It is remarkable that Victoria L. McAlister's The Irish Tower House: Society, Economy and Environment, c. 1300–1650 is the first monograph ever to be published with the Irish tower house as its sole focus. Utilizing field studies of more than one hundred sites from both rural and urban environments across the entirety of the island, this volume looks outward at the impact that the thousands of tower houses that once existed had on their economic, social, and environmental worlds. McAlister posits that tower houses appealed to a wide swath of the moneyed population of Ireland across cultural and social lines owing to their relatively small scale, affordability, and adaptability to a variety of uses.
A foundational concept for this book is that, while the structures represented an investment on the parts of those who built them, they also generated substantial income for their inhabitants. The Irish Tower House contends that the economic and environmental impacts of the activities that accompanied tower house building and occupancy resounded throughout their local regions and, via control of local and even international lines of trade and communication, had reverberations that were felt throughout Europe and the Atlantic world.
Divided into six chapters, the volume begins with an examination of the immediate environs and uses of rural tower houses and gradually expands its viewpoint to include the ways in which tower house occupants participated in the medieval agrarian, riverine, and coastal economies of the island; controlled lines of communication, travel, and trade via the country's roads and waterways; and benefited from the general lack of Crown oversite during the pre-Tudor era through the collecting of taxes and tolls. McAlister argues that tower houses were a familiar site in urban contexts as well and, owing to the flexibility of the architectural form, may have, in diverse urban settings, provided a location for commercial activities, communal defense, storage facilities, and residence. In the final chapter, McAlister begins to position Irish tower houses within a greater international context, examining the ways in which their occupants drove connection between Ireland and the world at large through the exportation of the excesses of Ireland's agricultural and manorial economy as well as via their demand for iron, salt, wine, and luxury goods.
McAlister admirably utilizes the tower house as a window through which much can be learned and understood about Irish society during an era that straddled the medieval and the early modern periods. The author delivers a nuanced and well-supported handling of the multifarious ways in which these potent visual symbols of their owners’ social and economic status provided good return for investment by allowing for exploitation of natural resources of their local area, control of lines of production, and by forming interconnected webs of trade and communication across Ireland and the world beyond. The most conspicuous limitations of this volume are those pointed to by McAlister herself, namely the temporal and geographical constraints of the study. Readers may wish to learn more about the ongoing lives of these monuments, their changing uses and interconnectedness to land, society, and economy over time.
While the construction of Irish tower houses had largely ended by the 1630s, their occupancy and use did not, with several continuing to be occupied and added onto during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Readers may also wish to know more about the parallels between Irish tower houses and similar towers found across the island of Great Britain and further afield. Despite these few shortcomings, The Irish Tower House is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a time in Ireland largely bookended on one side by the Black Death and the societal shifts that followed, and on the other side by the Cromwellian conquest. It does much to further our understanding of the appeal and effects of tower house building across Ireland and should be of interest to scholars of castle studies and historians of late medieval and early modern Ireland.
