Castles remain, with the great cathedrals, the most evocative monuments of the middle ages. They come down to us from a time when the aristocrats of Europe controlled the rest of society through their possession of great landed estates. They built castles to serve them as centres of their lives, the administration of their estates and the means to hold on to them in times of war. For the last 150 years scholars and others have been studying and writing on castles in western Europe. This often started with the more military parts, the castles’ defences and sieges, but then moved on to considering their wider, civil aspects. As a result, we think we know the main lines of development of castles and the life they represented. This is no static picture, but one subject to great variation. It changes according to time, as the builders adopted new fashions and developments; according to the resources of the lord who built any castle, and the skill of the workmen whom he employed; and (above all) because of the rooted objection of medieval lords to build a castle exactly like any other existing one. As objects meant to display their lord’s power and prestige they had to be impressive, and uniformity denied that. It is in this endless variety, as well as in the humanity of their bombast and in the ingenuity of the individual designs, that the appeal of castles lies.
Ireland is remarkable among the countries of western Europe for its scholarly neglect of its castles after the early years of this century. Then there were at least two major scholars working on the study, Thomas Westropp and Goddard Orpen. The latter was one of the key figures writing in English on the study of castles in the decade before the First World War. His greatness rests on two things. He recognised, as early as the more famous Ella Armitage in England, that earthworks were as much castles as were masonry structures. He also was a great historian, who combined the physical and the documentary evidence when he wrote about an individual castle. To him castles told a story just as much as did royal documents, and on the one hand he used their evidence in his histories, while on the other he never stopped at mere description in his account; the castles were evidence to be interpreted and expounded. Westropp was less concerned with the grand sweep of history. He was a great gatherer of information about individual castles, from documentary sources and particularly from the field evidence; he was also concerned not just with the medieval period but with monuments of all dates, but mainly in his native south-west of Ireland.
After them, in 1941, came H. G.Leask to uphold the standard of castle studies, but he never had the time to produce a study of castles comparable to his threevolume work on the ecclesiastical buildings of medieval Ireland; his book remains a sketch of what it might have been. Leask’s publication of churches rather than castles, whatever his individual reason, represents a certain ambivalence in the study of the secular world of the later middle ages in Ireland. As in many of the countries to emerge into independence after 1918, the study of history and archaeology in Ireland was closely affected by the politics of nineteenth - and twentieth-century nationalism. It was difficult to divorce castles from the fact that many of the lords who built them ultimately came from England and owed allegiance to the king of England. Especially as long as the emphasis of castle studies was on their military role, it was inevitable that they should be seen as the symbols, not of national freedom but of the beginning of English domination. As such, they were unwelcome guests at the academic feast, a situation exacerbated by the overt Unionism of Orpen. It must be significant that much of the archaeological study of early Dublin, even after it became a city under the English Crown, is often presented as the study of Viking Dublin; similarly, the medieval lords of Ireland who were not Irish are often called Normans. It avoids reopening futile disputes. The situation also intimidated outsiders; it is curious, and unfortunate, that Ireland was excluded from the publication of the History of the King’s Works which played such a seminal role in the study of castles in Britain and beyond in the 1960s.
For obvious reasons people in Northern Ireland, reacting to the nationalism of the rest, were less affected by this view of the middle ages. The amateur tradition, with such men as H. C.Lawlor, continued to include the middle ages and castles as part of their antiquarian writings. The first professional archaeologist to work in the North, O. Davies, did the same, which also ran counter to the tendency visible in Britain to cut professional archaeology short at the Romans or Vikings. A new era opened in 1948 with the appointment of an overtly medieval archaeologist, E. M.Jope, to a lectureship (later to a chair) of archaeology in the Queen’s University in Belfast. He was followed two years later by D. M.Waterman, appointed to a position in the newly created Archaeological Survey of Northern Ireland. Between them, with A. E.P. Collins, they revolutionised the study of archaeology there, especially in the medieval period and the study of castles. A systematic programme of excavation of the castles of Co. Down was started which saw more such activity in the county during the 1950s than probably any other area of Europe. Waterman produced a whole series of studies of castles, either already in State Care, or else as they came into it, in advance of conservation work. By 1966, with the publication of An Archaeological Survey of Co. Down (Jope, 1966), Northern Ireland was one of the leading regions in Europe for the study of castles.
