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EARTH AND TIMBER CASTLES

The most difficult area in the study of Irish castles is the recognition in the field of the earthworks of the timber castles. The country is full of earthworks of all shapes and sizes and recent work in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland has shown that it is extremely difficult to date and classify them. When we look at medieval earthworks we have to remember that we are seeing only part of the defences of the castle and that we are missing all the woodwork connected with the defences. We have two types of earth and timber castles in Ireland, namely the motte and the ringwork. However, there are a number of sites that could fit into either category while others, which are obviously of medieval origin, will not fit neatly into one or the other. For instance, Sheeaunbeg Motte, Barrinagh, Co. Roscommon was recorded as a motte, as a motte and bailey using a natural esker for part of its defences, as a ringfort converted into a platform ringfort or motte, and by the Archaeological Survey as a possible inauguration site. None of the recent work on medieval earthwork castles has come to grips with the morphology of the ringwork.' The ringwork has been described as, at its simplest, being shaped like an empty flan case.' It can therefore be easily confused in Ireland and possibly Wales with the ringfort. Indeed, in Wales, many sites which have been identified as ringworks look remarkably like large ringforts. If it is difficult to recognise a ringwork in the field based on its morphology alone, then other factors can come into play which might help us identify these sites, namely their siting and distribution. Higham and Barker in their book on the timber castles set out a framework for discussing these monuments by dividing them into five groups:

1. Ringworks without baileys

2. Ringworks with one bailey or more

3. Mottes without baileys or with no apparent baileys

4. Mottes with one bailey or more

5. Ringworks or mottes (with or without baileys) within earlier earthworks

The only category mentioned above which has so far not been found in Ireland in any great numbers is the ringwork with a bailey. However, recent fieldwork has revealed an example of one just off the north slope of the Loughcrew Hills, Co. Meath, and two possible sites in Roscommon at

Sheeaunbeg and Dundonnell. Other Irish site types which sometimes prove to be of Anglo-Norman origin are the raised raths, cliff-edge forts and promontory forts, whether inland or coastal. I will deal with these in the first section on ringworks followed by a discussion on mottes.

RINGWORKS

The morphology of the ringwork or its exact definition presents something of a problem in that it is often difficult to distinguish its earthwork remains from the more common ringfort or other unclassified earthwork enclosures. In England and Wales it is, in its simplest form, an area enclosed by a fosse and rampart. It has also been defined as having a minimum height of 2m above the level of the outside defences with the enclosed area disproportionately small compared to the massive enclosing elements. However, in Ireland we can expand on these definitions by saying the bank(s) are more pronounced and the fosse is wider than one would expect to find on a ringfort. The entrance to a ringwork is also distinguishable from a ringfort in that it will often have a pronounced ramp and each side of the gap in the rampart will be faced with stone. The example at Drumsawry, Loughcrew, Co. Meath, also has extensive stonework on top of its rampart. A number of ringworks have recently been identified in north Tipperary and, in most instances, they are not circular, being either almost squared-off or irregular in shape. A ringwork, test excavated by the author at Mulphedder, Clonard, Co. Meath, was of a very irregular shape, Fortunately, one of the three small cuttings on the river side of the site produced the parts of fifteen planks which were part of a wooden palisade and appear to be part of the outer defences of the ringwork. Several of the planks had dowel holes in them for securing to upright posts and cross timbers which would have been braced from the inside.

Recent excavations at Trim Castle, Co. Meath," produced unequivocal evidence for a ringwork castle which was undoubtedly the fortress mentioned in the near contemporary Norman-French poem 'The Song of Dermot and the Earl'. The poem states that Hugh de Lacy fortified a house at Trim, threw a fosse around it and enclosed it with a herisson in the year 1172. There was clear evidence for a palisade trench and bracing posts at the north-west section of the ringwork. In addition, excavations uncovered large post-holes of a wooden structure inside the ringwork which had been burnt down. The excavated evidence here fits nicely with the historical reference to the burning down of Hugh de Lacy's castle in 1173 by Roderick O'Connor. Also found were the remains of grain spread over a wide area as well as horseshoes and arrowheads, just what one would expect from a fortification which housed knights and their horses. Four other castles have also clear evidence of a ringwork fortification pre-dating the stone castle. At Ferns in Co. Wexford, excavation revealed the remains of an earthwork under the south-east angle of the keep.` A small fosse outside the castle at the east side may also have belonged to the pre-stone castle fortification. Recently at Carlow Castle, which is morphologically the same as Ferns, the fosse of a ringwork was found below the foundations of the remains of the keep. ` At Adare Castle, Co. Limerick, a wide deep fosse encloses the keep providing protection for the inner ward. Until 1961 it had been postulated that this fosse was the remains of an earlier ringfort. However, it was convincingly demonstrated that metal and wooden objects recovered from the fosse c.1845 were mainly of a mid- to late-medieval date and there was no reason to assume the enclosed area was a ringfort. The subcircular shape of the site with its wide deep fosse would rather suggest that it was a ringwork castle and would therefore have a direct parallel in Trim Castle. Also the siting for a ringfort on low ground beside the river would be very unusual. Another possible example of a ringwork pre-dating a stone castle is to be found at Clonmacnoise although some archaeologists claim that the earthwork is contemporary with the stone building. However, it is in a similar siting to Adare Castle beside a river on low ground and it would be unusual to build such a massive fosse and rampart contemporaneously with the erection of the stone fortress. Recent excavations at Kilkenny Castle and Limerick Castle have also revealed a substantial ringwork underneath the walls of the stone building. At Limerick Castle the earthen bank was, in places, revetted by stone and there was a substantial external fosse. There is also the possibility of a ringwork surrounding Lea Castle, Co. Laois.

It was stated, in 1987, that there were only five sites where excavation had uncovered possible ringworks: Pollardstown, Co. Kildare; Castletobin, Co. Kilkenny; Beal Boru, Co. Clare; Clonard, Co. Meath and Ferns, Co.Wexford. Four more can be added to this list, namely Trim Castle, Kilkenny Castle, Carlow Castle and Limerick Castle. The number of excavated examples is unlikely to increase in the near future unless a research programme is undertaken. None of the partially excavated sites other than Trim, Clonard, Limerick and Carlow have given us definite evidence of defensive details such as wooden palisading and revetting so we have to rely on observation and interpretation of the remains of the earthwork. If we compare the ringwork, using recently discovered examples in Kildare, Cavan, Meath, Laois, Offaly, Roscommon and Tipperary, to a typical ringfort there are quite pronounced differences. It has been maintained that Irish ringforts could be classified as ringworks if they occurred in England, and that ringworks in Ireland may have been classified as ringforts because we lacked a classification scheme which is sufficiently discerning." Unfortunately, until recently, this has been the situation. Lurking in the archaeological records of the Archaeological Survey are many ringwork castles classified as large ringforts or merely as enclosures. For instance, at Danestown and Rodanstown, Co. Meath, multivallate ringworks adjacent to medieval churches have been classifed as ringforts. Fortunately, fieldworkers have come on the scene with an interest in medieval archaeology, who are no longer predominantly interested in the prehistoric and early historic periods.

A number of cliff-edge forts in north Tipperary appear to be exactly the same as those identified in Glamorgan as ringworks. They basically consist of single or multiple ramparts and fosses in a semi-circle enclosing a D-shaped area which is bounded on its straight side by a cliff or ravine. In Glamorgan, ringworks are often situated close to church sites as are the mottes, but in Ireland sites recently identified do not appear to have this association. There are, of course, examples of this association of ringwork and church. At Castlerahan in Co. Cavan, for instance, there appears to have been a medieval church sited inside a bailey associated with a large and impressive ringwork. This ringwork is built on the summit of a drumlin and consists of a subrectangular platform 4m high, measuring 42m by 24m enclosed by two substantial banks of earth and stone. Another cliff-edge fort, Ballyprior, was identified in Co. Laois. Its entranceway was via a

causeway and its rampart consisted of an earth and stone bank. Seven ringwork castles, three of which are 'cliff-edge forts' were identified in Co.Wexford. The one at Newtown (Ferrycarrig) was fortified by FitzStephen in 1169-70 and excavations here revealed a stone wall on top of an earthen bank.` The site is located on a spit of land which extends northwards into the estuary and is naturally defended by steep cliffs to the north and east. By 1171 the site was defended by a fosse and a bank with a palisade. The excavation showed that the fosse was 5.2m wide at the top, 1.8m at the base and 1.9m deep. Unfortunately the finds from the fosse could not be closely dated. Thirteen cliff-edge forts have been recorded in Cork and many of these are likely to be Anglo-Norman in origin.

In Co. Kildare, excavations were carried out on the remains of an earthen enclosure at Pollardstown which was situated on top of a natural gravel ridge. Its siting, and the recovery of medieval finds from it, indicate that this was a ringwork. The finds included an iron arrowhead which can be dated to the twelfth century and two medieval stirrups. Another earthwork site was excavated at Beal Boru, Co. Clare, which is situated on a steep-sided triangular spur of gravel on the bank of the River Shannon. Because of its position overlooking the river, its siting was believed to have been chosen to dominate or control an important crossing

point. The castle and its earlier earthwork defences at Clonmacnoise, also on the banks of the River Shannon, must have had a similar function. The Beal Boru site was circular in plan, had a very large bank and was surrounded by a broad well-marked fosse. The overall diameter of the site was 70m to 75m but since the base of the bank was up to 17m wide, only an area some 20m in diameter was enclosed. The entrance to this site, like so many ringworks, was via a causeway and the bank was faced with stone. This site was built and occupied in two distinct and separate phases, the earliest being sometime in the eleventh century based on the coin evidence. The second phase of construction was thought to be an unfinished motte; however, the site could be complete and is almost certainly a ringwork castle built on a pre-existing enclosure. Its location and siting would also point to the latter interpretation.

Another ringwork is to be found on the west bank of the old course of the River Shannon, at Meelick, Co. Galway. In the Annals of Clonmacnoise it is mentioned that William de Burgo founded a castle here in 1203 close to the church. It was assumed that the present ecclesiastical remains had been built on the site of the early castle and had destroyed it. However, an enclosure 100m north of the friary is very similar to the ringwork castle at Clonard and has a similar siting. The site consists of an irregular-shaped enclosure defined by a bank with the enclosed area slightly higher than the surrounding land. There is quite an amount of stone on and in the bank and there is a ramped entrance at the south. Since there are no obvious signs of a fosse around the site it must have been defended by a substantial wooden palisade.

In Co. Offaly three ringworks were identified compared to eleven mottes. However, mottes were a well-known feature whereas the ringworks are newly identified. One of these is a low, rectangular-shaped flat-topped mound situated just inside the earthen ramparts which enclose the monastic settlement at Churchland/Clonmore, Seirkieran. The example at Ballynacarrig is an irregular-shaped, flat-topped mound with the appearance of a truncated motte. It has the remains of a bailey-type area which is defined by a low earthen bank. The third example at Dungar is a circular platform enclosed by a water-filled fosse. It has a causewayed entrance and the possible remains of an enclosing wall around the perimeter of the platform.

Fourteen ringwork castles have been identified in Tipperary (North Riding). Three of these are cliff-edge forts while another is sited very close to a ravine. Most of the sites are low platforms with low earth and stone banks around the perimeter, some with stone facing and others with wall footings. Where a fosse exists it is usually flat-bottomed and access is via a causeway. One site, at Greenan, is very similar to the Meelick and Clonard examples and is situated in low-lying, wet terrain. Recent fieldwork in Roscommon has revealed at least six ringworks in addition to those identified in a 1988 paper.' All of these sites are marked on the Ordnance Survey maps but the initial interpretation and classification was not precise enough. For instance, there is an earthen enclosure close to the bank of the River Suck at Creeharmore. It is a subcircular earthen platform, slightly raised above the level of the surrounding ground. The platform has a slight lip around its perimeter possibly indicating the remains of a palisade. The platform is enclosed by a wide flat-bottomed fosse and the site is cut off on the landward side by a bank and fosse. There is a break in the bank and its terminals turn markedly inwards to give access to a small platform which lies between the outer fosse and the inner defences. This platform is undoubtedly the remains of a timber gateway controlling the entrance and drawbridge. At the river side of the ringwork there is a passageway which is delimited by an earthen bank on each side and would appear to be some type of slipway for small boats. Another of the Roscommon sites is at Ballyglass and has been classified as a platform ringfort. It is a circular platform c.2m high and c.35m in diameter and is surrounded by a wide flatbottomed fosse. Its location on flat low-lying ground suggests that this is a ringwork rather than a raised rath. The site at Rathnallog is very similar in its morphology and is located in the same type of terrain.

Some sites in Roscommon have initially been identified as burial mounds but their siting and morphology would indicate that they are medieval earthworks. For instance, an impressive site at Gortnasillagh was identified first as a rath and then as a barrow. It is situated on the summit of a ridge and consists of an almost circular-shaped platform with a diameter of about 24m and a maximum height of 2.7m at the west side. The platform is surrounded by a wide, flat-bottomed fosse but there is no definite evidence for a causeway entrance. Lissalway, classified as a raised rath, has a large deep fosse surrounding it and could well be a medieval earthwork castle.

Without citing further examples of ringwork castles, as well as possible sites, it has become quite obvious to field archaeologists that this type of site is there to be found. Another way of identifying the ringwork other than its morphology is its location, siting and association with other type sites. In England and Wales medieval earthwork castles are often associated with ecclesiastical remains; however, in Ireland this link is not as pronounced. A good example of this relationship is to be seen at Castlerahan, Co. Cavan, where a church and graveyard are situated within the bailey of a large and impressive ringwork. Another impressive site is at Rathangan, Co. Kildare, and is situated only 100m away from the site of a medieval church. It consists of a circular platform with a diameter of about 60m and rises 2m above the surrounding land. It has a causewayed entrance at the east. When considering the siting and location of earthwork castles one has to keep in mind medieval nucleated settlement in England where one would expect to find a church, a castle and houses with their plots. In Ireland we seldom find such a neat association of all three major elements despite extensive fieldwork in Westmeath and elsewhere. However, keeping the political divisions of the early Anglo-Norman settlement with its sub-infeudation in mind, we realise that we are more likely to find discrete sites and dispersed settlement within the broad area of the manorlands which can be roughly equated with the parish boundaries. The historical records are therefore very important in helping to identify medieval earthwork castles within a manor. However, there still remains the problem of identifying sites in the sub-manor which would be of a lower status to those in the chief manor.

Because of the poor historical records in some areas and the scattered nature of the earthworks it will remain almost impossible to distinguish medieval sites from earlier ones. It is undisputed, however, that where there is a manor there must be a medieval earthwork castle. So, for instance, at Rathangan, Co. Kildare, there is no obvious early castle to be seen until one examines the large earthwork which is classified as a ringfort by the Archaeological Survey. On close inspection it can be seen that its banks and defences have been altered to make it into a ringwork castle. There is an annalistic reference to the rath here in 801 and later references to a castle. Its position close to the site of a medieval church would be a typical model for manorial settlement in England.

When identifying ringwork castles it is very important to keep in mind their location and siting so that one can isolate them from the more numerous ringforts and other earlier enclosures. It is generally accepted that ringforts are located off the tops of high ground on the slopes of hills and are nearly always isolated. Ringworks seldom, if ever, are sited in the same type of location as ringforts and usually occupy the high ground on top of ridges and small hills. They occupy areas where there is often a degree of natural defence such as at the edge of cliffs or the end of inland promontories. Ringworks are also found in low-lying, wet ground but on a slight rise. For example, ringworks at Meelick and Clonard are beside rivers. The ringworks recently identified through the fieldwork of the Archaeological Survey indicate that most of the sites are located in strategic positions either controlling river crossings or passes through valleys. Other isolated examples appear to have been placed close to areas of historical and prehistoric interest such as at Loughcrew. and Knowth in Co. Meath and

Rathmore, Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon. The location of these three sites seems to be a statement to show that new rulers dominated areas of ancient importance rather than for strategic reasons alone.

West of the Shannon and in Ulster there are a considerable number of raised raths which consist of a circular raised platform enclosed by a fosse. In Co. Down, at Rathmullan, an excavated site ended as a motte but had four phases of occupation which pre-dated the Anglo-Norman fortifications. Another mound site in the same county at Gransha, was also excavated. Here, however, the final phase of occupation pre-dated the Anglo-Normans. Raised raths are defined as flat-topped mounds, sometimes with a slight bank around the perimeter of the summit and with a ramped or causewayed entrance?' From the evidence of those excavated in Ulster it can be seen that their height was a result of prolonged occupation with occasional deliberate dumping of clean upcast material. However, some raised raths were formed in one operation so their height was achieved at the initial stage of building?' At Gransha the extra height of the mound gave it a motte-like appearance, but this was achieved in one operation prior to the Anglo-Norman invasion. In the barony of Ikerrin, Tipperary, an examination of platform ringforts concluded that they were not of medieval date because of their siting and location.

