Paper short abstract:

Thousands of tower houses and hundreds of churches were built across Gaelic Ireland from 1400 onwards. This paper will argue that the relative character, quality and geographical distribution of castles and churches can say much about the workings of kinship and social status within and between lineages in each native lordship.

Paper long abstract:

Gaelic Ireland remains one of the least understood areas of Western Europe in the late medieval period. A network of small and competing lordships, its internal political and social structure was based on a lineage system that was swept away by the expanding capitalist world of Tudor colonists. Histories dependent on English state papers have been poorly equipped to chart the micro topographies of Gaelic Ireland's lordships or explore the complex alliances and identities that supported them. In particular, the character and context of Gaelic Irish settlement has been misrepresented, denigrated or rendered invisible.

Thousands of tower houses and hundreds of churches were built across medieval Gaelic Ireland from 1400 onwards, but while some archaeological research has assessed their typology we have yet to query what such buildings can tell us about kinship and identity. This paper proposes a new way to tackle the limitations of narrative histories, combining research on two poorly understood resources for Gaelic culture: the written genealogical record and built remains in the landscape. The rich but under-used genealogical data on Gaelic Ireland's families, carefully preserved in native manuscripts, allows us to reconstruct the complex network of kinship between the various branches of each sept, providing a new context in which to analyse their built environment. This paper will argue that the relative character, quality and geographical distribution of castles and churches can say much about the workings of kinship and social status within and between lineages in each territory.