What can castles tell us about the people who built them and the societies they sought to defend? Nicholas Morton reviews Dan Jones’ Castles: A Fortified History of the World, a wide-ranging exploration of fortifications and the many meanings they have acquired across history.
By Nicholas Morton
Many years ago I was driving through a major UK city (I forget which) when, pulling up at some traffic lights, I happened to glance at a building to my left. In many ways it was entirely unremarkable, just a medium-sized, semi-detached house probably built in the 1970s. The UK is home to tens of thousands of houses of this kind so I would probably have forgotten it immediately were it not for a single unusual feature. The house’s owner had made the choice to attach metal grills across all the downstairs windows. These weren’t the kind of utilitarian metal sheets hammered across derelict buildings; there was some very limited pretension here to aesthetics. The bars were shaped like tree branches interlaced with metal leaves – but they were still bars. I wondered about this house and I can still see it clearly in my mind many years later. What must the world feel like when you look out from your home through a metal grid? What level of threat drives people to enhance their house’s security like this? And what did these subtle-not-subtle enhancements say about the resident family and their identity? I drove away from the traffic lights with more questions than I expected.
An Englishman’s house is his castle, as they say, but if there is a pyramid of castley-ness then this house definitely sits at the bottom. Nonetheless the combination of defensiveness and home space is distinctive and, in that respect at least, this house shares features common to fortifications from all over the world. Of equal importance, and viewed with a historian’s eye, its brick walls also radiate hints about its owners’ identity and thought world – these kinds of clues are interesting and they all tell us something.
That the same is true for ‘real’ castles is a central contention in Dan Jones’ fabulous new book Castles, which takes its reader to places as various as the fortified cities of the early Islamic world, Edinburgh Castle, Chateau Gaillard in France, Azuchi Castle in Japan, and even ‘prepper’ bunkers, where families can live through any future apocalypse without facing the bleak reality of losing their big screen TV.
This is not intended to be an encyclopaedic work; it doesn’t aim to catalogue every castle that has ever existed, nor does it cover every region where castles have been built (that would be a huge book). It’s more thoughtful than that. Summarising this book’s purpose reminds me a bit of what Professor John France said about medieval warfare in general. I’m paraphrasing, but basically he said that you can learn a great deal about a society by examining the armies it deploys – one will mirror the other. In this book Dan Jones does the same thing for castles.
Castles reflect their builders and their wider environment. The various great walls of China tell us much about the emperors and leaders who ordered and arranged their construction. The majestic fortress homes built by medieval lords dreaming of King Arthur and imbued with notions of chivalry likewise closely reflect their creators. The example from this book that sticks out most prominently in my mind is Ludwig II of Bavaria’s remarkable spate of castle building in the second half of the nineteenth century. Enraptured by romantic notions of the Middle Ages, mixed with a more than usually large dose of Wagner (who was a close friend), he constructed some amazing fantastical strongholds, straight out of legend and folklore, most notably the famous fortress of Neuschwanstein.
One of this book’s greatest strengths is the incredible amount of detail ploughed into its case studies. This is something I’ve noticed across many of Dan Jones’ books and Castles is no exception. For example, when he talks about Cadbury hillfort in Somerset (UK), he doesn’t just talk about the fort’s origins and early history (as grisly as it was); he moves on to discuss its later history and how it inspired later writers, intellectuals and tourists. These range from John Leland in the sixteenth century – who thought it was Camelot – to the excavations carried out in the twentieth century by Mortimer Wheeler, an individual who exemplifies the notion that archaeologists and historians can be every bit as remarkable and colourful as the sites they worked on.
Obviously castles do not cease to exist just because they no longer perform their original purposes and they can inspire, appal, or enrage later generations as a community’s views and values change over time. To some extent therefore, castles serve as a society’s windvane and Jones is especially effective at examining their impact over the long term.
Naturally, we still construct castles in the modern day. The final chapter here concerns castles in the USA, including some built largely for military purposes as coastal defence fortifications all the way through to the Disney castle, which of course still represents an unavoidable symbol in today’s culture. A message that comes across clearly throughout this book is the versatility of castles. We can certainly roll up our sleeves and embark on technical discussions concerning military features such as wall thickness, machicolations, dry moats, and drawbridges, but while they all have either a defensive function, or at least the notional motif of a defensive function, castles speak into so many other registers of life, some of them very unexpected. It only remains to wonder what form castles will take in the future.
Taken overall, this is an extremely thought-provoking and wide-ranging piece of work. It’s also a page-turner; I devoured it in a handful of sittings. I would recommend it to anyone interested in castles, from seasoned academics to someone visiting a castle for the first time, because it encourages you to view the remarkable buildings from so many different perspectives, thinking not merely about what they meant at the time of their construction, but how they’ve been viewed and interpreted in later centuries.
What can castles tell us about the people who built them and the societies they sought to defend? Nicholas Morton reviews Dan Jones’ Castles: A Fortified History of the World, a wide-ranging exploration of fortifications and the many meanings they have acquired across history.