A paper on the timber and earthwork fortifications in western Ireland pointed out that there was little easily recognisable physical evidence for Anglo-Norman settlement west of the Shannon and in parts of Munster. Certainly, there is very little evidence for the classical motte-type castle, so we are dependent on finding other types of medieval earthwork castles for the physical remains of Anglo-Norman settlement. There are some cliff-edge forts which may be ringworks in Cork and in north Mayo recent fieldwork has turned up some hill-top enclosures which could also be of Anglo-Norman origin. In Co. Sligo almost 90 raised raths have been identified but only four mottes and one ringwork. Going on the basis of excavation results from similar sites in Ulster it is possible that between 25% and 50% of the raised raths could have Anglo-Norman remains on them. Therefore, raised raths could fill the void created by the lack of more easily recognisable, medieval earthwork fortifications in the western half of Ireland. Few raised raths, outside the Ulster counties, have been found in the eastern part of the country In Monaghan, where there are only three mottes recorded, there are a number of raised raths similar in their morphology to those excavated in Co. Down. In Co. Cavan, eight mottes and one ringwork castle were recorded; however, a number of sites classified as ringforts in the Archaeological Inventory would appear to be ringwork castles. For instance at Drumcor, Drurnharid, Cornaslieve and Lisnafana the enclosed area is raised considerablv above the level of the surrounding land. The enclosing elements consist of a verv large bank and a wide deep fosse and invariably they have causewayed entrances. However, as demonstrated by the excavation of a small number of raised raths in Co. Down, there is no way that we can be certain that any of these sites could be of Anglo-Norman origin. Virtually all of the sites listed as ringforts in Cavan are isolated and cannot be classified by their association with ecclesiastical remains. Since the Anglo-Normans settled areas west of the Shannon, in Munster and counties such as Monaghan and Cavan, they must have built earthwork castles. But as there are little or no obvious remains of their earthwork castles in these areas we must assume that some sites classified as ringforts, especially the raised or platform type, are in fact Anglo-Norman in origin, or Gaelic sites which have been adapted by the Anglo-Normans.

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HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

The English medieval castle was seldom an impregnable fortress. It served both as fortification and residence, and there was always a degree of incompatibility between the two roles. Military emergencies were unusual, even in the Middle Ages, and to keep up with the latest initiatives in siege warfare would have imposed an unjustifiable burden. One can often observe the dilemma between making a castle strong against assailants without rendering it inconvenient to those who lived there. Even the siting of castles was dictated not by defensive considerations alone, but by the need to dominate the town or control the highway. The dynamic role of the castle - forming the seat of a lord who commanded the surrounding territory - was more important than the strongest defences.

Although castles are similar in overall conception they can be highly individual and no two are alike. Each was purpose-built according to the site, the circumstances, the builder's preferences and the funds available. Contrasting schools of thought helped to create variety in numerous ways, e.g. keep or no keep, round or square towers, regular or irregular layout, etc. There is an element of evolution in these respects but it should not be overstated, Conversely the view that castles cannot be categorised meaningfully into types is unhelpful.

Origins

Although this book deals with English medieval castles, it must be emphasised that most of the defensive features employed in the Middle Ages had already existed for a long time, and very little is native to this island. Towns have always needed defending and from ancient times there was sometimes a citadel providing an inner line of defence. Such was the ancient Greek acropolis, though it should be noted that this was a state fortress opposed to a private residence. In Britain mighty hillforts protected the Iron Age populace; their earth ramparts are still impressive at sites such as Old Oswestry and Maiden Castle. The Roman invaders built forts which were garrison bases designed to house a professional army. The later Roman forts of the 'Saxon Shore' are more geared for defence, with thick walls and flanking bastions a sign that Rome was losing the initiative to Teutonic invaders. As the western half of the Roman Empire fell apart in the fifth century AD, wealthy senators fortified their country villas against barbarian attack. These were arguably the forerunners of the medieval castle, though there are no known examples in Britain.

The castle proper originated in Dark Age Europe. With the break-up of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century there emerged the pragmatic system of feudalism, with its emphasis on loyalty to one's immediate superior in place of the old ties to a remote central authority. Lords great and small carved out estates for themselves and raised private fortresses to live in. This process can be seen most dearly in northern France, where a number of dukes, counts and lesser warlords wielded power without effective restraint from the weak French monarchy. By the year 1000 castles were becoming a familiar sight in western Europe, though almost all of them were modest affairs of earth and timber.

Different conditions prevailed on the English side of the Channel, however. After the Danes had been rebuffed England emerged in the tenth century as a relatively unified kingdom. This unity contrived to keep feudalism and the castle at bay. Defence remained purely communal, as in the 'burghs' or fortified towns founded by Alfred the Great and his successors. A few castles were in fact raised in England before the Norman Conquest, but they were the product of Norman adventurers invited across by Edward the Confessor to assist in the wars against the Welsh. These Normans were not popular and their stay was brief Whether the English would eventually have adopted castles of their own accord is an open question. It is difficult to see how they could have resisted such a pervasive European trend in the long term, but we shall never know as the Battle of Hastings was about to change their destiny dramatically.

Castles of the Conquest

Castles finally appeared in England as instruments of foreign conquest. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis observed with some justice that England's lack of castles made the Norman Conquest easier, since the defeated Saxon thanes had no private fortresses to retreat to. William the Conqueror is said to have brought a ready-to-assemble wooden fort across the Channel with him, and his march upon London was accompanied by the foundation of several impromptu castles en route. William erected castles at key places (primarily the old Saxon burghs) all over England in the years following 1066. Most of these castles were formidable earthworks, consisting of one or more enclosures (baileys) defended by massive ramparts, ditches and wooden stockades. Such castles were often dominated by a huge artificial mound or 'motte'. William's chief followers, who had been rewarded with vast estates, also began to raise castles. All the early castles acted as administrative centres, barracks, prisons and places of justice, but their primary function was to protect the small Norman households who lived in them from the defeated but resentful English.

By the end of William's reign the castle had become a well-established - and much hated - symbol of Norman domination. The Domesday Book (1086) mentions about sixty English castles but the real total must already have been considerably larger. As a taxation document Domesday only mentions castles incidentally, for instance if houses had been destroyed to make way for them. At least half were under William's direct control, and the rest were held by trustworthy tenants-in-chief William Rufus was less cautious than his father, so castle building increased. Nevertheless, only on the Welsh Border did castles begin to proliferate, because here William 1 had delegated his powers to three 'palatine' earls who enjoyed a free hand in return for invading Wales. They and their sub-tenants built castles in considerable numbers to defend the newly-won 'Marcher' lordships. There was no comparable militarisation of the Scottish Border. Territorial disputes arose from time to time but, on the whole, England and Scotland coexisted peacefully for the next two centuries.

Transition to Stone

Earthwork castles of the 'motte-and-bailey' type continued to be the norm well into the twelfth century. However, as the Norman conquerors settled down some of them began to reconstruct their castles permanently in stone. Defence was no doubt the primary consideration: earthworks can quite easily be dug away by an attacking force and wooden stockades are extremely vulnerable to fire. Nevertheless status was an important factor even at this early stage. Norman lords sought monumental buildings to rival the great churches which were beginning to dominate the landscape. Stone tower keeps had originated in northern France in the late tenth century Naturally, the King was the first to build such keeps in England. William the Conqueror himself began the White Tower which forms the heart of the Tower of London. Designed as a palace-fortress truly fit for a king, it set the pattern for the next hundred years. In fact, few tower keeps ever rivalled it. A simpler form of keep was the so-called shell keep, consisting simply of an embattled wall around the motte top. Even before 1100 a few enterprising barons had built stone 'curtain' walls a-round their baileys in place of wooden stockades.

Castles feature prominently in the sporadic revolts of the period. Indeed, Norman warfare was characterised by few battles but many sieges. Hence William 11 had difficulty besieging the Northumbrian castles of Robert de Mowbray in 1095, and seven years later Robert de Belle c defied Henry 1 from his Shropshire strongholds. Henry 1 rebuilt the impotant royal castles in stone - one of several measures aimed at keeping the barons in check. A number of keeps are convincingly attributed to him, though documentary proof is lacking. Royal control broke down following the disputed accession of King Stephen. Many barons, particularly in the South-West, preferred the rival claims of the Empress Matilda, and an inconclusive civil war known to history as the Anarchy' lasted for most of Stephen's reign. Ambitious lords took advantage of the situation to build castles without authority. As the Anglo-Saxon chronicle complains: 'They filled the land with castles ... and filled them with devils and wicked men A considerable number of England's more obscure earth-work castles can no doubt be assigned to this period, but some fine stone keeps rose as well. By contrast, Stephen exhausted his resources in fruitless campaigns to defeat his rival. Hence he was not a great builder of castles, although no one besieged more!

The breach was healed when Matilda's son assumed the throne as Henry 11. Henry ordered the demolition of any (though by no means all) of the'adulterine' castles, while taking some of the more important ones into royal hands. Henry proved himself the master of his barons but not of his own family, as shown by the great revolt of his son (Prince Henry) in 1173-74. Some disgruntled English lords took part in this abortive rebellion, and as a result more baronial castles were destroyed. Meanwhile Henry did much to strengthen his own castles, consolidating a vast personal empire which stretched from the Tweed to the Pyrenees. For the first time we have yearly records of royal expenditure in the Pipe Rolls, and Henry built on a prodigious scale. He spent over £7000 on Dover Castle alone - a vast amount of money in those days. By the time of his death the King's authority was reinforced by a series of masonry castles throughout England.

Henry 11 also endeavoured to control private castle building. A system of royal approval emerged, whereby barons were required to apply fora licence to 'crenellate', or fortify, their manor houses. Despite this restriction the greater barons frequently strengthened their castles in stone without interference. Most castles of this era, whether royal or baronial, had a plain curtain around the bailey and a keep for inner defence - either a shell keep on a motte or a big square tower. Even Henry ll's great keep at Dover is a massive cube in the tradition of William I's White Tower. However, there was a gradual shift towards more dynamic defensive forms in the second half of the twelfth century, in response to the rapid improvement in siege techniques.

Castles of Enclosure

The revolution in castle building was triggered to a large extent by the experiences of crusaders, in the Holy Land and (no less importantly) in Spain. Siege warfare became more sophisticated, enabling besiegers to penetrate castle defences in a variety of ways. Scaling ladders and siege towers allowed attackers to go over the wall, catapults and battering rams could breach the ' wall and, worst of all, undermining could bring a section of wall crashing down. Norman castles, with their lumbering square keeps and relatively low curtains, were vulnerable to such forms of assault, but England was comparatively slow in embracing the remedies. Curtains gradually increased in height and thickness and were strengthened by the provision of flanking towers, which enabled archers to fire laterally upon attackers approaching the wall. Mural towers feature in some early Norman castles, but the concept did not reach maturity until Henry 11 built curtains at Windsor and Dover which are comprehensively flanked by towers.

These towers are square in the Norman tradition, but the angles of square towers were particularly vulnerable to undermining- This was demonstrated at Rochester in 1215, when King John's sappers brought own a corner of the keep. Castle builders responded by eliminating angles altogether. Mural towers became circular,' or at least semi-circular with their curved fronts towards the field. Keeps were also built in rounded form, but there are few English examples because the very concept of the keep was Wing out of fashion. Circular rooms must have seemed particularly inconvenient at a time when lords were beginning to move out of their inhospitable keeps in favour of more spacious bailey accommodation. Furthermore, a welldefended enclosure with a number of projecting towers - each of which could serve as a self-contained strongpoint in the event of the bailey being overrun - eliminated the need for a keep as a last resort. Hence there emerged the 'castle of enclosure', consisting of a high curtain with several flanking towers of equal status. The dominant feature of such a castle is likely to be the gatehouse, which developed from a simple tower into a long gate passage flanked by twin towers.

After the glut of castle building in Norman times not many new castles were built in thirteenth-century England. More often there was a piecemeal strengthening of older castles with keeps. Some castles had to be reconstructed after suffering damage during the Magna Carta war (1215-16), when King John attempted to reverse his humiliation at Runnymede and the rebel barons invited the French Dauphin Louis to claim the English throne. Undermining caused devastation at Rochester and Dover, while a number of curtains crumbled before Louis' powerful trebuchets. The siege of Bedford Castle in 1224 demonstrated how even a single castle could be a real nuisance in the hands of a rebel baron. Simon de Montfort's revolt (1264-65) saw long sieges at Pevensey and Kenilworth, but this time the decisive battles were fought in the open. It should be stressed that these wars were short-lived interruptions of a mainly peaceful era. Only in the Welsh Marches was there anything resembling a hostile frontier. Here, Llywelyn the Great and Llywelyn the Last reversed the tide of conquest and put the Marcher lords on the defensive. That is why the new idiom is most apparent in Wales and the Welsh Border districts. One important group of thirteenth-century fortifications should not be overlooked. This was the era in which many English towns received their stone defences.

The kings of England led the way in adapting their castles to the new style. It is estimated that castle building and maintenance accounted for a tenth of royal revenue in this period. Even Henry 11 had experimented with a round keep at Orford. Richard Is great monument is Chateau Gaillard in Normandy. King John, thwarted by the loss of his continental possessions, lavished attention on his English strongholds instead. Henry 111 continued the comprehensive programme of strengthening royal castles, leaving an impressive legacy at Dover, Windsor and the Tower of London. Castle building in Britain reached its climax in the reign of Edward 1, with the conquest of Wales and the erection of a mighty group of strongholds there. Some of the Welsh castles follow a concentric plan, in which the main enclosure is closely surrounded by a parallel outer curtain. Edward 1 converted the Tower of London into a concentric fortress but this is the only fully-developed example in England. Combined keep-gatehouses - another characteristic of the 'Edwardian' castle - are nearly as rare.

Fortified Manor Houses

Scotland replaced Wales as the goal of English imperialism in the later years of Edward 1, but then the tables were turned. Robert Bruce seized the initiative after his victory at Bannockburn (1314), and for the rest of the fourteenth century there was intermittent warfare between the two kingdoms. The Border counties would languish in an atmosphere of raiding and feuding for the next three hundred years. In this war-torn environment the need for defence was paramount, even among the lesser nobility who were compelled to build pele towers in large numbers. Elsewhere in England the tower house, as opposed to the unfortified manor house, was a rarity and castle building remained in the hands of the greater barons. Owing to the Hundred Years' War (1336-1453) there is one other area where English castles retained a serious defensive role. Although the war was mainly fought on the Continent, the French did manage a number of retaliatory raids across the Channel, especially in the later fourteenth century when they went onto the offensive. New castles on the South Coast, such as Bodiam and vanished Queenborough, were intended to play a part in coastal defence.

Even on the frontiers, however, the nature of the castle was changing. Edward I's Welsh strongholds were exceptional because they had been designed to hold down a conquered people. Contemporary English castles are seldom as formidable. They were no longer instruments of conquest, even if they remained symbols of feudal inequality, and the Scots and French came in raiding parties which were seldom equipped for a long siege. Hence there is a gradual shift in emphasis, castle builders making more concessions to the demands of comfort. The term 'fortified manor house' is often used to describe such castles. Many older castles were brought up to date but some were already being abandoned as residences. In their place we find a resurgence in the building of new castles, many exhibiting great uniformity in design.

Previously most castles had been laid out around a conveniently defensible perimeter dictated by the contours of the ground, without much regard to overall symmetry. Now the four-square plan around a quadrangle became fashionable, with towers at the corners and a gatehouse usually located in the middle of one side. This quadrangular layout was efficient from a defensive point of view. It also allowed the domestic buildings to be ranged conveniently against the four surrounding walls.

Some castle builders of this era were professional soldiers who earned their reputation during the long-running wars with France and Scotland. They made a fortune out of ransom money and plunder, erecting impressive castles which emphasised their soldierly status. Fourteenth-century castles also reflect the chivalrous aspirations of the aristocracy at a time when knightly virtues were highly valued, if not always practised. Some developments appear to put the clock back to the Norman era. One is the reappearance of the square flanking tower. Most later medieval towers contained suites of apartments instead of being purely defensive platforms, and from a domestic point of view circular rooms were never popular. Another seemingly archaic development was the revival of the keep. Scholars prefer the Scottish term 'tower house' to distinguish these structures from the keeps of Norman times. They were not so much a defensive last resort against outsiders, it is argued, as a secure place for the lord against his own retainers, at a time when the French wars had caused the old system of feudal levies to be replaced by one of recruiting untrustworthy mercenaries. Tower houses, including the many small pele towers, are most common in the Northern counties but they can be found all over England. It should be noted that there was much less royal castle building in the fourteenth century and beyond. Edward 111 strengthened some South Coast castles against the French but his biggest castle expenditure, at Windsor, was mainly of a domestic nature.

