John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Interview with John Goodall: "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. John Goodall
Date: November 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of the New Books Network features a conversation with Dr. John Goodall, distinguished architectural historian and author of "The Castle: A History." The discussion explores the multifaceted role and cultural legacy of castles in Britain, from their origins in the early Middle Ages to their ongoing presence—real and imagined—in contemporary society. Dr. Goodall elucidates how castles are more than just defensive structures: they are emblems of power, sites of myth and memory, and evolving architectural texts that reflect shifting social identities and historical attitudes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. John Goodall’s Background and Approach (01:32–06:10)

• Goodall trained as a medievalist and began his career at English Heritage, crafting guidebooks where he learned to convey the significance of castles within their physical context.
• As the architectural editor of Country Life, his view expanded beyond medieval buildings to architecture of all periods.
• Approach in the Book:
  • Blends archaeological, architectural, and narrative history.
  • The narrative is constructed from historical sources—chronicles, newspapers, poetry, and novels—giving primacy to how people from various periods themselves perceived and described castles.
  • Intended for both scholarly rigor and broad accessibility.

“This book... is really a whole series of narratives taken from everything from chronicles to newspaper accounts, poetry, novels of different periods, which describe castles through other people's eyes.” (05:15–05:21)

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2. Defining 'Castle' – Beyond Defense (06:35–10:02)

• Conventional Definition: Nobleman’s residence that is defensible.
• Dr. Goodall’s Definition:
  • A nobleman’s residence, made “magnificent through the trappings of fortification” (battlements, towers), not solely defense, but as a demonstrative building expressing social identity.
  • Emphasis shifts from functionality to symbolism.

“If people call things a castle, it's not the responsibility of historians to tell them why they got it wrong, it's the responsibility of historians to explain what they meant.” (07:21–07:28)

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3. Organizing the Book – Chronology and Themes (10:59–15:38)

• Structured as a broad chronology from Julius Caesar’s era through to modern constructs like the Disney Castle.
• Strives for a balanced representation across different time periods.
• Incorporates both real and fictional castles; examines castles as material sites and as objects of cultural imagination (e.g., Arthurian legend).
• Emphasizes the importance of interpreting historical perception—sometimes requiring the historian to “make the same mistakes as the past” to understand it from within.

“I used to think that there was a thing called the real history of a site. And then all these other things, all these other stories that people invented... Now... the distinction between them is not as clear as I used to think.” (14:29–14:50)

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4. The Norman Conquest and the Arrival of Castles (17:00–22:12)

• Confirms that castles, as recognized today, are largely a Norman import, but notes complexity:
  • Some Norman influence pre-dates the conquest.
  • Anglo-Saxon England had fortified residences, but these lacked later castle attributes and did not serve as active military centers in narrative histories.
  • Post-conquest, castles rapidly proliferate as militarized power centers and symbols.

“There is a very complex history... but I think it is still fair to say that the Norman Conquest does really constitute a new beginning.” (22:04–22:12)

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5. Castles, the Nobility, and ‘Ordinary’ People (23:36–27:15)

• Castles were not just homes, but also sites of tyranny, authority, and justice for the broader population.
• Featured narratives show castles as both admired for grandeur and feared as tools of oppression.
• Example: Construction of the Tower of London engendering terror among Londoners; legends like Thomas Becket’s ghost toppling its walls reflect collective anxiety.

“This sense that when the Normans start building castles in England, this is not some… byproduct of conquest. This is actually completely fundamental to the process.” (24:16–24:21)

• Judicial function illustrated by anecdotes, like court cases held within castle walls.

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6. The Myth and Reality of Licenses to Crenellate (29:12–33:01)

• A “license to crenellate” (permission to fortify one’s residence) was less about royal control, more about social status; it was often a formality, purchased rather than strictly policed.
• Many true castles were built without formal licenses.
• These documents were more signals of privilege than effective state oversight.

“They are much more sort of passports to social status than anything else.” (32:03–32:06)

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7. Castles and the English Civil War (33:11–37:15)

• Civil War marks a major break: many long-inhabited castles are ruined or deliberately demolished, changing the trajectory of English domestic architecture.
• Some castles and towns prove unexpectedly strong in sieges, resisting even gunpowder artillery for extended periods.
• The postwar Restoration sees a decisive shift—aristocrats build new types of residences, often in Continental baroque styles, signaling both a rupture and a new beginning.

“It’s a moment where the English nobility really start living completely differently in totally new buildings almost overnight.” (37:16–37:29)

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8. The Gothic Revival and Romantic Reimaginings (38:26–43:01)

• 19th-century Gothic Revival reawakens fascination with castles, both as symbols of tyranny (Gothic novels) and as idealized sites of chivalry and heritage.
• Influential works: Horace Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto” and Walter Scott’s novels.
• Social phenomena like the Eglinton Tournament reveal how romanticized medievalism shaped culture and even inspired real restoration/construction.
• The Middle Ages become a canvas for imagining social ideals and historic authenticity.

“In a romantic sense, they made castles seem to live again.” (39:51–39:54)

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9. Modern Preservation and Interpretation (44:02–46:35, 48:23–54:26)

• Shifts in heritage attitudes:
  • From seeing ruins as “texts” to be stripped to their ‘original’ state, to attempts at making history “live again” through reconstruction and interpretation.
  • Institutions now grapple with the challenges of presenting complicated histories, especially questions around slavery and social injustice, sometimes lagging behind private owners in fully addressing the complexities.
• The landscape today is mixed: ruined, restored and still-lived-in castles coexist and invite a range of responses.

“Our whole treatment of buildings involves tensions between so many different interests.” (44:26–44:29)

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10. Challenges of Reconstructing Historic Interiors (49:39–54:26)

• Accurately reconstructing castle interiors is fraught: material limitations, loss of context, and chronological “telescoping” can result in anachronistic or misleading spaces.
• Reconstructions—even when well-researched—tend to reflect the time of their creation more than historical reality.

