Windsor Castle
First screened 25 February 2008

The film of the book of the film

Historian Richard Barber, who was one of the experts involved in Time Team's search for Edward III's round table at Windsor, outlines how the original filming at Windsor led to a book and then another round of filming for this Time Team Special documentary.

Hectic business
Making television programmes is always a hectic business for the producers, camera crew and technicians, and it is usually engrossing for those invited to take part. Trying to sum up many years of research in an hour or so, which ends up as two minutes in the final film, concentrates the mind wonderfully.

An occasion like the Big Royal Dig at Windsor in 2006 is rather different. There is a great deal going on, but scattered across a wide area, and there are often lulls in the action as far as the individual participants are concerned. It was because of these intervals that a group of us who had been invited to comment on what the archaeologists had found began to discuss what Edward III's round table building at Windsor might have been like.

Tangible proof
We had just the outline of the wall as tangible proof that it existed. I have to admit that I had said that the chronicler must have made a mistake about its size – it was so big – until I saw the geophysical survey plans with a large circle marked on them. But we also had a hugely detailed set of accounts for the building work, together with chronicles and histories of Edward III's activities at the time it was created.

I suppose the moment when we realised that there was a real possibility of working out what it could have been like was when we asked Tim Tatton-Brown [another of the experts used on the Big Royal Dig] why 26 pieces of a certain type of stone had been bought, and he told us that it was generally used for the capitals of columns. From the number of columns and the diameter of the building we could work out a plausible plan for the vaulting, and we had done enough by the time filming ended for me to suggest that we did a book on the subject.

The book of the film
And that is what happened. The book of the film appeared eight months later, with a mass of new material and with translations of the vital building accounts as well as a wide-ranging narrative. Edward III's Round Table at Windsor was written by Julian Munby, Tim Tatton-Brown and myself, and the report of the excavations and a diary of the weekend were provided by Richard Brown of Oxford Archaeology. Julian was able to point to an exciting parallel to the round-table building: the castle of Bellver at Palma on Majorca, built some 30 years before the Windsor project; and there was much else that we discovered, even in the short time available.

Now there is a film of the book of the film, so to speak, in the shape of this Time Team Special, The Real Knights of the Round Table, and once again there is new material to add in Brendan Hughes' splendid treatment of the subject. To mark the occasion, the publishers have brought out Edward III's Round Table at Windsor in paperback. After all this, there is only one thing for it: a sequel – and we might just have one in mind…

Edward III's Round Table at Windsor by Julian Munby, Richard Barber and Richard Brown (Boydell Press, 2007) paperback £14.99

To purchase a copy of the book, please visit www.boydell.co.uk/43833913.htm

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Online exclusive: download a chapter from the book by ctrl-clicking (Mac) or right-clicking (PC) your mouse to save the PDF to your hard drive. You may need a free Acrobat reader to open this documents.

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