De Re Militari | Book Reviews

John R. Kenyon

Castles, Town Defences and Artillery Fortifications in the United Kingdom and Ireland. A Bibliography 1945-2006

Donington: Shaun Tyas 2008 xii, 740pp £35.00 ISBN 978-1900289-894 .

The City of Manchester is no longer in Lancashire. Yorkshire has a South Riding. Rutland and Huntingdonshire have disappeared altogether and Cumberland and Westmorland are now Cumbria . The shires aren’t what they used to be. Furthermore, English county community studies have waned in the last couple of decades. It is therefore refreshing if mildly anachronistic that John R. Kenyon’s bibliography of the military architectural landscape of Britain draws attention to a “shire literature” that once encompassed the scholarship of the parish vicar, who undertook the study of local landmarks between sermons. There is much of use in this literature of yore, however, and this volume is about the only way any modern scholar is likely to find it collected in one (massive) bibliography of virtually all the castle studies published since the Second World War (for those before 1945, see the similarly-massive D.J . Cathcart King’s Castellarium Anglicanum [1983]).

While there is a particular charm in Victorian and Edwardian writings on the various forms of British military architecture, Kenyon has eschewed the older stuff and begins his survey in 1945 (after all, if you really need to drill down on a particular fortification, you can either start with Cathcart King, go straight to the VCH , or play follow-the-footnote from the entries in Kenyon’s work). The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of the expansion of county record offices throughout England and is thus a good starting point. Creating a central repository for local records in each of the shires in some ways made possible the county community studies genre of history and it built on the strong local identity so much loved in the British Isles--even still today, to some extent.

Military history played a central role in the proliferation of local studies because from the time of the Romans to World War II, military exploits of kings and soldiers (and even outlaws) served to focus the national identity; it also promoted a--if you will pardon an Americanism--“Washington slept here” mentality at times. More germane to this bibliography, however, the maintenance of defensive structures in the UK has left a rich architectural, archaeological and written legacy that may be as celebrated by the public as much as made useful for the historian. The English militia that safeguarded the shires personified the English amateur military tradition and the defensive military monuments that dotted the coast and hinterland symbolized the stability of the realm. The wealth of literature on castles and fortifications, widely popular despite the essentially unmilitary nature of the English people, sustains an amateur English military history tradition, so there are plenty of folks who will find this book useful. Kenyon’s bibliography helps us keep track of the thousands of fascinating articles, guidebooks and monographs that have illuminated military architecture in the various corners of the island.

Understandably, then, the key to Kenyon’s bibliography is geography. This massive volume incorporates and builds on his previous multi-volume Castles, town defences , and artillery fortifications in Britain and Ireland bibliography for the Council for British Archaeology (CBA Research Reports nos. 25 [1978], 53 [1983] and 72 [1990]; the first is out of print, the latter two are available online from CBA , although they apparently declined to issue this full version [p.x ]) to bring together all the modern literature on defensive structures in the British Isles. Part one (pp. 1-86) is arranged around format (book, article, etc.) and authorship, Part two (the next 580 pages) is organized under “national” (England, Wales, Scotland, The Islands, and Ireland) and then by region within them (historic shire or county). This geographical approach is very much in keeping with the conceptualization of the literature it organizes. Thus, if you are interested in a particular castle or even a particular region this bibliography is a godsend. If however, your interests cross a historical boundary--castles of the Solent or defenses on the Severn, anyone?--it will be a bit harder to use.

Further, as historiography has shifted from national history to comparative and cross-disciplinary topics, readers seeking works on more synthetic subjects such as “bastions” or “garrisons” or landscape archeology will have an uphill struggle (gradient nearing 90?) with the bibliography. Even teasing out the career of a particular architect/engineer known to have worked on multiple sites still means going to every item published on every site if one starts with this bibliography. This is a perfect volume for someone who wants to know everything about one place, but is less useful for anyone who wants to take a more thematic approach to military history. There is no arrangement by topic in the text, nor any indexing terms that might allow one to find the disparate works that treat one metatopic . Compounding the problem is that the content within articles remains hidden as annotation would have forced this tome to become a multi-volume leviathan. Similarly, one cannot extract a narrowed chronological cross-section from the book. If you are writing about the period 1639-1640 there is really no convenient way to pry loose the listings relevant to those dates across the geographic boundaries.

The indices, too, list authors and places, and thus mirror the binary structure of this two-part bibliography. The only way to enhance the functionality of the book would be to have chronological and topical indices, and that is unrealistic in light of the current production costs faced by publishers. As four indices, ideally, are needed for the book, it would seem that an electronic format would have been a wiser course here, where searches could be customized and narrowed (despite their limitations, the bibliographies produced by Brill as physical books as well as on CD and the web show that such tactics are being tried--see reviews of two of them here and here). Additionally, the electronic format would have made the addition of new or newly-rediscovered old material much easier--as it is, there is a 15pp. section of addenda material, organized by the same geographic breakdown as the main listing, which is oddly appended rather than integrated into the main bibliography (one assumes the main text block had already begun printing but was not bound before this appendix came in). It is a short appendix, but one does have to remember to check these pages to see if there may be more entries on a particular shire. Kenyon, however, explains the choice of a physical book in that the members of the Castle Study Group, when asked about book vs. electronic format, “overwhelmingly” responded that they wanted hard copy (p. 1). One does wonder, however, how a different group might have responded, but as the CSG is one of the obvious audiences, we must defer to their request. It is also worth noting that this bibliography seems to be a compilation of Kenyon’s three earlier bibliographies as well as the CSG annual bibliography that has appeared for the last 20 years--Kenyon mentions the connection, but does not clarify whether this is a comprehensive incorporation of that material or not, though one suspects it is.

The above-mentioned considerations thus make the book unwieldy for purposes of many kinds of research. However, despite all our observations (we’d prefer not to think of them as criticisms, exactly), we both feel that this is an indispensible volume for castleologists. Kenyon has produced a massive, impressive, and canonical work. It is a necessity for any comprehensive research library, a strong candidate for any library with a military concentration, and given its relatively modest price, individual researchers will certainly want a copy as well.