Since then, things have evened out between the two parts of Ireland. Medieval archaeology in general, and the study of castles in particular, has advanced greatly in the South, while there has been an unfortunate relative decline in the
North. In both, the activity has mainly been publication of excavations of individual castles; essential in themselves but not the complete studies of the upstanding fabric and documentation combined into one study which the subject needs to establish its basic evidence. The tradition of Westropp, rather than that of Orpen, perhaps, has been the dominant force, in Ireland as elsewhere. Leask’s book of 1941 has continued to be reprinted, with the last edition in 1977, because there has been no attempt to replace it as a source of information about the castles of Ireland in general.
Against this background, there need be no apology for a new book on castles in Ireland as such. It may cast light on what was the period when Ireland became, for better or for worse, intimately tied to the social and economic fabric of western Europe, through the medium of England. How that happened is clearly a significant object for study. The lack of work on the castles still leaves the field open for one of two kinds of books on the subject. The first would be to take Leask’s approach, which he used in both his major works, and concentrate on presenting the reader with descriptions of individual castles. The other would be Orpen’s, where the aim is to weave the evidence from the castles into a story, to give an explanation of their meaning in history, in the wider sense of that term.
This book aims to be one of the latter kind. Working from a university gives one neither the time nor the resources in the field to undertake the massive programme of recording that the descriptive book would demand. The role of detailed recording is best done from within the state organisations entrusted with the care of the monuments. On the other hand, facing up to sceptical students impresses the habit of explanation on to a lecturer. While obviously I hope that I have made no false statements in this book, I would be shocked if the subject was left to rest here. More work will inevitably give us more information, more evidence of the complexity of the castles and new interpretations of them. Waiting for this, however, and rewriting each remaining bit around the new story, would make the whole process unending, as likely to be completed as giving the final coat of paint to the Forth Bridge. We cannot wait until everything is in place, not least because some of the castles will no longer be so. The pressures on castles are mounting again, often in the guise of well-meaning but overenthusiastic restoration and interpretation. In these circumstances I am prepared to face the criticism and take the plunge into trying to tell the reader what I think these sites mean.
This aim dictates the structure of the book. It is divided into three parts, corresponding to three periods which present us with different questions to ask about the castles of the time. Within these period divisions, I have tried to let the study of the physical remains of the castles, their archaeology, play the dominant role in the account, rather than the historical documentation. The accounts, and in particular many of the drawings, must be seen in the light of the foregoing remarks. They are often based on a one-person attempt at survey which is aimed at giving an explanation of the remains rather than a total record of them; that is for another operation, just as assembling the complete documentary record of the castles is. In a sense all this adds up to a plea of caveat lector but it is not meant as such; rather it is a plea for this book not to be judged for not being what it was never meant to be.
PART I
Society in Ireland during the eleventh and twelfth centuries was in a state of flux. The establishment of a number of coastal towns, initially by Scandinavians, of which the most prominent was Dublin, meant that Irish goods were able to be marketed abroad in much greater quantities and much more regularly than before. Political affairs were marked by the rise to power of a small group of pre-eminent provincial kings, whose military power allowed them to suppress lesser kingdoms within their areas, and to contend for a position of supremacy over their peers, as so-called High Kings of Ireland. Their power was based on controlling armies (a steady increase in the length and ferocity of wars followed) and on their vast herds of cattle, which they used to buy support from other lords. They captured cattle in war and, along with them, slaves; both could be marketed through the Scandinavian towns for silver to be used for display and for buying more support. The twelfth century saw a determined attempt to transform the traditional Irish Church institutions into ones in line with the rest of Europe, most notably in the introduction of new monastic orders and territorial bishoprics, leading eventually to a network of parishes over the country.
The impulse for change seems to have come from the top levels of society, typified by the alliance of reforming churchmen with some of the new, aggressive kings. The resources that we hear of being deployed by the new powers were essentially mobile forms of wealth, particularly cattle, that could be captured in war. In the rest of Europe new forms of lordship were being introduced (lumped together by historians as ‘feudalism’) which were based on tighter control of smaller estates linked to increased grain production, through machines such as the great plough and the water mill. The changes in Ireland might be similar or they might involve the new kings simply seizing a greater share of existing resources for themselves at the cost of their inferiors. Elsewhere a key element in the changes was the use of private fortifications as the skeleton of control of the fields and estates. In Ireland there are hints of such things in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
World History
