The Medieval Castle Manual: Design - Construction - Daily Life (Haynes Manuals)

This book should be considered a requirement for anyone with even a passing interest in medieval castles. Although I am also a fan of medieval military history, I was pleased that this book wasn't laden with tales of famous battles and sieges, but, with almost every detail involved with the placement, construction, and maintenance of a castle. Every single page is alive with full color diagrams, illustrations, and photographs, with accompanying text describing the how and why all these incredible things were accomplished. This is the absolute best book on castles I have come across thus far and I highly recommend it. You will not be disappointed!

The focus of this book is actually building a castle in France using the the techniques of the 10th-14th century in modern times. Reading it you will learn of the techniques of masons lost and recreated during the build. This book gives you the how and why for the various sections of the castle needed to live, maintain, and perform the functions as fortress, civil center, and living quarters for a family with retainers. I highly recommend this one as a must have reference about the subject.

Great book for understanding all the steps in building a castle. The author uses a castle being built from scratch in France to show what was involved. Check the LOOK INSIDE and you will see what I am referring to. IT makes an excellent companion to CASTRUM TO CASTLE and SIEGE WARFARE.

This is a very high quality book, lot of information and pictures.

Print and illustrations are far too small.

Very nice book

I spent my childhood tramping round many kinds of castles. These ranged from ruins to ones that had been so extensively rebuilt that it was impossible to discern the original structure. This meant that I have always found it hard to visualise what these novel Norman buildings looked like. (I suspect many of us find it hard to translate an outline of stones into a room or a crumbling wall into a tower.) As I study medieval history I wanted to remedy this failing and learn more about castles.I first bought Marc Morris' book "Castles" which I found disappointing. I hoped this would be better as it had lots of pictures and contained a lot of information about Guedelon - the project to build a replica 13th century castle using the tools and techniques of the time. The first two thirds of the book were excellent and gave me a lot of the information I wanted as long as I ignored the occasional but obvious errors in the text. ( Wrong conversions of metric measurements and problems with homophones were irksome but ignorable.)However the last third of the book rapidly descended into sub-literacy - call me picky, but I regard having a verb as an essential part of a sentence. Then being told that pole-lathe motive power is supplied by wrapping a rope round a mandrill was a positively Pythonesque image as this is a large, savage variety of baboon. ( A mandrel is the axis at the centre of a lathe.) This last section is full of grammatical howlers and other errors that render it nonsensical and painful to read. Sadly this mainly affected the section about ancillary trades and crafts supporting the castle which could have been fascinating to explore.I found this a great pity as this lack of editing ruined the educational value of the book and undermined my trust in its veracity. I am giving it four stars as the illustrations are excellent throughout and it did give me a lot of the information I wanted about castle design and construction before it descended into gibberish. If you can get a cheap copy and ignore the last part it is probably worth buying, otherwise avoid it.

I have many books on castles, but most of them deal on their social, political or military roles. This, however, details and illustrates many of the mundane aspects of their construction and function. If you visit any ancient castles, this book will help to explain many features that you may notice but not understand. For example, were towers open or roofed, what evidence is there to explain this?

If you buy this book you must also buy the dvd of the tv series; the two really compliment each other. However, the book doesn’t really stand up without the background of the tv programmes!

Very informative book!

Excellent analysis of castle construction, building materials, architecture, history & daily life- Beautifully illustrated.