Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages

by A. Hamilton Thompson

Military Architecture in England During the Middle Ages, published by Oxford University Press in 1912 with some two hundred photographs, drawings and plans, is A. Hamilton Thompson's history of English fortification from prehistoric earthworks to the fortified manor house. He describes Roman stations and the defenses of the Saxon and Danish period, the earth and timber castles raised after the Norman Conquest, the great stone keeps such as Rochester, the cylindrical tower keeps of the age of transition, the domestic buildings inside castle walls, thirteenth-century curtain walls, the concentric castles of Edward I, and the fortified towns and houses of the later Middle Ages. Throughout he links changes in design to changes in methods of attack. The full text is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, and the first chapter is free.