Castles

Abstract

To the two delightful volumes, “Cathedrals” and “Abbeys,” the Great Western Railway has now added a third dealing with the castles on or accessible from its system. Eighty castles in the south and south-west of England and in Wales are here described in full and illustrated by many photographic plates of great beauty and a number of equally pleasing sketches in the text. All the castles with the exception of six have been carefully inspected by the author, while his son was responsible for about half the illustrations. In addition to the description of each building and the notes on its history, Sir Charles Oman has provided an introduction in which he gives the history of the castle, royal and baronial, in England, and sketches its development as well as the development in methods of attack which took place pari passu—a subject on which so distinguished an authority on military history is peculiarly competent to speak. Sir Charles discusses at some length what constitutes a castle, and finally defines it as a military structure used for residential purposes which is a unit as itself. It is interesting to note that the author attributes the fact that castle building virtually ceased in the fourteenth century, not so much to the development of artillery, though that was no doubt a contributory cause, as to the realisation by that time that war in the open had come to be the only form of decisive action, and it was consequently more effective to spend money on the maintenance of men-at-arms rather than in buildings.