Tudor Monastery Farm

The team move in, coppice hazel, build a pig enclosure, commission a guild, plough using oxen, make rushlights, make wattle-and-daub barriers, sow peas and barley using broadcasting, and celebrate religious festivals.

This episode finds the farm team arriving at Weald & Downland in West Sussex - a new location in a new time period. There are domestic tasks to tackle, from lighting fires with flint, making meals with depleted crops during the Hunger Gap and using a tread wheel to fetch water from the well.

The team work with sheep: driving, milking and shearing them; make cheese from the milk; sort, grade, card and spin wool. Additional they produce a period cold treatment from herbs, steam-bend wood, and celebrate Whitsun. They take custody of geese and drive them to market. They observe the smelting of iron as well as the weaving and fulling of cloth.

The second episode revolves around wool, known as "the jewel in the realm" of the English economy and accounting for around half the country's wealth.

It's the height of summer and our farmers are carefully monitoring cereal crops from which they'll make the staple foods of everyday Tudor life - bread and ale. Records show that it wasn't unusual for a person to consume a two - pound loaf and drink eight pints of weak ale a day.

The team wean piglets, cultivate wild yeast, malt barley, make ale and bread, harvest honey and beeswax, dip candles, shave their sheep's hooves, demonstrate period hair care methods, roast lamb, and celebrate both a mass and the midsummer festival. They take custody of a boar to service their sows. They observe the shaping, moulding, and pouring of a bell, learn about period clock mechanisms a...

This week the team learn to master the landscape away from the farm in order to supplement their income. The monasteries' land covered a variety of landscapes, from rivers and woodlands to hills and mines, all of which would be expected to be exploited by the tenant farmer to raise income for themselves and the monastery.

The team mine, smelt and cast ingots of lead; plait eel baskets and harvest eels; shape stained glass; patronize a pub; pasture their piglets in the forest; paint cloth and manage their garden. Tom sits for a camera obscura portrait.

The team launder bed linen, serve as cooks and stewards, calcine and slake lime, build a lime-ash floor, churn, press, and salt butter; sanitize the dairy, plait rushes for floormats, lay and press rag paper; prepare lye from ash; harvest tree hay for the animals; harvest and thresh their pea crop, cook a feast and make brandy. They observe period typesetting, printing and bookbinding.

This episode explores the theme of hospitality in Tudor England. With no provision for the poor from the state, it was down to the monasteries to provide welfare for those in need.

It's harvest time, winter is drawing in and the Dissolution of the Monasteries is on the horizon. This week the team will be bringing in the barley and celebrating with a harvest feast, to give thanks for their bounteous crop.

The team harvest, stook and store their barley; extract salt from brine, celebrate Michaelmas, carve decorative stone, form and decorate floor tiles, produce blackpowder for Roman candle fireworks, a Damson and Bullace Melomel beverage, and perform a mystery play.