I decided to read this since I have an unhealthy love of castles and because I really enjoy the idea of imagining what the actual life in the depths of history was like. But maybe it wasn’t the best idea to read this one in parallel with one of Ian Mortimer’s books about British history since it inevitably led to comparisons, and at least for me Mortimer’s style wins. And that’s just not fair to the Gies writing duo as the styles are just very different.
“But the final role of the European medieval castle seems to be that of tourist attraction. In Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, with the aid of a guide or a guidebook and some imagination, one can stand in the grassy bailey and re-people the weathered stone ramparts and towers and the vanished wooden outbuildings with archers and knights, servants, horses, and wagoners, the lord and lady and their guests, falcons and hunting dogs, pigs and poultry—all the unkempt, unsafe, unsavory but irresistibly appealing life of the thirteenth century.”
Don’t expect (as I had) that it will focus just on the day-to-day castle life in the Medieval times. First there is quite a bit of a background on feudal relationships, inheritance, and some of the history of the family which owned Chepstow castle — the castle that’s used as an illustration here. It takes a bit to get to the actual life in the castle, but once you do you will also learn about the details of training a falcon (which is harder than I ever thought it would be) as well as a bit of a village life, hunting details and royal forests, the evolution of castle fortifications (from moat and bailey to the familiar castle shape, from rectangular to circular, with ever-thickening walls to withstand evolving attack methods), different roles involving in maintenance of daily castle routine (no, I never though about where chamberlains and haywards and woodwards and stewards came from), and eventual decline in castle role after political changes and preference of the nobility to live in more modern comforts.
“The rushes were replaced at intervals and the floor swept, but Erasmus, noting a condition that must have been true in earlier times, observed that often under them lay “an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats and everything that is nasty.”
It’s written in a somewhat dry style, especially if comparing to easy banter of Ian Mortimer (again, reading his book and this one in sync was not the best choice), and it made it too easy to put it aside for a few days at a time. And the photos are clearly from 1970s edition (seriously, publishers, would it have killed you to update those so that I wouldn’t need to constantly search online for images that look like anything but grey grainy blobs?).
And yet I’m still interested enough in the approach this writing duo took to the Middle Ages to check out their books on the life in medieval city and medieval village.
books are life 