“We run the risk often of constructing historic interiors in inverted commas that no person in history would recognize.” (53:37–53:40)

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11. Looking Forward (55:09–56:00)

• Goodall is immersed in regular journalistic work on architectural history but hints at a possible future book on the English Perpendicular Gothic style.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Defining Castles:

  • “A building, a nobleman's residence, that uses the trappings of fortification… to demonstrative effect as an expression of social identity…” (08:46–09:05)

• Myth vs. History:

  • “You need to make the same mistakes as the past if you're going to understand the past.” (15:38)

• On Civil War and Change:

  • “When the restoration comes, there are lots of people who have been in exile abroad… They come back and they find their ancestral homes in ruins... and they build something completely different.” (36:36–36:45)

• On Restoration and Authenticity:

  • “Historic interiors in inverted commas that no person in history would recognize. So it's difficult. It's worthwhile, too… but… it’s a very difficult thing to do successfully.” (53:37–54:08)

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Important Timestamps

| Segment | Topic | |---|---| | 01:32–06:10 | Goodall’s background and methodology | | 06:35–10:02 | Defining castles | | 10:59–15:38 | Chronology and structuring history; myth vs. reality | | 17:00–22:12 | Castles and the Norman conquest | | 23:36–27:15 | Ordinary people’s relationship to castles | | 29:12–33:01 | Licenses to crenellate | | 33:11–37:15 | Civil War and its aftermath | | 38:26–43:01 | Gothic Revival and romantic perceptions | | 44:02–46:35 | Modern preservation: authenticity, memory, and conflict | | 49:39–54:26 | Problems of historical reinterpretation and reconstruction | | 55:09–56:00 | Works in progress; future plans |

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Tone and Language

The conversation is informed, engaging, and accessible—balancing scholarly perspective with vivid anecdotes and a strong awareness of the continuing appeal of castles in modern culture and imagination.

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Summary prepared for listeners and non-listeners alike, with clarity, attribution, and critical insights from Dr. John Goodall’s comprehensive historical and cultural study of castles.

Transcript

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[Dr. John Goodall]

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[Interviewer]

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[Dr. John Goodall]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of the hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today to be interviewing Dr. John Goodall about his book titled the A History, published by Yale University Press in 2022. As you can probably expect from the title, this book presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain from the early Middle Ages all the way to the present. I found this book absolutely fascinating because it covers both kind of the castle in general and how it's perceived and built and used, as well as a ton of specific examples of actual castles, some of which are not as old as I expected, some of which had different stories than I expected. So I enjoyed this book thoroughly and I think you, the listener, will also learn a lot from this. So, John, I'm very pleased to welcome you to the podcast, Miranda.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could we please start off with you introducing yourself and explain why you decided to write this book?

[Interviewer]

So I trained, as it were, as a medievalist and I worked briefly for.

[Dr. John Goodall]

English Heritage as a historian. I launched their new guidebook series. I was one of the people involved in doing that more years ago than I care to think of. Must be about 15, 20 years ago.

[Interviewer]

And that was, in a way, the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Sort of hook that got me first interested in castles. You know, looking at these buildings, trying to understand them, trying to write guidebooks about them.

[Interviewer]

I like to think of guidebooks as.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A unique technical literature because they're the.

[Interviewer]

Only kind of literature that is meant to be read in a particular place. And the challenges of trying to convey.

[Dr. John Goodall]

What castles, you know, mean in guidebooks was sort of a starting point for my own interest and the technical details of that.

[Interviewer]

I. From there, I moved to my present.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Job, which is the architectural editor of Country Life, and I work each week producing an article on buildings of different kinds, often country houses, but things that could be built in the distant past and the present.

[Interviewer]

And the point about that, I suppose.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Is it broadened my interest in architecture from the foundations in the Middle Ages, which I studied before, and medieval buildings.

[Interviewer]

To buildings of every period. And so this particular project brought together.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Those two interests in a way. It brought together, on the one hand, technical and archaeological interest in castles, but.

[Interviewer]

Then allied it with an interest in how they fit in the grand traditions.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of domestic architecture in the British Isles. This book really focuses on English castles. I actually cover buildings, as I say, right across the British Isles in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.

[Interviewer]

But it's a sort of convenient way of dealing with something briefly, because all.

[Dr. John Goodall]

These different areas, of course, have their own traditions of building.

[Interviewer]

And what I wanted to do, in.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Effect, therefore, in this book, was to.

[Interviewer]

Try and look at the castle across.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Time, from the distant past to the present day.

[Interviewer]

I also wanted to look at it.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Not just in literal history, but in literary history. So it contains buildings both, you know, that exist physically and those that have been imagined at different periods of time.

[Interviewer]

And then, finally, as an architectural historian, I spend all my time necessarily turning.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The buildings I love into words. And words are necessarily so much less interesting than buildings.

[Interviewer]

But one way, you can never avoid that. But one way, I think, of blunting.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Your own use of words is to.

[Interviewer]

Try and turn to the words of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Different generations of people as they've described castles.

[Interviewer]

So this book, the skeleton of this book, is really a whole series of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Narratives taken from everything from chronicles to newspaper accounts, poetry, novels of different periods.

[Interviewer]

Which describe castles through other people's eyes. It's about how people in the distant.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Past have perceived these things and how they've presented them.

[Interviewer]

So it's basically a long chronology with a whole series of anecdotes which I interpret and explain and relate in the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Words of the person who has presented them.

[Interviewer]

And I hoped in that way that I could do something, in short, that was, you know, rooted in one side.

[Dr. John Goodall]

In one part in rigorous architectural history.

[Interviewer]

But also rooted in many voices of the past, and also took a very.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Broad view of a subject that commands.

[Interviewer]

Still enormous popular interest. So it's also meant to be a.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Popular and accessible book, and writing a history, I suppose, in a slightly different way.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that's a very helpful introduction to kind of what brought you to this, and also a really lovely summary of the book, not just in its content, but also the way it conveys that content, which I'd love to ask you about in a minute. But before that, given, as you've just described, the massive kind of sweep of the book in time, in geography, could we first start off with just clarifying how do we define the term castle?

[Dr. John Goodall]

Yes, this wonderful old chestnut.

[Interviewer]

The book, I suppose, starts, you know, from the point of view that it has become conventional to define the castle.

[Dr. John Goodall]

As the residence of a nobleman that is defensible.

[Interviewer]

And that conventional description is, in fact, I think, perfectly accurate of buildings.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Castle buildings in the early Middle Ages in England.

[Interviewer]

But it becomes very complicated in the late. Even, you know, even by the 13th century.

[Dr. John Goodall]

I think it becomes complicated because it's.

[Interviewer]

Involved scholars in discussions of whether fortifications function. And that's a very subjective and difficult thing to judge. And my own preferred way of approaching.