Impact of Artillery

Under Henry V there was a renewed tide of conquest in France. The fruits of victory - admittedly short-lived - created another generation of veterans eager to advertise their soldierly status by building castles. The main themes of the fourteenth century - quadrangular castles and tower houses - carried on into the fifteenth. A new development was the frequent use of brick as the main building material. Castles maintained that cautious divide between the ford and his hired retainers, the latter sometimes being confined to an outer or 'base' court. However, except perhaps in the North there was less castle building in the fifteenth century, and the concessions made for comfort at the expense of security reached a point where the castle turned into a castellated mansion. Great piles like Herstmonceux and Tattershall, although they look impressive enough, have serious defensive flaws. The quadrangular castle, with its ranges backing onto the curtain, was on its way to becoming an unfortified courtyard house. Such tendencies increased after the middle of the century, which is surprising in view of the dynastic struggle which erupted between the Houses of Lancaster and York. In fact the Wars of the Roses (1455-87) were an intermittent series of field campaigns in which castles played little part. A few Northumbrian strongholds were besieged by the Yorkists but the castle had ceased to have a significant role in warfare. Few castles of the late fifteenth century show any genuine defensive capability, and small gun ports are the only admission that artillery was introducing a new dimension to warfare.

Cannon first appeared in England in Edward Ill's reign but their impact on siegecraft was minor owing to their unreliability. In the fifteenth century guns became more powerful, and the French made devastating use of the new weapon in the last stages of the Hundred Years War. On the Continent and even in Scotland attempts were made to adapt castles to artillery, but the English resisted these developments. Hence, although the rise of artillery coincided with the decline of the English castle, it seems that the one did not actually cause the other. If castles had become status symbols, it was because their high towers and embattled parapets conveyed an image of baronial pride. The response to artillery demanded a squatter profile which failed to appeal to the nobility.

The End of the Castle

It is not strictly true that castle building was forbidden under the Tudors. Licences to crenellate were still issued occasionally but they had become a symbolic gesture, permitting a favoured subject to put battlements on top of his house. Tudor legislation abolishing private armies did more to bring the aristocracy to heel. This and other incentives encouraged their transition from war lords to courtiers. The North took longer to adjust and pele towers continued to rise near the Scottish Border well into the sixteenth century This was due to general lawlessness as much as the periodic dashes between England and Scotland. Conditions did not really improve until the union of the two realms in 1603.

Frontier defences were needed more than ever in the sixteenth century. Henry VIII's breach with Rome and the alliance of the chief Catholic powers against him led to a short-lived threat of invasion in the 1540s, and this prompted Henry to embark upon the first comprehensive scheme of coastal defence since Roman times. With their thick walls and geometrical layouts Henry's forts were designed to withstand the artillery of the day. They also differ from castles proper in being garrison posts rather than residential fortresses, so we have strictly reached the end of our story However, by Elizabeth I's reign low ramparts and arrow-headed bastions (as at Berwick) had become the staple defence for artillery, and Henrician forts have more in common with the medieval castle than with that kind of fortification. How effective these coastal fortifications would have been in stopping an invasion is doubtful. The scare of the 1540s did not materialise, while the Spanish Armada was defeated by weather and aggressive seamanship.

Many older castles were abandoned for up-to-date residences in the Tudor period. Others were modernised to the detriment of their old defensive strength. Ironically,temporarily broke the medieval castle had long ceased to be a fortress when the stability of England down in the conflict between Charles 1 and Parliament (1642-46). As in previous wars the outcome of the Civil War was

primarily on the battlefield, but many castles were astily refortified to act as garrison posts. As a result the Civil War is remarkable for its many sieges. Some castles held out surprisingly well against the artillery of the day, but the victorious Parliament ordered the 'slighting' of many to prevent their future use by the Royalists. It is a pity that so much damage was done during a crisis which only lasted a few years.

Recent Times

In the Post-medieval centuries English castles have suffered a variety of fates. A number of Royal Castlesdeclined to utilitarian functions, such as garrison posts on the frontiers or gaols and court houses in the county towns. Other castles lost their defensive role but remained inhabited. This often entailed sweeping changes to the fabric, particularly if their owners could afford to keep up with changing tastes. Only where there was impoverished occupancy, as at Stokesay, has a castle survived more or less in its original form. The majority of castles, abandoned both as fortifications and residences, were regarded as white elephants and often became convenient sources of building stone for the local populace. Many castles have vanished in this way. Ironically, as genuine castles were being destroyed there emerged a new interest in castellated architecture. Sham castles became fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both to five in and to have as romantic ruins in landscaped parks.

It is only in the last century that society has begun preserving historic monuments for their own sake. Interest has been growing since the Victorian era and a great deal of progress has been made in the sympathetic restoration of old buildings. For many castles the process of decay has been halted, temporarily at least. Today they are enjoying a new lease of life as tourist attractions. While the public continues to be fascinated with the past they may stand for a long time yet, if we can master the environmental problems which threaten to engulf us.

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It is easy to strip away the legend surrounding some notable figure from the distant past, but clearing away the legend does not necessarily reveal the man. Nothing that has been stated as a fact about Bruce in the foregoing pages, nor any speech or writing attributed to him, is legendary in quality. But it must still remain doubtful whether we have come much nearer to the king's true personality. To some extent our view of Bruce will always depend on how much credence we give to Barbour. If we choose to ignore Barbour altogether, as we may, we shall be left with a jejune assortment of glimpses in record and chronicle, and a few authentic utterances. These might carry more weight than Barbour, but they would not add up to a portrait. Barbour is far from being legend, but we need to remember that for him Bruce was the hero of a work of art. Consciously or unconsciously, he emphasized the chivalrous qualities in Bruce, and in Douglas, his other hero. More seriously than this, he overemphasized the chivalrous qualities of the age in which Bruce and Douglas lived. It was an age in which a king of England was murdered with a red-hot iron plunged through his rectum into his bowels, in which two knights at the court of Philip IV, because of an affair with the king's daughters-in-law, were flayed alive - one of them having been extradited by Edward II for the purpose, much to the indignation (may it be said to their credit) of ordinary English people. It was, though not of course uniquely, an age of horrors, of brutality, of intrigue and squalor. Much of this Barbour passes over. He touches on the miseries, but he dwells on the splendours.

Nevertheless, on the score of general reliability Barbour must be reckoned a biographer, not a romancer. How much would we feel we knew of Dr Johnson were it not for Boswell? It would not be absurd to ask a similar question with regard to Bruce and Barbour. Of course, Barbour lacks the pages of dialogue recalled verbatim, the mass of convincing detail, which constitute the chief reason for reading Boswell and believing his portrait to be a very close approach to truth. But Barbour, though only a boy when Bruce died, was a most careful and exact recorder, especially of names, personalities, incidents and points of detail. We shall not be on unsafe ground if we accept Barbour's portrait of the king, even though we must correct it by more reliable evidence wherever that is necessary and possible. He shows us a man at once humane and kingly, generous and firm of purpose. Barbour was not often embarrassed by the need to excuse or explain away some act which detracted from his hero's stature. The execution of the burgesses at Perth in 1313 was played down by Barbour in the words 'bot thair wes few slayne', which were vague enough not to be untrue. The apparent fact that the king singled out the Scots for deterrent punishment, letting the English go free, is actually contradicted by Barbour's statement 'that thai war kynde to the cuntre he wist, and had of thame pite'. The king's refusal to intervene to save Sir David Brechin's life clearly troubled Barbour, and he passed rapidly on from this sorry business to tell an anecdote of Bruce's unusual generosity towards Sir Ingram de Umfraville. In these somewhat pathetic evasions or discomfitures of Barbour lies one of our surest pieces of evidence of Bruce's essential goodness.

The king's sense of humour comes out even in dry official documents, but is best remembered in his reply to the nobles who rebuked him for risking his life in the encounter with Sir Henry de Bohun at Bannockburn. His immense courage is attested by the whole of his career. Patience, on the other hand, he was forced to learn, yet once learned it became his most dominant characteristic. Men trusted his word and his judgements, so that decisions and laws made by him were respected and, in after years, invented in order to be respected. In a period when there were virtually no professionals, generalship was not of a high order. But modern military experts agree that Bruce's handling of Bannockburn was masterly. The secret of his success here lay in the fact that behind his tactical brilliance and superlative gifts of leadership Bruce had an exceptionally good grasp of strategy: he always knew what should take priority. Directly or indirectly, Barbour's portrait gives us these qualities. His terms of reference forbade him to write of shortcomings, such as the evident rashness and hot-headedness of Bruce's earlier years. Barbour hardly brings out Bruce's ambition, yet it cannot be doubted that from young manhood Bruce was determined to play a leading part. The truth about his submission to Edward 1 in 1302 has now been established in sufficient detail to disprove the old charges of treachery and double-dealing, yet the fact remains that Bruce did change sides two years in advance of his colleagues. Nothing but frustrated ambition will easily account for his conduct. Barbour also falls to mention, presumably because word and concept were alike lacking in his time, one of Bruce's greatest gifts, the imaginative quality of his mind which allowed him to be revolutionary in more than just the political sense.

Finally, we must return to Robert Bruce's kingliness. It was suggested earlier that the key to much of his conduct may be sought in the background, at once aristocratic and royal, in which his grandfather was brought up and lived out his long career. There is an unmistakable assurance about the manner in which Bruce assumed kingship even though he reached the throne by a revolutionary coup. Even his flight in the heather did not snuff out his claims to royalty, though the news of it inspired mocking ballads in England:' and became common gossip as far away as Italy.' The regia dignitas of Scotland was never in safer hands than those of King Robert 1. Barbour convincingly makes the magnates gathered at his deathbed mourn their lord as a great exponent of kingship and kingliness: 'for better governour than he mycht in na cuntre fundyn be'.

Let us look at two brief letters of which King Robert was at least the official author. They have not been mentioned earlier, and one was scarcely known at all until Professor Duncan brought it to light. The first was addressed to Edward II at some unknown date, the second to the kings and people of Ireland, probably in 1315, preparatory to Edward Bruce's expedition.

"To the most sincere prince, the Lord Edward, by God's grace illustrious king of England, Robert, by the same grace king of Scots, sends greetings in Him by whom the thrones of rulers are governed.

Since while agreeable peace prevails the minds of the faithful are at rest, the Christian way of life is furthered, and all the affairs of holy mother church and of all kingdoms are everywhere carried on more prosperously, we in our humility have judged it right to entreat of your highness most earnestly that, having before your eyes the righteousness you owe to God and to the people, you desist from persecuting us and disturbing the people of our realm, so that there may be an end of slaughter and shedding of Christian blood. Everything that we ourselves and our people by their bodily service and contributions of wealth can do, we are now, and shall be, prepared to do sincerely and honourably for the sake of good peace and to earn perpetual grace for our souls. If it should be agreeable to your will to hold negotiations with us upon these matters, let your royal will be communicated to us in a letter by the hands of the bearer of this present letter.

The king sends greetings to all the kings of Ireland, to the prelates and clergy, and to the inhabitants of all Ireland, his friends.

Whereas we and you and our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent over to you our beloved kinsmen, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God's will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty. Whatever our envoys or one of them may on our behalf conclude with you in this matter we shall ratify and uphold in the future."

Does either of these letters give us the real Bruce? Are they, in the most personal sense, authentic, or are they both merely the products of an embryonic 'foreign office' with an eye to the main chance? In view of the extremely personal quality of royal government in the fourteenth century, it would probably be wrong to put these letters too far from the king himself At the very least they show two aspects of his policy, and give examples of his method of approach. There is no reason to suspect Bruce's sincerity in his professions of peace towards England, so long as it was peace between independent monarchies and not simply submission. And it seems typical that he should write direct to the only person who could take the initiative on the other side. If Professor Duncan is right in thinking that the letter to Edward II belongs to the period of the Declaration of Arbroath, possibly composed by the same author, then the seriousness of purpose underlying the Scottish king's appeal would be confirmed.

The letter to Ireland is a very different matter. The invasion of Ireland hangs over Bruce's career as a large question-mark. Some English historians dismiss it as nothing more than deliberate trouble-making, and dwell upon the horrors and miseries that followed from King Robert's perilous and futile march to Limerick and from the Scots' whole sojourn in Ireland between May 1315 and October 1318. One or two even contrive to suggest that this unique and short-lived Scottish invasion ended a halcyon period of Anglo-lrish harmony, and introduced a note of altogether unusual barbarity into the history of a nation which had hitherto been ruled and protected by the English Crown with motherly solicitude.

The question must nevertheless be asked, was Bruce's motive plain aggression, the sort of aggression upon which successful revolutionary nationalism so often embarks ? The affair hardly admits of any simple explanation. A powerful resurgence of Celtic tradition and Irish national feeling would have caused an explosion regardless of Scottish intervention. Behind the obvious propaganda appeal of Bruce's letter lay important truths. Scotland and Ireland did share in part a common ancestry and culture, and the Irish did yearn to be free of foreign rule. The example set by Bruce in his own kingdom was bound to be infectious, and it was understandable that some of the Irish leaders should fancy that an answer to all their pent-up aspirations lay in Edward Bruce and a few thousand veterans of Loudoun Hill, Brander and Bannockburn.

Equally, there is no doubt that contemporary observers, both in England and in Ireland, believed the Scots were bent on conquest. Their invasion threatened to wrest the lordship of Ireland totally from the control of the king of England and create a fresh kingdom of Ireland under a Scottish king, Edward Bruce. Moreover, in May 1315 when he crossed to Ireland to embark on his three-year adventure, it must have seemed well within the bounds of probability that Edward Bruce would succeed to the throne of Scotland. He was duly crowned king of Ireland at Dundalk about mid-June, 1315, obviously with the knowledge and acquiescence of his brother. Robert 1 had an acute awareness of the dangers of a hostile, of the value of a friendly, Ireland. For three years from 1315 a significant part of the military resources of Scotland (chiefly veteran commanders and soldiers, but also weaponry, shipping and supplies) was diverted to the Irish enterprise. Thomas Randolph was involved from the outset, and when the Scots invasion appeared to be penned within the borders of Ulster Randolph went back to Scotland to fetch reinforcements (December 1315) whose numbers enabled the invaders to penetrate as far south as north Leinster. Had the Scots intended merely to secure their western flank by neutralizing Ulster this southward push would be hard to explain. It is true that after outfacing, near Ardscull in Co. Kildare, an Anglo-lrish force weakened by rivalries and jealousies, Edward was compelled to withdraw northward again.`

Stalemate ensued, but instead of Robert I's deciding to cut his losses and abandon his brother to the common fate of so many invaders of Ireland he personally led an army of veterans to Ulster in January 1317, and in company with Edward and Randolph undertook a bold and dangerous operation, the aim of which was clearly to rouse the clans of central and southern Ireland in support of 'King Edward' and to amass sufficient forces to drive the English government out of Dublin. A winter of dearth and disease was not well chosen for this venture, which with hindsight seems more desperate than it may have appeared to those who were there. Save in Ulster, where a few families such as Mandevilles, Bissets and Logans fought on the Scottish side for some of the time, the Anglo-lrish opposed the Scots, only isolated dissidents like the Lacys of Meath or Gilbert de la Roche joining Bruce because of private quarrels. The Dublin administration, whether under Edmund Butler or more vigorously under Roger Mortimer, could afford to wait, making a Fabian virtue out of financial necessity. For the Scots everything depended on the Irish kings, greater and lesser, uniting in the common cause of Irish independence and being motivated by a shared enmity towards the English. But of this they were quite incapable. O'Neill merely excited jealousy, rival branches of the kingly family of Connacht could not both receive satisfaction from 'King Edward', and on the banks of the Shannon near Limerick the Scots army was confronted by a hostile Muirchertach O'Brien where they had hoped to find friends and allies. By May 1317 the king of Scots, his force decimated by sickness and hunger, judged it prudent to return home.

It has been said that 'when Robert [bruce] sought the backing of "all the kings of Ireland", he was asking for a unity quite foreign to Gaelic Ireland'. It is not easy, however, to accept that the king of Scots was so naive, so ignorant of the truth about Irish society and politics, that the failure of the Irish kings or chiefs to rally behind his brother took him utterly by surprise. Robert I was a realist, born and brought up among people who knew Ireland well and, indeed, thoroughly at home in a region of Scotland, Carrick and Galloway, which must have resembled northern Ireland very closely. The establishment of his brother as king of Ireland would certainly have suited Robert I's book. If the English government was drawn into costly diversions of Irish resources which it would otherwise use against the Scots, if the English could be harried not only in Ireland itself but by an Irish-based invasion of north Wales, above all if the subjugation at least of Ulster could, along with the recovery of Man, secure for the Scots unchallenged command of the narrow seas between Ireland and Scotland, then a substantial, though not reckless, investment of ships, troops and leadership in Ireland would pay off.`

As for the long term, and the deeper implications, that seems a different matter. In the fifteen years between Bannockburn and King Robert's death he devoted a mere few months to personal interventions on Irish soil, and the Scots as a whole were active in Ireland for only three years. Had Ireland and its relations with England and Scotland been 'in the mainstream of Scottish policy, not regarded as a temporary diversion of it'," the Scots would surely have given Ireland closer and more continuous attention than appears to have been the case. This is not to say that King Robert did not take Ireland seriously. Geography alone would have guaranteed that the Irish situation could never be of temporary interest to Scotland. Bruce never forgot Scotland's Irish frontier. There was even a belief in Scotland (unsupported by any known evidence) that if only Edward Bruce had postponed the encounter with John Bermingham at Faughart (14 October 1318) 'till the morrow', his brother would have come to his aid with a large army. Improbable as this may seem, Bruce could not afford to let English power become firmly established in Antrim or Down. In the very last years of his life, although suffering from a crippling malady, he crossed to Ulster twice, first in 1327 to make sure that Edward III got no help from Ireland, and second, in the summer Of 1328, for an unknown purpose. There is absolutely no question that Scottish policy throughout Robert I's reign embraced the exercise of a decisive influence upon the situation in northern Ireland. But when it came to the notion of a 'Celtic empire' in the west, fulfilling in part the popular prophecies of Merlin, the Scots seem to have been opportunistic. It would be wrong to sentimentalize the relations of the two peoples. They made use of each other when it suited them, and since under Robert I the Scots were better organized, the advantage, as long as he lived, lay with them.

