Introduction
Some of my fondest childhood memories come from visits to castles; running across the ubiquitous grassy slopes and fields which so often seem to shelter them , timidly peeking around dark rough corridors, their old stone craggy and cave like, straining to gaze up at the soaring mountainous bulk of their walls. Screwing my eyes shut and trying to imagine what it was like in days long gone by, before their ruination, back into their glory where the hollow castles that dot the British landscape, thrived alternatively as the bastions or terrors of local communities. Of course, the answer is, often crowded, perpetually draughty and more than a little smelly. Granted I was the kind of little boy who would grow up to write a series revelling in ten of his favourite castles but I am hardly alone in my romance fuelled and wistfulness tinged enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Indeed, the ongoing communications revolution has provided new means of access and outlets for medieval adherents. This has inexorably led the internally dynamic but impermeable orthodoxy of medieval studies to begin, fittingly enough, something of a renaissance as resources and the resultant familiarity with the Middle Ages percolates further than ever before, informing and then, as is always the case, being reinforced by trends in popular culture.
While the search for any definite truths in history, with the academic cycle of new theories and cascading revelations slowly settling only to be torn down by the next generation, may appear a Sisyphean task, the blurred edges of Medieval society, a culture as riotously diverse and sometimes even as wilfully contrary as our own, slowly gathers definition. When thinking about and conjuring the Middle Ages in our minds, few images loom through the murk of time as large in the public consciousness as the castle. Castles remain one of the last tangible links between ourselves and the culture from which, through an avalanche of literature, religion and societal mores, our own is partly derived. Curiously while there are a good number of castles still inhabited today, it can be in the ruined fossilised remains of one which can have the largest psychological impact . To know generation upon generation of people laboured and lived within now crumbling ruins is an unsettling thought, emphasising at once our underlying similarity to the people past and the vastly removed context we now find ourselves in.
As will become horribly clear as you go on, my roots in architectural history, even with regard to the Middle Ages, are rather shallow; although in cases where one or more of the featured castles contain architectural characteristics, either formative or distinct, I have striven to highlight and explain them as best I can. Rather, my real historical interest lies in poking the fabric of Medieval European political culture and examining the form and function of the intricate aristocratic networks of power composed of, but superseding, a mesh of interlocking geographic and dynastic affinities which, alongside the church, roughly lashed Europe together. The Castles covered here are judged to have had a transformative impact upon the shape and course of Medieval Britain and were chosen partly on the weight of the incredible and significant events that transpired in or around their walls but also partly on a thematic basis. The history of these Castles touches upon either a particular point in time or geographic location where an aspect of the continuously evolving and ever fractious political framework of the British Isles was undergoing some form of structural stress or change. It is hoped that in addition to learning about the history of some of Britain’s most beautiful and notable castles, the reader will come away with some sense of the flavour and political tempo of the various eras of Medieval Britain. Castles are, after all, constructs of culture and politics just as much as they are of stone and mortar.