I have happy memories of the Round Room at the Public Record Office in the 1950s, with the large fire occasionally made up by one of the supervisors,… - R. Allen Brown

Brown unashamedly proclaimed himself an "old" historian in terms of shunning trendy topics and approaches. He refused to tolerate nonsense, and he spoke his mind plainly, doubtless stepping on many toes. He must have offended archaeologists with his insistence that archaeology is a branch of history, that an archaeologist should be first a historian and only then an archaeologist

Few subjects in English history have been studied more and for longer than the Norman Conquest, and few have been more bent in the process by biased interpretations based upon unhistorical prejudices.

It sometimes seems to me, with a mixture of admiration and despair, that almost any question one may raise about castles has already been raised, and answered, and often definitively answered, by this remarkable woman [Ella Armitage] in her remarkable book, The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles and the main reason why the study of early castles and their origins in this country has not got very much further since her day is that she did not leave us very much further to go.