To the modern Scottish mind, largely Protestant or postProtestant, there is one element in Robert Bruce's nature which has seemed unfamiliar and unattractive and has consequently been omitted from standard and popular works, or played down. This is the king's piety and devoutness, especially his devotion to certain saints of the church. Perhaps he was in no way exceptional in this respect among the kings of his time. But one is left with a strong impression that religious feeling at this level had a much more dominant place in his life than in that of Edward II, even if it meant less to him than it had done to Henry III. Certainly no picture of the king would be complete if it did not take this into account. Bruce seems, for example, to have felt a special devotion towards Saint Fillan, one of the most renowned of the Scoto-lrish saints. He granted Fillan's chief church and sanctuary (Killin and Strathfillan) to Inchaffray Abbey, evidently with the intention that a daughter-house of Inchaffray should be founded at Strathfillan, and this daughter-house he endowed with land in Glendochart.

WHILE engaged upon their work on The Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland, the authors were frequently brought in contact with the various ecclesiastical structures throughout the country, and they naturally availed themselves of such opportunities to make notes and sketches of these interesting edifices.

These notes and sketches, together with others made during a long series of years, formed a considerable fund of information and a collection of drawings, the possession of which has induced the authors to undertake the completion of the illustration and description of the Ancient Architecture of Scotland, by adding an account of the Ecclesiastical to that of the Castellated and Domestic Architecture of the country already given to the public.

The size of the former book has been found to be some what restricted for many of the illustrations of the churches, but it has been thought best, for the sake of uniformity, to adhere to the same size and style as in the former work.

The subject of the Castles and Mansions, having been previously little investigated, afforded a fresh field for enquiry. The history and gradual development of the design and construction of these buildings had to be wrought out and arranged in periods according to the dates and the peculiarities of the structures, and an appropriate nomenclature had to be invented. These considerations added greatly to the interest of the subject.

In Ecclesiastical Architecture the case is different. The various styles and periods of Gothic architecture, both in this country and abroad, have for long been carefully investigated and defined. It thus only remains to apply to our Scottish edifices the system already adopted in the rest of Europe. An attempt is made in this work to do so, and attention is drawn to the various points in which Scottish Church Architecture agrees with and differs from that of other countries.

It has been suggested that our Ecclesiastical Architecture might be arranged in connection with the various orders of ecclesiastics by whom it was employed, and the specialities of the architecture of the various orders pointed out. This matter has not escaped attention; but it has been found impossible to form a system of nomenclature on that foundation.

The more this subject is investigated, the stronger is the conviction that there is, in this country- at least, practically no difference in the style of architecture of the different orders of Churchmen from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The cathedrals and parish and other churches were all built on general and well understood principles. The monasteries also were all constructed on the same general plan. Whether the occupants were Canons Regular or Monks of the Cistercian, Tyronensian, Premonstratensian or other order, or even Franciscans or Dominicans, their convents were all designed on one general system.

The plan consisted of an open court or cloister, surrounded by a covered walk, having on one side (generally the north side) the nave of the church; while on the east side, in connection with the transept, lay the sacristy, chapter house, and frequently the fi atery or day-room of the monks, on the upper floor of which range extended the dormitory, library, &a The south side of the cloister was occupied by the refectory and kitchen ; and the west side contained cellars and stores, and apartments for the lay brothers and guests.

These dispositions were sometimes extended and modified, but were invariably adhered to on the whole.

None of our Scottish monasteries are sufficiently well preserved to exhibit these arrangements in their entirety; but the various portions of the different convents which survive always correspond with the parts which would be expected in the positions they occupy.

As regards the style of the architecture and ornamentation, the only difference observable is that which is common to all the structures of the respective periods.

While it is intended to include in this work all the examples of ancient church architecture discoverable in Scotland, such subjects as ancient sites, demolished structures, and mere foundations do not fall within its scope, and are only referred to incidentally. These matters belong to the province of archooology, not to that of architecture.

Most of the ancient ecclesiastical structures of the West Highlands and Islands, and also those of Orkney and Shetland, being of a special and somewhat indefinite, although very interesting, character, are treated separately, before the

main subject of the work is entered on.

In connection with the churches of Orkney and Shetland, the authors have to express their obligation to Sir HENRY E. L. DRYDEN for his kindness in allowing his drawings and descriptions of these buildings to be incorporated in this work. They have also to thank the COUNCIL Of the SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF SCOTLAND, with whom these drawings and descriptions are deposited, for their permission to use them.

The descriptions of the churches of the Highlands and Islands are, as stated in the book, chiefly abstracted from the late Mr. T. S. Muir's interesting volumes.

The authors further take this opportunity of returning the, sincere thanks to the many friends and well-wishers who have rendered them assistance in their labours. The names of these gentlemen are mentioned in connection with the number of the different structures. They would also express their indebtedness to all those whose n- was necessary to enable them to visit and make drawings of public and private buildings, which permission was invariably freely given.

They have specially to acknowledge their indebtedness to Dr. JOSEPH ANDERSON, of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, for his goodness in revising the portion of the work dealing with Celtic Art; to Mr. T. S. ROBERTSON, Architect, Dundee, and Mr. WILLIAM GALLOWAY, Architect, Wigton, for their assistance in supplying drawings, and otherwise; and to Dr. DICKSON, late of the Register House, Edinburgh, for valuable aid in many ways.

EDINBURGH, January 1896.

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Building Castles

In Chapter 2 we saw that motte castles could be erected in a few weeks. Stone castle construction, however, was a very different matter and generally took years, despite the fact that most stone castles were wanted in a hurry. D.F. Renn estimated that the annual building rate on a great tower was about 3 metres (10 ft) of elevation, allowing for weather, stopping work in winter or if funds ran out. Scarborough, some 27.4 metres (90 ft) tall, took ten years (1158-68). This 3-metre average applies to great towers. In the same period, work on other parts of the castle must have been done simultaneously, such as constructing the curtain with towers (if any), raising the gateway or gatehouse and so forth. At Orford, for example, it is thought that the whole castle, great tower and surrounding enclosure with its smaller (rectangular?) towers and gate went up in seven or eight years, the tower itself in two years. The time may seem lengthy, but the medieval builder had no mechanical aids except the pulley-wheel crane and the wheelbarrow, and stone cutting and dressing had to be done by hand.

Every stone castle posed a veritable catalogue of problems, some of which had to be dealt with in advance and which could not be solved merely by riding roughshod over the feelings of local people. Early in the Norman occupation, the conqueror-lords steamrollered their way through towns and countryside to clear sites for castles and pressed Anglo-Saxons into forced labour. But in the time of Henry 1, who introduced a new spirit of co-operation between Norman and Anglo-Saxon (setting an example by marrying the daughter of an Anglo-Saxon princess), proper formalities were observed. Some sites were paid for, some were exchanged, and there are even

instances of compensation being paid for intrusion upon neighbouring land, such as at Gloucester. It is interesting to look at the various problems, for it is still a matter of some wonder how well the medieval builder coped with them, particularly in the construction of the great tower type of castle.

Some stone great tower castles were superimposed upon motte castles because the site had proved advantageous. Others were built on new sites, generally selected for their strategic position vis-a-vis the lands of neighbours as well as suitability for controlling their own lands, and for the nearness to water sources. There were other important questions for the builders to consider. Could stone be quarried on the site, or nearby, and was it suitable or too soft? If not, where was the nearest quarry? Did it belong to the king or the Church? Most quarries were royal or ecclesiastical property. How much would the stone cost? Where was the nearest waterway for transporting the stone and other materials? Water transport was much cheaper than land cartage, and it was quicker. Many of the best quarries, such as Barnack in Northamptonshire, were close to navigable rivers. How easy would it be to find enough masons and assistants to extract stone (by hammering iron wedges into the layers in the stone beds) and to cut by saw or split the lumps into appropriate shapes and sizes, and to dress (smooth) them? What sort of rubble was available nearby? Were there any Roman remains, such as tiles and brick segments? At Colchester great tower, both brick and dressed stones were taken from the extensive ruins of the old Roman town at Camulodunum and used in the masonry, and can be seen in many parts of the tower, notably in some of the steps of the great stairs. The owner and builder of a castle might also have considered whether he wanted to obtain a supply of the cream-yellow limestone quarried at Caen in Normandy, generally reckoned the best of its kind, to make the ashlar quoins and other features such as arch heads, keystones, window mullions and lintels, loopholes and battlement tops.

While masons were attending to the stone supply problems, carpenters and joiners were worrying about timber availability. Was there a source close to the site and were the trees big enough to produce the lengths of beam and plank? In some cases owners contracted to buy the wood from a supplier; in others they would buy a stretch of forest with the appropriate trees. Oak in one or other of its many species was preferred. Wood was also needed for burning to make charcoal for blacksmiths.

There were other materials wanted in quantity: lead for the tower roofs and water pipes; iron for a multitude of requirements; sand and lime for mortar (cement). All had to be acquired and transported to the site. Details of this kind today would be skilfully estimated down to the last nail, and the operations supervised by one or other of a building team of architect, quantity surveyor, consulting engineer and services engineer, but in those times there were no such disciplines. Estimating had to be guesswork.

Once the material supply problem was satisfactorily in hand, the building gangs were recruited, or pressed into service, generally from the immediate neighbourhood. However, in the case of the castles of Edward 1 in Wales, the authorities found they had to recruit from English counties, from Norfolk to Devonshire, because they could not depend upon loyal service from the Welsh whom they had just overcome. In early Norman days men were not generally paid, but as Norman and Anglo-Saxon began to edge towards a better relationship, castle owners started to pay wages. Pay was not standard, except in so far as it was low everywhere. In the late thirteenth century we read of diggers, carpenters and masons being offered bonuses for good work - and docked wages for absenteeism - but these were the country men recruited for work on the Edwardian castles in Wales. A site supervisor, or custos operationum, at Builth could earn 12d a day in 1277 and a master mason 7 1/2d a day in 1278. Piecework was also done: at Flint, in 1280, masons were paid 1d or 1 1/4d per stone for cutting and dressing. Diggers were paid 3d a day at Rhuddlan. At Deal in 1539, a number of labourers on the site of the coastal fort being built at the order of Henry VIII went on strike because of low wages: they were only paid 6d - and some even 5d - a day. The differentials of the thirteenth century seem much the same as today: thus the head of a building team on a large project would generally expect to earn about 1 to 4 times the basic wage (without overtime) of the builder's labourer.

Work on a castle site began with a careful scrutiny of the ground. If it was an existing motte site, the owner would have known about its earth content and whether there was rock or not. If it was a new site, this would have to be discovered. The presence of rock meant that possibly the great tower could be built on rock foundations. If so, the rock was flattened by gangs of men chipping it away with iron cold chisels, and the plinth of the tower was laid down. If the ground was soft, deep trenches were cut, a yard or two wider than the intended thickness of wall, and filled with an assortment of rubble, stone and timber - a kind of hardcore - which was rammed down. The plinth was laid on these foundations. In many great towers, plinths were battered, that is, they sloped outwards and downwards for structural strength and for ricocheting missiles; though some led straight downwards, such as at Richmond. Then the first levels of wall were put together above the plinth.

In some castles the walls consisted of an inner 'skin' of an aggregate of rubble, old brick, pebbles and almost anything else hard, held together by a tough mortar of sand and lime which set as hard as rock, sometimes prepared by creating a trough of wooden planks between which the aggregate was poured. The method may have been learned by the Normans from the Saracen castle builders in Spain of the tenth century who used tapia, a mix of pebbles and cement poured between boards and left to dry in the sun. A fine example of a castle built of this material is at Banos de la Encina. The aggregate skin was generally clad, in England, with an outer skin of dressed stone, and the corners of the towers were set with quoins of dressed stone which tied in with both skins. In some castles, such as Rochester, the walls were all rubble (Rochester was Kentish ragstone) with corners of ashlar. At Middleham great tower you can see stretches along the wall faces that are stripped of the outer skin, and part of the corners where the quoins have disappeared, leaving the inner rubble skin exposed. At Baconsthorpe, the quoins in the corners of the great flint-built rectangular gatehouse were deliberately taken out to provide for later building nearby.

As the first courses of wall went up, scaffolding became necessary to continue to work. Long poles held together with rope were erected, anchored here and there with horizontal poles, called put-logs, let into the masonry already built. These put-logs slotted into put-log holes, and many great towers (such as Hedingham) today bear the patterns of rows of put-log holes. In most cases they were horizontal lines. A more sophisticated system was used during the building of some of the Edwardian Welsh castles of the late thirteenth century, where helicoidal, or inclined scaffold paths, about 35-40 degrees from the horizontal, supported ramps for hauling or winching materials, notably at Harlech gatehouse. This system appears to have been a speciality of Master James of St George, the Savoyard master-mason. Whether the ramp for a wheelbarrow was more efficient than the pulley wheel and basket is a moot point.

Great tower walls rose in a vertical straight line (although at Oxford the walls tapered inwards with offsets

spaced out in the height), either solid or hollow with passages here and there, and in the greatest of the towers, chambers and staircases until they reached the desired height whereupon they were topped with the wall-walk and parapet and given the outer protective battlements. Many towers had corners which were in effect corner turrets, and these rose higher than the four walls with their battlements. Corner turrets contained the spiral staircases and also rooms, and they acted as buttresses. Some great towers had one corner turret of slightly greater dimensions than the other three.

When the walls were completed they might be coated with plaster and whitewashed, or whitewashed directly on the stonework. Occasionally, the plastering was made to look like coursing of large stone blocks (as may be seen on many Georgian or nineteenth-century town buildings), by means of thin lines etched into the wet plasterwork. The great tower at London is called the White Tower because of the whitewashing it received in the thirteenth century. Whitewashing was not simply decorative; indeed, with the smoke and dirt given out by fires and from slops thrown out of windows and loops, it would not have remained clean for long. It was a preservative for the stone, and it is also held that medieval builders thought it helped to fireproof the castle.

The building operations we have outlined applied to great towers. They were much the same for gatehouses and gatehouse-towers, chapels and halls. Put-log holes can be seen in many smaller curtain wall towers and in gatehouses, such as at Tonbridge. In some of the Edwardian castles, the put-log holes are also in helicoidal pattern on the smaller towers and gatehouses. At Goodrich the three early fourteenth-century cylindrical towers in the inner quadrangle enclosure stand on a square base with spurs up the tower sides, an alternative to a battered plinth. This type of support was particularly appropriate for structures on sheer cliff faces, like the Constable's Gate at Dover.

Since castles were residences as well as fortresses, we should not be surprised to find them having many domestic features. Internally, many had fireplaces, some of considerable decorative attractiveness and elaboration, from the simple thirteenth-century sloping ashlar hood on corbels and columns at Tretower great tower, to the massive 6-metre (20-ft) wide pillar-supported hood at the great hall at Linlithgow. Windows in great towers and halls are endlessly fascinating in variety. Loopholes (arrow slits) are likewise varied. We have mentioned the chapels in the fore-building at Dover. At Castle Rising the chapel is next to the great chamber, at its east end. At Conisbrough the chapel, hexagonal in plan, projects into one of the wedge-shaped buttresses. At Colchester and the White Tower of London, the chapels are in the apsidal ends in the east wall. Numerous great towers had kitchens in the wall thicknesses, or in the basement, or at the top - perhaps a better place, so that the cooking smells could get out without affecting the occupants. At Orford there were two kitchens, one at ground- and one at first-floor level.

What did all this castle building cost? A great deal of work has been done on the costing of building works on castles in the Middle Ages, particularly those in royal hands, and the costs to private owners other than kings must have been much the same. Expenditure for many royal castles is well documented, and sums looked at in relation to the total income of the kings in a year are startling. We may take the position over the period c. 1155-1215, namely, the reigns of Henry 11 and his sons Richard 1 and John. It is reckoned that the king's annual income from taxes and rents was not much more than £10,000. It is also estimated that none of his lords was worth more than about one-twelfth of that £10,000, and that the average knight could indeed live comfortably on £20 a year.

