For nearly six hundred years castles lay at the heart of England’s social and political life. Whether located in cities or the country, along land frontiers or sea-bound shores, they served as strongholds, centers of government, residences, markers of social status, and political showpieces. Introduced at the Norman Conquest in 1066 (with more than five hundred constructed in the first decade after the Battle of Hastings), castles outlasted the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and succumbed only in the Civil War of the 1640s. Such longevity might be expected to ensure exhaustive coverage in the literature, but oddly this is not the case. Compared to churches, studies of castles are relatively few, and architectural surveys assign barely a page or so to their discussion. Addressing this imbalance is John Goodall’s The English Castle: 1066–1650. Weighing in at a bulky seven-plus pounds, the book provides 500 pages of text, 1,300 footnotes, and 380 custom-made plans, reconstructions, and photographs, most in color and all with long explanatory captions in the 150-word range.

As stated in the introduction, Goodall sets out to offer an accessible, updated overview of the castle in the light of recent research. He approaches the subject as an architectural historian, a novelty in a field dominated by archaeologists and antiquarians. Freed from this older tradition, Goodall explores new approaches. Much of the study is steered by his revised definition of a castle as “the residence of a lord made imposing through the architectural trappings of fortification” (6). The emphasis on residence over fortification is a reaction to the view prevailing for the past two hundred years that a castle was a military phenomenon whose evolution was the preserve of the military historian. Intentionally provocative, Goodall challenges received opinions in his re-appraisal of this architectural type. Unraveling the castle’s role as residence provides the reader with a more flexible and convincing narrative of its long history and also allows Goodall to add no fewer than two hundred years to its life span. Among other revisions he tilts at the modern appellation “castle” by turning to mid-twelfth-century charters where alternative Latin terms such as arx, mota, turris, oppidum, firmitas, municipum, chastel expand the more restricted meaning of our single word in use.

Earlier scholarly studies focused on castle origins; traced development of the motte and bailey type; described the decentralizing arrangements of interval towers and the doubling of perimeter defenses in the second century of development; spiced texts with discourses on weaponry, sieges, garrisons, and mounted knights; viewed Edward I’s castles in Wales as the apogee of castle design; and saw the castle’s demise as a consequence of the Hundred Years War and hastened by the more controlled use of gun powder. Goodall distances himself from most of these organizing categories. His interest is in the castle as architecture. The different forms architecture took during the castle’s dominance control the narrative. To achieve this Goodall adopts a chronological organization based around the reigns of individual monarchs or groups of monarchs. For readers whose grasp of England’s history has dimmed, Goodall provides helpful contextualizing introductions and rarely passes up the chance to grab the reader’s attention with hair-raising accounts of the demise of the more hapless rulers.

Goodall’s architectural orientation leads him to explore analogies between castles and churches and to borrow the period terms assigned to the latter. Thus readers encounter for the first time “Gothic,” “High Gothic,” “Perpendicular,” and “Renaissance” castles. The terms work best for the later periods when Goodall reveals the vigor and originality of castle building between ca. 1400 and 1640. Architectural developments of the principal living quarters focus on halls, entries (including gatehouses), withdrawing chambers, circulation, fireplaces and chimneys, service rooms, and plumbing. In turn, they are related to social and professional themes such as governance, patronage at different class levels, the crystallization of design in the kings’ works at Westminster, workshop practice in the masons’ yard, and material culture. All are backed by documentary evidence drawn from chronicles, charters, building accounts, fabric and furnishings’ inventories, inscriptions, and coats of arms.

The calculated destruction of castles in the Civil War left many of them as ruins, and 350 years of deterioration from weather and neglect have followed. A persistent difficulty for the historian is therefore the reading of different building periods from ruins (as late as the 1950s some parts of castles were thought to be Roman). Far from being static structures, castles were subject to change as owners incorporated new ideas domestically and defensively. Recent advances in dating techniques have made it easier to sort out building sequences and to build a clearer history of development from them. To deal with this Goodall threads throughout his account discussion of four well-preserved major castles—Dover, Windsor, Kenilworth, and Durham—using them as case studies to elucidate the contingencies that periodically impinged on design decisions. The pages devoted to Windsor show Goodall at his best as he takes the reader through Edward III and Edward IV’s lavish rebuilding and remodeling which amounted to the astonishing sum of £51,000, the most recorded for any single building operation in the Middle Ages.

