Castle — hall-house in Manorland (1st Division)

In 1283 Geoffrey de Geneville and his wife Matilda entrusted their English and Welsh lands to their son, Peter. They retained only their Irish possessions and thus signalled a strong commitment to the liberty of Trim and the improvement of the castle which would become their home (Duffy, 2011, 14). They built the Great Hall inside the N angle of the ward, probably on their return to Ireland in 1284, although its close dating is not possible as no deposits are directly associated with it. However, deposits outside the SW wall of the Magdalen Tower where a fragment of a glass vessel provides a date in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century can be applied to the hall, and from documentary sources it is known that the hall was extant in 1326 when £20 was required for the repair of the ‘Great Hall’ and other structures (ibid. 16). Further major repairs were conducted on the ‘Red Hall’ and the Magdalen tower in 1367 (ibid. 18). The one-storey hall at Trim was perhaps the largest (max. int. dims 28.5m NW-SE; 17m NE-SW) medieval hall ever built in the country. Its NE wall is built on the line of the curtain wall, and its floor is over the infilled lower arrow-loops (Hayden 2011, 196-9). An undercroft, which originally had a wooden ceiling, was excavated at its SE end to serve as a larder and store (ibid. 201-07). The present barrel-vaulted roof (int. dims 17m NE-SW; 5.6-5.85m NW-SE) with its wicker-centring is an insert as it partly blocks the doorway in the SE wall and its NW wall abuts the pillars of the hall above. The undercroft was accessed from outside by steps down from the SW and through a wide doorway (Wth 1.4m) in that wall. It also communicated through a doorway (Wth 1.55m) in the SE wall and a rock-cut passage with the watergate. This would have been punched through the curtain wall and only the base of its opening (Wth 1.85m) survives. Outside the watergate a masonry platform served as a dock, and there may have been a wooden pier outside this as bedrock is barely beneath the water level of the moat here (ibid. 207-08). The hall was an open space where the roof was supported on two arcades of four masonry pillars, the rough bases of which are still evident. The entrance was not identified but would be on the SW wall and the wooden floor was supported on offsets. The NE wall has five large embrasures over the now blocked and buried arrow-loops of the curtain wall, which is a wider wall. The wide embrasures are now blocked up with smaller defensive gun-loops of the seventeenth century, but they were positioned to light the bays between the pillars supporting the roof. Between the windows are niches (2.5m over floor level) in the wall to take bracers for a hammer-beam roof rising in stages to span the hall. From dressed stones found in the excavation each window would have had two fairly wide, pointed lights (ibid. 199, Figs 22. 23; 22, 36). The SE end of the hall was subsequently cordoned off with a small wall that might have supported a dais, although this would have been more appropriate at the other end, and the wall may have enclosed a kitchen as there is no positive evidence of such a facility anywhere in the vicinity. The hall underwent further development in the fifteenth century when the doorway at the centre of the SE wall of the undercroft was closed and a new one opened at its N end, allowing more direct access to the watergate, which would ultimately be closed and the rock-cut passage filled in. The vault of the undercroft was built, and above it at the hall level a wall connecting the most south-easterly pair of piers with the long walls separated off this end of the hall. A small structure, possibly a kitchen, was built onto the SE wall of the great hall, and the undercroft itself continued to be used into the late seventeenth century when the floor level was raised and a drain inserted at the NE end. A coin of 1689 and late seventeenth century clay pipes were recovered from these deposits (ibid. 285). See the attached view from W while under excavation Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 11 July 2019