CHRONOLOGY

To Westropp, the tower-houses were mostly built in the fifteenth century, with a few from the late fourteenth, and more from the sixteenth (1907, 55-75). Leask, as we have noted, thought that there was very little, if any, building in Ireland during the fourteenth century and into the first two decades of the fifteenth. To him, the stimulus for the start of tower-houses came with the passing of an Act in the Irish Parliament in 1429: ‘an origin for the towers might be sought in what were called “the ?10 castles”. These were the fruit of a statute of the 8th year of Henry VI (1429)’ (1977, 76). He went on to state that ‘in 1449 a limit was put to the numbers to be built’ (Leask, 1977, 77). Both these statements are oversimplifications (Abraham, 1991, 325-9). An Act of 1428 had been passed for Co. Louth; it was this which was extended to Meath, Dublin and Kildare in 1429 (Berry, 1910, 17, 33-5). The Act did not apply to a direct grant from royal funds, but permitted the commons of each separate county to levy a subsidy to provide the ?10. The Act of 1449 (Berry, 1910, 176) withdrew this power for Meath. In fact, grants of the same sort continued to be permitted, specifically ?10 and for towers of similar dimensions, into the later 1450s in Kildare and Wicklow (Berry, 1910, 285, 299, 457, 633). The reasons for abandoning the grant policy may lie in the way that, around this time, a number of men had fines for not constructing castles discharged, possibly because the ?10 grants had not been forthcoming. The grants may, in fact, have cost the royal government money in fines. This, linked to the reluctance of the county commons to subsidise the richer landowners’ new houses, is the probable reason for abandoning the grants.

It would be very unwise to use either the Act of 1428-9 or that of 1449 as arguments for the chronology of tower-houses. Although the 1429 Act did lay down dimensions (of 20 ft by 16 ft, and 40 ft high), no tower-house has been convincingly identified with them. It is, of course, unclear as to whether the Acts stimulated the first buildings of the type, or whether they required them to be in existence as models; whether they are points of origin or proofs that the tower-houses already existed. Even more, the Act of 1449 was not about limiting the building of towerhouses, as stated by Leask, and followed, among others, by Barry (1993, 212): it relates to the ending of a possible subsidy, not an end to building as such. It has never been possible to see ?10 as a large enough sum either to cause a man to build who did not intend to anyway, or its withdrawal as really enough of a disincentive to stop building, if the owner wanted a castle. At best, it can only have swayed a small minority of potential builders.

In recent years, there have been several attempts to see a significant number of towers as having been built in the fourteenth century. The origin of this lies with the criticism of Leask’s idea of the gap in building during that century, but it is applied not just to building in general but to tower-houses in particular. Three sorts of argument have been proposed: two based on interpretations of documents and one on the physical remains (summarised in Barry, 1993). In the first argument, unspecific references to fortified houses or to towers in castles are identified as being to the particular type of the tower-house, as for example the inspeximus taken in 1331 of a letter patent of 1310 (Jope and Seaby, 1959). This document allowed Geoffrey de Mortone to build two towers along the line of Dublin city wall, one at the end of the great bridge, and two houses against the city wall between them. Because the houses were to be made defensible, this has been taken to indicate that they might be urban tower-houses: similarly, references to towers in extents of castles have been identified as ‘some of the ancestors of the later urban towerhouses’ (Barry, 1993, 215). A similar, second line of argument identifies the word ‘fortalicium’ with tower-houses in the fourteenth century (Cairns, 1987, 9; Barry, 1993, 215). The word was, of course, used mainly because it was not a precise term to contemporaries, nor did it carry the social and administrative overtones of ‘castellum’. It means simply a small fortified site, no more and no less. The third argument musters physical evidence which tends to be in the form of negative evidence: the absence of identified late medieval features being used as an indication of an earlier date, as with Kilteel (Barry, 1993, 215). All these arguments are also deployed by O’Keeffe in an article which seeks to date two building to the fourteenth century: a stone tower at Ballyloo and a gate house at Rathnageeragh. He uses a mixture of arguments, from the absence of features said to be firmly datable to either the thirteenth or fifteenth century to an appeal to the distribution of castles related to a reconstruction of the political history of the county (O’Keeffe, 1987).

