For a long time the fourteenth century, however precisely defined, has been seen as a major horizon in the study of the medieval history of Ireland. This is usually presented in terms of political or military events, typically starting with the invasion of Ireland by Edward Bruce in 1315, and finishing with Richard II’s expeditions to Ireland in 1395 and 1399. Elsewhere in Europe historians see the outstanding problems of the century as economic in their roots, not political. It is true that there are few direct sources for the demography or economic processes of the period in Ireland, such as taxation records or continuous series of manorial accounts. The main phenomenon of the Black Death did, however, strike in Ireland; notoriously so in the case of Friar Clyn, who left parchment for the continuation of his chronicle after his death, should anyone survive. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that the main trends applied in Ireland as over the rest of Europe.
The basic assumption must be of population decline. Elsewhere this had profound results for the agricultural market, which was the main economic engine of the middle ages. The decline in population resulted in a rise in the price of labour and a decline in the price of food, so that some agriculture moved from a position of low profitability to one of loss and so was abandoned. Typically this involved cereal farming being changed to pastoral, which employed fewer people, the effects of which were most to be seen on the margins of the core areas of arable agriculture. In this European context, Ireland as a whole was marginal land, and so would have seen a decline in or cessation of the immigration of land-hungry peasants from England or elsewhere. Within Ireland, there were also areas, whether upland or because of poorer soil or wetter climate, which would have been marginal compared to the good, drier lands of the southeast, which are still more likely to be farmed for corn. Pastoralism in Ireland overwhelmingly meant rearing cattle, for which Ireland is ideally suited; they were exported principally as hides. Indeed, if the main emphasis is on cattle rather than arable farming, much more of Ireland can be considered good land.
Politically, the century did see major change. South of a line from Dublin to Limerick the land was dominated by three great new lordships which arose from English families established among the thirteenth-century baronage. The descendants of Theobald Walter, now known as the Butlers from their hereditary office, moved their centre from Nenagh in north Tipperary southwards and eastwards to the valley of the Suir and to Co. Kilkenny, culminating in their purchase of the castle and barony of Kilkenny itself in 1393. The two Geraldine lineages founded the Earldoms of Kildare, to the east, and Desmond, in Limerick and the west. North of Dublin, the area of the modern counties of Meath and Louth was under the control of lords of lesser lordships, at least one of which, that of the Prestons, was a creation of the fourteenth century. In the west, the O’Brians were resurgent in Clare, following their victory over Richard de Clare in 1318. North of this the descendants of the de Burgh lords of Connacht and Ulster formed themselves into the lineages of the Burkes, in the eyes of the English government the most spectacular case of gaelicisation. The murder of William de Burgh, the last resident Earl of Ulster, in 1333 left a power vacuum in Ulster. The lands of the former Earldom were mostly seized by the Clandeboy line of the O’Neills, with a small area in the south-east remaining nominally part of the English polity. The Earls’ position of dominant lord in the North was increasingly assumed by the main line of the O’Neills.
The principal loser in this process was the royal government in Dublin. The rise of the new lordships in the English areas ushered in a cycle of decline for the power of Dublin. The new Earldoms were constituted as Liberties, where the royal power was significantly weaker than in the shires. The loss of power meant the loss of revenue, which in turn led to further loss of power. To the lesser lords and towns of the south-east, the result was increasingly a choice between competing powers, those of the royal government and those of local lords. Both aimed to raise revenue and both offered protection against the other competing powers. Not surprisingly, it was often the local lords who were able to provide the better deal in fact. This simply reinforced the cycle of decline of royal power, so that it shrank steadily both in terms of the area of Ireland which it controlled and even in its power within that area. By the end of the fourteenth century, Ireland was more than ever a land of competing local lordships.
When we combine the economic changes in settlement which we may postulate with some certainty and the changes in lordship which also took place in the fourteenth century, it is clear that the period was one of massive change. To the civil servants of the royal government, whose documents dominate our view of events, this was all disastrous, and they used such words as ‘decline’ and ‘degeneracy’ liberally to describe what was happening. In this they have been followed by many historians. However, as Frame points out (1982, 335), the structure of society and government created in the fourteenth century was very durable. Inevitably in the middle ages (as in other periods), competing lordships meant violence between them, taking the form of raids and devastation of territory. This appears in the Annals as war, as indeed it appeared to the people who were killed and whose crops and herds were stolen or destroyed. It was, however, a particular form of war, which could also be seen as being distinctly limited in its scope, in the numbers of men involved and in the duration of individual campaigns. Whether we should really think of fourteenth - or fifteenth-century Ireland as especially dominated by war, compared to the England or France of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, is a moot point.
