FOR 46 - Castles and Tower Houses of the Scottish Clans.pdf

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For tress

SPREY

PUBLISHING

Castles and Tower

Houses of the Scottish

Clans 1450 – 1650

Stuar t Reid

•

Illustrated by Graham Turner

First published in 2006 by Osprey Publishing

Midland House,West Way, Botley, Oxford OX2 0PH, UK

443 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, USA

E-mail: info@ospreypublishing.com

research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act, 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical,

optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of

the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the Publishers.

ISBN 1 84176 962 2

Cartography: Map Studio, Romsey, UK

Design: Ken Vail Graphic Design, Cambridge, UK

Index by Glyn Sutcliffe

Originated by United Graphic, Singapore

Printed and bound in China through Bookbinders

06 07 08 09 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A uthor ’s not e

North American readers are advised that British convention is

followed throughout in the naming of floors: the lowest, at ground

level, is the ground floor, while the next is the first floor, and so

on upwards. Basements are always at least partially below ground

level.

For the sake of consistency and for the avoidance of confusion,

reference is made in the text to historical Scottish shires and

counties rather than to post-1974 local government areas.Thus

Bothwell Castle is located in Lanarkshire rather than Strathclyde,

and Edzell Castle stands in Forfarshire rather than Tayside.

In any reference to costing it should be borne in mind that One

Pound Sterling (£1) was equal to Twelve Pounds (£12) Scots.

A r tist ’s no te

Readers may care to note that the original paintings from which

the colour plates in this book were prepared are available for

private sale. All reproduction copyright whatsoever is retained by

the Publishers. All enquiries should be addressed to:

Graham Turner

PO Box 568,

Aylesbury

HP17 8ZX,

The Publishers regret that they can enter into no correspondence

upon this matter.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

OR A

CATALOGUE OF ALL BOOKS PUBLISHED BY

SPREY

ILITARY AND

VIATION

PLEASE CONTACT

Osprey Direct, c/o Random House Distribution Center, 400 Hahn Road,Westminster,

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E-mail: info@ospreydirect.co.uk

www.ospreypublishing.com

you use it for personal, non-commercial purposes only. Please don’t upload this pdf to a peer-

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M easurem ents

Distances, ranges, and dimensions are mostly given in Imperial

measures.To convert these figures to metric, the following

conversion formulae are provided:

1 inch

2.54cm

1 foot

0.3048m

1 yard

0.9144m

1 mile

1.609km

1 pound

0.4536kg

T he Fo r tress S tu d y G rou p ( FS G)

The object of the FSG is to advance the education of the public in

the study of all aspects of fortifications and their armaments,

especially works constructed to mount or resist artillery.The FSG

holds an annual conference in September over a long weekend

with visits and evening lectures, an annual tour abroad lasting

about eight days, and an annual Members’ Day.

The FSG journal

FORT

is published annually, and its newsletter

Casemate

is published three times a year. Membership is

international. For further details, please contact:

The Secretary, c/o 6 Lanark Place, London W9 1BS, UK

FRONT COVER

Castle Stalker, in Loch Laich, built c.1495 and recently

restored. (Image: www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk)

Contents

Introduction

Chronology

Design and development

Motte and bailey castles • Enceinte castles and courtyard castles

Tower houses • Entrances, stair towers and cap-houses

Construction

Structure • Roofing • Slates • Windows

Floors • Internal walls and details

Principles of defence

Artillery • Gunloops

Tour of a castle: Urquhart

The Upper Bailey • The Nether Bailey • The gatehouse

The tower house • Ruin

Everyday life in the castles and tower houses

The castles and tower houses at war

The fate of the castles and towers

Visiting the sites today

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

At ﬁrst sight the great profusion of castles still studding Scotland’s landscape

seems to underscore the romantic view of its tumultuous and anarchic past

created by writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Nigel Tranter. However, a closer

look at them reveals a much more complex picture of Scotland’s history – and

demonstrates how its castles and tower houses were nearly always smaller and

very different to their counterparts erected south of the border.

These constructions were shaped both by history and society and in

particular by the disastrous Wars of Independence at the outset of the 14th

century. Outwardly that conﬂict was straightforward enough: on a dark and

stormy night in 1286 King Alexander III tumbled over a cliff, broke his neck

and left no obvious heir. Consequently the various claimants or ‘Competitors’,

13 in number, submitted their candidacy to Edward I of England for arbitration

and while judging the case honestly in favour of John Balliol, he took the

opportunity to declare himself Scotland’s feudal overlord. The Scots were

unimpressed, repudiated his pretensions and after nearly 20 years Robert I –

The Bruce – eventually settled the matter at Bannockburn in 1314. To get there,

The tower house at its most bizarre

– Amisfield Tower, Dumfriesshire,

built in 1628 very much as a

‘romantick’ castle rather than a

serious fortification. Reconstruction

by McGibbon and Ross.

however, he ﬁrst had to ﬁght and win a vicious civil war against the supporters

of the Balliols, chieﬂy led by the Comyns (or Cummings) and the MacDougalls.

Their lands, as it happened, collectively stretched in a great arc from Lorne

in the west through Moray and Badenoch to the Buchan coast in the North-

East, and included most of what would later become considered as the

Highlands. At the time no such distinction existed, but the eclipse of the

Comyn lords of Lochaber and Badenoch effectively disenfranchised the

Highlands in a Scotland dominated thereafter by the Bruces and their Stewart

successors. In the ordinary way of things, the Comyns should simply have been

replaced by Bruce allies; and indeed one of his favourite lieutenants, Thomas

Randolph, was awarded the Earldom of Moray. However the Randolph line

died out within two generations, as did the Bruces themselves, leaving just the

Stewarts and the Douglases. Although the former gained and held the Crown

long beyond any reasonable expectation, as a family they rapidly declined in

importance, as did the Douglases, ravaged by ﬁghting both amongst

themselves and with the Stewarts. It is a complicated story, but the upshot was

that by the middle of the 15th century the territorial earldoms had effectively

collapsed and the ‘new’ lords who came to prominence did so through Crown

patronage and sometimes transient political inﬂuence rather than as a

reﬂection of their comparatively modest landholding.

This in turn meant that they had in effect to recruit followers, often through

the medium of mutual Bands or Bonds of Man-rent, rather than relying upon

their own tenants alone, in order to achieve and maintain that inﬂuence. The

precise form of these bands varied but essentially they were a contract whereby

one gentleman (it was very rare for anyone below the rank of laird to make

such a band) pledged his allegiance and that of his kin, friends and servants to

another, usually a lord or earl, promising to ‘ride and gang’ and to assist the

lord ‘in his actions causes and quarrels’ in return for a promise of protection

and favour. The Earls of Huntly for example received no fewer than 90 bands,

of which nine were made by lords, 71 by lairds, seven by captains of clans, two

more generally by a clan, and one by the burgh of Aberdeen. The references in

these bands to kin and friends were important, for notwithstanding the feudal

veneer, Scotland throughout this period remained very much a clan-based

society – one in which John Grant of Freuchie would feel obliged in 1590 to

take up the case of two murdered men named Grant, for they were assumed to

be his kin or ‘at the leist being ane of his surename.’ Thus, as King James VI

famously complained, men reacted to ‘anie displeasure, that they apprehend to

be done unto them by their neighbours, to tak up a plaine feid against him and

(without respect to God, King or commonweale) to bang it out braiﬂy, hee and

all his kinne, against him and all his.’

Predictably enough, although the bands could sometimes have a stabilising

inﬂuence, generally speaking they resulted in a fragmentation of authority,

encouraged feuding, and so led to a certain endemic degree of instability. All of

which led a French envoy to report in 1546 that ‘The Kingdom of Scotland was,

and still is at the present time, under arms; for all the friends of one faction

mistrust all those of the other faction; insomuch that not only the nobles are

in arms, but churchmen, friars, and peasants travel through the country only

in large companies, and all armed with jacks, swords, bucklers, and a half-pike

in hand (which they call in this country a lance).’

At the time Scotland was trembling on the brink of the Reformation, and

when it came it only made matters worse. As quickly as the vast landholdings

of the Catholic church were seized by the Crown, they were parcelled out again

amongst great numbers of small proprietors, each of whom if possessed of

lands valued at more than £100 Scots per annum was required to erect a ‘tour

of fence’ as a condition of the royal grant. The intention was to assist in the

maintenance of law and order by planting what were in effect to be local police

stations, which would inhibit the operations of those ‘large companies’,

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