By Nicholas Morton
Many years ago I was driving through a major UK city (I forget which) when, pulling up at some traffic lights, I happened to glance at a building to my left. In many ways it was entirely unremarkable, just a medium-sized, semi-detached house probably built in the 1970s. The UK is home to tens of thousands of houses of this kind so I would probably have forgotten it immediately were it not for a single unusual feature. The house’s owner had made the choice to attach metal grills across all the downstairs windows. These weren’t the kind of utilitarian metal sheets hammered across derelict buildings; there was some very limited pretension here to aesthetics. The bars were shaped like tree branches interlaced with metal leaves – but they were still bars. I wondered about this house and I can still see it clearly in my mind many years later. What must the world feel like when you look out from your home through a metal grid? What level of threat drives people to enhance their house’s security like this? And what did these subtle-not-subtle enhancements say about the resident family and their identity? I drove away from the traffic lights with more questions than I expected.
An Englishman’s house is his castle, as they say, but if there is a pyramid of castley-ness then this house definitely sits at the bottom. Nonetheless the combination of defensiveness and home space is distinctive and, in that respect at least, this house shares features common to fortifications from all over the world. Of equal importance, and viewed with a historian’s eye, its brick walls also radiate hints about its owners’ identity and thought world – these kinds of clues are interesting and they all tell us something.
That the same is true for ‘real’ castles is a central contention in Dan Jones’ fabulous new book Castles, which takes its reader to places as various as the fortified cities of the early Islamic world, Edinburgh Castle, Chateau Gaillard in France, Azuchi Castle in Japan, and even ‘prepper’ bunkers, where families can live through any future apocalypse without facing the bleak reality of losing their big screen TV.
This is not intended to be an encyclopaedic work; it doesn’t aim to catalogue every castle that has ever existed, nor does it cover every region where castles have been built (that would be a huge book). It’s more thoughtful than that. Summarising this book’s purpose reminds me a bit of what Professor John France said about medieval warfare in general. I’m paraphrasing, but basically he said that you can learn a great deal about a society by examining the armies it deploys – one will mirror the other. In this book Dan Jones does the same thing for castles.
Castles reflect their builders and their wider environment. The various great walls of China tell us much about the emperors and leaders who ordered and arranged their construction. The majestic fortress homes built by medieval lords dreaming of King Arthur and imbued with notions of chivalry likewise closely reflect their creators. The example from this book that sticks out most prominently in my mind is Ludwig II of Bavaria’s remarkable spate of castle building in the second half of the nineteenth century. Enraptured by romantic notions of the Middle Ages, mixed with a more than usually large dose of Wagner (who was a close friend), he constructed some amazing fantastical strongholds, straight out of legend and folklore, most notably the famous fortress of Neuschwanstein.
One of this book’s greatest strengths is the incredible amount of detail ploughed into its case studies. This is something I’ve noticed across many of Dan Jones’ books and Castles is no exception. For example, when he talks about Cadbury hillfort in Somerset (UK), he doesn’t just talk about the fort’s origins and early history (as grisly as it was); he moves on to discuss its later history and how it inspired later writers, intellectuals and tourists. These range from John Leland in the sixteenth century – who thought it was Camelot – to the excavations carried out in the twentieth century by Mortimer Wheeler, an individual who exemplifies the notion that archaeologists and historians can be every bit as remarkable and colourful as the sites they worked on.
Obviously castles do not cease to exist just because they no longer perform their original purposes and they can inspire, appal, or enrage later generations as a community’s views and values change over time. To some extent therefore, castles serve as a society’s windvane and Jones is especially effective at examining their impact over the long term.
Naturally, we still construct castles in the modern day. The final chapter here concerns castles in the USA, including some built largely for military purposes as coastal defence fortifications all the way through to the Disney castle, which of course still represents an unavoidable symbol in today’s culture. A message that comes across clearly throughout this book is the versatility of castles. We can certainly roll up our sleeves and embark on technical discussions concerning military features such as wall thickness, machicolations, dry moats, and drawbridges, but while they all have either a defensive function, or at least the notional motif of a defensive function, castles speak into so many other registers of life, some of them very unexpected. It only remains to wonder what form castles will take in the future.
Taken overall, this is an extremely thought-provoking and wide-ranging piece of work. It’s also a page-turner; I devoured it in a handful of sittings. I would recommend it to anyone interested in castles, from seasoned academics to someone visiting a castle for the first time, because it encourages you to view the remarkable buildings from so many different perspectives, thinking not merely about what they meant at the time of their construction, but how they’ve been viewed and interpreted in later centuries.
Dan Jones, Castles: A Fortified History of the World (Head of Zeus: London, 2026), 449 pp.
Nicholas Morton is an Associate Professor of History at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books covering different aspects of Medieval Near Eastern history, including The Crusader Storm: A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East.
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