A book of this size and complexity runs into controversial areas. One such instance is the question of whether architectural innovations at certain periods resulted from internal developments or from the stimulus of models from abroad. Goodall argues spiritedly for the former in his coverage in chapter 7 of the chain of castles built in Wales by Edward I in the late thirteenth century. Consistent with the title of his book, the English castle (rather than the castle in England), he explains the new features ranging from toilet chutes to tower forms that appear at Flint, Conway, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, and elsewhere as the product of earlier work in England. This revises the view of scholars such as Arnold Taylor and R. Allen Brown (Arnold Taylor, The King’s Works in Wales, 1277–1330, London: H.M. Stationery Off., 1974; and R. Allen Brown, English Castles, London: Batsford, 1976), who saw them as Savoyard and French and explained their appearance by the involvement of Master James of Saint George d’Espéranche. Cast as a figure of genius by Taylor, this Savoyard master mason and engineer enjoyed the title of “Master of the King’s Works in Wales,” a handsome salary and pension, livery, the constableship of Harlech, and a close friendship with the king extending to his service as godfather to one of Edward’s children. Goodall devotes only five pages with three plates each to Conway and Caernarfon and sees behind them the work of Michael of Canterbury whose prodigious talents underlay the Decorated style in ecclesiastical and secular architecture. Interesting as these links are, the jury remains out about the role of patron and master mason in the Welsh castles.

The patron’s role, particularly during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has bearing on this issue. All kings undertook wide travel and resided for long periods away from England; some were born and raised abroad and lived there by choice or necessity for parts of their reign. They were familiar with castles of different kinds in Europe, and some even with Byzantine and Islamic lordly residences in the eastern Mediterranean on account of their participation in the crusades. For example, in a single year, 1390, Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, saw service with the Teutonic Knights in the siege of Vilna in Lithuania and later in the spring traveled to the Holy Land, his land journey taking him through Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna, Venice, before setting sail to Jaffa by way of Corfu and Rhodes. In all these centers and others en route, he and his entourage witnessed variations and enrichments of castle residences and were in a position to draw on them for their own undertakings on their return to England.

Central to Goodall’s book are the nearly four hundred plates and figures, and they play a major role also in the transformation of the subject. Beautifully presented in the best design traditions of Yale University Press, they include generous analytical images—notably plans in color to illustrate phasing and cut-away reconstruction drawings to reanimate lost or minimally surviving features in the more heavily ruined structures. The latter are unknown in earlier studies, and their use by Goodall derives from his apprenticeship with English Heritage whose site guidebooks pioneered them. They involve collaborations between the historian and artists and model builders, and although enormously time-consuming, they are essential aids to readers. Goodall commissioned work from seven artists including the doyenne of the genre, the late Terry Ball, and his generous upfront naming of them and credit for their cut-away sections is much to be commended.

Equally notable is the book’s stunning photography. Goodall’s present position as architectural editor for Country Life provides him full access to its incomparable archive and links him to the magazine’s extraordinarily high photographic standards extending back more than a century. In addition to their architectural and documentary accuracy, many of the photographs convey a sense of setting, an element particularly critical for castles. Command of the surrounding countryside was essential for the success of any design and depended on the patron and master mason’s shrewd topographical placement. The required accents of authority and social status, as well as defensibility, resulted from the adjustment of the castle’s architecture to the setting. Capturing these qualities challenges the photographer, and the book contains a number of successful examples of meeting them. One such is the full-plate image of Dunstanburgh facing page 229. An early fourteenth-century castle in Northumberland, it is shown from a distance of a half mile or so and occupies barely a half inch in the left center of the image. All the rest is drenched, black rocks, expansive sea and plangent waves, and a wide expanse of azure sky. The gusting, brine-laden North Sea wind and low horizon combine seamlessly with the castle’s broken outline and skeletal walls brooding over its projecting headland. Documentation of Dunstanburgh’s features is conveyed by three further images and reconstructions.

The English Castle: 1066–1650 places the history of its subject on an entirely new footing. Goodall’s narrative gifts and enviable skills as a historian transform the subject. New concepts and organizations of the material over a six hundred-year period, along with revised approaches and more sparkling lines of argument, set before the reader a fresh map for future studies of one of Europe’s most enduring but poorly studied architectural types.