Tower houses

A tower house is a particular type of stone structure, built for defensive purposes as well as habitation.

History
Tower houses began to appear in the Middle Ages, especially in mountainous or limited access areas, in order to command and defend strategic points with reduced forces. At the same time, they were also used as an aristocrat’s residence, around which a castle town was often constructed.

Europe
After their initial appearance in Ireland, Scotland, Basque Country and England during the High Middle Ages, tower houses were also built in other parts of western Europe as early as the late 14th century, especially in parts of France and Italy. In Italian medieval communes, tower houses were increasingly built by the local barons as power centres during times of internal strife.

Scotland has many fine examples of medieval tower houses, including Crathes Castle, Craigievar Castle and Castle Fraser, and in the unstable Scottish Marches along the border between England and Scotland the peel tower was the typical residence of the wealthy, with others being built by the government. In seventeenth century Scotland these castles became the pleasurable retreats of the upper-classes. While able to adopt a military nature, they were furnished for comfort and social interaction.

Tower houses are very commonly found in northern Spain, especially in the Basque Country, some of them dating back to the 8th century. They were mainly used as noble residences and were able to provide shelter against several enemies, starting with the Arabs and later Castile and Aragon. However, due to complex legal charters, few had boroughs attached to them, and that is why they are usually found standing alone in some strategic spot like a crossroad, rather than on a height. During the petty wars among the Basque nobles from 1379 to 1456, the upper floors (with defensive capacity) of most of them were demolished. Few have survived unscathed to the present day. Since then they have been used only as residences by their traditional noble owners (Saint Ignatius of Loyola was born in one of them, which stands to this day) or converted into farm houses.

To the west of the Basque Country, in Cantabria and Asturias similar tower houses are found. Furthest west in the Iberian peninsula in Galicia, medieval tower houses are in the origin of many Modern Age pazos, noble residences as well as strongholds.

In the Balkans, a distinctive type of tower house (kule) was built during the Ottoman occupation, developed in the 17th century by both Christians and Muslims in a period of decline of Ottoman authority and insecurity. The tower house served the purpose of protecting the extended family.

In the Baltic states, the Teutonic Order and other crusaders erected fortified tower houses in the Middle Ages, locally known as “vassal castles”, as a means of exercising control over the conquered areas. These tower houses were typically not intended to be used in any major military actions; for this purpose the crusaders relied on a number of larger order castles. A number of such tower houses still exist, well-preserved examples include Purtse, Vao and Kiiu castles in Estonia.

In Svaneti, Georgia, there are also some medieval settlements famous of their tower houses, like Chazhashi and Ushguli.

Tower houses in Britain and Ireland
The tower house (Irish: caisleán) appeared in the British Isles, starting from the High Middle Ages. Such buildings were constructed in the wilder parts of Great Britain and Ireland, particularly in Scotland, and throughout Ireland, until at least up to the 17th century. The remains of such structures are dotted around the Irish and Scottish countryside, with a particular concentration in the Scottish Borders where they include peel towers and bastle houses. Some are still intact and even inhabited today, while others stand as ruined shells.

Scottish tower houses
Tower houses are often called castles, and despite their characteristic compact footprint size, they are formidable habitations and there is no clear distinction between a castle and a tower house. In Scotland a classification system has been widely accepted based on ground plan, such as the L-plan castle style, one example being the original layout (prior to enlargement) of Muchalls Castle in Scotland.

The few surviving round Scottish Iron Age towers known as brochs are often compared to tower houses, having mural passages and a basebatter, (a thickening of the wall that slopes obliquely, intended to prevent the use of a battering ram) although the entrances to Brochs are far less ostentatious.

Irish tower houses
Irish archaeologist Tom Finan has stated that while the precise origins of the Irish tower house is “shady”, he makes the case that “the Irish hall house is in fact the parent of the Irish tower house”. Tadhg O’Keefe has stressed that there remain issues over the use of terms halls, ‘hall-houses’, and ‘tower-houses’ have become needlessly entangled and argues for a clearer understanding of the terms, and where they apply , .

In Ireland, there are well over two thousand tower houses extant, with many more many built between the 15th and 17th centuries. After 1500 many lords built fortified houses, although the introduction of cannons slowly rendered such defenses increasingly obsolete. It is possible many were built after King Henry VI of England introduced a building subsidy of £10 in 1429 to every man in the Pale who wished to build a castle within 10 years(Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland, Reign of Henry VI, pp 33-5). However recent studies have undermined the significance of this grant, demonstrating that there were many similar grants at different times and in different areas, and because many were built in areas outside English control.

