Kilkenny Castle - History

History

Richard de Clare (also known as Strongbow) and other Norman knights came to Kilkenny in 1172, the high ground beside the River Nore was as an ideal site on which to build a wooden tower. He built a wooden castle of the type known as motte-and-bailey.

This strategic site was where the local kings of Ossory, the Mac Giolla Phádraigs, (later anglicized to Fitzpatrick), had their chief residence before the Norman invasion.

Twenty years later, de Clare's son-in-law, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, built the first stone castle on the site, of which three towers still remain.

The castle was owned by the seneschal of Kilkenny Sir Gilbert De Bohun who inherited the county of Kilkenny and castle from his mother in 1270, in 1300 he was outlawed by Edward I but was reinstated in 1303, he held the castle until his death in 1381. It was not granted to his heir Joan, but seized by the crown and sold to the Butler family.

Read more about this topic:  Kilkenny Castle

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.
    Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)