If the king's annual income was about £10,000, then from the evidence in the Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer, he seems to have spent a significant percentage of it on castle works, from new structures like Orford, to new parts at Dover, Newcastle and so forth, to repairs and upkeep on many others. The History of the King's Works considers the outlay on castles to have been the biggest single item of expenditure in all three reigns. Orford cost about £1400 in seven years, Dover had nearly £7000 spent on it in nine, Newcastle cost £1000 in ten years and Bowes £600 in seventeen years. King's Works estimates that about £780 a year was spent on castles by the Crown throughout the period 1155-1215, or a total of over £46,000 - about 7-8 per cent of the total income the Crown received over the 60-year period. Interestingly, while Henry 11 spent some £21,000 on about 90 castles, the great majority of the expenses were on less than 30 castles. In John's reign, £17,000 was spent in 15 years, the lion's share being on only 10 castles: over £500 on Hanley, Horston, Lancaster and Norham; over £ 1000 on Corfe, Dover, Kenilworth, Knaresborough and Odiham (his polygonal great tower castle); and over £2000 on Scarborough. A graph of his expenditure over the 15 years would show an acceleration towards the latter end, in both new works and repairs, and this has been taken as an indication of the growing tension between Henry 11 and his feudal lords at home, and the growing danger of invasion from abroad (Dover, Southampton and other castles in south-cast England are recorded to have received the main attention).

If we turn now to the expenditure of the three Edwards (1, 11, 111) in Wales from 1277 to 1330, the figures for which many writers on castles quote with relish, the sums involved are centred on ten new castles (Aberystwyth, Beaumaris, Builth, Caernarfon, Conwy, Flint, Harlech, Hope, Rhuddlan and Ruthin), with renovations to three Welsh-originated castles (Castell y Bere, Criccieth and Dolwyddelan). Aberystwyth (£3885), Beaumaris (£14,444), Builth (£1666), Caernarfon (£19,892), Conwy (£14,248), Flint (£8951), Harlech (£6224), and Rhuddlan (£9292) give an idea of the sort of money these kings were laying out. These sums are the minimum, as they do not include absolutely everything, but they are near enough for us to stand back in some wonder, more so when it is learned that some of the castles actually began to decay almost before they were finished, that Caernarfon took more than a quarter of a century to complete entirely, and that Beaumaris was never completed nor was it ever involved in any warlike event.

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Changing Perceptions

Continue my ride along the curvature of this beautiful bay [Largo] and meet with the cheerful and frequent succession of towns, chateaux, and well-managed farms.Thomas Pennant, 1772

I sent several drawings of your chateau and the means of enlarging it.

Robert Mylne to Lord Breadalbane regarding Balloch (Taymouth), 23 November 1789

I am most anxious to introduce the creator of the magnificent chateau of Murthly to them.

P.B. Ainslie to James Gillespie Graham, Burntisland, June 1830

Until very recently, the case for Renaissance architecture in Scotland was simply put - there was almost none. Instead, the buildings of the period c. 1500 to c. 1684 were defined by what followed, namely what appeared to be the inevitable triumph of classicism in the late seventeenth century. That was the time when Scottish country gentlemen, blinking like moles in the sunlight, were supposed to have emerged from their strongholds into a countryside enjoying its first real taste of peace. Architectural development in Scotland during the Renaissance centuries was dismissed as anachronistic and unworthy of serious attention.

This conclusion probably derived from the fact that once the Middle Ages were over, Scotland elected to follow a divergent path from the continent. In the fifteenth century, Scots nobles had expressed power and status in a manner not dissimilar to the rest of Europe through the construction of crenellated towers. Although the precise form and material was unique to Scotland, these country houses were essentially recognisable within a European context. But between c. 1500 and c. 1684, Scots nobles parted cultural company with their peers in France and Italy when they refused to adopt classicism as the Renaissance expression of power.

Bedevilled by how to explain why that happened, scholars constructed a rationale based upon five cultural propositions. First, that all Scots country houses built during the Renaissance remained tower houses; second, that these tower houses were designed primarily for defence ; third, the reason they showed so little classical influence was their remoteness from mainstream Europe; fourth, that Scots were ignorant of architectural movements on the continent and lastly, that it required the arrival of an architect with knowledge of the classical language to design unfortified houses for the first generation of Scottish lairds to realise that the tower house was an anachronism, and to persuade them to abandon corbel and crowstep in favour of cornice and pediment. So, from an architectural divergence from Europe, much broader conclusions were drawn about the country's Renaissance culture, and about the outlook of its nobility. Scots aristocrats were, it seemed, prevented from enjoying the leisurely architecture of the Loire chateaux or the villas of Palladio by poor communications, a political culture of feuding that required a continuation of castellated building, and an ignorant and introverted building industry.

Each of those retrospective preconceptions is dubious. Contemporaries almost never called these country seats 'tower houses' - and spoke of them as 'castles' almost as rarely (save where the term was desired by a grandee as an added signal of nobility). The word 'tower' was generally restricted to the vertically planned country house of the Middle Ages like, say, Kinnaird in Perthshire. The proposition of isolation from Europe also goes contrary to the facts. Indeed, Scots nobles who had not spent considerable time on the continent felt the need to justify themselves to their peers. Far from there being evidence of Scottish ignorance of contemporary cultural ideas, the truth was rather to the contrary. As for feuding, and the necessity for building for defence, suffice it to say that there was probably less need for defensive structures in Scotland than in most European countries, and when considered against the criteria of Renaissance military fortifications, Scottish country houses were woefully inadequate. That is why the use of the word 'chateau' for the mock-military Scottish Renaissance country seat by the intelligent, well-travelled people quoted at the head of this chapter is so significant. They wished to indicate something nobler than a house, more martial than the classical country seat, possibly something more exotically European than British - certain that it was not a defensible castle. These houses were almost unclassifiable within the normal terminology used for British country house architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although also meaning 'castle', 'chateau' is used in this book according to the Renaissance French meaning of 'the dwelling of the owner of a great property, a large and beautiful pleasure house in the countryside', and its use for this purpose was not unknown in Scotland. The word 'chateau' avoided both the militaristic implications of the term 'castle', and the patronising domesticity of the phrase 'laird's house', which discounts the displays of chivalric nobility that were, perhaps, the most important aspect of the design. It is simply a different way of expressing the impression such houses made upon visitors at the time - the English traveller, Sir William Brereton, for example, when he passed to Linlithgow in 1636: 'by the way I observed gentlemen's (here called lairds) houses built all castle-wise' [my italics] 'All castle-wise' is taken to imply in imitation of castles rather than in the substance of them.

Many of the chateaux that so delighted eighteenth-century naturalist and topographical author Thomas Pennant's eye were greatly altered, reduced to ruins, or vanished within a century of his visit. The rain that washed away their mortar washed away their domesticity, leaving ruins with overemphatic battlements, gunloops and turrets. They were now confirmed as 'castles' and it was as such that the architects David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross categorised them in their exhaustive, five-volumed illustrated survey of the Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland over a hundred years ago. It was the first time that Scottish architecture had been examined so thoroughly within its own terms and the effort they expended was prodigious. While earning their living from

an architectural practice in Edinburgh, they travelled to every remote neuk of the country by boat, train and horse, to measure, draw, sketch and to watercolour most pre-1700 castles, country houses, sundials, monuments, views, churches and town houses. So exhaustive were they that it is rare to discover a castellated house of the right period that they overlooked. Sometimes, undoubtedly hard pressed for time, they recorded a wrong orientation, or a tower in the wrong place. Their hasty reconnaissance of the Palace of Pitsligo, Buchan, for example, concluded erroneously that it was but a tower surrounded by labourers' dwellings.

Perhaps their train was due.

To make sense of what they had seen, measured and carefully researched, MacGibbon and Ross divided Scottish castle construction into four periods'- with sub-sections according to the shape of the building's plan. They were struck by the similarity in form between the tower house and the early medieval English and Norman keep and assumed that the keep was the standard unit of the Scottish country house. Subsequent developments could be analysed as variations of this basic module: the keep extended into L-plan, U-plan and T-plan and the courtyard. These terms are still used a hundred years later. Since MacGibbon and Ross believed the buildings they were studying were mostly castles in which defensiveness had been the primary consideration, it was scarcely surprising that they looked to somewhere like the Norman keep of Rochester Castle as an appropriate comparator for the Scottish tower house; and failed to include most contemporary houses that were not castellated.

In that, they were simply victims of their time. The predominant Victorian perception of pre-1707 Scotland was of a country isolated from the mainstream European Renaissance, turned in on itself and continuing anachronistically to build castles when mansions, country houses and villas were being constructed elsewhere. That perception remained current well towards the end of the twentieth century. The only distinctive architecture generally acknowledged to be of an international quality was the brief flowering of romance in early seventeenth-century north-eastern Scotland in houses like Craigievar. Even then, in its lack of display of the tenets of classicism this sole Scottish contribution to the renaissance was portrayed as engagingly odd or - even worse - an expression of a 'Scottish vernacular'. Vernacular implies the lack of an a priori design input, and the absence of a skilled designer. The very suggestion that the country seat in Scotland might just be vernacular, rather than designed like the bulk of country houses elsewhere, demonstrates lust how deep-seated had become the perception that the Renaissance had eluded Scotland's architecture. MacGibbon and Ross and their successors found castles because they were looking for them, and interpreted their plans and details accordingly. The principal aim of this book, however, is to examine the Renaissance country seat in its political and cultural context without such a distorting perspective. Many Renaissance sources illuminating this period in Scotland's history and published a hundred years ago would have supported such an unflattering interpretation of the country's architecture - particularly the influential and much quoted volumes of extracts from contemporary documents, The Domestic Annals of Scotland. Compiled by that prolific author, architectural enthusiast, antiquarian and early conservationist Robert Chambers, these three volumes of misery heaped upon misery presented a view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland that was almost barbaric. Chambers was frank about his prejudice. Mid-sixteenth century Scotland was a very poor, rude country - a threnody to which he returned again and again, like the chorus of a lamentable Border ballad. 'It is forced upon us that the Scots were, at this very time, a fearfully rude and ignorant people . . . ruder than the England of that day.' He perceived the country as 'bloody and turbulent' and puzzled over the thoughts of the 'polite' French poet Sallust on coming into contact with the royal circle around James VI in 1587, given the 'rude state of the people generally'. Like MacGibbon and Ross, he had a preconception about the country, and there was no shortage of material that he could select to justify it.

And select he did. The Annals have a preponderance of material on witchcraft and their trials, upon bloodfeud or rebellion, on plagues, freaks and incredible natural phenomena. This, he claimed, was part of a faithful recording of all 'symptoms of advancing civilisation' or 'anything that illustrates the progress of the arts as worthy of notice. That was far from true. He omitted almost all of Scottish poetry, painting, architecture, literature and, indeed, material on changing social and living patterns such as inventories. In the context of repeated attempts to explain the tragic fate of 'Marie Stuart' in terms of the defeat of European culture and civilisation by the forces of Scottish primitivism, it cannot be surprising that a notion of Scotland as a brutish country during the Renaissance should have taken root. Furthermore, this perception passed from historical hypothesis into architectural practice in a neat example of life imitating art when country houses undergoing alteration were rendered considerably more 'ancient' than they had been originally. In the late eighteenth century Sir John Dalrymple joked about how, when he had appointed 'Bob Adams' to refashion his ancient seat of Oxenfoord, Midlothian, Adam had 'really made it much older than it was' for the project was really about ratcheting up the romanticism. The nineteenth century cult of rubblemania, however, was entirely serious. Once majesty and money were deemed to consist in the display of powerful stonework, houses were stripped of the harling that had concealed their joints, strength and the minutiae of their construction. Many of the buildings in this book remained harled long enough to be photographed as such, but when, for example, Robert Lorimer 'restored' Earlshall, Fife, in the 1890s, he removed its coat of harling to make it less domestic in character and more martial. He likewise removed the plaster from the vaulted Great Hall at Lennoxlove, presumably in conformity to the philosophy that bare stonework added nobility and honour to a 'baronial hall'. Indeed, a contemporary wrote of Blair, Ayrshire (not a Lorimer scheme), 'It is a pity that the vaulted ceiling has been plastered; the original bare stonework would be so attractive If Scottish architecture was to be classified as primitivism as a work of art, it was hardly surprising that a belief should grow that 'civilised' qualities only entered the Scottish country seat after James VI had moved down to London - presumably to acquire some polish.

Apart from the classifications by MacGibbon and Ross, the only -systematic inventory and analysis of details of the Scottish country house was undertaken from an archaeological perspective, with a preconception firmly focused upon its defensive capability. There has been no attempt to consider it in terms of the four categories suggested by Italian Renaissance architect and theorist Sebastiano Serlio: farm or manor place, fortresses and villas derived from chateaux, small pavilions and 'villas '-,which represent the revival of the Roman "villa suburbana". All such categories were to be found in Scotland. Little illumination, moreover, is to be derived from the patterns of English or Irish architecture during the period, since the cultural and technological impulses were so very different. In any case, even early Renaissance architecture in England was considered backward until well after the Second World War, as James Lees-Milne admitted:

It is nowadays usual for knowing connoisseurs to depreciate architecture of the Tudor era as graceless, vulgar and barbaric . . . We . . . are offended by what we consider the Tudors' wilful disregard of the rules of taste and their reliance upon pictorial effect as the end-all of architectural endeavour. That is where we were unjust and wrong . . . .

What was occurring in Scotland was likewise individual and likewise misinterpreted.

At least Lees-Milne had plenty of raw material - namely surviving Tudor country houses - with which to redress the balance. Unfortunately, apparently uniquely in Europe, Scotland forswore most of its legacy of Renaissance houses during the eighteenth century. The few that survive reasonably intact architecturally are generally those of families who, through indifference (their principal seat had moved elsewhere), piety or penury, took the unfashionable decision neither to transform nor demolish. The interiors of these properties, however, were likely to have been refurbished with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century material.

The paucity of authentic Scottish Renaissance interiors led to some fine myth-making. The interior of the Provand's Lordship, a 1471 prebendary manse beside Glasgow Cathedral was 'restored' in 1927 to demonstrate how the house might have been when it was occupied in the late seventeenth century- by William Bryson - and was furnished with choice items from Sir William Burrell's great collection. Visitors were presented with a gloomy, stark interior. largely hare-walled and bare-ceilinged, with an occasional bed, tapestry and desultory kist chest and one or two items of uncomfortable-looking furniture. the chairs deprived of the elaborate cushions that inventories imply were usual. The harling that had covered the rubble exterior until at least 1901 was removed It was a tableau of Renaissance Scotland as a place to be tholed (endured). The Renaissance interior presented at Provand's Lordship was a world away from the patterned floors, silks,

damasks, piles of furniture. monogrammed cushions, house-clocks, harpsichords, 'little organs', paintings, vividly coloured or plastered ceilings,

painted exteriors, the gilt weathervanes and the finials revealed by inventories. One would scarcely imagine its occupier savouring the cosmopolitan fare of capers, olives and anchovies accompanying ptarmigan, followed by chocolate (the paper-brown type rather than the reddish variety) enjoyed by the Campbells of Cawdor. This restoration did Scotland a cultural mischief.

Nigel Tranter's five-volumed The fortified House in Scotland, almost as extensive a survey as that of MacGibbon and Ross seventy years earlier, accepted that most of the buildings described were houses (albeit fortified) rather than castles. Once they were accepted as houses, a new distinction began to be drawn: pre-Reformation castles and post-Reformation houses - by implication showing the Reformation as a civilising force. It was the third time people had managed to prove that the Scots always needed some such external agent to reform their ways. First, it was peacefulness settling in the countryside in the later seventeenth century after the Civil War. Then civilising ideas -wafted back up north once the king was settled in London after 1603. Now it was the Reformation in 1560 that had managed to transform pre-Reformation castles into peaceable post-Reformation country seats.

In fact, 1560 has no relevance to the developing architecture of the country seat in Scotland, as you shall see; save for the release of monastic land and the subsequent opportunity for a new class of person to build a smaller country seat. It occurred midway through the Marian period - the time when Scotland was under the influence of Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary Queen of Scots . This important period in Scotland's cultural evolution has been overlooked through overemphasis upon religion and the absorbingly evil political fortunes of those two

monarchs (if the queen regent may be called such). The principal influence that the date 1560 might have had upon country house design was restricted to the gradual disappearance of the private chapel.

It is impossible to detach architecture from the culture of its time, and the more we know about Renaissance Scotland, the less sustainable the myth of an archaic defensive architecture becomes. The myth would ask us to believe that the sublime harmonies of a glorious Robert Carver tenpart mass - let alone the madrigals, songs, instrumental pieces and clarsach works, the histories of George Buchanan, John Major or Hector Boece, and the volumes of sixteenth -century poetry - were created or enjoyed in buildings of an unnaturally antique character. A distinction of much of the music - notably of Carver's masses - is the extent to which it integrates contemporary European trends with very identifiably Scottish strains. A similar intent to 'lend Scottish public worship a distinctly Scottish accent' underlay the way the 1510 Aberdeen Breviary was compiled. If it was accepted in music, poetry and illustration that the Scots had participated in the Renaissance - while adding something of their own individuality - why should those same Scots characteristics reveal backwardness when it came to architecture?

