medieval-atlas/social-and-cultural/433

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Defensible houses • cO· 0 • • ~ .. " 00 • • • •• . • •• ~... •• • • •o a$J• • ' ~ • • • .. . ... • • • • • ..: •••• • •• • In most areas the typical residence of the landed proprietor was the towerhouse, and buildings of this class were widely distributed throughout the lowlands, being particularly numerous in the rich agricultural lands of the Forth, Tay and Dee estuaries. Some of these towers had been erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but the majority were of sixteenth and seventeenth century date. The survey of documentary and structural evidence for towerhouses in Scotland is incomplete and it is not yet practical to include a map of their distribution in the whole of Scotland. Work in the Borders and northern England, however, has shown that large towers were built only by men of the highest status. Smaller towers of sixteenth century date were numerous in the Scottish dales, and were occupied by the local lairds and their kindred. English men of comparable local power were normally much poorer, the tenants of absentee lords, or of the crown, and built themselves small gabled defensible farmhouses, the pelehouses. These buildings are extremely rare in Scotland, and the rather larger and better-built bastle houses are also relatively uncommon. The latter were the homes of richer men who lived in towns or other • • • • • •• 6 • • ·....,. • • Tower Bastle Pelehouse Uncertain places where defence could be subordinated to convenience of living, and the later bastle houses resemble the seventeenth century unfortified house of the southern lowlands. In the north-west Highlands and the Western Isles, only the wealthiest lairds occupied even small tower-houses, and other types ofstone castle, and lesser proprietors often made do with lake-dwellings. These structures, little different in essence from prehistoric crannogs, usually took the form of a small island, wholly or partly of artificial origin, situated close to the shore of an inland loch and sometimes joined to it by a causeway; typically they contained two or three single-storeyed buildings of dry-stone or timber construction, the perimeter of the island itself occasionally being enclosed by a defensive wall. The sixteenth and seventeenth century defensible houses of Scotland, northern England and Ireland contrast with the contemporary buildings in Wales and southern England, where men of wealth did not expect to have to fortify their houses. In the former area, through lack of an effective central authority, seJf defence was necessary, and in the troubled Borders even relatively small landholders looked to their own protection . • .0 • • ~L'> . • ... .·6 6 • .'.' • • ......•• : ;.:. / , ........ • ·N·· ~ •• ->-' 6 -_ .... 00 6 6 •• 0 ~ ~ • 00 00 0 • 66 • • • kms I I I 0 10 20 30 miles Defensible houses in southern Scotland and northern England about 1500 to 1625 PD, JGD 433

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