In this situation there are really only two statements that we can make with confidence. One is that Leask’s stress on the Acts of 1429 and 1449 was wrong; they are unlikely to have affected the building of tower-houses much, either in stimulating or depressing activity. The second is that the great majority of towerhouses, as Leask pointed out, display a common set of features, which in turn are linked to the late Gothic style of architecture found in Ireland, notably in the friaries known to have been founded in the fifteenth century. The origins of that style are to be sought in the earlier fourteenth century for churches, and it is inherently unlikely that there were no castles built in the fourteenth century (see, for example, Greencastle, Donegal, Newcastle West or Harry Avery’s castles), but that does not tell us about the specific history of the building of the tower-houses as an identified type of castle. In the absence of new, better evidence, we may stick with Westropp: a few tower-houses may have been built in the later fourteenth century, with numbers rising steeply from the start to the middle of the fifteenth century, and then declining, particularly after the earlier sixteenth century, although with a small burst of activity associated with British Plantation schemes of the early seventeenth century. Jordan (1991) reviewed the evidence for the general dating, but, more importantly, attempted to discriminate between early and late tower-houses in Wexford, without much success, as he stated.

In this context it is pertinent to recall Stell’s warnings about drawing too firm lines within the population of castles and exaggerating the special nature of towerhouses as opposed to hall-houses in particular. Within Ireland there are a number of castles which lie in between the two classifications. One is Ballisnihiney in Co. Galway (Knox, 1910). This has the proportions and apparently open internal space of a hall, with the joist holes of an external, first-floor entry. Over the first floor, however, is a vault built over wicker centring, like a tower-house (see Fig. 97). Castle Carra, in Co. Antrim, has the features of a hall-house, but the outside dimensions of a tower-house (McNeill, 1983, 11820). Moylough castle, and the other hall-houses, apparently isolated in the countryside without associated stone buildings around them, cannot have been very different in effect from tower-houses. This would allow the strict typologist to see these as hybrid structures and to propose the idea of the tower-house developing from them internally in Ireland, which is one of the thrusts of the argument for continuous building through the fourteenth century, with the emergence of the type then.

Against the idea of an essentially internal evolution of the tower-houses of Ireland may be opposed the idea that they were introduced from overseas. O’Danachair (1979) put this forward overtly, but based his argument rather curiously on the internal distribution of towers within Ireland. Because they are found most often in the south-west, from Galway to Limerick counties and east of there, he concluded that the idea of the tower-house entered Ireland there, probably from France, and then spread like vegetation. The argument is, most remarkably mechanical and ignores the ease of communications within medieval Ireland, where people moved freely and regularly from one end of the island to the other.

The question of the outside introduction still remains, however. The idea of a blueprint of a tower-house being introduced to Ireland from somewhere and copied we may dismiss. There are few, if any, parallels close enough to argue that case, and the regional varieties of tower-houses in Ireland militate against such an idea. The nearest to such a case would be the similarity of the twin-turreted ‘gate house’ type found in Co. Down (Jope, 1966, 120-1) to the tower at Belsay in Northumberland. The general plan of the towers, with the entrance place between two turrets linked by an arched machicolation, is similar, but the masonry at Belsay, its vaults, corbelled rounds and crenellations are all different. At best, the overall scheme of the one inspired imitation in the other; communication could have been at the level of a description by the patron, and almost certainly did not involve a mason travelling, because the technical details of the masonry are so different. Nor is it clear in which direction the communication went.

In England, however, there is a clear line of development of chamber towers, sometimes in lesser castles: one could instance Stokesay in Shropshire or Longthorpe near Ely around 1300. In the north of the country, where tower-houses became very popular in the fifteenth century, one of the Feltons added a fine chamber tower to his hall-house at Edlingham in Northumberland during the second half of the fourteenth century; it was square and vaulted over the ground floor, while at Etal in the same county a similar tower was built during the same period. The chamber tower in all these cases was not an isolated structure but linked to a hall, but the idea was there. The tower had always been important as a symbol of lordly authority (Dixon and Lott, 1993) and it is possible to imagine how a lord might reduce his castle to the tower alone. Chamber towers were found in Ireland, too, and the same might have happened there.

Although there are no more hard-and-fast rules for the end date for the building of what we may define as tower-houses than there are for the beginnings, we can see tendencies. There are a number of features which we may associate with buildings of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first dated occurrence of the use of brick in Ireland appears to be at Carrickfergus castle in the 1560s (McNeill, 1981, 47-8). Significantly, the brick was employed there to insert cannon ports into the medieval structure. The use of guns in war in Ireland seems to become common from around 1500 and we may consider as sixteenth century or later those loops specifically designed for the use of handguns, which means the loops which are reduced to a small hole at the outer face, or those with double splays. A feature of later Tudor buildings is the elaborate fireplace, often with a flue leading to an elaborate set of chimneys. Some or all of these features tend to be found in those tower-houses which have no vault, so its absence may also be linked to a later date.