ABSTRACT
A c a st l e is the defence of a man who is obliged to mistrust his neighbours. An Anglo-Saxon lord-even an AngloSaxon king-lived among his own people, with nothing more than a hedge or a ditch to separate him from those who were subordinate to him. A Norman baron, like his Celtic or Teutonic predecessor, who had seized upon lands to which he had no hereditary right, was under the neces sity of protecting himself against those whom he had dis possessed. In England, castles were unknown in the social order till just before the Norman conquest: certain Norman proteges of Edward the Confessor appear to have erected structures of this kind somewhere about 1048. Not till after the Conquest had been accomplished, however, did a fever of castle-building begin. It is not to be supposed that these early castles were
comparable with the imposing structures of Plantagenet times. They were, indeed, nothing more than wooden towers, erected on the tops of earthen mounds, surrounded by an enclosure of earth and palisading. The enclosure was called basse-cour, base-court, or ward,, the ' guarded place ' : or else ballium, bailey, the ' palisaded place \ The mound, which was usually at one side of the bailey, conical in shape, and flattened on the top, was called the mote or motte (not moat, a word which should be confined to the water-ditch of later fortifications). The wooden tower was known as bretesche. Castles of this kind were suitable to the conditions which
called them forth. Castles, to serve as military bases, were essential to Norman methods of fighting : and there-
fore in subduing a new country, at each military centre a castle had to be run up hastily. Even if the conception of stone castles had evolved in the eleventh century-and the Tower of London, which appears to have been built of stone from the first, shows that such structures were not impossible even at so early a date-the Conquerors could not have afforded the time to wait until they had been erected. But when the Conquest was completed, the castles could
never remain at such a rudimentary stage of development in the turbulent conditions of eleventh-century society. Building with wood is easy and rapid, but it is dangerous ; wood can be easily burned, and determined assaults by fire are difficult to deal with effectively. Stone very soon took the place of wood, and the essentially temporary houses, in which the new lords had lodged themselves, gave place to permanent fortified habitations, strong to resist the puny munitions which were then the sole resource of the attackers. This change took place in England during the century that intervened between the victory of William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland ; indeed, by the time of the latter event, the large fortified keep, with its surrounding walls, had become an estab lished feature of the English landscape. The motte-andbailey stronghold was already, in England, a thing of the past. But history repeated itself when Ireland was invaded;
the same conditions were met with once more, and the old devices were revived to cope with them. Once more the invaders had to run up castles rapidly, to serve as bases for the reduction of a hostile country. Once more they had to deal with a people among whom castles were unknown, and with a land where warfare took the form of hand-to-hand fighting. Once more the fortifications of the newcomers took the form of wooden bretesche-towers, erected on the tops of earthen mottes, to raise them above the range of the arrows which were the most formidable weapons in the hands of the enemy. Once again the structures were temporary, to suit the immediate emer
gency; and were superseded by strong buildings of stone so soon as the reduction of the country had been sufficiently accomplished. As the new stone structures were built to conform to the contemporary styles of England-though on a smaller scale-Ireland cannot show any examples of the intermediate stages of the evolution, which in England ran its course between 1066 and 1172. There are motte-and-bailey earthworks in plenty through
the country, especially in the places where the AngloNorman lords established themselves most firmly. These take the form of conical flat-topped hillocks, resembling in outline a gigantic Turkish * fe z ' more than anything else. The flat top distinguishes them from the rounded hillock-tumuli wherein the magnates of the Bronze Age were buried; but otherwise there is little external differ ence between them, and there is some excuse for the early antiquaries who could not understand that all earth-works are not necessarily prehistoric. Indeed, it may be that an ancient tumulus was sometimes adapted to the purpose of the motte-builder, by having its rounded top flattened down : such a transaction could be exposed by an excava tion bringing to light a bronze-age burial in the heart of the mound. It is difficult to believe, for example, that the enormous mound of Knockrafann, near Cahir in Co. Tipperary,1 was erected from the first as the foundation for a Norman bretesche, although in outline it conforms to the motte model. The results of excavation would, however, have to be
interpreted with judgment. A find of bronze-age objects in the soil of a motte would not in any way justify us in dating the structure to the Bronze Age : on the contrary, its evidence would be definitely unfavourable to such a conclusion. It would mean nothing more than that they happened to be lying in one of the parcels of earth which the motte-builder appropriated for his own purposes, and that they were heaped up with the earth, unnoticed or disregarded in the haste with which the operation had necessarily been carried through. It is in this way that we interpret the discovery of a stone hatchet-head, and
the slip of bronze inscribed with the Runic inscription of Domnall Seal's-head [ante, p. 219), in an incongruous union within the motte of Greenmount, Co. Louth. Though we may pardon the earlier writers for misinter-
