This book was originally published under the name "Roy Royland"; or, "The Young Castellan". The edition we used was printed in the US, and for some reason was not given its full name.

A Castellan is a person in charge of a castle, and that is what young Roy Royland has become, while his father, Sir Granby Royland, is away defending his king. For the time is about 1640, and there is a move afoot in the country of England to do away with the monarchy. In the castle most of its old defences have not been used for many years, perhaps centuries, and old Ben Martlet sets about restoring them, cleaning up the armour, teaching young Roy the arts of self-defence, by putting him through a course of fencing, by restoring the portcullis and draw-bridge, and by training the men from the neighbouring tenant farms to be soldiers.

But eventually, through treachery, the Roundheads, as those who oppose the monarchy, were called, managed to take the castle, and to make Roy and his mother, along with old Ben Martlet and the other defenders, prisoner. This can't do the management of the tenant farms much good.

Eventually Sir Granby, Roy's father, appears on the scene, and the Roundheads are chased away. As we know from our history books, the Monarchy was restored, and peace spreads again through the land of England.

George Manville Fenn lived from 1831 to 1909, and was a prolific writer of boys' adventure stories. He also wrote serialised books for the various boys' periodicals.

The feature that is common to most of his books is the method of sustained suspense that he employed. He wrote, in explaining this, that he relied upon the human desire to unravel a mystery, to retain his readers' attention. He was able to retain their interest right up to the very last page, by building up mysterious and dire situations one upon the other. You are constantly left asking, "How does he get out of this one?" It is just this aspect that makes transcribing his books to e-texts such fun.

George Manville Fenn, English writer of juvenile stories, was born in London January 3, 1831. He was educated at private schools, then attended Battersea Training College for Teachers from 1851 to 1854. He was Master of a small school in Lincolnshire for a time, then became a printer and published a small magazine of poetry, "Modern Metre," in 1862. Two years later he was part owner of the Hertfordshire and Essex Observer, another unsuccessful venture. He then began writing for various periodicals, such as Chamber's Journal and All the Year Round, and was editor of Cassell's Magazine in 1870, and of Once a Week from 1873 to 1879. He soon began to pour out a flood of books for boys, as well as a few novels, many of which were reprinted in America, and before his death he had published between 175 and 200. He was married in 1855 to Susanna Leake, and by her had two sons and six daughters. He died August 26, 1909.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used ABBYY Finereader 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk