# The definition bands — the spine of this dataset. # # Six answers to "what is a castle?", each with a named authority, an explicit # criterion, and its own closure rule. A structure is never "a castle" here; it # takes a verdict per band, and each band publishes its own count. # # Adding or amending a band is a decision-request PR, never a data edit: the # bands are the dataset's contract with its readers, and silently moving one # would silently move every number on the site. version: 1 definitions: - id: fortified_residence label: "Fortified residence" summary: > The strict scholarly castle: a fortified private residence of a lord. Both halves are load-bearing — a fortress nobody lived in is not one, and an undefended great house is not one either. criterion: > The structure was built or adapted to be BOTH a defensible work and the residence of a private lord (secular or ecclesiastical), and was so used. Defensibility means active defence — wall walks, parapets, flanking fire, a gatehouse meant to be held — not merely a wall or a moat. Communal defences held by a town, and works built and garrisoned by a state, both fail the "private residence" half however formidable they are. Tenure decides, not silhouette. includes: - "Masonry castles and timber castles (mottes, ringworks, motte-and-bailey)" - "Tower houses and pele towers where residence and defence coincide" - "Fortified episcopal and royal residences (a royal lord is still a lord)" - "Japanese shiro and other non-European lordly fortifications — the criterion is functional, not geographic" excludes: - "Urban defences and town walls (communal, not private)" - "State artillery forts and coastal batteries (state, not seigneurial)" - "Moated houses and walled sites with no active defensive capability" - "Palatial residences whose defensive features are decorative" authority: - kind: scholar name: "R. Allen Brown" work: "English Castles (Batsford, 1954)" url: "https://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/Defin.pdf" quote: "The private fortress and residence of a lord." - kind: scholar name: "D. J. Cathcart King" work: "Castellarium Anglicanum (Kraus, 1983)" url: "https://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/Defin.pdf" quote: "A fortified residence of a (feudal) lord." - kind: scholar name: "John Goodall" work: "The English Castle (2011)" url: "https://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/Defin.pdf" quote: "A castle is the residence of a lord made imposing through the architectural trappings of fortification." - kind: scholar name: "Philip Davis" work: "Defining 'The Castle' (2009, revised 2016)" url: "https://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/Defin.pdf" quote: "In effect it is impossible to define 'the castle' since there is no one such thing. Much of the controversy in castle studies between militarists and revisionists lies in a befuddled use of examples of 'castles' of very different function." - kind: standard name: "FISH / Historic England Monument Type Thesaurus" work: "Term 'Castle', scope note" url: "http://purl.org/heritagedata/schemes/eh_tmt2/concepts/68833" quote: "A fortress and dwelling, usually medieval in origin." closure: enumerable closure_note: > Closable per jurisdiction, because national archaeological registers classify by monument type and a "castle" class can be filtered and counted. Ireland is the proof: the SMR returns 4,552 Castle-class records, and 129 if you accept only Anglo-Norman masonry castles. The band closes one jurisdiction at a time, never globally. registers: [ie-smr, gb-wls-cadw, gb-wls-coflein, gb-nir-nismr, fr-pop, gatehouse, wikidata, osm] note: > Three cautions about this band, all of which its own authorities supply. First, the scholars are cited THROUGH Davis's essay, which quotes each of them and was read directly; the monographs themselves were not opened. That is recorded rather than hidden, because a citation chain is only as strong as its weakest undisclosed link. Second, Davis — who built a six-thousand-site gazetteer, making him about the most qualified person alive to define the term — concluded that it cannot be done. This project agrees, and the bands are the consequence: not a better definition, but an admission that one definition was always the wrong shape. Third, medieval usage was itself unstable, so the strict band is not even faithful to its own period. Davis notes that a castellum could be a manorial centre with no fortification at all, or a village — the Vulgate calls Bethlehem a castellum. Note too that the leading learned society, the Castle Studies Group, publishes no definition of the term at all. That absence is itself evidence. - id: enclosure_fortification label: "Enclosure fortification" summary: > Defended enclosures with no lord and often no permanent residence — hillforts, ringforts, raths, cashels, brochs, promontory forts. The band that turns Ireland from a 4,552-castle country into a 31,431-site one. criterion: > An enclosed site whose bank, ditch, rampart or wall was built to defend or command the enclosed area, where the enclosure is the primary work and no single lordly residence defines it. Predominantly prehistoric and early-medieval. Excluded where the enclosure is agricultural, ritual or merely boundary-marking with no defensive intent. includes: - "Hillforts, promontory forts, multivallate enclosures" - "Irish ringforts: raths, cashels, and related enclosed settlement" - "Brochs, duns, and crannógs where defensively sited" - "Ringworks lacking an identified lordly residence" excludes: - "Enclosures of purely agricultural or ritual function" - "Any site with an identified lordly residence — that is fortified_residence" - "Post-medieval state works — that is state_fortification" authority: - kind: institution name: "Atlas of Hillforts of Britain and Ireland" work: "University of Edinburgh / University of Oxford / University College Cork, AHRC-funded; 4,147 entries at 2017 launch" url: "https://hca.ed.ac.uk/research/about/research-projects/an-atlas-of-hillforts-in-britain-and-ireland" quote: "Many hillforts are not on hills and are not really forts." - kind: register name: "Archaeological Survey of Ireland (National Monuments Service)" work: "Sites and Monuments Record, monument classes Ringfort — rath / cashel / unclassified" url: "https://www.archaeology.ie/collections-and-publications/open-data/" closure: enumerable closure_note: > Strongly closable where a national survey exists, and the numbers are large: 31,431 ringfort-class records in the Irish SMR, 4,147 in the Atlas of Hillforts across Britain and Ireland. Closure fails wherever no national survey has been done, which is most of the world. registers: [ie-smr, hillforts-atlas, gb-wls-cadw] note: > This band is a European instrument and shows its limits fastest outside Europe. Māori pā are hilltop fortifications built in the thousands with timber palisades rather than stone, because metal tools were unavailable — a whole fortification tradition invisible to any definition that reaches for masonry, and one this dataset does not yet hold a single record for. Recorded here so the omission is a stated gap rather than an implied absence. - id: state_fortification label: "State fortification" summary: > Works built and garrisoned by a state rather than held by a lord: artillery forts, bastion and star forts, citadels, coastal batteries, and the fortified systems of the gunpowder age onward. criterion: > A fortification commissioned, owned or garrisoned by a state, polity or municipality as a military installation, where no private lordly residence is the organising purpose. Typically post-1500 and designed against artillery, but the test is tenure and military purpose, not date. includes: - "Bastion and star forts; Vauban-system citadels and fortified towns" - "Coastal artillery forts, Martello and signal towers" - "Nineteenth and twentieth-century defensive works, including WWI/WWII" - "Urban citadels and town defences held communally" excludes: - "Lordly castles later garrisoned by a state — the original purpose governs" - "Field works and temporary siege works" authority: - kind: institution name: "UNESCO World Heritage Centre" work: "Fortifications of Vauban (2008), 12 serial components — citadels, urban bastion walls, sea forts, a mountain battery" url: "https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1283" - kind: register name: "Gatehouse Gazetteer (Philip Davis)" work: "Class 'Artillery Fort or Bulwark', maintained separately from castle classes" url: "https://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/lists.html" closure: enumerable closure_note: > Closable in principle — states keep records of their own works — but much weaker in practice than the two bands above, because military estates are documented by defence ministries rather than heritage registers and the twentieth-century material is barely surveyed anywhere. registers: [gatehouse, osm] - id: palatial_seat label: "Palatial seat" summary: > Buildings called "castle" in their own language whose defensive function is absent or vestigial — the German Schloss, the French château, the country seat. Where most of the world's famous "castles" actually sit. criterion: > A high-status residence commonly named with a castle-word (Schloss, château, castello, kasteel, castle) whose fortification is absent, decorative, or a retained relic of an earlier defensible phase that no longer