Some Books of the Week
WHEN' the late Lord Curzon bought Tattershall Castle to save it from destruction, he had it thoroughly restored at his own expense and gave it to the National Trust. But that was not all. He set experts to trace the history of the great fifteenth-century pile and its owners, intending to write a book upon it as he had done on Bodiam.' The task that he did not live to accomplish was entrusted by him to the very competent hands of Mr. H. Avray Tipping, whose scholarly and superbly illustrated quarto, Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire (Cape, 30s.), will be a lasting memorial of the public-spirited donor. The great brick keep, built by Lord Cromwell, Treasurer to Henry VI, was remarkable in its day as a reversion to the castle type of three centuries earlier. But it appears that it was added to an existing stone castle which eighteenth-century lime-burners completely destroyed. Lord Cromwell's building accounts were found in. the Penshurst archives—the Sidneys held Tattershall for part of the sixteenth century—and thus some idea may be formed of the Treasurer's expenditure on the great mansion which was only one of his stately homes. One new fact brought out by Mr. Tipping is that brick was freely used in mediaeval England, and that Thorold Rogers was quite wrong in asserting the contrary.
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