"Castles from the Air traces the origin and evolution of British castles from their Norman and earlier beginnings, through the great age of castle building in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to the slow decline of castles as an architectural form in the fifteenth century. Through the Civil War in the seventeenth century, and the Napoleonic wars at the turn of the nineteenth century, although no longer the imposing bulwarks of earlier times, castles continued their important defensive role." "In Castles from the Air, hundreds of years of history are captured at a glance in more than 150 photographs of outstanding quality, revealing the past in a new and illuminating way."--BOOK JACKET.