governs the building. The name is evidence; the defences are the test. includes: - "Schlösser and châteaux built as unfortified lordly residences" - "Castles rebuilt so thoroughly as palaces that no defensible fabric governs" - "Country seats and stately homes bearing a castle name" excludes: - "Buildings with real retained defensive capability — those take fortified_residence" - "Purely ornamental structures never intended as residences — those are revival_folly" authority: - kind: institution name: "UNESCO World Heritage Centre" work: "The Palaces of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (2025) — Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, Schachen, Herrenchiemsee" url: "https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1726" - kind: standard name: "German usage: Burg vs Schloss" work: "The standing terminological distinction between the medieval fortified residence (Burg) and the early-modern unfortified lordly residence (Schloss)" url: "https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burg" closure: open closure_note: > Not closable. No register enumerates "buildings called castle that are not fortified" — the category exists in language, not in law. OpenStreetMap offers the best available evidence of scale rather than a bound: of the 28,544 objects carrying castle_type, 23.7% are tagged stately, 20.5% manor and 16.4% palace, against 19.5% defensive. This band publishes that distribution, not a total. registers: [osm, wikidata] - id: revival_folly label: "Revival and folly" summary: > Castles built as architecture rather than defence: nineteenth-century romantic revivals, castellated country houses, and sham castles that are sometimes a screen wall and nothing behind it. criterion: > A structure built after the defensive era in castle form — battlements, towers, curtain-wall silhouette — for aesthetic, symbolic, picturesque or status purposes, with no defensive intent at any point in its history. includes: - "Gothic Revival and castellated country houses" - "Sham castles and eyecatchers, including facades with no interior" - "Purpose-built romantic castles of the nineteenth century" excludes: - "Genuine castles later restored or romanticised — the original intent governs" - "Reconstructions of real castles on their own sites" authority: - kind: project name: "canonical-castles" work: "This project's own band, defined here for want of an external authority" url: "https://castles.bussetech.com/definitions/" closure: open closure_note: > Not closable, and honestly labelled: no register recognises "folly" as a designation class. Individual examples are protected as listed buildings — Leyburn Sham Castle is Grade II listed — but they are listed as buildings, so no filter extracts them. This is also the one band whose authority is this project itself, which is stated rather than dressed up. registers: [] note: > Philip Davis draws a distinction most datasets collapse — a SYMBOLIC castle, built in castle form to assert status, is not the same as a SHAM castle, built as scenery. This band currently holds both. Splitting it is a live open question rather than a settled design. - id: popular_castle label: "Popularly a castle" summary: > What an ordinary person would call a castle and travel to see. No scholarly standing whatsoever, and by far the most useful band for anyone actually planning a visit. criterion: > A general audience, shown the structure without context, would call it a castle — evidenced by how the structure is named and described by its own operator, its national tourism body, and general reference works. This is a claim about usage, and it is measured, not adjudicated. includes: - "Anything marketed, signposted or commonly referred to as a castle" - "Structures failing every scholarly band but universally called castles — Neuschwanstein is the type case" excludes: - "Structures called castles only by this dataset" authority: - kind: project name: "canonical-castles" work: "Usage band; verdicts cite the naming sources rather than a definitional authority" url: "https://castles.bussetech.com/definitions/" closure: open closure_note: > Not closable, ever, and this is the band's point. Popular usage has no register and no boundary, so any single global integer for it — 2,435, for instance — is a selection presented as a census. This band exists to hold that number and label it correctly. registers: [wikidata, osm, thecastlemap] note: > This is the band thecastlemap.com actually built while presenting it as the general one. Recording it as a band rather than dismissing it is the point: popular usage is real, widely held, and the reason most people arrive at a castle dataset in the first place. It is simply not a census.