[Dr. John Goodall]

This problem, therefore, is to say that.

[Interviewer]

If people call things a castle, it's not the responsibility of historians to tell.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Them why they got it wrong, it's.

[Interviewer]

The responsibility of historians to explain what they meant. And I think, obviously, the word castle.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Has been very widely applied to buildings in England through long periods of time.

[Interviewer]

And what I've settled for is the definition of a castle as a building.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Made magnificent through the trappings of fortification. So the residence of a nobleman made magnificent through the trappings of fortification, and.

[Interviewer]

In changing it, the definition from the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Conventional one in this way, I think.

[Interviewer]

We sidestep, first of all, a huge amount of very subjective discussion about whether.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A particular fortification actually works, and therefore whether it's a real castle in inverted commas or, by implication, a fake one.

[Interviewer]

But also, it's possible to look at a much wider spectrum of buildings than those that are constructed in the 11th.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And 12th centuries, where clearly, defence is a very important element.

[Interviewer]

But even in those buildings, I would say, you know, this architecture has never been purely functional.

[Dr. John Goodall]

It's always had a demonstrative quality.

[Interviewer]

And I think that that's actually, you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Know, really the most important quality of the castle. It is a demonstrative building.

[Interviewer]

And so that's Ultimately, that's what I.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Plumb for is the definition of a castle, that is a building, a noman's residence, that uses the trappings of fortification, battlements, towers, turrets, to demonstrative effect as an expression of social identity, but also, you know, which can, can sometimes function as defensible buildings.

[Interviewer]

And one of the themes, of course, that's picked up in the book is that it can be quite shocking to discover how late people were still building castles with a defensive function.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Sometimes, you know, it can be quite remarkable to be reminded of 19th century buildings that are, you know, they're not meant to withstand attacks from armies, but they're certainly intended to withstand attacks from mobs.

[Interviewer]

So, you know, this, this is, this is the defence never quite vanishes. But I mean, I think it's certainly.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A thing of diminishing importance. And this book is trying to set.

[Interviewer]

The specific issue of defence to one.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Side without denying its importance, but saying.

[Interviewer]

That there's something even more profound that.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Identifies a castle today. And of course, you know, the irony is that they are instantaneously recognis to us as a building type. You know, whether or not you're professionally interested in the subject. I think we all know what castles are inwardly, which in a lot of.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Ways means that defining it is even trickier because we do have kind of built in connotations and assumptions that make someone, you know, someone like you. It's harder then to come up with a definition because there's already so many out there. So thank you for sort of providing us with that baseline to understand the rest of this. The other kind of foundational question I wanted to ask sort of comes back to something you were mentioning earlier around kind of the goals of the book, not just purely being about kind of, I don't know, a textbook going along with, you know, year by year, what's happening, but the idea of kind of unearthing voices from the past and putting them kind of in conversation with each other. And the book does, in a lot of ways work chronologically, but you also do organize it in other ways. And I was wondering if you could sort of tell us a little bit about kind of how you group castles together, how you organize and how you think about them as you are structuring the book.

[Interviewer]

Well, I suppose as I was structuring the book, what I was really trying.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To do first and foremost was create a chronology.

[Interviewer]

I wanted to have stories that talked.

[Dr. John Goodall]

About castles from, you know, the early.

[Interviewer]

Middle ages right through to the present day.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And, you know, without giving anything away, you know, one of the first quotations in the book is, in fact, from.

[Interviewer]

Caesar's Gallic wars, and the last is.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A discussion of the Disney castle. Because I suppose that's another point that, you know, we're still creating castles. It's not as though they've. They've vanished.

[Interviewer]

So that I was trying to find things that furnished a broad chronology. And that's actually always agonising because there were all sorts of things that I would have loved to have included, but they fell too close to other things that I thought were more important. And that was slight agonising series of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Choices when I was trying to really whittle things down. You know, there are some periods of time where narratives are packed with references to castles, and there are other periods.

[Interviewer]

Of time where you have to seek.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Out references to castles.

[Interviewer]

So that was the main, you know, imperative, I suppose, in structuring the book.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Was trying to create a balance in.

[Interviewer]

Time to make it clear what the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Sweep of the book actually was getting. You know, what the breadth of the subject and what it was covering.

[Interviewer]

I mean, the. I also think that buildings are one of the ways in which we get closer to the physical experience, the reality.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of the past, than anywhere else.

[Interviewer]

I mean, I think when we confront paintings, open manuscripts, or we visit buildings, we are brought face to face with the visual world in as far as we can be that people in the past have known and experienced. And so I wanted not only to incorporate within the book quotations from, you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Know, from accounts of castles, but I.

[Interviewer]

Thought it was also important at certain points to use images of castles or photographs of existing buildings to illustrate the narrative. So they also fall into that overarching chronology.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, images of castles at different periods of time.

[Interviewer]

And it's not that I think that images are separate, quite the contrary, but I was almost trying to cast images and real buildings as texts, just as.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The other things were as texts that you could glass and analyze. I think it's really important that you try and stop and gloss and text what you see in images and in buildings that you visit.

[Interviewer]

So those, I suppose, were the two groups of things. And as I've said already, I was very conscious that I wanted to cover imaginary buildings as well as real ones, literary castles. And also one of the things that I think has been very important in the story of the castle and is.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Again, I think, lives in the Disney castle, for example, is the castle as.

[Interviewer]

A sort of foundation of myth and fantasy. Castles have, very early on in English.

[Dr. John Goodall]

History, become associated with the foundational Legends of Britain, figures such as King Arthur.

[Interviewer]

And I think it's very important that that sort of fictional character of history.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Is represented as well in a history of the castle.

[Interviewer]

It's really, really significant. I don't think we always. You know, when I was writing guidebooks.

[Dr. John Goodall]

For English Heritage, I used to think that there was a thing called, you know, the real history of a site.

[Interviewer]

And then all these other things, all these other stories that people invented about.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Castles or monasteries and buildings.

[Interviewer]

Now, it's not that I. I don't.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Think that that is a real distinction. I think, you know, there's history as invention and there is history as, you know, factually related.

[Interviewer]

But sometimes I notice that the distinction between them is not as clear as I used to think. And I think also. So I suppose I feel sensitized to the reality that when people think things about buildings, those things can seem real to them. I mean, people from the 13th century thought that the Tower of London was built by Julius Caesar. And if you're going to understand the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Tower of London in through their eyes.

