ROUND TOWERS
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for instance, and that any modern military man could have found
a much better site not far away. Therefore, so the argument runs,
if some can be shown not to have been originally for defence or
refuge, then this purpose is invalidated for all, since they are so
similar in essentials.
I believe this objection is at fault in neglecting the great weight
which, in the Middle Ages, would be attached to the supernatural
protection supposed to be available at holy sites. We may safely
assume that the later or present stone church often replaced a
wooden church or even an open-air altar or sacred tree on the
same site, so that I suggest the Tower was built not where a soldier
of 1963 would chose, but where, in 963 seemed to lie the greatest
hope of salvation for a farming community, beset by a well-armed
and pitiless foe. The English Litany of the eleventh century
included the petition, "From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord
deliver us".
My point here may be summarised by the hypothesis that first
there was a sacred, perhaps pre-Christian, site, then a secular
refuge or look-out tower erected nearby, then followed consecra-
tion and re-use of the tower itself to serve as a belfry to the new
Norman stone church built on the already-sacred site adjoining
the tower, where a Saxon timber church may sometimes have
stood. Most East Anglican round towers appear to antedate their
adjoining churches, although this is less certain in the Essex
examples. Two round towers (Bramfield in Suffolk and Snoring
in Norfolk) do not physically adjoin their churches, but are
separated by several yards therefrom.
We should now consider Round Towers abroad, briefly touch-
ing on their location and characteristics, and noting how they
differ from the English Towers.
Ireland had some 120 round towers, and over half of this
number remain. Despite early theories of their origin, ranging
from Budhist missionary zeal (O'Brien3), Phoenician colonisation
(eighteenth century over-imaginative antiquarians) to Danish
strong-points (that is, built by the invading Danes themselves, a
curious and entirely unwarranted extrapolation from the tradi-
tional name "Dane Towers"), there is little doubt that they were
roughly contemporary with the Round Towers of East Anglia, and
seemed to have served the same original purpose (de Poer4). How-
ever, instead of being typically 50-60 feet tall and 16-20 feet in
external diameter, like ours, the Irish examples were often 80 feet
in height, even up to 120 feet in one case, with about the same
base diameter as their English counterparts: they are thus so
slender and chimney-like that it seems difficult to suppose they
were built solely for refuge. They are usually isolated, or separated
by some distance from their nearby churches: indeed, one is far
removed from any church site.
The significance of the shaped cap which once terminated most
of the Irish Towers (but not the English) is still in doubt. Ireland
was not widely "christianised" until the twelfth century, if then,