Robert Higham

Robert Higham is a British archaeologist specialising in the Middle Ages and the study of castles.

Quotes

 * My introduction to castles occurred as a schoolboy, visiting Edward I’s castles in North Wales over several summers in the early 1960s: it was a favoured holiday area of my parents.


 * In the 1990s and early 2000s we have heard a lot about so-called revisionism especially with reference to the promotion up the agenda of the display and status aspects of fortification as well as the importance of settlement and landscape context. Without any doubt at all this increased emphasis has enriched the subject enormously. But it has led, I think, to two problems. First, in the minds of some writers … it has led to an assumption that political and military motives for castle-building can safely be demoted. This is surely an error. What we have done is to have enlarged the repertoire of castle-building motives, not substituted some new repertoire items for old ones. Second, in the minds of some writers there seems to be an assumption that everything written up to the 1980s was the product of an “early” mind-set whereas everything written later has been the product of a “modern” mindset. This, too, is an error. A reading of early castle “classics” from around 1900 reveals their authors knew how important castles were to the builders’ self-image and how important they could be as centres of rural estates.


 * [Philip Barker] demanded high standards in all things but was never elitist or exclusive.