[Interviewer]

You need to make that. You need to make their mistake. You know, we now know that it's.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Not a Roman building, but that doesn't mean that people who thought it.

[Interviewer]

You can't understand people who thought it was a Roman building if you insist on so in some way, and just discounting their perception of it. You need to make the same mistakes.

[Dr. John Goodall]

As the past if you're going to understand the past. I think.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I think that that makes a lot of sense, especially kind of put in the context of understanding and interpreting images as well, because, of course, photography is not around for a lot of the history of the castle. And so a lot of the images in the book are sketches or are kind of other methods of documenting images. And that in a lot of ways tells us more about what people thought about castles, necessarily, than kind of an accurate architectural rendering of sort of a military fortification. So I think kind of all this goes together in sort of helping us understand kind of the castle in and of itself, but also like the history and the way people have talked about and perceived castles. So I'd love to kind of. I mean, you had to write a proper chronology looking at really all the castles. I do not have that burden. So I am going to explicitly, essentially cherry pick through the chronology that the book provides in the interest of time. We obviously can't go into all of it, so I'm going to pick bits of this history to ask you to tell us a little bit more about and Kind of the obvious place to start is, of course, the Norman Conquest. So traditionally, we perhaps understand that castles kind of come to England through the Norman Conquest. That's where the English and then the British castle comes from. To what extent is that actually true?

[Interviewer]

Yes, well, this is another really complex issue, and it comes down in part.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To the question of what do we mean by the word castle? How is the word castle actually used?

[Interviewer]

I think the basic premise that the castle is a building type introduced to.

[Dr. John Goodall]

England at the Norman Conquest is correct.

[Interviewer]

But it is important to acknowledge that.

[Dr. John Goodall]

There are complications to it. One of those complications is that there are Normans who are brought to England before the conquest happens. Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo Saxon.

[Interviewer]

King of England, of course, spends some.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of his life in exile in Normandy.

[Interviewer]

And he brings back to England when.

[Dr. John Goodall]

He becomes king all kinds of things.

[Interviewer]

That savor of the sort of Norman cultural revolution.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And one of those, of course, famously not in the world of castles at all, is his rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, which is in this new style, which is in form by the Romanesque Roman architecture and is effectively a building of Norman inspiration before the Norman Conquest.

[Interviewer]

So one complication, in other words, is.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That there are Normans around and there.

[Interviewer]

Are a few, a handful of castles.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Constructed by foreigners in England before the Norman Conquest itself.

[Interviewer]

But it's also true to say that the Anglo Saxon nobility do live in buildings that are defensible.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And the name of them, the Bergheat, which literally means the gateway to the.

[Interviewer]

Enclosure, this actually is a building type that's clearly defensible. And the Anglo Saxons, after all, long.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Been building fortifications against the Vikings, apart from anything else.

[Interviewer]

So there are fortifications in England, and they do occur sometimes around residences. I use in the book the example of Bambra.

[Dr. John Goodall]

What we're told by the Venerable Bede.

[Interviewer]

Is this citadel named after Beba the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Queen, Beba of Benicia, Bebba's Burr.

[Interviewer]

And there is a siege described by.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Bede when the King of Mercia, Penda, tries to destroy the fortifications by creating an enormous bonfire.

[Interviewer]

Now, what's sort of fascinating about this.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Early description of this fortified site, which sounds like a citadel of some kind.

[Interviewer]

Is that it's, you know, it doesn't really conform to what we think of. There's a castle built there after the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Conquest, of course, but, you know, it.

[Interviewer]

Long precedes castle building. It's odd, however, that the siege that Penda undertakes, you know, it really has.

[Dr. John Goodall]

None of the qualities of a siege that you would read in the later Middle Ages. You know, there aren't catapults or anything like that.

[Interviewer]

Like that. It's tremendously passive. You know, Pender basically pulls down all.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The neighboring houses, stacks them up to.

[Interviewer]

Form a bonfire, wait until. Waits until the wind is in the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Right direction and sets fire to them.

[Interviewer]

And this, this is not the stuff of sieges that we're familiar with. And I think herein lies one of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The most interesting distinctions between sort of pre and post Norman conquest castles, if you want to call them all that.

[Interviewer]

Is that before the Norman Conquest, there are fortifications and there are residences that are fortified, but they don't really turn.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Up very often in narratives of historical.

[Interviewer]

Narratives, and they certainly aren't often the objects of sieges. But after the Norman conquest, this building type turns up absolutely everywhere.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, the narratives and chronicles of the period are full of references to.

[Interviewer]

Castles and they're being besieged so much more actively, though they're, you know, elements in warfare. And that's not just a matter of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The increased surviving evidence.

[Interviewer]

It really does seem to be a.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Reflection of the way in which they're being used as tools in war.

[Interviewer]

So in other words, there is a very complex history and there's a final.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Actually, sorry, the final thing I should.

[Interviewer]

Say is that just to confuse matters even further, that the English tradition of nobleman's residences, the Anglo Saxon tradition, does seem to feed into Norman castle building in architectural terms. So we know that an English noble.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Residence before the conquest often has a.

[Interviewer]

Great hall, which is where feudal Jews.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, that's the sort of focus of a manor, there's a hall, a.

[Interviewer]

Building, and that these fortified houses, these birgits, have prominent gatehouses. And it is striking that in England, when the Normans build, they often build.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Castles with gatehouses of a kind and scale you never see in continental Europe. And they also construct halls on a scale and in a form that you don't see elsewhere in France.

[Interviewer]

So it's as though English traditions and.

[Dr. John Goodall]

English ideas permeate the castle building tradition of the post conquest period. So there are really complex relationships between them.

[Interviewer]

But I think it is still fair.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To say that the Norman Conquest does really constitute a new beginning.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I think that idea of permeating is very interesting. And as of course, the book goes on, there's a lot of examples, particularly around the halls of castles and kind of what they're used for and what we think they're used for later on, as you said, sort of thinking the Tower of Londo was built by Caesar. Historical assumptions about what has happened in castles is not always correct. But that can be really interesting, especially around kind of things, big theatrical spaces in a way, and kind of, well, what would they have looked like? So I think it's really interesting to kind of think about, like, where does that idea of a hall come from? So thank you for kind of explaining the. That it's, as you said, it's complex, it's not quite as simple as the myth we may be used to. So I'd love to turn then to the sort of. The other group of people involved. Right. We've talked about it as nobleman's residences, but of course, they're not the only people living in a castle, living near castles, encountering castles, particularly in this kind of early period, you know, before we can talk about maybe sort of mass literacy or pamphlets, and certainly long before we can talk about sort of leisure travel, what did ordinary people think of castles, respond to them? The view of them, the building of them, we've talked about for more years. But, like, what did normal, everyday people think?

