Matthew Johnson takes a look at castles in England at the end of the Middle Ages, to discover how they were used, what influenced the way they were built and why were they modified and who did it.

In this engaging book Matthew Johnson looks 'behind the castle gate' to discover the truth about castles in England at the end of the Middle Ages.

Traditional studies have seen castles as compromises between the needs of comfort and of defence, and as statements of wealth or power or both. By encouraging the reader to view castles in relation to their inhabitants, Matthew Johnson uncovers a whole new vantage point. He shows how castles functioned as stage-settings against which people played out roles of lord and servant, husband and wife, father and son. Building, rebuilding...

Ideas of Landscape discusses the current theory and practice of landscape archaeology and offers an alternative agenda for landscape archaeology that maps more closely onto the established empirical strengths of landscape study and has more contemporary relevance.

• The first historical assessment of a critical period in archaeology
  
• Takes as its focus the so-called English landscape tradition -- the ideological underpinnings of which come from English Romanticism, via the influence of the -father of landscape history- W. G. Hoskins
  
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An Archaeology of Capitalism offers an account of landscape and material culture from the later Middle Ages to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. In tracing some of the roots of modernity back to the transformation of the countryside, this book seeks an innovative understanding of the transition between feudalism and capitalism, and does so through a unique synthesis of archaeology, economic, social and cultural history, historical geography and architectural history.
Medieval and early modern archaeology has in the past focused on small-scale empirical contributions to the...