They were built by both the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish, with some constructed by English and Scottish immigrants during successive conquests of Ireland between the 1570s and 1690s. Many were positioned within sight of each other and a system of visual communication is said to have been established between them, based on line of sight from the uppermost levels, although this may simply be a result of their high density. County Kilkenny has several examples of this arrangement such as Ballyshawnmore and Neigham. County Clare is known to have had approximately two hundred and thirty tower houses in the 17th century, some of which were later surveyed by the notable Irish antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the 1890s.

The Irish tower house was used for both defensive and residential reasons, with many lordly dynasties building them on their demesne lands in order to assert status and provide a residence for the senior lineage of the family. Many had a defensive wall around the building, known as a bawn (Irish: bábhún).

Welsh Tower houses
Welsh Tower Houses were fortified stone houses that were built between the early 14th and 15th centuries. They are related to Tower houses which occur in considerable numbers in Ireland and Scotland and to a much lesser extent in England. A map showing the distribution of Tower houses within the United Kingdom is given in Houses of the Welsh Countryside.

Distribution of Tower Houses in Wales
The main concentration of Tower houses is in southern Pembrokeshire. These were first published with detailed drawings in 1877-8 by Rev. E L Barnwell. The Pembrokeshire examples have a coastal distribution and this also true of the Monmouth and Glamorgan Tower Houses as well as the demolished examples at Penhryn in Caernarfonshire and Ty-gwyn, Abermo. Otherwise the Tower houses are distributed along the Welsh – English border, with one example, Wattlesborourgh, just over the border in Shropshire. In 1976 Hilling produced a map (with listing) showing 17 examples. Further houses have been added by Suggett and it is possible that new examples will be recognised as being incorporated into existing buildings, as at Sandyhaven House in Pembrokeshire.

Dating and features of Welsh Tower Houses
The Welsh Tower houses are not particularly large and have up to three storeys above an undercroft, as at the Old Rectory, Angle and the Tower at Talgarth. Smith distinguished a smaller group of house which only have one storey above an undercroft, The best example of this type is Carswell in Pembrokeshire. Smith compared this group to the Irish £10 Tower houses. These were built after 1427 when a statute was passed that any of the King’s liege living within the Pale would be paid £10 for building a house of a minimum size. It seems likely that the Welsh houses were built about the same time.” Taller Tower houses, such as the Old Rectory, Angle, are likely to have been built before 1400, as they have arrow slits, rather than an early form of gun port, which would have been used after that date. At Penhryn, Licence to crenellate was granted in 1438. The internal round staircase at the corner at the Old Rectory, Angle is similar to some Irish Tower houses and some the Welsh Tower house have projecting gardrobes similar to the Scottish and Irish Tower Houses. There is also some evidence that a stone or timber hall would have been built or added to the tower at the same time or shortly after the Tower house was built, At Eastington and Bonville Court, the tower which was built against a hall, is rectangular, rather than square. The Old Rectory at Angle clearly shows the evidence for a gable of a hall butting up against the tower.

Asia
The Yemeni city of Shibam has hundreds of tower houses which were the tallest in the world. Many other buildings in the Asir and Al-Bahah provinces of Saudi Arabia also have many stone towers and tower houses, called a “qasaba”.

There are also numerous examples of tower houses in Georgia in the Caucasus, where there was a clanlike social structure (surviving here into the 19th or even 20th century) in a country where fierce competition over limited natural resources led to chronic feuding between neighbours. One theory suggests that private tower-like structures proliferate in areas where central authority is weak, leading to a need for a status symbol incorporating private defences against small-scale attacks.

Similarly, hundreds of Tibetan tower houses dot the so-called Tribal Corridor in Western Sichuan, some 50 metres high with as many as 13 star-like points, and the oldest are thought to be 1,200 years old.

North America
Most notable in the New World might be considered a focal element of the Mesa Verde Anasazi ruin in Colorado, United States. There is a prominent structure at that site which is in fact called the “tower house” and has the general appearance characteristics of its counterparts in Britain and Ireland. This four-storey building was constructed of adobe bricks about 1350 AD, and its rather well preserved ruins are nestled within a cliff overhang; moreover, other accounts date this ruin somewhat earlier. The towers of the ancient Pueblo people are, however, both of smaller ground plan than Old World tower houses, and are generally only parts of complexes housing communities, rather than isolated structures housing an individual family and their retainers, as in Europe.

Source from Wikipedia