[Interviewer]

Yes, well, I think this is a.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Really important point to make.

[Interviewer]

And one of the things that I find where I found that this idea of using other people's voices is very helpful because for some people, of course, castles are home.

[Dr. John Goodall]

For some people, they're places that, you know, they can live out grand lives.

[Interviewer]

But there's, as you say, there are.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Other people for whom castles are places.

[Interviewer]

Where justice is meted out or they can be seen, I mean, throughout the Middle Ages, too, as tools of tyranny. And, I mean, I think that's true.

[Dr. John Goodall]

From the Norman Conquest onwards, you know.

[Interviewer]

This sense that when the Normans start.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Building castles in England, this is not.

[Interviewer]

Some, you know, this is not a.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Sort of byproduct of conquest.

[Interviewer]

This is actually completely fundamental to the process.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You're forcing people to come off the.

[Interviewer]

Land to build fortifications for you. It's really brutal. And, you know, we're told by the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, you know, that it's oppressive, it's tyrannous, that people are being.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Forced to work on castles.

[Interviewer]

And that theme of the castle is a place of tyranny and of threatening building. Of course, you know, another anecdote I tell in the book is about Henry III's rebuilding of the Tower of London with, sorry, someone, my daughter, coming into the room, Henry III building the Tower of London, and the citizens of London being terrified by, you know, by the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Reality of having this castle being built beside them.

[Interviewer]

They think it's going to be used to tyrannise over them. And there's this Wonderful story of Thomas.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Becket, of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[Interviewer]

Who is always, who's a born a Londoner and is always a supporter of the citizens of London and who knocks in a dream, is seen to knock.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Down the castle walls of the Tower of London.

[Interviewer]

And that this happens on two consecutive occasions, exactly a year apart. And amazingly, I think people long thought.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That this was just a sort of medieval myth.

[Interviewer]

But during excavations at the Tower of London, it turned out that there really.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Were fortifications being built by Edward III that fell down twice.

[Interviewer]

So this story is suddenly linked, you know, to archaeology.

[Dr. John Goodall]

It's rather fascinating.

[Interviewer]

And in the book itself, of course, I go on to talk about castles and their perception as places of tyranny. I cite a passage from John Bunyan's.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Pilgrim's Progress, which illustrates again, the soul, Christian and hopeful, his companion, who are on this metaphorical journey to heaven, are imprisoned in a castle. And I tell that anecdot. And this is again, a story of tyranny.

[Interviewer]

So this is where the other side.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To the castle from a setting of grand life. And there are also, I should say, you know, references to castles as seats of judicial authority. And the rather wonderful story of. Rather sad story of a lady who's.

[Interviewer]

Killed by a kettle, killed by a stone that falls.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Out of a castle in Wales. And the person who throws the stone or who dislodges the stone is the castle constable of Montgomery Castle. And the law case brought by this woman's daughter is heard within the walls of the castle in which her mother was killed. Again, reminder of the judicial function of these buildings.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Interviewer]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Thank you for explaining. Kind of the range of interactions and reactions, and of course, that many of those can be kind of all experienced by the same person. Right. It could be a place of work that also becomes a place of justice that maybe starts off or becomes a place of tyranny. It's all sort of interconnected and there's not just one way to look at it. So I'm really thank you for kind of explaining that to us and of course for threading that throughout the book, not just in the kind of early medieval stuff. So it is really something that is present throughout, which is helpful because ordinary people were present throughout, despite what we may tend to think about in terms of castles. And I'd like to move then to kind of my next question, which is, I suppose, still in the realm, I guess, of myth busting, really, which is the idea of something called a license to Crenelate. What was that in actual fact?

[Dr. John Goodall]

So this is. Yes, this is a very complicated thing.

[Interviewer]

I mean, in the 19th century where people were. People were obsessed by the idea. Not obsessed, they. They regarded castles as a decentralizing force.

[Dr. John Goodall]

On the life of the realm.

[Interviewer]

Because if you owned a castle and you resist, you could with. You could resist the king and withdraw into your castle and, you know, live independently. And so it was believed that all castles had to be licensed. When the crown was strong enough, the. The crown insisted on licensing all castles and people began to look through the documentary material to identify a category of document that they described after a phrase.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That often appears in licenses to build fortifications as a license to crenelate.

[Interviewer]

Now, licenses to Crenelate, so called, are issued between that they appear in the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, in documentation issued by the.

[Interviewer]

Chancery and also by certain Palatine powers.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Princely powers in England from the 12th century onwards.

[Interviewer]

But in fact, they're not a natural category.

[Dr. John Goodall]

They're sort of a selected category. It's what historians have chosen sort of to bring together.

[Interviewer]

And the main group of them belong to a particular period of time and follow a particular formula that often allows people to build stone walls and erect crenellations on them around their residences. Now, when it was believed that the king needed to control his realm by.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Restricting the construction of fortifications, it was.

[Interviewer]

Thought that a licensed crenelate was a sort of gracious, you know, royal gift. But it's quite clear now that many of the licenses of crenellate that were issued were in fact really being issued like licenses for anything else. You went to the chancery and you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Paid a fine sum of money and.

[Interviewer]

They would write a license for you according to whatever you'd asked for, if.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You provided enough money.

[Interviewer]

And so what, in fact, licenses to Crenelate really are, is not the king allowing people to build castles, and by.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Limiting the construction of castles, organizing and maintaining law and order in the realm.

[Interviewer]

They'Re in fact documents issued by the Royal Chancery in response to people who want to build castles as a sign that they are of the requisite status.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A nobleman to live in a castle.

[Interviewer]

They're a sort of part to social status. And they are often also issued with other rights and privileges, markets, for example, the right to hold markets or another. Also rights to create parks for the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Aristocratic privilege of hunting.

[Interviewer]

So again, you know, they are much.

[Dr. John Goodall]

More sort of passports to social status than anything else.

[Interviewer]

And of course, the irony about licenses.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To Crenelate is not only are they issued over a limited period of time.

