We are led into a consideration of the chronology of motte building: effectively in Ireland this means how late mottes were still erected. There are three possible approaches to this question. The first involves the sort of argument just used, to find areas which were settled by the English at some known date but are now without mottes, and to argue from these a date when they went out of currency. The second works from the dates of individual mottes and extrapolates from them to the class of sites as a whole. The third is based on an empirical assessment of what seems to have been the probable circumstances at the time, a sort of common sense.
The argument from absence applies not only to Munster lordships but more powerfully to Connacht. In 1235 Richard de Burgh finally achieved the conquest and settlement by English tenants of a substantial part of the former Ua Conchobair kingdom. Numbers of the places which he granted to major tenants, as well as his own demesne estates, are now marked by castles of the thirteenth century, as we shall see in a later chapter, but there are no mottes among them (Lynn, 1986; Holland, 1988, 86). Counter to this lies the north of Co. Antrim where there are some dozen mottes in the area of the Earldom of Ulster known as the county of Twescard. In the records from the 1211-12 Pipe Roll to returns of seneschals of the Earldom before it was restored to Hugh de Lacy in 1227, it is clear that this area did not then form part of the Earldom (McNeill, 1980, 21-2). It would appear to have been settled under Hugh de Lacy, and the mottes to be associated with this settlement, although it is just possible that it was settled in the decades before but, being held by the Scottish lords of Galloway, excluded from the Earldom until seized by Hugh de Lacy.
The dates from excavation of mottes would need the precision of tree rings to bear effectively on this problem, but it is worth recalling the coins from Ballyroney, Clough, Lismahon and Rathmullan. When all the uncertainties of the date of deposition, as opposed to the date of striking, are admitted, the conclusion remains that both Rathmullan and Lismahon should have been erected before 1200 and Clough soon after. Some mottes are mentioned in documentary sources also. There is the weight of the general picture in eastern Ireland, that the sites of many of the castles mentioned in documents before 1216 are now occupied by mottes (Orpen, 1907a); after this there is a sharp drop in the number of references to the new building of castles. Clones is one of the latest of these, as is Roscrea, which a later inquisition shows was a motte and bailey erected in 1213 (Orpen, 1906, 426-7). In 1215 the Justiciar erected a castle at Clonmacnois (Fig. 43). The present castle consists of a hall and courtyard of stone; the hall is raised up on what looks very much like a motte, with the courtyard occupying the bailey.
The most general argument would be from common sense. If castles are to articulate the new settlement, whether to defend the lords of it or to provide them with a suitably impressive centre for the administration of their lands, it seems perverse for a lord not to build one within a very few years of arriving in his land. We should expect the bulk of castles to have been substantially erected within a decade. This is particularly true of those castles of timber and earth where the main reason for choosing these materials was for speed and simplicity. Unlike the major stone castles, the materials were to be found throughout Ireland, as were men with the skills to work them. More importantly, however, this reminds us that the main effort of constructing castles will have varied from lordship to lordship, as each was settled and organised into estates. There can be no such thing as a date range for mottes throughout Ireland, for, even if they were being built in one area, there would be other parts where the stock of castles was complete.
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