Schofield/London, 3. Castles, palaces and royal houses

The palaces and other houses of England’s kings and queens in London will be dealt with only briefly in this book, which is mainly about the archaeology of everybody else, the people who formed the backdrop to national events. But the lives of many revolved around the monarch and the royal court, wherever it was, and we should outline what innovations or revolutions in taste started in royal buildings. From the archaeological viewpoint, these tend to be new or recently-fashionable (or plain cost-effective) ideas in construction and layout of buildings, rather than royal artefacts. The themes of this chapter, therefore, are constructional highlights or innovations at royal sites; archaeological gathering of information on those palaces and royal houses which are less known because their sites are built over; and the setting of some of the palaces, including their prehistory as houses belonging to others.