This is one of my favorite books about castles. I wrote about a couple of other books I have about castles over the summer, but this is my favorite. I think I bought it while I was in Wales, driving my mother insane by insisting on visiting every castle I could find.

I like the illustrations in this book (you get an idea from the cover illustration). The author takes photographs of castles and dresses them up with little drawings of people and enhancing the buildings with drawings (see the merlons that got added to that picture above and the roof?). It adds a certain amount of charm to the book, reminiscent of the marginalia that monks added when they were copying books in their scriptoriums.

Her sense of humor is clear from the first sentence: “Primitive men found that the best way to avoid getting eaten by wolves or knocked on the head by their enemies was to live in places that were extremely difficult to get at.” Even her words generate pictures in your head. (Illustration to the right of that paragraph is a primitive man, naked except for a toothed necklace and an arm-ring, holding a spear and with a strategically placed primitive shield preserving his G-rating – and a silly moustache that makes him look like a cross between the dad in Bob’s Burgers and a young Kevin Kline. (I suspect he sounds a little like the guy in Bob’s Burgers, too, “Uh, guys, I think you should maybe not – uh – pet the dire wolf – uh…”)

After a quick sprint through the fortifications of the Romans, the Saxons, and the Danes, she settles in with the Normans, those ferocious castle-builders of fame. She starts with the wooden mot-and-bailey castles and then looks at the influence of the early timber castles on later stone castles. Then she goes deep with the different spaces within the castle, with close-up photos of timber walls and thatched rooves, enhanced by her drawings, illustrating the layouts and providing scale.

These first stone castles often consisted of a stone tower that provide refuge under siege, enclosed in a wide wall, and supplemented with wooden halls and neighboring huts where most of the living happened. The wooden halls were later replicated by stone buildings and thicker walls. After the revolt of the marcher lords – Norman lords who had been appointed to keep those crazy Welshmen away from the civilized Eastern areas of Britain – the King sent his men to raze the castles to the ground (or at least blast enough holes in them that they couldn’t keep the King’s men out when they come a knockin’). And then the King built more castles of his own.

As the author shows the evolution of the castle, the different kinds of arches and drawbridges and siege engines, she inserts little people dressed in contemporary garb that she describes (and we learn that “Crusaders returned from the Mediterranean with silks and muslins for their wives and daughters” or that Henry II, who was “always in a hurry” returned easy-to-wear garments to fashion, such as short cloaks and, beneath his hauberk, “no long skirts”. These youngsters with their abbreviated hemlines!

In the later pages, she begins to describe more of the games people played, the bedroom furnishings, and the mores and attitudes that went along with living in a castle. Think of the typical cinematic picture of the prisoner who has been thrown into a dungeon in rags and kept their so long that his beard and hair have grown to almost waist-length. Law breakers, the author tells us, were given a choice between a trial by jury with hanging if found guilty and refusing trial to starve to death in prison instead, on a cold floor, in a thin shirt, with moldy bread one day and polluted water the next, and “all the weight that they could bear.” Why would someone choose a week of torture (documents say they rarely lived more than 6 days) instead of a trial and a quick drop? If they refused trial, their family could still inherit all their goods and chattel (i.e. possessions that are not real estate). If they went to trial, and were found guilty, their goods and chattel were siezed.

The book ends in the 16th Century, when castles started to be phased out, as almost all books about castles do.

You often hear me praise a book by saying it is fun to read and that, to me, is a big part of reading. If you make it fun to do, people will do more of it. If, instead, you write murder mysteries about horrible people who are partially eaten by cannibals as part of an anthropology study and then return home (not reviewing that one, ew, I was surprised to even find it still on my shelves, I thought I had gotten rid of it after reading it), you make reading less fun and people are not going to read your stuff.

So to say that something is fun to read to me means that it makes me laugh and teaches me something and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

A high complement indeed.