The Growth of Castle Studies in England and on the Continent since 1850

Summary

Now that the study of castles - or casteilogie - has become a respectable and established subject in its own right, it is difficult to imagine how little it was so regarded in the early part of the nineteenth century. Then detailed studies of castles were scarce, or covered in a chapter or two, perhaps, in large volumes devoted to mediaeval architecture generally. In spite of the work of many enthusiastic and energetic antiquarians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the whole business of antiquities was in something of a muddle. A great deal was written about a great number of interesting objects or places by, very frequently, gentlemen of means and leisure but with not an enormous amount of background knowledge of their subject. So, as we shall see later, much of what they had written fell into disrepute and gave the study of antiquities a bad name. But however ridiculous the conclusions they may have come to in many instances they had one good point in common. Many of them drew beautifully. Whatever they may have said about the hundreds of ivy-clad ruins which caught their eyes, at least they have passed down to us very useful images of how ancient ruins looked more than two hundred years ago. We have only to look at those 1737 prints of castles, abbeys and stately homes by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, still on sale in souvenir shops, to notice how lovingly the architectural detail is recorded. Then between 1799 and 1805, Edward King produced his Munimenta Antiqua or Observations on Antient Castles in four massive volumes.

Though King, who was born about 1735 and died in 1807, was working before the time-limit of this paper, his influence must have been considerable in the years following his death. His books are enormous in size and beautiful in presentation. They are packed with learned material in Greek and Latin and full of detailed drawings, and he devoted the whole of volume three to Norman and Saxon buildings of all kinds. Even in his day, though it was recognised that much of what he wrote was full of factual mistakes, his drawings and plans were invaluable to the architect and historian and have been valued as such ever since.