pretating the nature of the mottes, there is now no excuse for doing so. It is not difficult to distinguish at a glance between true prehistoric structures and these Norman erections. The flat top is the invariable criterion: and such mounds as those of Kilfinnane, Co. Limerick ; Castle town Geoghegan, Co. Westmeath (a superb example) ; Clonard, Co. Meath; are object lessons, a sight of which is worth pages of description, to teach the student to dis criminate these works from any other. Other criteria can be found at individual sites. The complete Norman estab lishment includes a bailey at the foot of the motte-an enclosed court, surrounded by a defence now reduced to an earthwork and ditch, though once, no doubt, strongly palisaded: and when this remains (as at Castletown Geoghegan) no doubt can possibly be left as to the purpose of the structure. Again, place-names may often help us to assign a mound of the kind to its proper use and period. The Norman word motte was borrowed, in the form mota, by the Irish, and sometimes reappears in topographical nomenclature. The town of Moate, Co. Westmeath, con tains within its area a mound resembling in size and shape the motte now called ' Castle H ill' at Cambridge: this structure has obviously given its name to the town, and the name helps to explain the structure. There is another name which reappears several times on the map of Ireland, and is equally instructive : this is Brittas, a corruption of bretesche, the name of the wooden tower which once stood on the motte. Of such a structure nothing ever remains but the memory, enshrined in the name : but if at a place called Brittas we find an earthen mound, we are obliged to explain it as a Norman motte unless there be unshakeable evidence to the contrary. In addition to the palisading surrounding the bailey,
there was a further rampart of the same kind surrounding the bretesche on the summit of the mound : and the first
stage in the evolution of the stone castle was the con version of this inflammable defence to a wall of stone. Such a wall, however, would be very insecurely founded on the top of a recently heaped mound of earth : and the consequential abandonment of the motte became inevit able. For the motte with its summit-palisade was sub stituted a circular wall within the bailey, inside which stood the wooden house of the lord of the castle. This shell-keep, as it is called, characterizes the castles of the end of the eleventh century: and in consequence shellkeep castles are unknown in Ireland. By the time stone castles began to be built in Ireland, the shell-keep had evolved into the mediaeval stone keep, the strong house of stone in several storeys, wherein the master with his family and servants had their habitation. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, castle-
building was one of the chief industries of the country. The number of ruined ‘ castles 1 is enormous. We must, however, enclose the word thus, within inverted commas, because, although it is the term commonly used to denote the structures indicated, it is in most cases a misnomeralmost as bad as calling a hedgehog, a porcupine. The great majority of the buildings so designated are merely family houses, fortified as an act of precaution in a country liable to political and other disturbances ; they have little in common with the lordly baronial establishments, hous ing an army of retainers, and dominating an extensive territory of serfs, to which the name should properly be confined. This plethora of fortifications is a severe practical
embarrassment to the Irish antiquary, especially to those charged with administrative duties in connexion with the preservation of ancient monuments in Ireland. It is an impossibility to undertake the care of them all, for many of them need constant attention, and often expensive repair or conservation works. And yet they should not be allowed to perish unrecorded. Once more, as we contem plate these ancient structures, many of which will dis appear before the road-maker or house-builder within the
coming century, we realize the need of an official Survey of ancient monuments, by which the special points of interest of each structure could at least be recorded on paper. There is no one of these buildings that has not had a history-a history of joy and grief, romance and tragedy. But once again, they have been struck dumb by the hand which fired the Record Office, and thus con demned the people of Ireland, for all time, to grovel in a bovine ignorance of vast tracts of the history of their country. Notwithstanding the wealth of the material, it cannot
be said that any adequate study of the castles of Ireland has ever been made.2 Individual specimens have been described with more or less accuracy: but there is no synthetic work tracing the history of the development of the fortified dwelling, from the motte-and-bretesche through the mediaeval castles and the Tudor houses, to the manorial dwellings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of the latter, in recent years, have been wantonly destroyed, along with an untold treasury of con tents in furniture, books, pictures, and family and other historical documents, to the permanent impoverishment, not so much of their individual owners (who presumably obtained at least a nominal compensation by insurance or otherwise) but of the nation at large. Never did the people of Ireland cut off their noses to spite their faces so assiduously as in those troubled years. The material for the study of civil history is now much less than it was, so recently as the beginning of the present century: by so much is the need for preserving what is left all the greater. In fact, the true castles in the country are not really
so very numerous. The early thirteenth-century fortress of the De Lacys at Trim is the most imposing, with its huge square keep, each side having a square projection — thus making the unusual form of a twenty-sided build ing. Outside is the bailey wall with numerous towers, enclosing a space of about 2 acres. Thirteenth-century castles with circular keeps are found at Dundrum, Co.