Some writers have linked the impression of war and the complaints of degeneracy together and have associated them with the cultural changes of the period, as did, indeed, contemporaries. To them the changes in speech, from French to Irish among the aristocracy, and the measures taken to enforce local law, often using measures borrowed from Irish practice, such as making the kin responsible for bringing malefactors to justice, or billeting troops on communities, rather than taxing them in money, all seemed part of a cultural decline. To men like Eoin MacNeill this was a ‘Gaelic Revival’, the stirrings of nineteenth-century nationalism, while to Orpen it was the abandonment of good, royal government for Celtic chaos. Leask picked up the basic message of both, that the fourteenth century was one of war and collapse which saw a halt to building, both of churches and of castles. To him, the years around 1400 then saw a new start, with new styles and new types of building, not a continuation from the thirteenth century.
Irrespective of the validity of the idea of the new start, Leask, like Champneys before him, picked out the main identifying traits of the late medieval building style in Ireland. Primarily they derived this from the study of churches, but the style applies to castles as well. Some of the features associated with it are indeed derived from English Decorated style: window tracery, ogee-headed openings or low, four-centred arches, and the use of shallow ‘wave-like’ mouldings. There are other particularly Irish traits, however. The use of sandstone for dressings disappears, to be replaced over much of the country by the use of the hard, Carboniferous limestone: extremely durable, it may be that the use of better chisels is implied in the change. Commonly the stones are decorated with shallow punched dressing, and occasionally with the sort of leaf decoration more commonly found on late churches. The arches of doors especially were often built, not of many voussoirs, but of only two or three long curved stones. While we have seen the occasional use of wicker centring for vaults in the earlier period, after 1350 this appears to be universal, so that, when we find it, there is a presumption that the vault is late. Roof lines were also distinctive, marked by stepped merlons on the battlements and corbelled machicolations and turrets, the latter again reflecting French or north British ideas.
Leask’s idea of a hiatus in building followed by a new start has been challenged for church building and style (Stalley, 1984; McNeill, 1986): late Irish Gothic should now be seen as arising from early fourteenth-century English Decorated style, modified to accommodate Irish resources. Leask in fact put forward two ideas on castles of the late middle ages. The first was that, with secular buildings as with the churches, there was also a gap in work. The second, which he never overtly stated, was that castles after 1350 were almost exclusively tower-houses. This last is conveyed in the layout of his book on Irish castles (Leask, 1977). The chapters (9-11) which follow his account of the enclosure castles of the later thirteenth century concern tower-houses, while only the last two pages of Chapter 12 (‘The larger castles of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’) consider castles other than tower-houses, and then only three: Cahir, Askeaton and Newcastle West. The question of continuity through the fourteenth century has been challenged in considering the origins of Irish tower-houses, as we shall see.
When it comes to dating, it is worth emphasising that no scheme has yet been produced to discriminate within the work of the late middle ages, to distinguish work of 1350-1450 from that of 1450-1550, for example. In part this is because, if the early 70 years were removed from this range, it did not seem worth distinguishing, of producing dating schemes of half a century or so. Mainly, however, it is because the masons at the end of the period seem to have been quite as likely to use any individual feature as those at the beginning, that the style was uniform throughout. At present, therefore, we must treat the period as a unity, with all the problems which that must bring.
The argument is more than this point of dating, however. Inherent in Leask’s view were two assumptions, or conclusions. The first is that there was a dislocation in the way of life from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The second was that the pattern of life of the later period, which could not be traced back to the earlier, was distinctively Irish, that it was a part of the Gaelic Revival, or gaelicisation of Irish society, which he was told by historians had taken place. Even from those who have challenged Leask’s views on the dating of late medieval castles, his view of the period as one of change in the way of life has survived.
I would rather view this period as a time of major change, indeed almost of a revolution in castle construction in Ireland when the great feudal fortresses were largely made obsolete by the smaller scale but generally endemic warfare of the later middle ages.
(Barry, 1993, 216)
This quote links together Leask’s idea of a shift in the castles (from enclosures to tower-houses) to the idea of endemic warfare in the period.
Just as the present generation of historians has challenged this view of collapse and a great social upheaval, so too we can challenge such views on castles. Although they are all connected, we can try to examine separately three issues. The first is how far evidence from the study of castles might shed light on the question of the extent and nature of the changes of the fourteenth century and later. The second is whether tower-houses did really replace enclosure castles. The third is the extent and nature of warfare in late medieval Ireland, as seen from the perspective of the castles. These three questions run through the whole period but cannot, unfortunately perhaps, be isolated and dealt with separately.
World History
