When we discuss the domestic use of tower-houses, we immediately encounter a major problem: we do not know whether the tower that we see now constitutes the whole accommodation of the castle. We cannot make proper allowance for other possible buildings beside the towers because we do not know whether they existed or, if they did, what they were. Especially if we consider a source for towerhouses to lie with chamber towers of the fourteenth century, we should
Figure 132 Two Mile Borris, Co. Tipperary: a Minister tower-house, without turrets but with machicolated corner turret
Recognise the possibility, if no more, that the tower was attached to a hall. The presence of a hall or of other domestic buildings would obviously totally alter our view of the life for which the tower-houses were designed. In Scotland, this is a question raised by the excavation of halls outside the tower-houses of Threave and Smailholm, formerly considered to be free-standing (Tabraham, 1988). While we may sound two cautionary notes (Threave and Hermitage, on which much of the argument depends, were the residences of earls, and at Threave, the construction of the fifteenth-century enclosure meant abandoning the hall), the point is an important one. We have taken the self-sufficiency of tower-houses for granted in the past, rather than demonstrating it.
There is support from Ireland for Tabraham’s view. Richard Stanihurst, writing from Dublin in the late sixteenth century, says:
Adjoining them [sc. castles] are reasonably big and spacious palaces made of white clay and mud. They are not roofed with quarried slabs or slates, but with thatch. In the palace they have their banquets but they prefer to sleep in the castle rather than in the palace becauses their enemies can easily apply torches to the roofs.
(Lennon, 1981, 146)
It should be pointed out, however, that Stanihurst is here describing the life of the Gaelic Irish princes, not his own Anglo-Irish. The tower-house of Athclare in Co. Louth has the roof-line of a substantial building attached to the west side: the dressed quoins of the tower on the south-west angle only start from the eaves level of the attached building. This was therefore built with the tower and may have been a hall. In Meath, in the grass of the former bawn of Walterstown towerhouse, are the remains of a rectangular building, which again might on excavation prove to be a hall.
It must be admitted, however, that the limited excavation that has been done outside tower-houses (summarised in Donnelly, 1994, 168-9) has given little support to the idea of substantial buildings set beside tower-houses, but the halls need not have left substantial traces. More to the point is that we would expect halls to be located in bawns. This is not an absolute rule: Threave hall pre-dated the enclosure, but it is sited on an island, and was guarded by the formidable presence of Archibald Douglas, the Grim. Bawns in Ireland are by no means universally associated with tower-houses. A fairly consistent figure of around one tower in five having evidence of a bawn comes from the surveys of Counties Down, Louth, Meath and Limerick. In the latter county, the Civil Survey of the 1650s mentions bawns at just 20 per cent of the towers it lists (Donnelly, 1994, 168). Clearly, the argument is undecided: we cannot assume either the presence or absence of other buildings associated with any individual tower-house in Ireland.
With all this said, we have to proceed with the evidence available to us: perhaps in the future a programme of excavation around tower-houses will shed light on the problem, but there is no sign of it coming yet. This means that we have to judge the tower-houses as free-standing structures. The rooms within them may be graded and assigned uses with the same confidence, or lack of it, that we can bring to the earlier castles in Ireland or to castles elsewhere in Europe. This is not easy, and there are clearly areas of doubt: the use of the ground floor of the towerhouses shows the problem. In many tower-houses the ground floor is covered by a vault and has only poor windows: to Leask (1977, 79) this was used for storage, while the vault was defensive in purpose, stopping fire which an attacker might start through the ground-floor windows from spreading to the upper floors. The latter was clearly not universal, because (particularly in the south) vaults were not confined to the ground floor. Nor were the ground-floor rooms always just for storage. In Meath, several tower-houses have doors which lead straight into the main ground-floor room, which a visitor must cross to reach the stairs. Mainly in the smaller towers in the same county, the vaults have lofts providing a first-floor level: at Summerhill, the loft is fully equipped for domestic life with two windows, fireplace and latrine (Abraham, 1991, 285-7). In Limerick, there are fireplaces in the ground-floor rooms of some tower-houses, which seems to preclude their being designed for storage (Donnelly, 1994, 161-2).
The most detailed analysis of the domestic arrangements of tower-houses is that of Abraham in Meath. The towers provided different levels of accommodation: the small towers had effectively only one room on each floor, with stairs and latrine taking up the rest of the available space. Against these are the tower-houses with lesser rooms usually provided in the turrets, either one or more, as well as the stair and latrine, but the builder at Summerhill contrived a lesser chamber without a turret. The main room was the one occupying the main block on the floor above the vault; it is distinguished by having the largest fireplace and windows and if any window seats are in the tower-house they will be found at this level. In the small tower-houses, where there was no provision of lesser chambers, there are hints of a division of space on this floor. The doors from the stair and the fireplace are at one end, while the best window and latrine are at the other; if the fireplace was used for cooking, it would have allowed a more private space away from servants at the other end of the room. Above this level, the second floor has the next largest windows and fireplace, and also has a latrine. The top floor, on the other hand, has neither fireplace nor latrine. Conventionally this looks like an arrangement of the hall above the vault with a great chamber over it, and then accommodation for servants above that (Abraham, 1991, 283-300).
The arrangement within the turrets is interesting. The smaller tower-houses seem to provide simple small chambers for sleeping, one per floor. The larger towerhouses permitted a more elaborate arrangement. At Liscarton, the turrets provided what Abraham called mini-tower-houses in themselves (Abraham, 1991, 307-8). The south-west turret had three floors of chambers with fireplaces and good windows. They were linked, not to the main block on each floor, but to each other via a private stair in the turret. The north-west turret provided two identical floors; in effect two suites of lodgings were provided in the turrets there, leaving, presumably, the lord to occupy the main block with a hall, great chamber and service above. This has moved rather far from the idea of the simple stack of rooms that tower-houses can be visualised as providing.
As such Liscarton invites comparison with the elaborate provision of side rooms in the very large tower-house of Bunratty castle in Co. Clare, the base of the O’Briens of Thomond (Leask, 1977, 116-17). In Limerick, the large tower-house of Bourchier’s castle, owned by the Earl of Desmond, had four main floors, of which the first and fourth are covered in vaults. In other Limerick tower-houses there is more than one vaulted floor: Cappagh has three vaults, over the first, third and fourth floors. This multiplication of vaulted rooms, which weakened the structure of the tower, makes it less easy in Limerick to identify a main room than in Meath or in Ulster.
Finally, we may note cases of the special adaptation of tower-houses to serve a particular need. The first of these is for the life of the urban merchant. The Bridge castle in Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny (Murtagh, 1988), and the two tower-houses in Carlingford town, Co. Louth, Taffe’s castle (see Fig. 126) and The Mint (Buckley and Sweetman, 1991, 323-9), all have ground floors with entrances separated from the rest of the tower floors. Both the Bridge castle and Taffe’s castle have doors in their ground floors which open out on to what were the sites of the medieval quays. These were the equivalent in Ireland of the later medieval merchants’ houses, for example in Southampton (Platt and Coleman-Smith, 1975), where the ground floor or cellar had a separate entrance from the rest of the house. It acted as a warehouse, or might be let out as a shop by the owner if he did not want to use it himself. In Co. Down, Nendrum and Sketrick castles were both sited on islands: both have vaulted rooms on the ground floor, apparently to house boats (Jope, 1966, 244-5; 1250-2).
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