Towers, Halls And Bastles

England’s Border counties are renowned for their castles, which played significant parts in the so-called ‘Four Hundred Year War’ with Scotland, but deserve to be known too for their lesser defensible buildings, the towers, manor houses and defensible churches, which reflect the same troubled society.

This book examines and analyses just under 170 of these structures and identifies several different traditions and building types, spanning the centuries from the remarkable Saxon lordly tower that was incorporated into Morland Church, to the long-lived tradition of living on an upper floor that persisted in the Northern Pennines into the 18th century.