Many years ago, I flew to Paris, kidnapped my mother, and forced her to bring her car on the channel ferry and drive me around Wales for two weeks. The purpose of this journey, from my perspective, was to see as many castles as possible and Wales is a great place for this activity, owing to the Marcher Lords building castles as a line of defense against those unruly Welsh in the 13th century. They built a lot of castles that century; because the Welsh were particularly unruly (by contemporary Norman standards; I suspect the Welsh may have seen things differently).

We went to Chepstow, Caernefon, Conwy – I can’t name them all because we went to so many. I would get into these places and wander around half in a dream, thinking about what it must have been like to live there…. I call it “history daze” and have been known to do the same in the historical exhibits of The Museum of the City of New York¹, to the boredom and exhaustion of friends and my husband.

About Day 8, Mom rebelled and said she didn’t care what we did that day as long as it didn’t involve “piles of old rocks.” (Some people just don’t appreciate a good, crumbly castle.) As I recall, I gave her a day off to do something else (I can’t even remember what we did – that may have been the day I took her to Tintern Abbey) and then back to castles again! Even now, just thinking about it makes me want to go back and do it all over again or maybe expand the journey to include castles in other areas of Europe.²

For this, I blame Joseph and Frances Gies. They were the ones that got me started reading about the middle ages and I realize now that I own not a few history books about the middle ages but many. In addition to the entire Gies series,³ I picked up another great book about castles while in Wales, and I have so many books about the climate shift of the middle ages (Long Summer into Little Ice Age, as Brian Fagan would call it), diseases of the middle ages (Black Death mostly), chivalry and poetry of the troubadours (which I have written about in an earlier post), and I started reading a book about famine in the middle ages which I will write about when I finish reading it, which may be never because it seems determined not to stick to the topic and diverted into the early history of the Kings of England and their perpetual wars with Scotland.⁴

Joseph and Frances Gies are thorough in their description of how castles came to be, evolved, and died out. They describe their building patterns, and the men who ruled from them and what their challenges were. They talk about the role of the ladies of the manors; the servants and their roles; what people had for breakfast (bread and wine), dinner (timed for what we think of as the lunch hour, but dinner-sized), and evening meal (basically a large snack); what they wore; how and what they hunted⁵; the furniture they used; how they spent their daily life; the organization of villages associated with castles⁶; how the castle changes during times of war; how the life of the castle shifted during the different seasons; and etc.

You might think this would be boring but No! the authors are extremely deft at bringing these scenes to life through diary excerpts, the words of contemporary chroniclers, pictures – often cribbed from those adorable marginal doodles in medieval manuscripts, and even music. My only complaint is that, although the editions I have are “trade paperbacks,” they are printed on mass market paper and the black and white photos of the castles have faded into blurry black blobs.

These books originally came out in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80’s and are still widely available and very much in demand.⁷ As you can see above, the new edition features a quote on the cover from George RR Martin about how he used them while writing Game of Thrones⁸ and I suspect that many other writers of books set in the middle ages, and fantasy set in middle-age equivalents refer to these books.

I read a meme the other day that said that reading is basically staring at thin slices of trees with symbols on them and hallucinating for hours on end.

Agreed.

Ah, but what pleasant dreams they can be.

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1. If you come to New York, include this museum on your tour. It often gets overshadowed by The Met and Moma, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Cloisters, the Ellis Island Museum (also awesome), and The Museum of Natural History. The Museum of the City of New York is a great way to get to know New York City. You don’t have to do the whole museum – they often have a big exhibit about the evolution of the city which you should put on your list and a bunch of other, smaller exhibits which are interesting but may be too much info (recently, I found one that was about how food gets into NYC – basically it all comes through a single hub in the Bronx, interesting but viewing that in addition to the other exhibit I had come to see). Right now they have one tracing the history of movies set in New York City which I need to get to see. ↩︎
2. I did a similar journey with Dad once when he was stationed in Germany. We did manage to hit some great castles along the Rhine but I wasn’t wise in the way of interpreting the Green Guide and kept ending up at Palaces which are a different animal entirely. ↩︎
3. Oops, just checked Wikipedia (always a mistake) and discovered that they have two books that I do not own: Leonard Of Pisa And The New Mathematics Of The Middle Ages (which I will not be purchasing because life is short although my husband might enjoy it) and Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality (which is absolutely going on my list). ↩︎
4. In great detail. His point is that – in addition to the impact of the 13th century climate change on crops – during war, both sides had a scorched earth policy that involved stealing each other’s crops and animals and then burning whatever they couldn’t carry away. But I suspect this author really cares about the wars more than famine. He’s spent about 200 pages on the England-Scotland impact and is now switching to the continental wars of the same period. I’m learning a lot about Robert the Bruce, which will probably re-emerge when I finally make it to Scotland, but I’m a little overwhelmed and I still have 250 pages to go. ↩︎
5. A chapter that illuminates Robin Hood’s world. ↩︎
6. Useless medieval fact of the day: remember the “Ent Moot” from the LOTR, where all the Ents got together, talked waaaaaay too long and then decided to march on Saruman’s Orthanc? (Oh so sorry, talking about the book here, not the stupid movie where Pippin and Merry threw a temper tantrum before finally tricking Fanghorn into attacking.) It turns out the “moot” is a real thing, where villagers got together and agreed on policies. They didn’t vote on them, they just talked until they were generally in agreement, and then went with that. So much more effective than congress, it seems. ↩︎
7. I saw them for sale recently in the Cloisters gift shop and was tempted to buy them all over again. ↩︎
8. Which I have not read. I didn’t even watch the HBO series until Covid gave an excuse not to leave the house because I knew, once I started watching, I wouldn’t stop until I had seen the whole series. I sometimes feel like I need a job where I get paid to read, so I don’t feel so guilty about reading instead of exercising, doing laundry, grocery shopping, getting together with friends, writing, or even – some days – getting out of bed. So I am trying not to start Martin and staying at arm’s distance from Cornwell (Bernard not Patricia). At least until I retire someday. ↩︎