This book is the first of three intended volumes that, taken together, will start to tackle a major gap in our knowledge of medieval and later Ireland. Dublin castle was the principal English royal castle of Ireland and it remained at the centre of the government of the island until 1921. As with any other major castle, medieval Dublin castle combined a number of roles: a residence, a military stronghold, a ceremonial centre and the focal site of political and judicial actions of the king’s representative in Ireland, but it has a number of features that distinguish it from other places in Ireland and outside. In 1237 King Henry iii ordered the construction of a magnificent, aisled great hall, which was built against the west curtain wall and took up nearly half the western half of the space inside the walls. This was a purely ceremonial hall, with no chambers attached to it, serving as the site of grand occasions, the holding of courts and, later, for the meeting of the Irish parliament; it was separate from the regular hall and chamber range along the south wall. Its construction marked the castle out as the chief place of the king’s governance of Ireland. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attempts were made to convert it into a Renaissance palace: Sidney built a new lodging and council chamber for the lord deputy in the 1570s on the north side, with Falkland’s grand long gallery of the 1620s connecting it to the medieval hall. From the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth, the whole castle was converted from the irregular space and buildings of the old, essentially medieval, castle into regular, classical ranges around one rectangular courtyard; the Upper Yard, and the less formal Lower Yard, framed by the Treasury building and the buildings for the horses. The castle was placed on a site at the end of the ridge between the Liffey to the north and its tributary, the Poddle, to the south and east, which also formed the pool of Dublin immediately south of the castle. It was hemmed in by the city on the ridge, on the north and west. Space was restricted, at first by nature and then by the walls of the castle itself. Re-use, re-building and compromise were very much the features of the later castle. It remained, however, the seat of real power and the centre of ceremonial and high society life until the end of the English government.

While it is remarkable that this major site has not been described before now, it is understandable, for Dublin castle is a most complex site and its long history makes for a great mass of documentation (as well as much re-building). This has shaped the project, of which this volume is the first of three; to be followed by one on the Viking archaeology and one on the medieval and post-medieval archaeology. Its aim is straightforward: to bring together into one volume the evidence of the documentation of the castle. It does so in a lavish manner; large pages with double columns, printed on glossy paper with many illustrations. However, to manage the amount of material and present its content to the reader, the editors have taken two major strategic decisions. The first is to ask more than one person to work on it; the volume consists of three essays by different authors on three periods: the medieval period (by Seán Duffy); 1560–1684 (by John Montagu); 1684–1850 (by Kevin Mulligan and Michael O’Neill). Each of these is broken up into chronological and topographical sections. The second decision was that the priority of the authors should be, first and foremost, to present the details of the documentation, rather than to analyse it or weave it into a coherent narrative, let alone to combine the written record with information derived from a record of the physical remains of the standing buildings or the excavations.

The primary objective of the project has been achieved. No-one can be at a loss any more as to what the documents can tell us of the castle’s development and the individual buildings within its walls and the evolution of the area around them. It has been possible in the past to pick a document out of context because the context had not been made accessible. One example of this will suffice to show how the comprehensive nature of this volume can change our view of the castle. King John issued a writ in 1204 to construct a castle and tower at Dublin and this has often been quoted (because its wording was so emphatic) in such a way as to make it seem that this marked the origin of the castle. Some writers have recognised that there must have been a castle before this (the English seized Dublin in 1170), but this view was based on rather vague grounds, either of a single reference or the opinion that there must have been one. Duffy now deploys a considerable number of individual documents to show clearly that there was a castle in Dublin before 1204. The matter is now settled, but it comes after a section where Duffy summarises some of the evidence of the enclosures or fortifications recorded at Dublin before 1170. Here, space and the desire to stick to the castle area limits the usefulness of the section; he omits all reference to the early cemetery upstream at Islandbridge/Kilmainham and seems to link the communal enclosure of the tenth century, an Irish royal centre, which may have been enclosed, and the first castle together. The important point is, however, the way that the individual documents can be taken out of their context and the need to have a complete record of all documents, as this volume supplies in exemplary fashion.

This said, the structure and aims of the volume also cause problems. It is not an easy read. The three essays are divided chronologically and the divisions, between the three essays and the sub-divisions within them, make for difficulties. Sidney’s building projects of the 1560s and 1570s are considered twice; in Duffy’s medieval chapter and Montagu’s succeeding one. The great fire of 1684 divides the second and third essays, logically enough, but it gets lost between the two, when we need a clear account of the area of the damage. The important Dartmouth plan of the castle in 1673 appears twice, as figures 1.12 and 2.1. Topics and buildings appear in different places; illustrations are displaced from the relevant test, such as the 1606 plan of the castle or the 1728 view of it, both of which are put in the medieval chapter. The admirable stress on making the contents of the documents available as they stand leads to a tendency for the description of the trees to outweigh a consideration of the wood. Many original plans and elevations, particularly from 1700 onwards, are reproduced, which is excellent; they are core documents, but they make up the great bulk of the illustrations. The lettering is often hard to read (the reader needs to have a powerful magnifying glass to hand) and they can be difficult to locate within the overall layout of the castle. By contrast there are very few recent photographs of the buildings or diagrams and plans drawn to elucidate points or orientate the reader. Themes are separated into several sections, such as the one of the steady progress of draining the pool south of the castle and canalising the River Poddle to the south and the east to create the castle gardens and the stable yard. Perhaps the oddest editorial decision is the choice of c 1850 as the end of the volume. We are told that this ‘reflects the latest archaeology recorded’ (p xiii), but that is not a criterion applicable to the documents. The obvious termination is 1921, with the ejection of the British rule and the establishment of the new Free State. The arbitrary date of 1850 precludes a full treatment of the nineteenth-century history, which was marked, among other issues, by the withdrawal of the vice-regal residence to Phoenix Park after 1817. Although we have an account of the removal of the horses and the military from the Lower Yard, we do not have an account of the growth of the administration, filling up the spaces left by the withdrawal of the viceroy’s household. The comparison with the growth of 10–11 Downing Street in London, residence and administration in the one building, is striking.

These remarks are not so much a criticism of the volume as it stands, for they arise from the commendable aim of making all the material available to the reader, as it exists. Rather, it is a strong plea that there be a fourth volume, which will bring all the evidence together, documentary and architectural or archaeological, under themes, such as the development of the lodgings, the provision for state ceremonies, or the separation of the palace from the city and its surroundings. This would truly complete the project so well started in this volume.