Not least because they were highly valued throughout Europe as good fighting stock, the Scots were enmeshed in European politics and culture. Perhaps Chambers found it difficult to accept the typically Renaissance paradox that somebody could be highly cultured and savage at the same time. Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, for example, a much travelled European Scot with whom Queen Anna liked to converse in French and who had built a fashionable new lodging within Crichton Castle in the 1580s upon his return from Italy, (Fig. 9.2) was widely suspected of dabbling in witchcraft if not necromancy. Three times he attempted to separate his kinsman the king, by kidnap, from the malign influence of his adviser Maitland of Thirlestane. Similarly, the Earl of Gowrie who spent seven years in Padua imbibing the Renaissance, was obsessed with the Cabbala and necromancy, and attempted to murder the king in 1600. Such ambiguities were indigestible to early nineteenth-century rational Presbyterians.

There were European humanists at the Scottish Courts and humanist teaching in Scottish abbeys like Kinloss. There was a distinct Scottish ,nation' at the universities of Orleans and elsewhere from the early fourteenth century, and some of the Scots scholars had stayed. During the mid-sixteenth century, when the French came closest to achieving their goal of making Scotland a French colony, there were substantial numbers of French in Scotland - including an entire French garrison of 100 professional soldiers in Dunbar and the majority of Mary Queen of Scots' personal household . The Treasurers' Accounts reveal the presence of German mining engineers, Dutch gunners, Spanish clockmakers (and possibly inventors) and Italian trumpeters. One of Montaigne's household was a Scot, and three of James VI's Octavians had been educated in Europe. When King James VI visited Tycho Brahe on his island of Uranienborg on his wedding trip to Denmark in 1590, he must have had a shock to find, staring at him from a prominent position on Brahe's wall, the gaunt features of his old tutor, George Buchanan, with whom Brahe had been corresponding.

The clientele for the Scottish country scat was a largely educated and well-travelled one. It was as intrigued as any other noble society in Europe by the chivalric ideals expressed through jousts and games. It pounced on alterations to status, hierarchy and precedence. Changes to precedence were so sensitive that they could cause a deadly feud. james Melvill recorded in his diary the extent to which James VI had been trauchled by such squabblings during his marriage trip when the Scottish Court was staying in the Kronberg, at Helsingfors, during the wedding trip:

The Company who were with his Majesty put him to great trouble to agree their continual janglings, strife, pride and partialities. The Earl of Marshall, by reason that he was an ancient Earl . . . thought to have the first place next unto His Majesty, so long as he was there. The Chancellour by reason of his Office, would needs have the preheminence [and so forth].

Precedence remained sufficiently thorny a matter for the king to summon all earls and lords to Holyrood in February 1601 for the purpose of sorting it out. Five years later, the king's Decreit anent ranking and placing was designed to put an end to feuds based upon status. None the less, precedence still remained sufficiently problematic that over ten years later the Earl of Montrose entered into a bond with the Earl of Eglinton confirming that a royal commission to Eglinton would not affect the precedence enjoyed by Montrose. Buildings and their emblematic skylines formed one of the principal means by which such preoccupations were expressed.

However, the Scots elite had other preoccupations that lent a distinctive flavour to their architecture. The first was a veneration for ancestors and family. Of David Home of Wedderburn it was written that his love of the House of Home was 'not the least of his virtues', and when remodelling his House of Glamis in the 1670s, the Earl of Strathmore admitted that he was 'inflam'd stronglie with a great desyre to continue the memorie of my familie.' The second preoccupation was the built expression of the first: namely a predilection to reuse and adapt ancient motifs for application to the present. This desire was as evident in royal palaces and churches as it was in the country seat. The turrets and heraldic skylines of the 'nationalist' period in north-cast Scotland were not at all old fashioned - for they were not turrets but studies in turret form. The principal decorative elements upon Scots Renaissance buildings were not those of the new language of classical architecture, but those of the earlier Scots architecture of defensiveness directed to peaceful purposes, as swords into ploughshares. The medieval gatehouses became chatelets turrets became gazebos, and the fretted silhouette of crenellations would be achieved by the alternation of chimneys and dormer windows . So the magnificent early seventeenth -century skylines celebrated ancient lineage, the nobility of warfare, and also modernity, clamped together by elaborate cornices designed in echo of ancient machicolations. As was the case throughout Europe, modesty in architectural expression could imply vulnerability, and few Scots aristocrats wished to do that.

Those lonely ruins of freestanding fortified 'tower houses' or (worse) 'keeps', standing like decayed molars, high and dry after their isolation by eighteenth century landscape planners, are little help in understanding the Scottish Renaissance. They were never keeps, tower houses probably only in the Borders, not fortified, and certainly not solitary. They would have been surrounded by an inner court, and an often extensive establishment of walled yards, gardens, orchards or courtyards. Soaring above all this paraphernalia of the burgeoning rural economy would be the flamboyant, mockheraldic superstructure, whose turrets provided delightful many windowed, brilliantly lit small chambers with excellent views .The machicolations were decorative and unusable, and the

cannon-mouths were only water-spouts because Scotland was a country largely at peace by comparison with contemporary Europe. Beyond the frontier lands

with England, it had been largely at peace for centuries. Unused to the

passage of armies, the country had adopted subtler and more effective methods of deterring the rare predator, feudster or casual brigand than using artillery, moats, drawbridges and beetling defences, namely by surrounding houses with a cordon sanitaire of walled gardens and extensive yards . So the sense of outrage caused by the savage destruction of houses and property during the civil war in 1640 may partly be explained by the fact that the country was unaccustomed to such uncivilised behaviour .

Country house building was probably influenced by considerations of family loyalty and kinship. The drawings on the maps of Timothy Pont, c. 1586-1606, imply that the scale and ornamentation of houses reflected the local or regional hierarchy .The largest houses he drew in Strathearn were Kincardine (Earls of Montrose), Drummond (Lord Drummond) and Tullibardine (Earl of Atholl), and this is illustrative of the extent to which a district might be dominated by the principal local families. The extravagant constructions of early seventeenth -century north-east Scotland, for example, may be attributable to the leadership of the Earls and Marquesses of Huntly, and of the Earls Marischal. Whereas in Ayrshire 'Kyle was full of gentlemen free to act on their own initiative . . . in Cunninghame such men appear in the followings of '. There was great emphasis not just upon family, but upon how many of the family name a lord could call to his support; and relationships were often underpinned by bonds of manrent - a form of mutually beneficial bond of allegiance. Status would be demonstrated by how many gentlemen might be kept by a lord to ride with him . Buildings sharing the same features are as likely to reflect kinship patterns as the work of putative architects.

Kinship - sixteenth-century networking - was celebrated by the carved and once gilt marriage stones that adorn so many houses. They recorded an alliance to the wife's father, and probably wealth and new property to the husband (it was often her dowry that funded the new construction). The marriage stone (which always records the wife's initials, identifying for onlookers and posterity the family to which the husband was now allied) celebrates both marital bliss and social advancement - 'being planted in the stock of honour' - by the male in the partnership. A laird marrying an earl's daughter and rebuilding upon the proceeds - as did James Menzies of Weem in 1571 after his marriage to Barbara Stewart, daughter of the Earl of Atholl - would install the record proud, painted and triumphant, facing the entrance.

Such symbols were part of what was an extensive visual culture. When Mary of Guise retook Edinburgh in 1558 after its brief occupation by the Lords of the Congregation, she found that they had had the original mural decoration in St Giles' church painted out, and replaced it with 'the Lord's Prayer, the Belief and the Commandments ... patent on the kirk-walls'. It is difficult to imagine, in its largely deplastered current gloom, how St Giles was once vividly painted with improving religious texts. Mary of Guise had this propaganda swiftly blotted out. Visual mementos, paintings, banners and posters were customarily deployed for political purposes, particularly by those seeking redress. In 1593, for example, 'there came certain poor women out of the south country, with fifteen bloody shirts, to compleen to the king that their husbands, sons, and servants were cruelly murdered by the Laird of Johnston' - a ritual that was neither infrequent nor effective. Two years later the Earl of Mar had displayed in procession around the district a picture of the corpse of one Forester, a member of his entourage accidentally murdered in a large-scale lover's battle, 'on a fair canvas, painted with the number of shots and wounds, to appear the more horrible to the behalders'. The most famous example was the Dowager Countess of Moray's response to the murder of her son the 'Bonnie Earl' in February 1592: 'The Earl's mother caused draw her son's picture, as he was demained, and presented it to the king in a fine laine cloth, with lamentations, and earnest suit for justice.' By far the most extensive and astonishing residue of this visual culture is the painted decoration of the principal rooms, galleries and bedrooms of country seats. It suggests that Scottish culture was 'deeply infused with an emblematic mentality, and its material culture was deeply impregnated

with applied emblematics'. There are only slight remnants of what was probably an equally extensive culture of timber screens doors, wainscotting and cornices carved with visual messages.

That visual culture embraced the buildings in totality. So, given the relative lack of ornamentation on the lower floors of a country house and the extravagance on the upper floors, the composition of the building's silhouette was probably -;,.-mbolic in intent. There are no pattern books to help decode the array of gables, turrets, chimneys and dormer windows, so in most cases, their interpretation remains conjectural. However, the symbolic significance of the crown steeples of the great parish churches of Scotland - St Michael's, Linlithgow, St Mary's, Dundee and St Mary's, Haddington; of King's College, Aberdeen; and those of the Tolbooths of Glasgow and Linlithgow - has been unlocked. These were visual representations of the imperial crown, signifying that the King of Scotland was an emperor - that is, a ruler free to rule in his own domain without interference. The imperial crown 'was the most potent available symbol not only of regional solidarity but also of the complete jurisdictional selfsufficiency - effectively the independent national sovereignty aspired to by the new monarchies of Renaissance Europe. On the north-east corner of the Palace of Stirling, there is a lion above the statue of King James V, holding an imperial crown on a cushion above the king's head. The use of the crown by the Stewarts - by James IV on his coinage, and by his son on his palaces - was directed particularly at the ancient English claims of sovereignty over Scotland.

Once James VI left for London in 1603, visual messages of independence from England enjoyed a paradoxical resurgence. They varied from the widespread use of the royal arms on the exterior, to vast plaster armorials above the principal fireplace. Frequently attached to the inscription in stone or plaster was the vainglorious motto 'Nobis haec invicta miserunt CVI proavi '- which might be translated as 'a line of 106 kings have left us this unconquered' . To judge from paintings still on display during the eighteenth century, it was also fashionable for the aristocracy to commission portraits of monarchs and fellow members of the nobility when ordering paintings of themselves and their family for their state rooms. In 1628, the Earl of Winton commissioned three such portraits from Adam the painter in addition to his own for the walls of Winton. Much more extravagant were the Campbells of Glenorchy. In 1633 Sir Colin Campbell commissioned an unnamed German artist (perhaps Adam of Koln) to paint a picture of all his predecessor lairds. He then commissioned George Jamieson not only for an extravagant family tree, but also for 16 separate portraits at 20 merks each, each rising to £100 if a gilt frame were to be included. By 1640, the Glenorchys had 24 paintings of the kings and queens of Scotland, and 34 other portraits of the lairds and ladies of Glenorchy and of fellow aristocrats. Indeed, the sheer quantity of paintings in Scottish Renaissance country houses has probably been grossly underestimated.

There were 59 paintings in the Glamis seat of Castle Lyon in 1684, and 94 in Glamis itself - excluding framed pictures. Finavon had 59, and Fetteresso well over 100. Scaled up from these examples to cover the entire country, the number of paintings in Scotland in the late seventeenth century could have been somewhere between 12,000 and 25,000.

Focus upon royal construction has unbalanced perceptions of the

evolution of the Scottish country house, and this is indicated by MacGibbon and Ross's conclusions about the penetration of Renaissance architectural ideals into the country:

There were indications in the architecture of Stirling and Falkland Palaces of the approach of the Renaissance style. But these . . . were exceptional cases, and during the following half-century, the encroachments of that style on the native art of the country were not very considerable.

The measure they used to determine the spread of Renaissance ideas in architecture was the extent that such classically inspired facade detailing had been emulated. They had little sense of any coherent architectural revolution of the country house between 1540 and 1590 - a time when construction was at its peak. But there are other measures for evaluating how far the Renaissance influenced a country: 'More impressive than any superficial imitation of antique or foreign precedent, however, was the dynamic display of virtuosity, both technical and rhetorical, within the framework of what one might call tradition.' So this book also seeks to explore whether, by using those other yardsticks, different conclusions might be reached.

The tendency to treat the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as though the architecture was relatively homogeneous - save that split at the Reformation - is a principal source of the myth. Such an approach simply cannot be sustained and a more sensitive categorisation is needed. So this book also examines whether architectural evolution matched the reigns of the monarchs. Even though broad, the classifications of English architecture into Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean have proved useful. Comparable period divisions might likewise prove useful for Scotland.

Unfortunately, categorising periods of architecture works best where they can be associated with recognisable forms. Pure form was in short supply in Renaissance Scotland. Principally as the result of the country's mass-stone technology and shortage of long-span timber, we developed into, and remained, a nation of adaptors. A landowner seeking to improve his house in fashionable mode in the mid-sixteenth century would no doubt find that he had inherited a sturdy building with walls between 6 and 10 feet thick. It making no sense to waste all this masonry, his impulse would be to retain the old building and extend from it, or to build something new within the inner court. The occasional, courageous decision to refashion the entire building complex into a single composite design occurred rarely before the early seventeenth century, and was largely restricted to the north-cast. So most Scottish Renaissance country houses lack the easily comprehensible shapes of Azay le Rideau or of Chambord, or the instant recognisability of Compton Wynyates, Montacute, Longleat or Blickling Hall. Instead, most appear as an agglomeration of structures of different ages and different heights, dominated by the tower house from which all else was derived.

Whereas the medieval house had indeed been 'pure form' in the shape of a rectangle or L-plan tower, smaller chambers and stairs compressed within the thickness of the walls, the Renaissance country house burst out of such constraints. Scottish architects threw off the straitjacket of pure form just when the architects of other countries were rediscovering the pleasures of its constraints. The resulting highly expressionist architecture that remained the Scottish fashion until the late seventeenth century stood in counterpoint to the growing formalities of plan and tight expression of the Italian-influenced Renaissance. That was another Scottish particularity. But from the very earliest days of the Union, as the very different cultures of Scotland and England began the process of assimilation, this national characteristic was misinterpreted. Take the Revd Thomas Morer, a minister in London who was, for a while, an army chaplain, in which capacity he visited Scotland in 1689:

'The houses of their quality are high and strong, and appear more like castles than houses, made of thick stone walls, with iron bars before their windows, suited to the necessity of those times they were built in, living in a state of war and constant animosities between their families. [my italics]. Yet they now begin to have better buildings, and to be very modish in both the fabrick and furniture of their dwellings.'

Visitors from England found it impossible to accept that unconscionably tall buildings with turrets and gunloops were the equivalent of their own large-windowed, peaceable, low-slung, moated, Tudor and Elizabethan manor houses. Parapets, crenellations and gunloops would only fit into a British architecture if they were taken to be real rather than metaphorical.

Two English perspectives of Scotland began to emerge. The one, like Sir Anthony Weldon's, determined to overpraise James VI by comparing his great achievements in England to his ghastly origins, and the other a more neutral role of a curious visitor in a foreign country. Weldon's squiffy account of his visit in 1617 described a barbarous country devoid of trees, whose beasts were small ('their women only excepted, of which sort there are none greater in the whole world'), habits revolting and food inedible. He concluded: 'I do wonder that so brave a prince as King james should be borne in so stinking a town as Edinburgh in lousy Scotland.' To set against that there is John Taylor, His Majesty's 'Water Poet' from London, who recorded his splendid visit the following year, and his narrative Pennyless Pilgrimage provides a corrective. Even though he too found the houses 'like castles for oyed continuous hospitality, praised almost

Yet (arm'd with truth) I publish with my pen That there th'Almighty cloth his blessings heape, In such abundant food for beasts and men I never saw more plenty or more cheape.

We have lost so much of our built history that any attempt at categorising the Renaissance houses of Scotland has to be tentative. The lack of building records, astonishing by comparison with England or France, can make it difficult to be definite about either dates or designers. Because datestones were so easily moved, their credibility sometimes extends only to recording the date on which they were carved. However, charters sometimes reveal when a building might have been constructed. For example, between receipt of charters in 1517 and May 1541, Michael Scott had made 'an honest mansion with a tower and other policies in the Forest of Ettrick, at the place, steading and lands of Aikwood [Oakwood]'.

Over 1,000 country seats, their extensions or their ruins are attributed to the period 1500-c. 1680, and, as you shall see, this represents probably only a fraction of those that once existed. A study of their attributed dates indicates how the quantity of building work varied from period to period, and from region to region . Since Scottish builders defy classification almost wilfully, both dates and titles for each period are loose, and for guidance only. The period of Mary's influence, for example, lasted beyond her political deposition, and that of her son James a good decade after his death.

