I fell down a rabbit hole of research into castle building & learned that many smaller castles and manor houses were wooden. But my question is HOW? I've found little information on how they could have made wooden planks back then and the process for making square beams was a long and tedious one. Any ideas?
The process of making beams is only tedious if you know about modern sawmills. Here's Roy Underhill working up a beam.The process is straightforward: lay out with a chalk line, cut some notches with a felling axe, flip 90 degrees, knock out the chunks in between the notches, clean up with a broadaxe . He's talking a lot , but one could expect that a medieval carpenter would be getting about it seriously and with green wood , it moves pretty fast, really. But again, only if you don't know about modern sawmills.
After a beam was squared, or at least two parallel sides hewed, planks could be sawn from it with sawyers in a sawpit, like here. Again, lines of chalk or charcoal would mark them. In the Middle Ages, the saw would have been much thinner, possibly even a strip of iron with a thin strip of steel welded to it for the teeth. That strip was tensioned in a frame, like here , so that the saw didn't kink or break as it was pulled back and forth.