Still hanging here in the middle ages – this time with drawings!

Macaulay takes the Gies books about life in a medieval castle and brings it to life through illustration. He creates a fictional location near Wales, where he builds a fictional castle and a fictional town. One of my favorite themes is the recurring illustration, framed the same each time, showing how the castle and the town evolve over time.

He explains how the idea of putting a castle there originated, how the people went about building the castle, what life was like in a castle, how the town evolved, how enemies attacked the castle, how the castle fought them off, and what happened when the castle eventually went out of use.

While the Gies covered this in their book, there are some things that just make more sense when illustrated with a cute little pen-and-ink drawing, like a garderobe¹. I could read descriptions of this all day, but seeing a little man sitting over a hole with a cesspool far below, just makes it come to life.

I also like Macaulay’s sense of humor. On the page where we meet the team that Master James – the fictional architect responsible for designing and building the castle – has put together to build the castle: Quarrymen, a Master Mason, Carpenters, a Blacksmith, a Mortar Maker and Carrier, Diggers, and last but not least, Master James’s Dog. Although Macualay never explains what exactly the dog does to help build the castle – dig, perhaps?

On another page, the author introduces the castle’s dungeon, which is accessible only through a trap door in the basement. That reminds me of a young adult book that I read² a few years ago, that I must have picked up on the free shelves³ at work. That book starts in China, where a medieval Scots laird is touring, a la Marco Polo’s route. He meets a Chinese girl who is too young to have her feet bound yet, and “rescues” her from her mother who plans to bind her feet and sell her to the highest bidder. He brings the young girl back to Scotland with him – journey described in detail, I believe – where he makes her a kind of pet. On the way to Europe, she scares away bandits by imitating a ghost. He decides to make use of this skill later by getting her to scare his enemy out of their castle so he can slay them. For some reason, this upsets her (can’t remember if she made a friend in that castle, or was just appalled by the idea of causing such bloodshed) and she refuses. The laird is so angry that he throws her in a dungeon beneath his castle where she is shut (like Shaw’s St. Joan) from of the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers…never again [to] ride […] nor climb the hills; [breathing] foul damp darkness and [kept] from […] the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost…⁴ The little Chinese girl (I think maybe she’s like 8 here, so “little” is about her age) imagines a beautiful garden to comfort herself and gradually dies, living in the dark in her beautiful garden. The laird, who has been so busy fighting and getting drunk (and, oh, maybe he gets sick or injured or something), forgets she is down there until he begins to imagine that her ghost is haunting him. His life goes downhill quickly from there.

Oops – a little far from this wonderful book about castles. You may remember Macaulay from his most famous book, The Way Things Work⁵ and his other wonderful books like this one like Cathedral. Just looking at his wiki made me want to go out and buy them all!

---

1. Which WordPress is trying to tell me is not a word. C’mon guys get with it. That’s almost as bad as LinkedIn refusing to certify that I am me and not a bot because (they say that) my name is not my name. Hey, it’s the name everybody knows me by, except the government and doctors and my 3rd grade teacher, who are determined to call me a name that I never use… except even the government allowed me to record a nickname when I renewed my passport the last time, to my surprise. ↩︎
2. Which is no longer on my shelf, so I can’t tell you what it was called. If you’ve read it, put the title in the Comments. ↩︎
3. Where the buyers left all the books they didn’t want for themselves that Billy didn’t grab. Billy is more addicted to books than I am. If he wanted to get up from the desk in his cube, he had to roll his chair backwards out into the hall because his cubicle was full of books. I kid you not – books were stacked corner to corner beneath his desk – leaving a space just large enough for him to put his feet when he was at his desk – and atop his desk from corner to corner, up to the level of the high cubicle walls, with just enough space for this monitor, CPU, keyboard and mouse (with books behind his monitor). He probably would have piled the books higher except that it was a hazard to his neighbors to exceed the height of the walls. And books were piled up to the right and left of the path for his chair, just leaving enough room that he wouldn’t crease the covers as he rolled in and out. Every now and they gave him boxes and told him to ship them home, and then he started from scratch again. Say what you will, I’ve never meet eccentrics like this away from books. ↩︎
4. Edits mine. When I was studying with Stella Adler, a lot of girls in my class did this monologue (hence my almost perfect recall of it). One memorable day, Stella was sitting on her (fake) gold-leafed, high-backed red velvet throne (a prop that she commandeered whenever she had to listen to us, she needed it to cheer her up because we were so dreadful), and a girl named Ruth did this monologue. When she got to the line, “Light your fire: do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?” Ruth – who was very nervous – said instead, “a rat on a throne.” And then made it 100 times worse by breaking character, putting her hand over her mouth, turning bright red and crying out, “Oh, I’m sorry!” That was the end of Ruth’s performance that day. ↩︎
5. One of my store managers, Susan, once accepted an order for 150 copies of The Way Things Work from a customer. We ordered and received them, gift wrapped them with the customer’s business card, and shipped them off to the recipients. I remember Susan with a gum eraser cleaning up the smudges on the glossy white covers so they’d look perfect for the customer’s gift recipients. That was an eye-opening experience for me in terms of both retail customer service and never turning down a sale. ↩︎