In this book, the Early Renaissance period is defined as lasting from c. 1500 to 1542, during which time a large number of country seats appear to have been constructed. It embraces the latter part of the resplendent reign of james IV until his death at Flodden in 1513, and the entire reign of his son James V. The courts of both were cultured and humanist, explicitly encouraging the arts of architecture, poetry and music. In an era of noble competitiveness and changing lifestyles, magnates were as likely to have been rebuilding as the court, but - with the exception of Sir james Hamilton of Finnart and his entourage records are scanty. The tower, albeit substantially modified, remained the principal feature of the house.

The Marian period, c. 1542-c. 1568, was one of French-influenced transformation. James V's marriage to Queen Madeleine and, after her death in 1537, to Mary of Guise in 1538 began a period of some thirty years of French-educated female influence or rule. It can best be called the Marian period, after Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary Queen of Scots. Writing retrospectively (about 1572), Bishop Lesley was concerned at the costs of conspicuous consumption:

Here is to be remembered that thair was mony new ingyms and devysis, alsweill of bigging of paleicis, abilyementis, as of banqueting and of menis behaviour first begun and used in Scotland at this time, after the fassione quhilk thay had sene in France. Albeit it semit to be varray comlie and beautifull, yit it wes moir superfluows and volupteous nor the substaunce of the realme of Scotland mycht beir furth or susteine.'

[Here it is to be remembered that there were many new inventions and devices, as well as building of palaces, attire, equipment and fittings, as of banqueting and of men's behaviour, first begun and used in Scotland at this time after the fashion which they had seen in France. Although it seemed to be very comely and beautiful, yet it was more superfluous and voluptuous than the realm of Scotland might bear or sustain.]

Lesley dated the French influence to the king's wedding, c. 1536, but architectural change only became evident in the early 1550s. The most extensive construction of the period was in Aberdeenshire. After Mary's deposition in 1567, the country was divided between the queen's (largely Catholic) supporters and the baby king's (largely Protestant) supporters. Yet the French influence lingered. Until the end of the century and beyond, nobles continued to be classified according to whether they were proFrench or pro-English. Even as late as 1612, the young Duke Charles (later Charles 1) could write to his father that the most civilised foreign nations were those that spoke French.

During the Early Jacobean period of James VI's minority - c. 1568-. 1590 - the building boom reached its peak, not surprisingly perhaps in view of the damage caused by the raids and campaigns of the civil wars between 1568 and 1573. Initially, during the regencies, Scottish architecture shed much of its francophile romanticism, and a different, more sober form of confidence emerged. But once james VI took control in 1585, and the country unified behind him, architecture began to assume a changed flamboyance, perhaps accounted for by influence from Denmark. The king had been accompanied on his wedding trip in 1590 to marry Princes Anna by William Schaw, the royal architect and Master of Ceremonies, who was to become Chamberlain to and a close confidant of the queen. Whereas it is only sensible to classify the architecture of c. 1590-c. 1639 as Later Jacobean (even though it extended fourteen years into the reign of Charles 1), there were two very distinct types. The Later Jacobean villa was the preferred house of a group of clever men associated with the court in Edinburgh and largely, although not entirely, restricted to a fairly small region whose focus was Edinburgh. Jacobean nationalism emerged in the shires, particularly in the north-east. Since most of the latter, so stridently Scots in character, was built after the king had departed for England in 1603, it implies that outside Court circles, Scotland, far from adapting to the implications of an absentee court, and absorbing the new fashions from England, went in the opposite direction.

Country house architecture in the aftermath of the wars of 1640-50 evolved from the architectures of the wealthy pre-war years, but the former heraldic display mutated into new forms and the preoccupation with height and skyline was addressed in a new manner . But what might be termed 'the Scottish difference' survived until it was rendered picturesque by Robert Adam a hundred years later in places like Oxenfoord.

This book first explains how some of the evidence was uncovered and assessed, examines the extent to which the Renaissance country seat was, or needed, to be defensible, and then introduces common features of the country house, its structure, components, function and its setting.

These houses were erected in a country that regarded itself as a cultured European nation participating in contemporary ideas, and an analysis of their architecture will differ radically according to whether they are evaluated within a European or a British framework. When interpreted within a British context, the Palace of Boyne, Banffshire, for example, appeared to exemplify 'the lengths to which native conservatism could go.... With its high walls of enceinte, massive circular angle towers, and strong gatehouse, Boyne might well be taken at first glance for a great thirteenth century castle of enclosure' like, say, medieval Harlech (Gwynedd) or Bodiam (Sussex). Boyne's plan did indeed echo a medieval one, but rather than being medieval, it demonstrated how both French and Scots culture continued to embed the past into the present. Considered within the European architectural culture, Boyne's adventurous plan closely resembled that of the sophisticated Chateau du Bury, by Orleans in which the designer Florimond Robertet may have been assisted by Leonardo da Vinci . Boyne's chatelet is not a strong gatehouse and its 'massive circular angle towers' are towers of lavish and largely indefensible chambers. Can Scotland be thought to have had its own architects during this period of staunch resistance against classicism? Hitherto, Scottish Renaissance houses have been dismissed as the product of enthusiastic but untutored masons, rather than the product of skilled design. Their very irrationality irritated twentieth-century rationalists, since it went against everything they had been taught that a good architect should do.

The mason is designing from the wall-head down, not planning. He is thinking of turrets descending from the wall-head, not rising from the ground. . . . In this wayward profusion and irrational importance of secondary features, romantic notions underlying the later towerhouses are most dramatically effected. . . . It is not great art; it achieves no sublimity; it forms no laws and conforms to none. Whimsical and capricious, its creators, mason-architects, depended upon personal inclination, were uncertain on occasion, and were prone to imitate. . . . The architecture of the romantic tower-house . . . is instinctive and arbitrary, the work of skilled artisans.

That was far from the perception of the times when the country houses were built. Contemporaries considered that they had an architectural culture, and that they had architects. Whether good or bad, contemporaries called their designers 'architectors' or 'architects', and expected an appropriate level of service. Quite what those new skills were (new, because the concept of architect as it now stands first emerges in the late fifteenth century and continued to be modified over the following two centuries) can be inferred from Alexander Montgomery's epitaph to Sir Robert Drummond of Carnock who was Royal Master of Works from 1579 to 1583:

All buildings brave bid DRUMMOND nou adeu; Quhais lyf furthsheu he lude thame by the lave. Quhair sall we craiv sik policle to haiv? Quha with him straiv to polish, build or plante? These giftis, grant, God lent him by the laiv.82

[All buildings brave bid Drummond now adieu, Whose life demonstrated he loved so many of them. Where now shall we seek building and estate improvement? Who with him strove to adorn, build or plant? These gifts, I grant, God lent him in quantity.]

An architect would be expected to have 'policie' - the ability to conceive of a plan or design, and be knowledgeable about building and landscaping. Above all, he could polish - that is, in Alberti's terms, 'to realise by construction whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man . . . '

He was no mere administrator.

By reconsidering the buildings and their aesthetic from the position of architectural composition within a structured time frame, this book also intends to investigate whether the perspective of 'untutored masons' is useful any longer. Was Charles Rennie Mackintosh correct in his intuition that each feature of the Scottish chateau was an act of deliberate design.'

The Hospitaller War-Machine

'We and our brethren, mixing knighthood with religion, sweat in the unending toil of defending [the Holy Land]. We do not refuse to spill our blood as we resist the enemies of the Cross of Christ and we make greater expenses than ever before in its defence' . - Letter from Master Gilbert d'Assailly to the Bishop of Trani.

The Military Orders of knighthood which came into existence during the Crusades can all be said to have evolved in response to the exigencies of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. The Hospitaller Order of St John, in particular, began as a charitable institution based upon the founding of a hospital in Jerusalem for the care of pilgrims and even when its brethren eventually took up arms, they did so as an extension of their eleemosynary activities in order to protect pilgrims on the dangerous insecure routes leading to and from Jerusalem. Together with the Templars, they soon began to participate in the military affairs of the kingdom and eventually developed into an effective and feared military organization, one that combined the concepts of knighthood and monasticism to ensure a single-mindedness of purpose that anchored their Order in the forefront of the Christian struggle against the infidel in a kind of holy war.

The heart of this war machine, like that of any other military organization with its origins deeply rooted in the medieval world, were the knights, an elite corps of feudal warriors drawn from among the noble families of Europe. Unlike their secular counterparts, however, the Hospitaller milites were warriors bound by religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to an organization devoted towards furthering the aims and ambitions of the church. This did not make them the less militant. On the contrary, it only served to reinforce their role as the soldiers of Christ. In all the theatres of war in which the Order established its convent, the Hospitallers followed an unremitting aggressive policy of offensive actions - the chaveaux in the Holy Land and the naval corso in Rhodes and Malta. This continual belligerency inevitably roused heavy retaliation from their Muslim enemies. In effect, the Hospitallers' survival throughout nearly six hundred years of warfare was as much a result of their daring, bravery, and fighting prowess as it was due to their unceasing efforts in strengthening and building fortifications. Their ability to survive on the border outposts of Christendom in the face of ever-growing Muslim power was largely possible only because of the possession of formidable fortresses.

It can thus be said that the history of the Hospitaller knights is in many ways a history of fortifications. For it begins in the Holy Land with the gift of the castle of Bait Gibrin from King Fulk of Jerusalem in 1136, and ends with the surrender of the Maltese islands to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. In between, there were nearly six centuries of incessant warfare, sieges, and fortress-building spread across the shores of the Mediterranean. Six centuries that saw the evolution of the art and science of fortification from the medieval castle at one end, down to the polygonal gun forts at the other. Crac des Chevaliers, Marqab, the fortresses and castles of Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands, and the bastioned enceintes and towers of Malta, are amongst the most outstanding examples of military architecture in the world and all stand monument to the extraordinary effort which the knights of St John invested in the design and construction of their fortifications in an unending struggle to redress the odds stacked against them.

For the moment the Hospitaller brethren took up arms, fortified strongholds became an indispensable tool of their crusading mitier The importance of these fortifications and their role in the continued existence of the Order becomes all the more clear when one appreciates the comparative smallness of the Hospitallers' military organization, which never amounted to more than a few hundred brethren backed by a few thousand men, the latter generally mercenaries or native militia recruited from the Order's territories. Stacked against them, however, was the might of the Muslim world, and on many occasions this was unleashed with great fury. With shortage of manpower being a constant feature of the Order's existence, it was inevitably the stone walls which had to make up for the lack of warriors 'in the permanent and arduous task of defence.' Frequently, the formula worked well and the knights owed much of their fame to a succession of epic sieges, notably those of Rhodes in 1480 and Malta in 1565, in which they successfully resisted considerably larger Turkish armies. And even where it failed, as at Acre in 1291 and Rhodes in 1522, the knights were able to extract some glory from their defeats. Charles Vs well-worn comment that nothing was ever so well lost as Rhodes was inspired by its surrender to Sultan Suleiman after a 5,000 strong Christian force led by Grand Master L'Isle Adam held out for six months against a Turkish army of 200,000 men.

In all the theatres of war in which the Order established its military base - the Latin East, Rhodes, and Malta - the knights' fortifications served primarily as the eastern bulwarks of Christendom. Their strongholds functioned both as frontier marches guarding against Muslim incursions into Christian territory and as military bases spearheading raiding expeditions into enemy lands. Twice the Hospitaller knights were forced to withdraw from their position under the heavy blows of the mighty Turkish war machine as it forced its way westward towards Christian lands, first at Acre in 1291 and then Rhodes in 1522, and each time the Order had to seek a new base and adapt itself to continue its struggle. Perhaps the most significant factor that was to influence the nature of the fighting tradition of the Hospitaller knight was the Order's transformation into a naval force for, with the loss of Acre in 1291, the Hospitaller knights had no other option but to trade their chargers for galleys in order to retain their crusading metier going on to fight most of their battles at sea. preying on Turkish shipping from their island bases of Rhodes and, later, Malta.

Although with the acquisition of its territorial possessions, particularly the islands of Rhodes and Malta, the Hospitaller Order acquired the trappings of an independent sovereign state, it remained intrinsically an international force which, whenever the need arose, could draw upon huge resources from those European nations represented in its organization. At the head of this brotherhood stood the grand master, who was elected for life by the senior members of the Order. The grand master, however, was subject to the Hospitaller statutes and was expected to govern with the advice of the council. His actual power was circumscribed by the chapter general, the supreme legislative authority. This assembly comprised all the senior brethren of the Order and was convened occasionally to enact laws and impose taxes. The day-to-day administration of the government of the Order was performed by the Gran Consiglio, the council or conventus, which was presided over by the grand master himself and involved the senior knights, the grand priors and bailiffs, residing at the convent, the Order's headquarters.

Grand priors, bailiffs, or piliers (pillerii), the heads of the various nationalities making up the Order, were responsible for administering the Order's vast territorial properties. The various nationalities, known as tongues, langues or languages, were in effect based on the geographical groupings of such territorial possessions, known as priories. Each priory was itself subdivided into basic administrative units known as commanderies, governed by a commendator. Those commanderies crucial for the defence of the Order were known as castellanies and fell under the jurisdiction of a castellan. The grand priors actually residing in the convent, the conventual bailiffs, held the important posts in the government of the Order. These responsibilities were established according to strict and elaborate rules intended to guarantee that political power within the Order was not concentrated into the hands of any one faction. Thus, second in rank to the master, came the grand commander (magnus commendator), a post always occupied by the pilier of the langue of Provence. His role was to control the common treasury. The pilier of Auvergne served as the grand marshal, the senior military commander. France supplied the grand hospitaller who administered the hospital, Italy the admiral in charge of the Order's naval forces, and Aragon. the conservator, who was responsible for the upkeep of charitable foundations. The pilier of England, the grand turcopolier. controlled the native militia. With the demise of the English langue in the mid-sixteenth century, this duty was delegated to the seneschal. The pilier of Germany held the title of magnus praeceptor and was entrusted with the command of the military outposts.

It was the Gran Consiglio which was directly concerned with the overall management of fortifications. It delegated such tasks, however, to commissions of knights assisted by competent military engineers. In 1475, for example, a commission of two knights was set up to inspect and record, every two years, the state of the towers and castles of Rhodes. A competent 'Commissario delle Fabriche c fortificationi, c le munitione' during that period was the knigh FrA Filippo di Giudone. Grand master d'Aubusson, prior to his being elected to his magistracy in 1476, held the post of 'Provediteur des Fortifications'. After the mid-seventeenth century these commissions were institutionalized into permanent sub-committees of the council, known as the congregation of war and fortification. By the late eighteenth century, these came to be composed of the marshal, four commissioners, the seneschal, the resident military engineer, the ordinary commissioner of fortification, the commander of artillery, and the commanders of the regular reciments. The member of the congregation most directly in control of the fortifications, however, was the resident engineer, the Ingeniere della Religione, who was employed specifically by the Order and entrusted with the supervision and maintenance of all fortified works. One of the earliest known engineers who operated in such a capacity was Bartholino de Castilione. He is known to have been employed at Bodrum and other islands in 1502. It is also in Rhodes that one first comes across the distinction between the ordinary resident engineer and the foreign military expert loaned by some European monarch to help design specific projects for the Order. Beneath the engineer came the master masons, skilled craftsmen and the native labourers. Slaves, too, were frequently put to work digging trenches and transporting earth.

Creating and maintaining a network of fortifications and outposts, an army, and after 129 1, even a navy, demanded a good organizational framework and huge resources went into ensuring that the Order's armed forces, garrisons, and fleet of galleys were adequately supplied with the weapons and munitions necessary for war. The money which paid for all this military effort and kept the Order's war machine oiled came form various founts. A large part was derived from the commanderies which remitted, annually, a fraction of their incomes (fixed at one-third) to the central treasury of the Order. To this revenue was usually added the profits generated from the spoglios, the spoils of war and mortuaries (properties of knights which reverted to the Order on their death) but these funds merely helped pay soldiers wagers and other current --- expenditures, and were frequently insufficient to support the extraordinary outlays that accompanied military campaigns and largescale building of fortifications. The bulk of the money to cover such enterprises generally came from donations and gifts made to the Order by European princes and monarchs, and, more frequently, by individual members of the Order itself, some of whom were considerably wealthy men in their own right.

Indeed, the Hospitallers were drawn from the noble aristocratic families of Europe and their nobility gave the Order direct access to the courts of many a European monarch. These connections also allowed the Order to tap the expertise of many of the leading military engineers employed in the warring armies of Europe. Their services ensured that Hospitaller military works remained within the stream of the latest developments in the art of fortifications. On many occasions, however, the Hospitaller knights and the engineers in their employ did not simply succeed in keeping abreast of the latest developments in the art of fortification, but were able, in the words of Prof. Quentin Hughes, 'to actually lead the field - they were early in the development of concentric defences, gun-powder artillery bastions, countermining, the caponier, the fougasse and polygonal forts. From the twelfth to the end of the eighteenth century, Hospitaller military architecture manifests nearly all the emerging devices of fortification which were to influence the nations of the West.'

