Alan Cook, formerly of the Historic Buildings Inspectorate, died in 2006. So this book – a welcome catch-up of the long-running excavations at Roger of Salisbury’s twelfth-century castle-palace at Sherborne – is essentially Peter White’s, as is the promised digital publication of the ‘technical details’ of the 1967–1990 excavations, again attributed to both authors. Meanwhile, three expert appendices on ‘The carved and worked stones’ (Jeffrey West), ‘The coin hoard’ (Marion Archibald) and ‘The pottery’ (Lorraine Mepham) add to the value of a report which, while still some way behind in the sophisticated site and finds analysis found, for example, in the latest Wharram Percy volumes or in Evelyn Baker’s comprehensive report on Grove Priory (Baker Reference Baker2013), is in most ways a model of its kind.

White is both discreet and fair-minded about his disagreements with Charles Bean (d. 1983), whose ‘explorations’ at Sherborne in 1932–40 and then again in 1946–54 preceded White’s own re-excavations from 1968 for the Ministry of Public Building and Works. We learn, however, that it was not until some twenty years later that Alan Cook, White’s successor at Sherborne, obtained unobstructed access to Bean’s records. And while that delay, as White points out, has had its value – it wouldn’t have done to rush into print without sight of Bean’s results – the presentation of much of this material as a dialogue between excavators, even with the benefit of White’s commentary on the two, leaves a lot for the reader to resolve.

That would have mattered less had Sherborne Old Castle been a conventional military site – the sort of fortress described by John Goodall (Goodall Reference Goodall2011) and favoured by tidy-minded castellologists. But Roger, bishop of Salisbury (1102–39, consecrated 1107), was also Henry i’s chief minister for an important part of that long reign. And his bespoke castle-palace at Sherborne (begun in 1122) functioned less as the defendable home of the bishop and his retinue than as the administrative hub of the kingdom. A bishop’s needs – domestic or otherwise – are different. Thus, while Roger’s episcopal palace featured an attached Great Tower comparable in some respects to the residential tower-keeps of his greater baronial contemporaries, the remaining domestic accommodation fell far short of the requirements of the secular users who followed him, and soon had to be extended or rebuilt.

Roger’s Sherborne, accordingly, fails to fit the standard image of an Anglo-Norman fortress of its date. But it still has much to offer to the castellologist: first, the precise geometry of its polygonal outer curtain; second, the sophisticated barbican (temp. Bishop Roger) at Sherborne’s North Gate; and third, the still-to-be explored remains of three contemporary barrack blocks or stable ranges, only partially uncovered by Bean in his final campaign and with few parallels in the literature until now. In all of these, what clearly distinguishes Roger’s work and helps date it so precisely is the no-expense-spared quality of the masonry, ‘the courses of stone being so correctly laid that the joints deceive the eye, and lead it to imagine that the whole wall is composed of a single block’ (pp 15–16, citing Stubbs 1887–Reference Stubbs9) as noted by William of Malmesbury. But that itself presents us with a puzzle. For so advanced was the design of Roger’s stepped and vaulted barbican that we might otherwise have dated it with confidence to a much later generation, its closest parallel in this country being the century-later Fitzwilliam Gate and Barbican at Dover. It was William of Malmesbury, again, who described Bishop Roger and his nephews (‘forgetting they were churchmen’) to have been ‘mad with rage for castle building’ (pp 15–16, citing Potter Reference Potter1955). And while the evidence is fragmentary, we could still be looking at Bishop Roger at this time as one of the unsung ‘greats’ of castle-building in the West. It’s worth thinking about.

White’s book, accordingly, is of much greater general interest to castellologists today than earlier castle textbooks – including my own – might suggest. It will also be welcomed by students of the Northern Renaissance, not least for Philip Corke’s reconstruction of the spectacular bay or compass window that Sir Walter Raleigh, still hoping in the 1590s to fashion a Renaissance palace for himself out of the unforgiving ruins of Roger’s Keep, added to the south face of his Great Tower. In between those builders, White unpicks the work of successive modernisers, from the engineers of the King’s Works to the bishops of Salisbury again in 1355, in particular Thomas Langton (1485–93), before his translation to Winchester.

In sum, in this welcome and highly professional presentation, one hopes that the dying-off breed of 1970s excavators will find a model for a return to those sites on which they built their careers – and then moved on. But one thing I would ask. Please help us readers, increasingly time-starved, with the longer explanatory captions which John Goodall, for one, uses to such effect in The English Castle. We are, after all, mere mortals.