[Interviewer]

I mean, those that have been identified spread really between the late 12th and the very latest ones are the early 17th century. But the point is that lots and.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Lots of people build things that they call castles, which don't have any licenses to Crenelate associated with them at all. Noblemen, for example, very, very rarely bothered to get a license to Crenelate, and they tend to live in castles without these ever being issued and build new cast without them being issued.

[Interviewer]

So the licensed grenllate has gone from.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Being a sort of indication that the king is ruling effectively and controlling his baronies, his barons, to being really, you know, passports to status and privilege.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Speaking of the king controlling baronies and castles, I'd love to ask about how castles were impacted by the English Civil War.

[Interviewer]

Yes, well, the English Civil War is a sort of, in architectural terms, architectural historical terms, is a major sort of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Caesura in the history of English building.

[Interviewer]

It's a counterpart, a secular counterpart, really.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To the dissolution of the monasteries.

[Interviewer]

For one thing, until the Civil War, there are lots of great medieval castles that in one way or another have remained major residents since time immemorial. They've just kind of kept on going. And at the Civil War, those buildings, some of them are obviously fortified with garrisons, often along with towns. I mean, I think I should say.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That we tend to read about Civil War sieges of castles, and we think of the castles themselves as being surrounded.

[Interviewer]

But I think the narratives that I've read often imply that the garrisons occupy.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Much bigger sites than the castles alone. Often the towns as well are enclosed by fortifications. So. So the castle is sort of an element of the defences. So some of these castles, anyway, in the Civil War play an active role in the fighting.

[Interviewer]

But in the aftermath of the fighting, huge numbers of them are destroyed by act of Parliament. And it's really interesting that owners of these buildings often are content to see castles demolished, because they're understood somehow to be a potential cause for the fighting being perpetuated.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, if you can have a small force of people and you can.

[Interviewer]

Get into a castle and then resist central authority, so quite a lot of people are willing to see castle defences damaged or slighted so that the castle.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Can no longer effectively operate as a place of defence.

[Interviewer]

Now, I think it's important to say that, you know, again, the conventional view.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Is that castles are very effective until gunpowder is developed.

[Interviewer]

The sieges of the Civil War demonstrate.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That, that plenty of medieval castles constructed long before the use of gunpowder, were incredibly effective as places of defence, and.

[Interviewer]

Even castles that were not even buildings.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That weren't really designed as defensible places.

[Interviewer]

So, you know, some medieval buildings, you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Know, proved incredibly strong in the face, even of gunpowder.

[Interviewer]

But it's also true that, you know, the sieges that took place very often.

[Dr. John Goodall]

In the early English Civil War, until.

[Interviewer]

You got an artillery train to a.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Particular castle, it could hold that almost indefinitely. And it's really the artillery that eventually subdues most castles.

[Interviewer]

And so, you know, what you have in the Civil War is that castles.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Become centres of defence once again.

[Interviewer]

Some of them are ruined, some of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Them are genuinely occupied places. Basing House, for example, one of the great lost buildings of Tudor England, probably is, of course, the subject of a very celebrated and bitter and cruelly concluded siege, brutally concluded siege.

[Interviewer]

But huge numbers of these buildings after.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The fighting are then deliberately destroyed.

[Interviewer]

And in that destruction, there is a complete change in the direction of English.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Domestic, grand English domestic architecture.

[Interviewer]

When the restoration comes, there are lots of people who have been in exile.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Abroad and have seen continental taste, Baroque.

[Interviewer]

Palaces and so on and so forth. They come back and they find their ancestral homes in ruins and they don't.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Particularly want to rebuild them and they build something completely different as a consequence.

[Interviewer]

So the Civil War is sort of hugely important. It's a moment where buildings, castles, which have, for very, very long periods of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Time, been developed generation after generation with fashionable new additions and basically parked and then demolished.

[Interviewer]

And then there's a new beginning.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And that, you know, in that sense, the restoration, to speak in general terms, really is a restoration in all kinds of ways. But it's more than a restoration, it's.

[Interviewer]

Almost a new departure.

[Dr. John Goodall]

It's a moment where the English nobility really start living completely differently in totally new buildings almost overnight. I mean, there's a massive change that takes place.

[Interviewer]

And famously, even a castle such as.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Windsor, you know, this great emblem of royal authority, it very, very narrowly escapes demolition. The parks associated with it are partitioned up, and at the Restoration, you know.

[Interviewer]

It'S all put back together, but it takes a little bit of time.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Charles II only kind of returns to Windsor properly when he feels threatened by London mobs.

[Interviewer]

And he moves to Windsor as a place of security.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And it's refact fashioned as a great Baroque palace. It never loses its title as being a castle, I don't think. Again, it's not necessarily a building that would serve in a major campaign against armies, but it is a security against mobs, and he definitely uses it in that way.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So given that there's now been this big change in how the nobility sees castles and the utility of castles, how are castles then impacted by the Gothic Revival?

[Interviewer]

Well, the Gothic Revival, of course, revives people's interests in castles in all kinds.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of, you know, quite complex ways.

[Interviewer]

One of them again, is the Gothic novel.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And this is to do again with the idea of castles as places of tyranny.

[Interviewer]

And that is a romantic perception of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Them, informed famously by, you know, Horace.

[Interviewer]

Walpole's first Gothic novel, the Castle of Otranto. But there is another side to the Gothic Revival, and that's a sort of reinvigoration in. Well, it's a return of interest in the Middle Ages as a living and breathing entity, sort of history as something that we can experience and imagine reimagine.

[Dr. John Goodall]

In our mind's eye.

[Interviewer]

An absolutely crucial figure in this process.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Is Walter Scott, the novelist.

[Interviewer]

And his novels were which turn castles and historic environments into places where people live, love and die. And the enormous popularity that his novels enjoyed, again, in a romantic sense, they made castles seem to live again. And there were circles largely fired by.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The novels of Walter Scott and others. You know.

[Interviewer]

All the things are sort.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of associated with that Romantic revival.

[Interviewer]

But many people want to revive the social orders and the architecture of the Middle Ages. I mean, some people idealized this in.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The most extraordinary way and saw in.

[Interviewer]

The Middle Ages a perfect society or.

[Dr. John Goodall]

A better society than the one in which they inhabited.

[Interviewer]

So the Gothic Revival, not only, I.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Mean, in many ways, I think we're.