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A bit expensive, I got my paperback copy in Malta for L28, about £37

ALTHOUGH THE FIGURE OF King Arthur is known throughout the world, it is little appreciated that the original stories about this great heroic figure seem to derive from that area of north Britain known since the ninth century as Scotland. Arthur is seen as a typical English or Welsh figure, while the scanty evidence of Arthur as a historical figure actually points to his northern origin. Just as the original mythological figure was that of a tribal hero, so the historic figure of the early sixth century was the leader of a war band rather than a king. The idea of the British king fighting off invaders from the Continent which is at the heart of most later developments of the Arthurian material is no longer sustainable in the light of modern scholarship. I put forward a different potential reason for Arthur's 12 battles.

Historians have long understood that the notion of the great feudal king with his Knights of the Round Table, the organised jousting tournaments and the romanticised notions of medieval chivalry are all creations of the early Middle Ages, but the notion of Arthur as coming from southern Britain persists. As early as the nineteenth century W. E Skene put forward sites for the 12 battles of Arthur described by Nennius that could all be located in Scotland. Most commentators who have located the battles in England and Wales have had to suggest a wide geographical distribution, from Bath to Lincolnshire, from the Severn to the Scottish Borders. W. E Skene suggested a series of locations that provides a basis for what can be seen as a concerted military campaign, and I have used his suggestions as the starting point for my analysis. I believe there are better potential sites for some of the battles than those suggested by W. E Skene and I hope through my own ideas to move the argument forward and provide a starting point for further discussion.

Behind the figure of the romantic hero-king is a tribal warrior leader, and in such creations as the Round Table perhaps all we are seeing is a memory of a time when the warriors, like the rest of the family groups who made up the British tribes, sat around a central hearth to eat and to talk. However, strip away the romantic trappings of chivalry and idealised feudal kingship and even chivalry can be seen to echo the honour code of the tribal warrior - an honour code that respected the individual above all and in which no man could follow another he did not respect. In the ancient tales that contain the earliest Arthurian material we can see remnants of ancient pre-Christian beliefs, and in the women of these tales there are clear suggestions of a time when the role of the female was more significant than the later romances suggest. In the figure of Morgan we have a female closely related to goddess figures on the one hand, and on the other to a specific institution that existed within the pagan religion. In the stories of shapechanging that occur in several tales we have perhaps a remnant of beliefs that are linked to shamanistic practice, and in several tales from ancient Welsh sources we have references to beliefs that hark back to the very dawn of time.

Although we rely on Welsh sources for almost everything we know about the figure of Arthur, we should remember that the ancestor of Welsh, recently referred to as Common Archaic Neo-Brittonic, was spoken at one time, in one form or another, from Scotland down to northern France. And in Scotland it is now realised that the Picts, the people who lived in northern and eastern Scotland, spoke a similar P-Celtic language. Where languages are the same, or similar, it is likely that traditions and beliefs will likewise be very close. We rely today on history as a written discipline but it was not so for the people of sixth-century north Britain. They had only word of mouth and memory by which to learn and to pass on what they knew and considered important. Recent studies have shown the remarkable capacity of oral transmission to carry provable data over stunning periods of time - tens of thousands of years. Our reliance on the written word has blinded us to the value ancient tales can have. It is also true that even when written literature arrived in Britain, the old stories continued to be told amongst the people. Even today we have storytellers who have never learned to read or write yet who have vast treasuries of knowledge and lore that they carry with them wherever they go. As storytelling becomes more and more popular the value of such treasuries is better appreciated.

The stories of Arthur, of course, do not belong to Scottish culture - they are integral to Welsh, Cornish and Breton tradition and in literary terms Arthur is truly pan-European. Most people know of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, but are unaware of Morte Arthur, written at an earlier date by Sir Hugh of Eglintoun, a Scot. There are Arthurian romances like Lancelot of the Laik, Golagros and Gawain and Sir Gawain and Sir Galeron of Galloway which survive in the Scots language and various Arthurian tales that exist within Gaelic tradition. There are also motifs in many ancient Gaelic and Scots sources that echo the earliest Welsh sources we know of. Within these Welsh sources there are many references to both Pictish and Gaelic individuals, which is precisely what one would expect from material that originated in an area where the Britons, Picts and Scots co-existed. The only place this happened was in central Scotland. The peoples of the areas we know as Strathclyde and Manau Gododdin in the fifth and sixth centuries spoke Common Archaic Neo-Brittonic and their cousins the Picts spoke something similar. It is only in a later period that this language became restricted to Wales, leading to so much misinterpretation of British history. We now know that the influx of Germanic-speaking peoples from the Continent started much earlier, and lasted much longer, than earlier interpretations have suggested. The idea of the Anglo-Saxon invasion itself as a concerted campaign is no longer tenable. We also now know that language shifts do not occur only as a result of invasion and slaughter. To say that Arthur was a Welshman from Scotland shows the weakness of trying to define people by the language they speak, but as a tribal warrior speaking an earlier form of the Welsh language and living in Scotland, what can we call him?

The truth is that Arthur is now universal, a virtual archetype of the hero, and belongs to all of us. However, since the Treaty of Union in 1707 the realities of Scottish history have all too often been suppressed by the dictates of creating a British history in which the role of England has been dominant. This process has been as common amongst Scots, happy with the advantages of Empire, as amongst the English. Times change, empires fall and history itself is subject to being revisited. Many writers on Arthurian material have interpreted him as having been heavily influenced by the ideas of the Roman Empire. 1 suggest that by the early sixth century Roman influence, never greatly significant in Scotland, was essentially irrelevant. Furthermore, 1 believe that just as the earliest historians were influenced by their role as classically educated Christians, so many of our later historians have been over-influenced by a classical education that stressed the importance of Greece and Rome. This attitude has been further influenced by the fact that England was under Roman rule for centuries and so English history and culture has been greatly influenced by the Romans. And English history became British history. In Scotland this influence comes into play much later and is essentially restricted to the influence of classical education and in particular the long tradition of Latin scholarship that flourished in Scotland. On the ground in sixth-century Scotland the Romans were effectively irrelevant. The new religion, Christianity, that they brought with them was not.

Stuart McHardy

November 2001

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The Definition of a Castle

WHAT is a Castle?

Probably every person to whom this simple query is propounded thinks for a moment that the answer is easy. But a little reflection, concerning the widely divergent structures to which the name is applied in daily conversation, will suffice to show him that a definition is not so readily to be found as he had expected. The word " castle " is linked to all manner of things, from prehistoric earthworks down to preposterous erections of the twentieth century, with mock battlements and sham drawbridges, built for misguided lovers of the romantic or for ostentatious profiteers.

To take an example of the first class-everyone has heard of " Maiden Castle," the vast ringed series of banks and ditches, three miles outside Dorchester, which probably served several successive British tribes as a stronghold long ere the Romans came to this Island. Certainly nothing could be more unlike a castle, as generally conceived, than this complicated structure, which is represented in the first illustration of this book. Yet " Castle " it has been called for at least eight hundred years, though it has none of the features which we associate with the name, save that it was once a place of defence - a fortress of the days that knew not of brick or of hewn stone. And, oddly enough, we know that the Romans called these British hill-forts castella. Juvenal describing the ordinary avocations of the legionary officer of his own day -somewhere about 120 A.D.- mentions among them " diruere castella Brigantum "-to destroy the castles of Yorkshire Brigantes - tough enemies of the legion that lay garrisoned at the newly founded Eboracum.

Yet if Dorsetshire had not persisted in calling Maiden Castle by that name through long ages, which of us now would call it anything but an earthwork or a tribal camp of refuge? The name castle would not other similar cases scattered all over the realm from occur to us.

There are other similar cases scattered all over the realm from Cornwall to Northumberland, where the enquirer, expecting to find mediaeval stonework, discovers nought but prehistoric spade-work.

But at the other end of the scale this same deceptive word "castle" is applied to certain very large mansions of Georgian, Victorian, or even twentieth century date, which have a sufficiently pretentious and semi-military aspect to deter the auctioneer or the compiler of local guide-books from calling them Halls or Manors. Some of them stand on the sites of genuine castles of the Middle Ages, of which every external feature has disappeared, and have inherited the name from their vanished predecessors. Others are mere usurpers of the name of castle, solely in virtue of their battlements and towers-anything big and Gothic in style may get the designation, if its owner is hardened enough to bestow it on a building of yesterday or the day before. The only exception that I can see is that a dwelling of pure classical architecture will not earn the name, however large and pretentious it may be. Colonnades, pediments and statuary may make a" palace," perhaps-but not a" castle." For that public opinion requires loop-holes, machicolations, the semblance of a portcullised gate-house, and (above all) battlements that fret the sky line. I refrain from quoting examples of modern castellated architecture, left certain owners should accuse me of malevolence. But a terrible example may be seen in the second illustration of this book.

The French of to-day are even worse than ourselves in the misuse of the name " castle "-they apply it to any large residential dwelling in the countryside, even when it has no signs of defensive decoration, and is of pure seventeenth or eighteenth century domestic architecture. Moft of our " halls " and " manors " would be called Chateaux by our neighbours across the Channel.

But to get to the heart of the question, as to what is a Castle in the proper sense of the term, we must commence by ruling out prehistoric tribal camps at one end, and Victorian mock-antiques at the other. The Society of Antiquarians has a much-valued " Earthworks Committee," to which I relinquish the examination of the former class. The latter may be studied in the photographs of the auctioneer or the land-agent, which adorn the outside pages of the Times or the Morning Post.

 

Victorian Castellated Architecture -- A Sad Example

We shall be getting near a definition if we rule that a castle is a "fortified dwelling intended for purposes of residence and defence." A British hill-camp is not a fortified dwellingthough it may once have contained many huts or wigwams,and a Victorian caftle is not intended for purposes of defence, however apparently formidable its aspect.

I do not think that we can properly include among castles such military buildings as were not intended for purposes of residence. They may be called forts, blockhouses, towers, redoubts, or what you please. It is difficult to draw the line: for example the modern antiquary has determined to call the small garrison-towers, which lie along the Roman Wall in Northumbria at regular intervals, "mile castles." But I doubt the applicability of the term. On a parallel line of argument we should have to call each of the mural towers that line the enceinte of the Tower of London a "castle." In each case these structures are, in fact, only parts of a greater whole, not independent units. Nor could one properly describe Mr. Pitt's line of Martello Towers, along the coast of Kent and Sussex, as castles. They are small and non-residential, mere emplacements for a few guns to command a stretch of foreshore in a time of threatened invasion. And modern usage has also denied the name of castle to military structures of recent date, placed for purely tactical reasons to block a pass, or to deny access to the entrance of a harbour. To these the title " fort " or " battery " is applied, even though they may be so far residential as to afford shelter to a certain limited garrison.

On the other hand we must carefully exclude also, from our definition of castles, all fortified towns. These are residential, it is true, and essentially places of defence. But they are much too large to be considered in the light of a single fortified dwelling. They must be called fortresses, even though in some cases their whole circuit may be no greater than that of certain exceptionally large and complicated castles. It is quite common both in Britain and on the Continent to find a castle on a height, with a town which has grown up below it, and has ended by protecting itself by a line of walls joining on to those of the castle above-as did, for example, Edinburgh in the sixteenth century. And it is still more common to find an ancient walled town, in some corner of which a royal or baronial master has built himself a separate stronghold, long after the town was originally fortified-as happened at Lincoln or Exeter. But in all these cases the castle is a distinct unit from the town, though it may be either enclosed within it or built against one of its sides. Invariably the castle was cut off from the town, and was built so as to be capable of further defence, even after the town had fallen into the hands of an enemy. It was not a mere part of the town.

I have seen the castle defined in one excellent book as " the private stronghold of a single owner," and in another as " the product of the feudal system, and the home of the feudal lord." While acknowledging that there is much plausibility in each of these two definitions, I must point out, with regard to the first, that a castle need not be the property of a single owner, unless the body of citizens composing a republican state can be said to be a single person, and to have private property-which seems to be an over great stretching of terms. For example the " Castello " at the south-eastern extremity of the main island of Venice is certainly a castle, but as certainly it did not belong to the Doge or any other individual, but to the State of Venice. And equally so the Swiss Cantons sometimes built, and more often maintained, castles which held down the regions which they had won from their Austrian, Burgundian, and Milanese enemies. We can not, therefore, insist on a castle being necessarily private property. While with regard to the other definition which makes it " the home of the feudal lord," we can not call an Italian or a Swiss Commonwealth a feudal lord, and moreover many castles were not baronial but royal, built and maintained by the king, as the suzerain of all barons and the representative of the State. The King of England did not hold the Tower of London or Dover Castle as a private individual, but as king. I hold, therefore, that the question of proprietorship does not affect the definition of the word " castle," and that the only conditions which govern the proper use of the term are size, character, and purpose. That is to say, a castle is a military structure larger than a mere tower, peel, or blockhouse, but not amounting to a fortified town. It must be residential, but the name would not cover military buildings intended for residence but not for defence - e.g., modern barracks. For the same reason the name ought not to be applied (but often is applied) to modern residences quite unsuited for defensive purposes, but having some delusive show of fortification. Lastly, a castle must, however complicated in its internal arrangements, be a unit in itself, and not a mere part of a town or some other agglomeration of buildings. But a castle may exist inside a town, or adhering to it, provided that it is essentially separate, and can be cut off from it - e.g., by the closing of gates and the lifting of drawbridges.

We have arrived at this definition guided by commonsense and logic only. But it may be well to make a note on the curious history of the word " castle," since much confusion has been caused both to medieval monastic chroniclers and to modern historians by mistranslation of the words caftrum, castellum, castle, castello, chateau. Castrum in classical Latin was a very vague word, meaning a closed place such as a fort, a walled enclosure, or a stronghold of any sort. Its plural castra, as every schoolboy knows, means a military camp, of the type of the great legionary square, girt by ditch and palisade, such as the Romans built in their prime. Castellum was a diminutive of castrum, and should have meant a closed place of a smaller sort-as Wycliffe thought when translating the Latin Bible into English, for by castella " he understondeth litil touns." But he was not quite correct - at the time when the Vulgate translation was made, in the earliest years of the fifth century, castellum was being used in a very vague sense, as was also castrum. Both seem to have applied to populated places, small and great, whether they were regularly fortified or not. And when St. Jerome was translating the Septuagint or the New Testament into Latin, he regularly rendered Kwun into castellum, though the Greek word meant a mere village of any sort. This turned out to be a trap for unskilled Latinists in the later Middle Ages, when the feudal castle had become a familiar phenomenon. And so we find the author of the Cursor Mundi, about 1300 A.D., stating that Bethany was the " Castle " of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, in which they entertained Our Lord. No doubt he conceived them as a feudal family, with a portcullis and a coat of arms.

Now both in Carolingian France and Anglo-Saxon England castellum was used in the eighth and ninth centuries, as St. Jerome had used it in the fifth, to mean merely an inhabited place, not always a small one. Egbert of Kent and Offa of Mercia in charters call Rochester a castellum, and the considerable towns of Mācon and Vitry were castella to a Frankish chronicler. Hence much confusion has arisen, and subsequent historians, both medieval and modern, failed to understand that castellum merely meant a town in the days of Egbert or Charlemagne, and not a fortified residential building. It was only in the tenth century that the word began to be used for what was then a new thingthe stronghold that the feudal lord,who had risen on the ruins of the Carolingian Empire,was beginning to build all over Continental Europe. It is a misfortune that no new word was coined to express what was actually a new phenomenon. But both chroniclers and clerks drawing up charters preferred to use old terms, not only castellum but arx, munitio, turris, all words old and familiar and with no necessary connection with the feudal caftle, and so all equally delusive to readers in later ages. There is a transitional period in the tenth and eleventh centuries during which it is impossible to discover, except from the context, whether a writer is speaking of a castellum of the sort that St. Jerome or Charlemagne knew, or of one of the new royal or baronial strongholds. But finally the old sense was forgotten, and the new use of the word passed from the Latin into the spoken tongues of most of the nations of Europe, and castle, chateau, kastel, castello, castillo, in the sense of a baronial stronghold, appears on the map all over Christendom, even as far as the AEgean, where kastros and kastris are in many cases legacies from the Frankish barons, who built their castles to hold down the scraps which they had torn away from the Byzantine Empire.

Their 60 page introduction to Volume 1, is a comprehensive treatise on the development of castles in France and England, and how it influenced Scottish design, before the book proceeded in vast detail to describe Scottish castles individually and their development. I will tag on to the end of this introduction, the introductions to various periods of Scottish Castle development, omitting the vast bulk of the sections on individual castles given as examples.

It's a great piece of writing on the development of castles in Scotland, England and France which all Castle 'anoraks' or students should enjoy and learn from.

Any time references relate to the book being published in 1887-1892.

Anyone wishing to purchase the books can do so via Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/090182418...5Fencoding=UTF8

or Amazon uk at

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0...9599692-4846801

.......Oh and by the way, this is down to Andrew and his comment about OCR!