In the preceding five chapters of this book the physical development of the English castle has been traced from its Norman and French origins in the mid-eleventh century to the triumphant culmination of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and we have dealt also with the slow decline of the castle thereafter as an architectural form. Such architectural history raises, or should raise, the question of how these things were done, and by what sort of men. In recent years, in fact, historians have paid increasing attention to the practical side of architecture, including medieval architecture, that is to say to the actual process of construction as opposed to the mere description of those buildings which survive. The method used has for the most part been the very desirable one of combining with the examination of the structures themselves the study of the documents and other written sources relating to their building. In consequence something of the gap between architectural history and real history has been closed, and, though much work remains to be done, we are beginning to know something of the cost of medieval building in terms of money, labour, materials and time, to see something of the complex organisation which lay behind it all, to learn something of the methods used, and to appreciate more fully both the finished results as we see them and the high degree of skill, both scientific and artistic, which produced them. The study of the relevant written evidence also has the immediate value of enabling surviving buildings in many cases to be dated with more precision than is possible by structural evidence alone, and especially is this the case with castles which have far less decoration, such as carvings and mouldings susceptible to stylistic dating, than, say, churches. Finally, not the least satisfying result of these studies has been to dispel a good deal of the hitherto cherished anonymity of the so-called Middle Ages, to establish in some measure who built what as well as when, and thus to add to the roll of English architects, which too commonly began with Wren, some of the names of the consummate masters of the medieval past.

Here our concern is only with castle-building.