Castle was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977 and received a Caldecott Honor. The book depicts the construction of a fictional castle called Doladog Castle — based on the real Edwardian castles (Harlech, Caernarfon, Conwy, Beaumaris) that Edward I built in Wales between 1277 and 1295 to consolidate his conquest of the Welsh.
Macaulay is characteristically honest about the political context: the castle is not a romantic ruin but a tool of colonial domination. An English king commissions it to control a conquered people; a fortified town grows around it, populated by English settlers and merchants; the Welsh whose land it occupies are excluded. The book does not moralize about this — it simply presents it as fact, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between architectural beauty and political violence.
The construction sequence is meticulously detailed: the selection of a defensible site, the digging of ditches, the raising of concentric curtain walls, the building of towers with murder holes and arrow loops, the installation of portcullises and drawbridges. Macaulay shows how every element of the castle’s design serves a military purpose — beauty is incidental to function.
Collecting Castle
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977): Oversize hardcover with dust jacket. Caldecott Honor.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40