[Interviewer]

Familiar with the Gothic Revival in church.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Buildings and the restoration of cathedrals and so on and so forth in the.

[Interviewer]

19Th century, but it also has this other side where people begin to build castles and they don't even only build castles. I mean, they begin to dress up in medieval costume there.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, Queen Victoria early in her reign has a celebrated fancy dress costume.

[Interviewer]

Ball, effectively which she turns up as Philippa of Hainault to Albert's Edward iii. You know, all and their portrait is.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Painted in these elaborate costumes and everybody comes in medievalizing costumes.

[Interviewer]

And one of the episodes I talk about in the book is a description of the so called Eglinton Tournament, which is a mock tournament.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Well, not a mock tournament.

[Interviewer]

It's a tournament in which lots of particularly young Tory sympathising noblemen get together in the lowlands of Scotland and they have a tournament to celebrate the coronation.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of the Queen, which they think has been done in a very sort of cheapskate way. And so they have a. They literally revive the Middle Ages for a few days.

[Interviewer]

The most famous thing about the Eglinton.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Tournament is on the first day it poured with rain and absolutely ruined the first day of the event.

[Interviewer]

But in fact, huge numbers of people turned up.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To this tournament and in.

[Interviewer]

The subsequent days there were lots of jousting, lots of jousting and feasting and.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Feats of martial arms and so on and so forth.

[Interviewer]

And the people who turn up are a really extraordinary list of the great and the good in European terms. Napoleon iii, for example, who goes on.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To restore castles such as Pierref in France, is one of the people there and he takes part in the tournament.

[Interviewer]

And so there are really very significant figures who go on to restore castles and build castles. It fires their imagination, this idea that.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The Middle Ages is a period that you can recreate and the idea of.

[Interviewer]

Chivalry and I mean, it's a subject that's been beautifully written about both by.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Marc Girard and more recently by Rosemary Hill in her more recent book about the Romantic period of history.

[Interviewer]

Antiquarianism, not.

[Dr. John Goodall]

As a dry study, but as somehow a full bodied attempt to imagine the past and relive the past sometimes.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

But this is still in a lot of ways quite a step from what we currently have in sort of English Heritage National Trust sort of thing, things of preserving historically accurately or preserving kind of in full these historical sites. And. And we can kind of almost see that progression in the answers you've already said, right. At first it's about building up in response to military events, in response to kind of social status. Then it's a change from the restoration of wait, there are other options. Then it's this revival of kind of, oh, we could do that. Let's build things like it or as if. But now we have a very sort of different sense in some ways of kind of combining in some sense this fancy dress, but also with kind of preserving the historical accuracy. How do we end up with this sort of idea of preserving castles? How did we kind of come to think of that as a thing and. Yeah, how do we come to think of that as a thing that we do now?

[Interviewer]

Well, it is, in a way, a product of exactly the same thing. I mean, I think the idea that we preserve monuments as we do is partly born of people's changing attitudes to churches and things.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, they, they.

[Interviewer]

These. There's a belief in the authenticity of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The original material and the idea that you need to preserve the original because.

[Interviewer]

It has authenticity and it brings you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Back to the past.

[Interviewer]

I mean, I think that, you know, it is fascinating because. Because our whole treatment of buildings involves tensions between so many different interests. I mean, there is particularly, I suppose, English heritage historically was very concerned that the ruins of buildings should be presented as texts of history. This is an idea that's first being.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Expressed in the late 19th century, that.

[Interviewer]

The original material is just like a text, and if it's properly presented, you can read it as another historical document of the past. And in the early 20th century, particularly.

[Dr. John Goodall]

When the Ministry of Works, as it then was, was taking lots of buildings.

[Interviewer]

Into its care, what it would do is it would find a building and then it would take away all the things that it thought of as accretions.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To its central history. Let's say if it's a monastery, you.

[Interviewer]

Clear the site, you get rid of every. Everything that's post medieval, because it's not.

[Dr. John Goodall]

To do with the monastery, and then.

[Interviewer]

You present these ruins. Now, the problem with that is that, you know, it creates very arid remains and ruins don't maintain themselves. In more recent years, there's been a great interest in trying to make ruins and history live again. And this is again taking us back to the idea of the romantic past, the idea that you can go to a place and imagine what life was like like there.

[Dr. John Goodall]

It's a very, in many ways, a very 19th century sensibility.

[Interviewer]

And so, you know, national institutions, including.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Historic Scotland and English Heritage, have attempted reconstructions of historic interiors.

[Interviewer]

And those are, you know, they're completely fascinating, but they're also deeply problematic because often they reconstruct historic interiors in ways that nobody in history would recognize them because they are, again, demonstrative reconstructions of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The past rather than, you know, real or, you know, real living reconstructions of the past.

[Interviewer]

But of course, you know, in some cases if you go to historical palaces.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Or something, you can go into reconstructed.

[Interviewer]

Rooms and there will be people dressed in period costume to explain the contents of those rooms.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Seems to me in its own terms.

[Interviewer]

A very successful thing to do. There are of course, another group of buildings which are still, still lived in castles that still have families occupying them. I mean it's, I think that we tend to forget that in England these things all do live side by side. And I think it's a curiosity actually in one way of some of the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Recent problems facing, you know, heritage organizations as they try and interpret the past in, in the face of debates about, you know, black lives matter, matter and.

[Interviewer]

Slavery and things is that private families were some of the first, you know.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Families living in stately homes and in.

[Interviewer]

Castles were some of the first to pioneer studies into their families connections with.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The slave trade, for example.

[Interviewer]

Somewhere like Lowther, for example, was, you know, looking into this long before or.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Harwood, long before any institutions turned their attention to it.

[Interviewer]

And the curious thing is even now families, I think are able to deal with difficult pasts with much more kind of conviction than institutions. Institutions just seem to be terrified by them because they don't know where to look or how to justify it. Families seem to have no problem in saying yes, we had.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You know, my great great great grandfather was a completely awful person and did these terrible things and of course I.

[Interviewer]

Wouldn'T do that now, but it's just part of, of as part of my family's history. Whereas institutions say that the great great.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Grandfather of the, you know, present owner or the, you know, the, the occupant in the early late 19th century was.

[Interviewer]

Was awful and therefore we sort of can't even present them anymore. So I think there are interesting ways in which institutions and, and family histories.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Can sort of learn from one another.

