page_title: Castles in Great Britain and Ireland
section_title: Tower houses
hierarchical_section_title: Castles in Great Britain and Ireland / 15th–16th centuries / Tower houses
caption_attribution_description: English: Clonony Castle, Clonony, County Offaly
context_page_description: Castles have played an important military, economic and social role in Great Britain and Ireland since their introduction following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Although a small number of castles had been built in England in the 1050s, the Normans began to build motte and bailey and ring-work castles in large numbers to control their newly occupied territories in England and the Welsh Marches. During the 12th century the Normans began to build more castles in stone – with characteristic square keep – that played both military and political roles. Royal castles were used to control key towns and the economically important forests, while baronial castles were used by the Norman lords to control their widespread estates. David I invited Anglo-Norman lords into Scotland in the early 12th century to help him colonise and control areas of his kingdom such as Galloway; the new lords brought castle technologies with them and wooden castles began to be established over the south of the kingdom. Following the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s, under Henry II, castles were established there too.
context_section_description: Tower houses were a common feature of British and Irish castle building in the late medieval period: over 3,000 were constructed in Ireland, around 800 in Scotland and over 250 in England. A tower house would typically be a tall, square, stone-built, crenelated building; Scottish and Ulster tower houses were often also surrounded by a barmkyn or bawn, a walled courtyard designed to hold valuable animals securely, but not necessarily intended for serious defence. Many of the gateways in these buildings were guarded with yetts, grill-like doors made out of metal bars. Smaller versions of tower houses in northern England and southern Scotland were known as Peel towers, or pele houses, and were built along both sides of the border regions. In Scotland a number were built in Scottish towns. It was originally argued that Irish tower houses were based on the Scottish design, but the pattern of development of such castles in Ireland does not support this hypothesis.
  The defences of tower houses were primarily aimed to provide protection against smaller raiding parties and were not intended to put up significant opposition to an organised military assault, leading historian Stuart Reid to characterise them as "defensible rather than defensive". Gunports for heavier guns were built into some Scottish tower houses by the 16th century but it was more common to use lighter gunpowder weapons, such as muskets, to defend Scottish tower houses. Unlike Scotland, Irish tower houses were only defended with relatively light handguns and frequently reused older arrowloops, rather than more modern designs, to save money.
  Analysis of the construction of tower houses has focused on two key driving forces. The first is that the construction of these castles appears to have been linked to periods of instability and insecurity in the areas concerned. In Scotland James IV's forfeiture of the Lordship of the Isles in 1494 led to an immediate burst of castle building across the region and, over the longer term, an increased degree of clan warfare, while the subsequent wars with England in the 1540s added to the level of insecurity over the rest of the century. Irish tower houses were built from the end of the 14th century onward as the countryside disintegrated into the unstable control of a large number of small lordships and Henry VI promoted their construction with financial rewards in a bid to improve security. English tower houses were built along the frontier with Scotland in a dangerous and insecure period. Secondly, and paradoxically, appears to have been the periods of relative prosperity. Contemporary historian William Camden observed of the northern English and the Scots, "there is not a man amongst them of a better sort that hath not his little tower or pile", and many tower houses seem to have been built as much as status symbols as defensive structures. Along the English-Scottish borders the construction pattern follows the relative prosperity of the different side: the English lords built tower houses primarily in the early 15th century, when northern England was particularly prosperous, while their Scottish equivalents built them in late 15th and early 16th centuries, boom periods in the economy of Scotland. In Ireland the growth of tower houses during the 15th century mirrors the rise of cattle herding and the resulting wealth that this brought to many of the lesser lords in Ireland.
caption: Clonony Castle in Ireland, a 16th-century tower house
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