Verity Relph

Title of Dissertation: The Medieval Tower-house Transformed: Gentry Housing in the English West March, 1540-1603

The fortified towers or ‘pele towers’ of the Anglo-Scottish border have generally been discussed in relation to the violent activities of the ‘reivers’ in the centuries leading up to the Union of the Crowns, and there has been little attempt to bring the region, its people and architecture into wider debates about the ‘age of transition’.

I set out to uncover what happened to these late medieval towers in the sixteenth century, to explore how members of the gentry adapted their existing strongholds to meet the demands of the modern age. Focusing on the English West March, which consisted of the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, my dissertation argues that the alterations that were made shadowed cultural and architectural developments taking place throughout England at this time. However, it also points to the persistence of defensive features and local planning methods. Rather than dismissing these elements as anachronistic, it interprets them as a conscious choice on the part of owners and as articulations of a distinct regional identity.

One of my fundamental aims was to engage with these buildings first-hand, to try to understand what drove specific design decisions. I also employed probate inventories to explore how the spaces within them were experienced and thought about. Crucially, I wanted to think about these houses in relation to the men who remodelled them, to consider what their building work can tell us about their values and aspirations and about their relationship to their locality and their country at large.