It is surprising to anyone accustomed to the study of castles in England that we have been able to proceed so far without much mention of the royal castles. This was one of the key elements of the polity of Ireland in the late twelfth century: the absence of real centres of English royal power in Ireland. The king had seized the ports of Dublin, Waterford and Wexford, and had demesne lands particularly in Munster, but he lacked either the equivalent of the baronial capita, or a close network of lesser castles in any region. The provision of the latter, as with the
Figure 25 Calingford: view of the castle set above the harbour and town
Figure 26 Carlingford castle: general plan of the ground floor, and the western half at first-floor level
Building of castles along the east side of the Shannon, is a topic which we will meet in the next chapter; here we must look at the question of the major castles.
There is no trace of what, if anything, served as Henry II’s bases in Waterford or Wexford. Reginald’s tower in the latter town was not a castle, but part of the town wall, stronger than most town towers because it was at the angle of the wall and the waterfront. He had a castle in Dublin, which he took from Strongbow, but it would appear to have been a motte and bailey structure (Orpen, Normans, II, 306). John seized Drogheda castle on the death of Hugh de Lacy in 1186, and never granted it to his son, although the king was still paying rent for it to the de Lacy heirs in the fourteenth century. Drogheda castle was also a motte and bailey, although it may have had stone walls added (Buckley and Sweetman, 1991, 289-91).
Dungarvan marked the south-western extremity of Henry Il’s demesne lands, as defined in the Treaty of Windsor in 1175 (Flanagan, 1989, appendix 3). The castle of Dungarvan is not at present an inspiring site: it became a British Army barracks, and then a Garda Siochana station after 1921, only to be deserted now. Its plan is in two parts: a twelve-sided enclosure, 21.6 m (71 ft) in internal diameter, with walls 2.4 m (8 ft) thick, and an outer courtyard with a large round angle tower and a twin-towered gate house (fig. 28). The walls have been much repointed and the crucial junctions are sometimes obscured, but it looks as though the outer curtain wall, angle tower and gate house of the outer ward were all built at the same time and added to the inner enclosure. This enclosure is now
Figure 27 Carlingford castle: south-west tower
Filled up with earth and vaulted structures to first-floor level; some of these latter are clearly later. It is possible, however, that the inner enclosure at Dungarvan, when stripped of modern accretions, may prove to have as its core the castle of Henry II or John.
Neither the mottes of Dublin or Drogheda nor the small enclosure at Dungarvan would do as royal capita after 1200. In 1204, John ordered the Justiciar to ‘construct a strong castle there [at Dublin] with good ditches and strong walls’; the reason he gives is that ‘you have no fit place for the custody of our treasure and for other purposes’ (Orpen, Normans, II, 307-8). He commanded the Justiciar to start with a tower and then to proceed to build the ‘castellum etbaluum’, as Orpen notes (Normans, II, 308), a good example of the distinction between a tower and enclosing walls. The castle itself has largely disappeared under the weight of post-medieval changes, although the southeastern tower and the bases of the two western towers either survive in the core of later building or have been exposed by excavation.
The overall plan and the site of the great hall built by Henry III are known from eighteenth-century plans and descriptions (Maguire, 1974). The overall plan was roughly rectangular, with the main gate in the middle of one long side, the north wall. It was guarded by two quite small semicircular towers projecting forward on either side of the gate. The four angle towers were larger, internally circular, with widely splayed external plinths; there was a small semicircular tower more or less midway along the south wall. Interestingly, the plan has no such
Great tower as John’s writ seems to demand, an indication perhaps of the small extent of his actual effect on the design, given that he was away in England when the plan was drawn up (Fig. 29).
The Pipe Roll of 1211-12 records the massive total of ?733-16-11 for works at Limerick castle. The only castle in England to receive such a sum in a single year in the reign of King John was Scarborough, also in 1211-12; Henry II exceeded ?700 in four years at Dover, and Richard I in one year at the Tower of London, and, of course, at Chateau Gaillard (Brown, 1955). We can safely identify the existing castle at Limerick with King John (Fig. 30). Excavation, already noted above for the discovery of the earlier fort on the site, has clarified greatly our knowledge of the castle plan (Wiggins, 1991). It was clearly intended to occupy an approximately square area between the Shannon river to the west and the road to the north, which led to the bridge over the Shannon. These two fronts were completed, but the curtain to the east, sheltered in part by the town, has now been shown never to have been finished; the south-east angle tower was never built, either, and it is not clear whether the southern curtain was. John’s effort resulted in a tremendous masonry show front; round the back, the castle was enclosed by a ditch and timber. Since then, as elsewhere, the castle history has been chequered; it was converted to an infantry barrack in 1787, and the walls show many signs of rebuilding.
The curtain walls have all been more or less cut down and refaced in recent times. There were three large corner towers, circular inside; all have been cut down for artillery. The two western ones, fronting the river, have straightforward loops at ground level; the northern one has loops with seats, but they may be restorations of the 1930s. The north-eastern tower is the best preserved. At ground-floor level, there is a single embrasure serving two slightly plunging arrow loops facing out to the vulnerable salient angle (Fig. 31).
The gate is the earliest in Ireland to be protected by two towers, although it, too, has suffered from later reconstruction (Fig. 32). The entrance is barred by a gate with a high slot machicolation in front and a portcullis groove behind it. Recent excavation confirms that there was no structure behind the two towers beside the gate passage, but the gate passage was prolonged by a sort of reverse barbican. These towers now have ground floors entered only by recent doors from the courtyard; they may well have been reached originally only by ladders from above. The first floor had three elements joined together, the two tower rooms and the platform (now rebuilt) over the gate passage which supported the portcullis mechanism, and was reached by doors from either tower. Mural stairs linked the first and second floors, which linked to the wall-walks on either side; the present doors at first-floor level were forced through in modern times when the curtain was lowered.
We may conclude this survey of early royal works with discussion of two lesser ones. The second largest sum recorded as spent on works at a castle is the ?129-12-0 on Athlone (Davies and Quinn, 1941, 25). This must be connected with the decision of the Justiciar to build it in stone in 1210, and the recorded collapse of a tower there, which killed Richard Tuit (Orpen, 1907b, 262-5). Again, the position is confused by later rebuilding of the castle as a barracks, but there are the remains of a polygonal tower enclosing what is probably the base of a motte.
A writ of 1216 from King John ordered the Constable of Carrickfergus castle to enclose an outer ward there, work which seems to have been completed by 1224 (McNeill, 1981, 4). This meant what is now the middle curtain at the castle, a wall with two turrets and two wall towers, erected purely to reinforce the defences, not to add significantly to the area enclosed. The main feature was the east tower, guarding both a salient angle of the wall and the line of approach across the shore exposed at low tide, but in dead ground from the great tower (Fig. 33). This was protected particularly by three triple arrow loops in the basement of the tower, designed for the use of crossbowmen (McNeill, 1981, 29, 56). Although the central section of this curtain and the central tower were knocked down to below ground level around 1700, excavation showed the polygonal plan of the tower, and that there was no gate house. The gate, which must have existed, was probably simply sited beside the central tower.
Figure 29 Dublin and Limerick: plans of the two main early royal castles in Ireland
World History
