, fair warning; I actually had to stop reading it a couple of times because I found it so distressing.

....man, I am so spoiled for choice for icons for this comment.

[jjhunter]

Oh wow - lots of neat stuff to look into! Thank you for sharing these.

As you'll see if you click through to the post proper at my journal that I linked to, the article that got expanded into 'World Without Us' was part of the inspiration for researching this in the first place (well, that and my Pod Together project *g*). Primary sources about food will be a good way to balance out how unsettling it can be to look at pictures re: abandoned things decades to centuries down the line.

I think I'll start with Peterson, and if I make it to Fitzpatrick's for this particular project, I'll be quite impressed with myself. (If I don't, it'll definitely go on my long-term someday reading list.)

[jjhunter]

p.s. your icon here is all kinds of brilliant.