Allen Brown's work encapsulates the slow drift from military to symbolic interpretation [of castles]. - R. Allen Brown

One would like to say de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but a friend may be allowed to offer a little criticism. He was not always as receptive to new ideas as he should have been, and as an historian was not always at ease with the physical remains of the period he studied.

R. Allen Brown might be classed as a military historian, but in the broadest possible sense. He restored military history to its place, recognizing that a state's military system is a fundamental aspect of its totality, not an isolated or unimportant sphere.

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.