Castles of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Renaissance

Omega Books Ltd, 1984. — 304 p.Throughout history man has sought permanent security by building fortifications, and every variation of landscape that Europe has to offer reveals evidence of this desire : lake villages. Bronze- or Iron-Age encampments dense with bracken and gorse. Roman town and frontier walls, a Norman motte standing like a large inverted pudding-basin, a castle on a mountain peak, a fortified monastery, a town still cramped within its star-shaped bastions of the seventeenth century, or a gun emplacement of the last war, its concrete now brown with rust. All these examples tell a story of men's need to guard their families, their land, their cattle, their crops, their factories, their way of life, and their local or national pride. This book deals with only a short part of the long history of defensive building, from the times of Charlemagne and of the Vikings to the French invasion of Italy in 1494, but to the fortifications of no other period does there attach the romance and fascination that draws us to the castles built and lived in during these few hundred years.