Gatehouse website - Finding bibliographical references for castle studies

John Kenyon has, over many years, collated and often reviewed bibliographical references for castle studies. This outstanding work is the base for much of the bibliographies given in the Gatehouse website.
These have been published as;

Castles, town defences, and artillery fortifications in Britain and Ireland: a bibliography. Volume 1

Castles, town defences, and artillery fortifications in Britain and Ireland: a bibliography. Volume 2

Castles, town defences, and artillery fortifications in Britain and Ireland: a bibliography. Volume 3

Kenyon, John R., 2008, Castles, Town Defences and Artillery Fortifications in the United Kingdom and Ireland. A Bibliography 1945-2006 (Shaun Tyas)

Castle Studies Group Website

1987;	link.	1992;	link.	1997;	link.	2003;	link.	2008;	link.
1988;	link.	1993;	link.	1998;	link.	2004;	link.	2009;	link.
1989;	link.	1994;	link.	1999;	link.	2005;	link.	2010;	link.
1990;	link.	1995;	link.	2000;	link.	2006;	link.	2011;	link.
1991;	link.	1996;	link.	2001;	link.	2007;	link.	2012;	link.

The online specialist and frequently updated bibliography of The Royal Historical Society previously recommended by this website stopped being freely available at the end of 2009. It is now available, for a subscription, as the Bibliography of British and Irish History. Many institutions will subscribe but for some amateur researchers the subscription cost is likely to make this service sadly inaccessible.

Below are links to sites which may help with finding copies of books and serial articles. It is likely that a fee or subscription will be needed to download copies of recent serial articles. Newer books can be brought from the usual well known high street and online booksellers although for academic texts specialist booksellers, such as Oxbow Books, may have better available stock.

The British Library - Hard copies of serial articles may be obtained from The Document Supply Service (Payment of copyright fees makes this a particular expensive source but to those without access to academic institute facilities, such as Athens, this may be an only option.)
biab (british and irish archaeological bibliography) a service of the Council for British Archaeology is a searchable database of archaeological references which includes some grey literature.
Copac - The Copac® library catalogue gives free access to the merged online catalogues of many major University, Specialist, and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library.
WorldCat.org - WorldCat connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.
GetCopy - is a tool for locating journals, journal articles and similar items.
Chris Phillip's excellent Medieval Genealogy¹ website has a large number of pages of medieval sources all with extensive lists of links to online sources. These pages and links are regularly maintained and updated.
Medieval Genealogy has a full page on internet libraries that have scanned and e versions of book of interest to medieval scholars. The most important of these are;
- Google Books - Will not give library details but does sometimes have 'previews' of modern books and full views of some old, out of copyright, books. (Many books, which are out of copyright in the UK, are not available on UK based computers, but see Medieval Genealogy's hints and tips)
- Internet Archive - Has a good number of scanned copies of old (over 100 years) books and journals and is worth searching for such texts.
A few journals have published older issues online, most notably Medieval Archaeology. Details can be found by clicking on this link.
Links for finding doctoral theses and archaeological grey literature can be found by clicking on this link.

Older, out of publication books but which are not out of copyright, are going to be only intermittently available for sale. Internet searching may help but it is also worth trying specialist second hand books shops such as the Castle Bookshop, Llandyssil or www.medievalbookshop.co.uk, whose stock many not, as yet, got into search engine results.

For a couple of hundred of the more important general texts and significant gazetteers fuller details, including ISBN, can be found in the Gatehouse bibliographies.

Finding copies of bibliographical references for castle studies