Castles, Lordship and Settlement in Norman England and Wales

The tired cliché of modernist architecture that 'form follows function' has often been applied, implicitly or explicitly, to the architecture of castles. Traditional interpretations have seen medieval castle design and development as the product of a struggle between the increasingly sophisticated art of the siege engineer and the responses of the military architect. For early British castle scholars such as George T. Clark and Alexander Hamilton Thompson, the medieval castle was an essentially military phenomenon, and for long, warlike interpretations cast a shadow over the world of castle study. More recently, however, archaeologists and historians have developed an understanding of castles  that reflects their broad range of functions and wider place within medieval society and landscape.