This is a book for the castle‐lover, the person who is drawn to Britain's often ruinous, fortified feudal residences of the Middle Ages. It is a book for the individual who, squinting up at a castle battlement, struggles (as I have often done) to make sense of the labyrinth of architectural terms in his or her guidebook. This attractive A‐Z of castle‐related terms is not really something that you can take on your visits to individual castles; it is quite a heavy hardback and far too nice a book to allow it to become dirty and dog‐eared by site visits. It has the feel of a coffee table book with its many black‐and‐white and some colour illustrations, but it is more than simply something pretty at which to look. In fact, the author implies in his Introduction that his vision is that the book will help the reader to be able to look at a site and establish his or her own thoughts about it in an informed way before buying the guidebook, thus putting the reader in a position to get more out of the guidebook and even to assess it critically. He also recommends that the reader visit the local parish church at the same time as the castle, as the history of castle and of church is often intertwined. (Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and the nearby Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity is a good example of this.)
The Companion is arranged alphabetically and consists of a number of longer, primary entries (e.g. Keep) from which cross‐references lead to various shorter, secondary entries (e.g. Donjon, Hall‐Keep, Tower‐Keep, etc.). Cross‐references are indicated by capital letters. Where necessary, the cross‐references are picked out in italic letters in the entries to which the reader is referred (p. vi). Primary entries tend to take a number of different forms. They are usually large, general topics relating to the building and architecture of castles, for instance, prisons, motte, gatehouses, masonry, etc. Because of the military element to castles, quite a number of the primary entries deal fairly extensively with warfare; for instance, there are primary entries on sieges, body armour, military recruitment and organisation, etc. On account of the domestic nature of castles, there is an extensive entry on household and on manor houses. There is also quite a number of contextual entries on subjects such as the Normans, the Conquest of Wales and the Wars of the Roses.
The secondary entries seem to fall into two categories. Some are very brief and tend to be architectural, for instance: “Cupola A small circular or polygonal dome crowning a roof or turret” (p. 86). Some of the less well‐known terms could have done with small, illustrative diagrams. (In some cases, these are included with the longer articles. The section on arches, for instance, has a very comprehensive set of diagrams of the many different types of arch; although sometimes, confusingly, more terms are used in the diagram than in the entry.) The longer of the secondary entries, usually about 100 words in length, tend to be more satisfying and informative and are long enough to include a few interesting contextual details. For instance, one learns that adulterine is a term applied to a castle that was erected or fortified without licence, that adulterine castles proliferated during the civil war of 1135‐1154, that many were demolished by Henry II in his attempt to restore order, that unlicensed castles continued to be built even in later centuries of the Middle Ages and that sometimes licences for them were granted retrospectively as in the case of Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire and Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland (p. 1).
The book concludes with sections offering suggestions for further reading and addresses (many including URLs) of related organisations. There is also an index of places.
For the seasoned castle‐explorer, this Companion provides an attractive mixture of the familiar and the new. For those who have not as yet done much castle visiting, the book is an enticement to do more.
