After the great achievements of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries it is difficult not to see much of what follows as an anticlimax, and impossible in any overall survey of the architectural history of the English castle not to label the next two centuries as the period of decline. Nevertheless we must not be in too great a hurry. The castle, like feudalism itself (and the two things go together), lasted long, and while, on the one hand, socalled ‘Bastard Feudalism’ in the so-called Later Middle Ages may seem remarkably like the real thing, on the other the castle in England had its sad Indian Summer of revived military importance in the seventeenth-century Civil War. With that exception, caused by special circumstance, what happens in England and Wales (Scotland, like Ireland, is another story) by, let us say, the earlier sixteenth century, is assuredly that the unique combination of fortress and personal, lordly residence, which is the castle, falls apart, and when it does so the history of the castle as a living and viable type of building is at an end. Tudor coastal forts – Deal, Walmer, Camber, St Mawes and the rest – being exclusively military buildings (and being also exclusively royal, i.e. national defences) are not castles, any more than Pitt's Martello Towers of a still later age are castles, though the former at least are often mistakenly said to be. And by the same token, great Elizabethan country houses are not castles (in France the word châteaux is still applied to their equivalents and thus the word changes its meaning pari passu with the residences to which it is applied), though some may have moats as a gesture to security, and others, it may be, crenellation as a decorative motif and a gesture to tradition and prestige.

The historian of castles, therefore, armed like all historians with hindsight, is prone to fall into the professional besetting sin of not only seeking, but even imposing, a pattern upon the past (in this case fourteenth- and fifteenth-century castle-building) which, being generally untidy, is impatient of it.