[Interviewer]

And I think that, that that full.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Spread of material is really fascinating that we have how castles that are ruined, castles that are still occupied, castles that are recreations, they all exist in a very, very rich combination of material.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I think definitely very much so, particularly as they all can often be in similar geographies. You can get to kind of a ruin and a currently occupied castle and a sort of restored place quite easily often and are very much geographically in conversation with each other. So it would make sense to kind of have more conversation and dialogue between them as well. But as we come toward sort to the end of it, I'm wondering if I can just ask you to give us a little bit more detail on something you briefly mentioned around kind of the reconstruction of the interiors being problematic. And you've just outlined really helpfully kind of how discussions about, of nasty people in the past are being had in different ways, some more productive than others. But I'm wondering if you can maybe help us understand perhaps through an example, kind of this idea of where and why we might want to be critical about historically constructed interiors and how that may not actually be as representative as it sounds like.

[Interviewer]

Well, I suppose, you know, it's very difficult discussing historically reconstruct interiors because I think there's always a conflation of arguments. One is about the quality of the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Scholarship and the quality of the craftsmanship that underpins the recreation of a period apartment.

[Interviewer]

And the other is the question of whether it's actually accurate, whether it actually shows anything that we know about. Now. It seems to me that in recent years there have been lots of really exemplary projects in terms of academic research and craftsmanship.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And I mean, I could name, let's.

[Interviewer]

Say, Stirling Castle in Scotland or, you.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Know, the Restoration of the 12th century Rooms in Dover Castle, or Historic Royal.

[Interviewer]

Palace's work in the Tower of London, but I think in all those different cases, the problem is that it doesn't. If you go in there with a sort of critical mind and say, is this actually a past that ever existed? You would be very hard pressed to answer yes to that question. And there are little details, I think, that, you know, that underline that point. I mean, one of the most obvious ones is that English kings and queens historically and noblemen were very, very rich and powerful people. They possessed objects of enormous value in their own societies. Now, we simply don't have, when reconstructing.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The rooms in the keep at Dover.

[Interviewer]

You know, English heritage doesn't have the money of Henry ii. It can't recreate the kinds of objects that he would have possessed and used. And it certainly couldn't put them on public display just for the reasons of their bullion value alone. So, you know, you can reconstruct those apartments to the very highest standards of academic, you know, work and to very.

[Dr. John Goodall]

High standards of craft craftsmanship, recreating beds and hangings and textiles and fabrics.

[Interviewer]

But, you know, it still, in a way, I don't think necessarily gives a flavor of what it would have been like actually to be in the presence.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of Henry II in the keep in Dover.

[Interviewer]

And there are also, I think, in.

[Dr. John Goodall]

The process of these reconstructions, I think.

[Interviewer]

They telescope time and often involve little changes that are important. So, for example, again, I'M not having it in for Dover because, I mean, I very much enjoy it. But, you know, the, you know, there is no evidence that the keep at dover ever had 12th century fireplaces. There were fireplaces created there in the 15th century, and those are the fireplaces.

[Dr. John Goodall]

That are now used in the display of the 12th century rooms.

[Interviewer]

Well, that's fine, but it's actually really.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Interesting that there aren't any fireplaces in dover in the 12th century and added to it.

[Interviewer]

By presenting the rooms in the 12th century, you're compressing or sort of effacing the fact that the keep at Dover has actually been used as a royal palace right the way through the Middle Ages. It's remodeled by Edward IV in the, you know, in the 1470s. It's also then used by Henry VIII as a palace. It's also the place where Charles I first meets his bride in the 17th.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Century when it's reworked as a palace.

[Interviewer]

And it then has a history of.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And all kinds of other things into the 20th century.

[Interviewer]

So when you take this back just to one period of time, it seems to me you're also denying the depth.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Of history that that building represents.

[Interviewer]

So I think that's quite confusing in a way. And it also ignores all kinds of physical things within the building that have.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Changed over that time.

[Interviewer]

So I think it's a really complicated.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Tightrope trying to reconstruct things convincingly.

[Interviewer]

And it has, of course, a very long history.

[Dr. John Goodall]

I mean, the Marquess of Bute was doing this kind of thing at Cardiff and Castel Koch in the mid 19th century. I mean, it's not a new phenomenon.

[Interviewer]

So it's complicated. As I say, I think that we.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Run the risk often of constructing historic.

[Interviewer]

Interiors in adverted commas that no person in history would recognize. So it's difficult. It's worthwhile, too. I mean, I think you only learn. I don't want to sound down about it entirely because I think it's a process full of really interesting insights when.

[Dr. John Goodall]

You try and reconstruct rooms in the past.

[Interviewer]

But it's a very difficult thing to do successfully. And always, always, it seems to me.

[Dr. John Goodall]

They date very fast. They look their time very, very, very quickly. And that's true of 19th century reconstructions of buildings, but it will be true of 20th and 21st century reconstructions too. You'll just go in there and you'll immediately know when it was done.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I think that's in many ways a really interesting kind of encapsulation of a lot of what the book does is deal with an incredibly complex topic that has a lot of different facets but lays it out clearly, not to reduce the complexity, but to make that complexity understandable without kind of saying there's one right answer. So I think that was. That's a lovely place to kind of wrap up with that kind of thing that helps us understand today, as we're encountering some of these places, what we might want to be thinking about and sort of end with that lovely taste of sort of how the book deals with these complex issues. But before I let you go, I was wondering if you might be able to share with us, now that the book is published, what you might be working on now or next.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Gosh.

[Interviewer]

Well, I'm working for a weekly magazine. I'm just always working on lots and lots of different things. It's a slightly overwhelming question. I mean, absolutely. On my desk at the present moment is a pair of articles on Hokombe hall in Norfolk. But I mean, I suppose I do have plans for another book.

[Dr. John Goodall]

And I mean, one thing I would be very interested in trying to do.

[Interviewer]

Is a history of, of maybe the.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Perpendicular style of architecture, late Gothic architecture in England. It's a subject that is, I think, of great interest at the present moment. And I've even seen newspaper articles on it recently, and it's not a very popular area of study. But I haven't really formulated what I might do. But it is something that would be of interest to me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Fair enough. Well, best of luck with that and with your weekly articles. And in the meantime, while you're off doing all of that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing, which, as a reminder, is titled the A History, published by Yale University Press in 2022. Dr. John Goodall, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[Dr. John Goodall]

Thank you, Miranda. That's very.