Castle Diary – The Journal of Tobias Burgess

Richard Platt's Castle Diary - The Journal of Tobias Burgess is a year of medieval castle life for 7 year olds, told by the boy living it.

What happens

Toby is about to turn eleven. He's off to be a page at his uncle's castle, and his mum has told him to keep a journal so he can tell her everything. So he does. EVERYTHING.

He serves his aunt at dinner and drops half the food on the floor. He learns Latin from a chaplain who is very keen on the cane. He gets a proper horse, rides out on a boar hunt and still manages to miss the best bit. He's the worst archer in the castle (until the day he's better, when they just give him a bigger bow).

It's history from the inside. You learn how bread was baked and who looked after the wine. You find out what a garderobe was and who had to clean out underneath it (the Gong-Farmer, and nobody envies him). There's a feast with a stuffed peacock and a "cockatrice" sewn together from half a big bird and half a piglet. Who knew?

Toby is lovely company. He moans about fish days and itchy new clothes. He gets teased by the older pages and plots his revenge. He makes friends with a poacher called David, which turns out to matter a great deal.

The language is old-fashioned on purpose. There are lots of "'tis" and "mayhap", which is part of the fun but makes it quite a stretch for a 7 year old reading alone. It works really well read together.

A few things to know. The boys are beaten at lessons and it's treated as normal. There's hunting, a pig slaughtered for winter (throat and all), a knight fatally hurt at the jousts and a man facing a very harsh punishment for poaching. The pages also call each other some old insults, and one of them looks uncomfortably like a modern racist word, so you may want to be ready for it.

If your reader is always asking how people REALLY lived in castles, this is a great answer.

What to read next

If they're keen for more castle life with a lot more jokes, try the World's Worst Knight. Roderick is a squire who'd love you to think he's a hero, and his diary starts with him scrubbing pigeon poo off the castle wall.