This nicely produced and presented book aims, as its title suggests and the introduction states, ‘to provide a framework for the visitor, so that each castle might be interpreted and placed in context. What was its purpose? How was it built? How did it work?’
Handily sized to serve as a useful field guide, it can also be consulted at home to answer many of the questions that visitors to castles might have about the terminology used by archaeologists and architectural and military historians to describe these buildings and from this to enhance their experience and understanding of the structures themselves.
Particularly for such a compact book, its geographical coverage is broad- ranging from the British Isles, across other western European countries to fortifications found in Asia and the Far East. As ‘a travel-sized primer that takes a strictly visual approach to castle architecture’, the book is fully illustrated; in fact there is not a single page in its approximately 250-page text without a picture.
There are however no photographs and instead the book is illustrated by a large number of carefully selected line drawings. Many of these are clear reproductions of high-quality engravings by 19th century ‘pioneers’ such as Viollet-le-Duc in France and J.H. Parker in England, complemented by a large number of modern drawings of features as varied as coursed rubble and other masonry details to the reconstruction of a motte and bailey castle through to gun ports and fireplaces.
But this is not a mere picture book or glossary. Despite its relative brevity, the text covers wider topics such as a discussion of the castle’s role both as residence and fortress. In this the author does not blindly follow the now well-worn but still far from proven new orthodoxy that castles (particularly those from the later Middle Ages) were almost always more about symbolism and display than defence or military prowess. Instead, he takes a more balanced and sensible view, acknowledging that both aspects were important and were, of course, often combined in a single building.
While Hislop is up-to-date in the ‘resources’ he cites at the end of the book (among them several of the works of the new generation of castle scholars) he does not attempt to take sides in this debate. Rather, and (in this book at least) taking the physical evidence of the buildings themselves as his principal guide, he calmly and rationally describes and analyses his material, noting for instance in the introduction that ‘while some castles were instruments of conquest, others were the residential and administrative centres of landed estates and had a largely peaceful intent. The character of a castle’s structures will suggest whether its prime function was that of a fortress, or whether it had a more domestic role... Noting the physical evidence will allow us to draw conclusions to questions such as these’.
Hislop’s book is thus not only a good introduction to ‘understanding fortifications’ for the general reader but also serves in part as a useful corrective to the growing and apparently unstoppable notion that the late medieval castle was, as one recent scholar would have it, much more about ‘fraudulent display’ than representing any real military purpose.