The century after about 1225 contrasts with the drama of the preceding 50 years. The only major conquest by the English was that of Connacht, in part seized by the king, but the greater part conquered by Richard de Burgh at the head of a federation of barons which saw success in 1235. There were other seizures, in Ulster and in Clare for example, but they were not on the same scale as that of Connacht or of the events of the preceding 50 years. The expedition of King John, and the subsequent dealings between the barons of Ireland with him and his son, resolved the question of who would be the dominant force in Ireland decisively in the king’s favour. For most of the period the English supremacy was not seriously challenged, except on a local basis, by Irish lords, and within the English lordships the king was recognised as supreme. One of the features of the period, therefore, is the absence of fighting for long intervals, especially in the south-east, until the start of troubles around the Wicklow mountains towards the end of the thirteenth century.
The royal dominance was helped by the failure of heirs in the two largest of the early lordships. Walter de Lacy in 1241 left no single heir of Meath, while in 1245 Anselm, the last Marshal Earl of Leinster, also died without a male heir. In both cases the lordship was partitioned between heiresses and their husbands; neither Meath nor Leinster was ever reconstituted in its original form. Against the fragmentation of these two lordships we can put the grant of the Earldom of Ulster to Walter de Burgh in 1264, which combined it and the lordship of Connacht. For the following 69 years, until the death of the last resident Earl of Ulster in 1333, the de Burghs were the most powerful baronial family in Ireland. Connacht was never a Liberty in the way that Leinster, Meath and Ulster were; a further reinforcement of royal power over baronial.
As a whole, however, the baronial lordships went through a period of stability. Their territorial integrity was recognised and established, so that one can talk at this period of fixed boundaries both of the lordships themselves and of units, cantreds, manors or parishes within them. Within each lordship we have often the benefit of surveys by royal officials which allow us to see the structure of the tenancies. As a result it is often possible to assign a castle to an individual holding and to assign it to its position in the tenurial hierarchy, from the great tenants in chief, through the lesser ones to the honorial baronage and the lesser lords. Because the power of the king was at its height and it is royal documents which have survived most, this is the period of the middle ages about which we know most in terms of land holding.
It was this baronial stability which led Orpen, perhaps, to structure his general account of the period not chronologically but regionally, recognising that the lordships were the real units in the island, rather than presenting a unified history, either of the whole island or of the English part of it. This approach has not seen much favour since, but there is more than a grain of truth in it. The English barons seem to have recognised that their seizure of the whole island was an impossibility (the incomplete conquest regretted by Orpen), and that their task was to intensify the exploitation of their lordships internally. The economic boom over much of Europe may have faltered towards the end of the thirteenth century but, if its causes were over-exploitation of the land since the eleventh century, these should not have applied to Ireland. More to the point might have been a slackening in demand for the produce of Irish agriculture, but there is little serious sign of this before 1300.
It was also a period of continuing close personal contact with England. On the one hand the major barons continued to keep in close touch with the court of the English king and to contract marriages with the English aristocracy (Phillips, 1984). On the other, the royal bureaucracy was staffed in large part by clerks from England. There was a steady influx of new leaders from England or from France, like Geoffrey de Geneville, who married one of Walter de Lacy’s heiresses. Ireland was closely tied at the top to England during the period, but that did not make Ireland into England. The estates had to be organised differently, because their origins were different. Even if they were aiming to introduce the pattern of agricultural settlement from England into Ireland, it was not fixed and organised. Equally, the nature of warfare in Ireland was different. The large, organised armies and the siege capacity which emerged in thirteenth-century England during Angevin kingship do not seem to have travelled to Ireland.
In church building we can see that English masons came over to work in Ireland during the thirteenth century and to train men who worked on there after them (Stalley, 1984). They brought with them new fashions of church design which reflected those of England closely: there is no sign of a ‘time lag’ in their work. As well as the designs of churches we can see the work of immigrant sculptors from England in Ireland, as at Kilfane, Co. Kilkenny (Stalley, 1987). Actual building stone was imported from England (Waterman, 1970). On the other hand, the work of such masons did not result in work on the scale of the great English or French churches. The parish churches remained very small and even the cathedrals and major abbeys were often not vaulted. Ireland remained poor in resources, whether money, trained men or building stone. By the end of the thirteenth century Edward I’s reckless financial policy led to serious problems for the royal government in Ireland, which presaged its even more serious problems in the fourteenth century. The confidence of the first lordships must have ebbed away as the realisation of the limited wealth of Ireland gradually sank in to the barons: it was not just the lack of capital, technology and management which had kept Ireland from being a rich country.
If we want to compare the castles in Ireland with those of England or France during this period we have the advantage that this is a time, in England especially, when we can see a main stream of castle development, if such a thing exists. It is around the castles of the thirteenth century that many of our ideas of castles are built. Defensively, the emphasis was on the curtain wall, with mural towers and a great double-towered gate house dominating the trace. In a few, principally royal, castles this trend culminated in the concept of the concentric castle with two lines of defence working in concert. Great towers continued (if unusually) to be built but they were a facet of the status and display of the castles, not the point of ultimate defence. The builders used the space of the courtyards and the accommodation in the mural towers to expand the domestic provisions in castles. The great hall, of course, remained dominant as the venue for ceremonial and the most public events of the life of the castle, but increasingly as the pivot of a formal arrangement of the domestic rooms of the whole castle. At the ‘low’ end were the service rooms; at the other, the lord’s. The lord had as a matter of course at least two rooms, an outer, great chamber for meeting his household, and an inner, private chamber for sleeping and confidential business. Important members of the household were accommodated in single rooms or suites in the towers or else attached to the lord’s chambers.
In England the increasing survival of baronial documentation, and in Ireland the growth of royal power and bureaucracy, has made the dating of castles less problematical. In Ireland, of course, the destruction of the Public Records during the Civil War in 1922 deprived us of many documents, but thanks to the efforts of earlier scholars by no means all was lost. Many had been copied to London and the copies survived there but the Pipe and Justiciars’ Rolls had been well calendared before the disaster; the documents in London have also been well calendared, so that, as well as surviving, much is easily accessible. This increasing documentation also allows us to be much more confident about the ownership of the castles. This applies not only to the castles of the major tenants in chief but also increasingly to the principal men below them: just as we know more about the boundaries of the lordships, so we know more about their internal organisation.
This is the background to the questions which we may ask of the castles during this period. On the one hand, with a reasonable number of dated buildings and the knowledge that the patrons of the castles were closely in touch with England, we can expect to compare the castles in England and Ireland. On the other hand, if we can see local ways of doing things in the church buildings, we might expect the same among the castles. This might be simply a matter of whim or else a response to the genuinely different life in Ireland from that in England. Whether that was a matter of the organisation of estates or households, or of the nature of war, the result should show in their castles. We must also be aware of the hierarchy within the ranks of the castle builders: what applies to the higher tenants in chief may not apply to their men. This particularly applies to the Irish, of course. One of the key questions is to ask how they had reacted to two generations of the presence of English lords beside them. Castles offered them much in the way of defence of their lands, and they were by and large on the defensive during our period. In Wales the native lords took to castle building, with less enthusiasm perhaps than to the destruction of their enemies’ castles, but systematically nevertheless. If the Irish felt as threatened as the Welsh, we should expect them to follow them in castellation of their lands.
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