CASTLEMANIA
I'm finishing my new book, The Castle. Ask me anything you like about it...
Sir Edward Coke, that great legal brain and Magna Carta fetishist of the seventeenth century, is the man usually given credit for the coining the idiom ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’
He did not use those words exactly. In fact, what he wrote was: ‘For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge]’.
But, well, it was near enough.
Coke was speaking to a principle of English common law, which (in his opinion) designated the home as a protected space which could not be entered or intruded upon by anyone - up to and including the king - without invitation or due process of law.
In other words, if the rozzers or anyone else came knocking, it was your right, should you choose to exercise it, to tell them to jog on, and come back when they had a warrant.
Right now, my home is certainly a castle - or rather, it’s a physical extension of The Castle, which is the book I am finishing now/publishing this autumn.
I can barely move around my office for the piles of reference books and scholarly articles that I have assembled. Crusader castles, Viking ring forts, Samurai castles, Great Walls from Beijing to Birdoswald… bristling strongholds from Troy to the Tower of London.
Imagine if Secrets of Great British Castles came back for a third season, but mated with Powers & Thrones - you’d be about halfway there.
Anyway, this is to say: that’s why I’ve been quiet. The deadline is a-looming, and my editors’ fingers are drumming pointedly on their desks. (Hi, Terezia!)
But quiet is boring. And since I value each and every subscriber to my Substack, I thought I would give you the first opportunity to ask questions about The Castle.
Want to know what it covers? When it’s released? How I’ve approached the storytelling? Whether your favourite castle makes the cut?
Then I shall tell you - if I can. If you’re a subscriber, just drop your questions in the comments, and I’ll make a video answering them all in the next week or so.
Sound good? Then, over to you.
Dan x
I adore hardback books packed with photos, art, facsimiles , engineering and architectural diagrams - your hard backs have always had excellent quality pictorial references; can we expect the same or better from this work? Will there be special & Signed editions like Henry V (which I’m am the proud owner of). Finally, where can I pre-order?
Hey Dan, you know that I'm incredibly excited about the new book! I'll go ahead and ask the big question, "What is the definition of a castle?". When does a palace or a fortified house become a castle? Does it have to do with function? That is, if a castle is never used for military defence does it cease making the list of castles? What is the difference between a castle and a fort? Is the definition essentially subjective?
My dad used to have a saying about things that were hard to define. He would say, "It's like defining 'ugly'... it is hard to define but you sure know it when you see it." 😁