“Know you that serving folk be of three kinds” Irish Towers and the Familia (original) (raw)

Abstract

"Focusing on Irish Tower Houses, this paper sets out to investigate the gentry household in late-medieval Ireland. This can be a difficult undertaking for several reasons. Foremost in Ireland is the lack of detailed documentary evidence for the period, but the buildings themselves also present problems. Not only are there differences in size from one tower to the next, but there are also differences in sophistication and both of these factors with have profound impacts upon the size and hierarchical organisation of the household. Using a survey of the available evidence for late-medieval household organisation, this paper attempts to scale this towards the gentry level and estimate the numbers and organisation of servants within an Irish tower house. This finds that as many as eighteen people may need to be accommodated either in, or around, the tower and also shows that the gentry level household lacks the complex departmental organisation of higher status medieval households. This gives the household a much more familial character. In Middle English, the word ‘family’ actually comes from the Latin words ‘familia’, meaning ‘household or ‘clan’ and ‘famulus’, meaning servant (Thompson 1995, 487). It was not solely immediate kin, as it is in the modern definition. The model household presented is then tested against evidence from over fifty towers across Ireland, in an attempt to refine our understanding and locate these individuals within the tower. The results show some regional variation, but generally suggest that, although class divisions would surely have been apparent to all concerned, there was little evidence within these structures of the desire to segregate service areas from the main body of the living space. Again this presents the tower house as the private inner reserve of the familia, here defined as the lord, his kin, and his loyal and trusted servants. "

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