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Wexford Castles Environment Settlement and Society |
July 9, 2014 |
| Reviewer:
Rory Sherlock, Landscape History from Ireland
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The publication of Wexford Castles by the late Billy Colfer brings to a close a remarkable trilogy in which the author sought to explore the history of his native county through a series of profusely illustrated volumes within the Irish Landscape series published by Cork University Press. Colfer's first engagement with Cork University Press came though his contribution of a case study on the Hook Peninsula, Co. Wexford, to the hugely successful Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997) and continued through his subsequent publication of a three large-format books on The Hook Peninsula (2004), Wexford: a town and its landscape (2008) and Wexford Castles (2013). The current volume, with the support of superb cartography, outlines the Anglo-Norman colonisation of County Wexford in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and so places the discussion of the castles of the county which follows in its wider geographic and historical context. Colfer notes the existence of twenty mottes and nine ringworks in the county, nineteen of which were adjacent to churches, and also records that five of the six thirteenth-century stone castles in the region appear to have been preceded by earlier earthwork fortifications. The gradual decline of the Anglo-Norman colony, due partly to the impact of the Bruce Wars and the Black Death, and the concomitant rise in the power of the Gaelic Irish in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led directly to the abandonment of manors and the neglect of castles in the region.
These events also shaped the settlement patterns of the coming centuries, as the old Anglo-Norman families retreated southwards to the baronies of Forth and Bargy where most of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tower houses were built, leaving the northern areas under Gaelic control. Towerhouse construction is commonly associated with weak central authority, as persons of means seek to provide for their own security in lawless times and, since Wexford was held as a palatinate by the absent earls of Shrewsbury until 1536, it seems that many of the 137 tower houses recorded by Colfer in Wexford were built within this context. While the suggestion that thirteenth-century castles were arranged in a series of defensive lines across the county may cause some debate amongst scholars, most of Colfer's arguments are securely founded in his extensive fieldwork, his knowledge of the Wexford landscape and his mastery of the available historical sources. For example, the suggestion that tower-house building in Wexford may have been boosted by an Act of Parliament of 1441 which established a subsidy for their construction in the south of the county is worthy of note and reflects the better-known act of 1430 in the Dublin Pale which gave rise to the term £10 castles. Like the tower houses of the Dublin Pale, those in Wexford are simple structures and are considerably smaller than comparable buildings in most other counties. Most of the Wexford examples are rectangular in plan, have a single entrance doorway at ground-floor level and feature a stone vault over the main ground-floor chamber, above which comfortable accommodation is provided on three levels. Discussion on Irish tower houses tends to focus on issues of architectural detail and Downloaded by [Fiona Counsell] at 07:19 08 July 2014 100 landscape history regional variation and Colfer is strong on matters of form and typology, but he must also be commended for taking a broader approach by exploring the manorial landscapes, including extensive church lands, within which tower houses were built. Tower houses and churches frequently mark the site of late medieval manorial villages which failed to prosper in subsequent centuries and so they can act as a key settlement indicator for the period in Ireland, since the lesser-status housing which developed around these twin nuclei was often quite ephemeral in form. Many Irish tower houses may also have had free-standing, timber-framed halls beside them, as described in late sixteenth-century sources, but the landscape of Wexford also features an important series of stone-built three-storey fortified hall houses of late sixteenth-century date. These buildings, rarely found elsewhere in Ireland, are commonly served by an attached four-storey service tower and mark the end of castle construction in the county. This handsome volume concludes with an exploration of the decline of the castle in Wexford, a consideration of their legacy and a useful gazetteer of standing tower houses in the county. Over 400 illustrations of the highest quality, including plans, maps, photographs and antiquarian sketches, serve to illuminate Colfer's elegant, well-referenced narrative and his love for his native place shines throughout this volume, a fitting legacy for a fine scholar.
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