ABSTRACT
By the year 1400 the impetus had gone out of castle-building in England. The country had been one of the leaders in the design of European fortifications down to less than a hundred years previously; but there was little to do but fill in the gaps in the system of second-rate castles which had been built up in the fourteenth century. In quality, moreover, there was a considerable falling-off; the degeneracy of the English castle, which earlier writers have supposed to have appeared at the beginning of the fourteenth century, becomes very plain in the fifteenth. The big fifteenth-century castles of Spain are familiar, while as for Italy, the powerful rocca of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, with its squat flankers — square towers, roundels, even proper bastions — is a familiar feature of the Italian countryside.
