Bastlefacts

© 2025 - The estate of Philip Davis and the Castle Studies Group

These terms, the generic term tower and the related terms (i.e. Bastle House) and alternative spellings (Peel; Bastel) are variously used by different authors to mean several different forms of building, quite often using the same term for different building and different terms for the same building, thrown in to this mess are the terms Strong House, Stone House and Fortified House which are generally used with less clear definitions to cover more vague monuments.

A good number of authors dislike the use of the term pele to refer to the smaller towers. In some cases the term originated as a reference to timber defences, probably specifically a timber palisade and was used with this sense in contemporary 13th century documents but it was, at least occasionally, in use for stone buildings of some form by the 16th century. The small and dated book of 1894 Peel: its meaning and derivation by George Neilson gives some contemporary examples. However, it should also be noted that the Celtic word pil can mean a fortified place and this does get spelt in various ways including peel. The antiquarian John Leland used the term pile, in the sense of heap of stones, quite often when referring to buildings, including tower houses. The general term pele is one that was widely used by common people to mean a fortified building of many forms and, for these people, the origin, whether Latin, Celtic or some confabulation, was not important (see the discussion in the RCAHMS Inventory for Roxburghshire transcribed below showing how the term was also used for strongly built timber and earth buildings).

There are a good number of examples of 'learned men' making assumptions that local people were using the term to refer to some form of tower house when, in fact, they were using it for more modest stone buildings. The Historic England monument type thesaurus classifications for fortified houses are;

• Fortified House - A house which bears signs of fortification. These often include crenellated battlements and narrow slit-like windows.
• Tower House - A multi-storey, fortified hall house with one of the crosswings being raised in the form of a crenellated tower. Permanently occupied, they date from the mid 14th to the 17th century and are found mainly in the border counties of the North of England.
• Pele Tower - A strong, fortified dwelling, of between two and four storeys. Occupied only in times of trouble built mainly in the border country of the North from the mid 14th to the 17th century.
• Fortified Manor Houses - A manor house, which was granted a royal licence to crenellate.
• Bastel House, Bastle House - A fortified house of two or three storeys, the lower floor being used to house animals and the upper for domestic use.

• Fortified House - A house which bears signs of fortification. These often include crenellated battlements and narrow slit-like windows.
• Tower House - A permanently occupied, fortified residence, built from the mid-14th to the 17th century. Tower-houses are rectilinear in plan, often with one or more additional wings, and provide accommodation on several storeys.
• Pele House - An uncrenellated, strong, fortified dwelling, of between two and four storeys, built mainly from the mid 14th to the 17th century.
• Fortified Manor Houses - A manor house, which was granted a royal licence to crenellate.
• Bastle - A fortified house of two or three storeys, the lower floor being used for storage and/or to house animals and the upper floors for domestic use.

These sets of classifications certainly has a number of problems. There is nothing to actually suggest most of the buildings generally called pele towers were only occupied in 'times of trouble' and some other axioms are questionable but the major issue may be the confabulation of the terms 'Pele-Tower' and 'Pele-House' terms which have had significantly different meanings to some important authors.The Monuments Protection Programme merely lumped all terms under Tower House.

The adoption of these problematic taxonomies is certainly not universal amongst modern writers, certainly not by those who are historians and earlier writers had many, usually idiosyncratic, terminologies of their own. Generally modern, academic, writers use the term 'tower house' as a general term for all buildings of three or more storeys using the description to differentiate between buildings of different types.

The one term which seems to have had a widespread uptake is the use of bastle for the rectangular chamber over byre buildings of 16th-17th date. Of this usage Philip Dixon, in an article of 1979 writes, with considerable authority:

Among the surviving sixteenth-century structures two broad divisions are apparent: those in the first group are tall buildings, normally with battlements and all perhaps originally surrounded by courtyards containing domestic offices. Their builders called them 'towers' or 'hall-houses' or, occasionally, 'peles' or 'peels', and they are now normally called 'towerhouses'. Those in the second group may themselves divided into two categories: in the first place are large rectangular houses, sometimes with projecting staircase turrets and seldom with crenelations. Contemporaries called these 'bastles' or 'bastle-houses', or sometimes 'towers'. Secondly there are small roughly built barn-like houses with thick drystone walls. These were called several different names: 'bastles', 'stronghouses', 'stonehouse' or 'pelehouses' or more recently 'peles', and many in the sixteenth-century clearly regarded these names as interchangeable. Strict adherence to sixteenth-century usage is thus undesirable, but a recent account has taken the name 'bastle' to refer solely to to the smallest of the fortified houses (Ramm et al. 1970).

This unfortunate practice excludes the very type of building normally called a bastle (see further Dixon 1972) ... the Scottish Royal Commission's useful distinction between 'bastle-houses' (large houses) [He uses the example of Doddington and Hebburn for this type of building.] and 'pelehouse' (small and rough houses, now often called 'bastles').

Thus Dixon (and it has to be said a number of other authors like Peter Ryder) seems to put under the one term 'towerhouse' that which other authors consider as two relatively distinct sets of buildings; Tower Houses and Pele Towers, but he also point out that the term Bastle also refers to two distinct sets of building. As he points out in Shielings and Bastles the term bastle is used exclusively for the smaller 'pelehouse' and later authors have generally followed this precedent rather than that of the Scottish Royal Commission (which itself now does not use the terms 'pelehouse' and 'bastle-house' but does now use the term 'Pele-House' but as a synonym for the English pele-tower), with 'true' bastle-houses being called 'tower-houses' or 'strong houses'.

However, most authors (including Ryder) do not differentiate between bastles and consider Dixon's Bastle-houses as belonging to the Bastle class although at the' top' end of the group. Other writers, such as Alastair Maxwell-Irving, further differentiate the smaller buildings between pele-houses sometimes with vaulted floor and with mortared walls and unmortered peles without vaulted floors. When looking at 16th and 17th century sources a reference to a bastile is likely to refer to a gentry status building of the form now usually called 'Tower House'.

The term came from France and its use probably relates to the influence of french culture o the Scottish court and gentry. Its use in England was rare until the late 20th century. When looking at modern sources the term bastle will relate to modest status buildings of the form of a chamber over a byre or store which contemporaries probably called a 'stone house' or 'pele-house'.

There is a continuum or spectrum for all these late medieval buildings of the form of residential chambers over a ground floor non-residential space. One way to resolve the difficulties of describing the complexities of this continuum is simply to classify all such buildings under the same name (tower house). For this writer this appears to be a cop out and should be compared to not bothering to identify the colours of the rainbow. Defining medieval social class can also be somewhat tricky, particularly in this border area where family and clan ties exist over and around manorial systems, but may be a bases on which some form of differentiation between buildings in the 'tower house' continuum can be made.

There can be some architectural similarities between pele towers built by wealth non-nobles and tower houses built by poorer members of the nobility but generally the difference in social status is clear in the buildings. Similarly the poorest members of the gentry may well have lived in two storey chamber over byre 'pele-houses' although that form of building is most likely to be the residence of reasonably wealthy tenant farmers.

As with the spectrum of light there are issues - Although we are all taught there are seven colours in the spectrum in fact there are infinitely many but just six main groups (Indigo is a really a form of blue - Issac Newton suggested seven because of his spiritual and numerological beliefs and not for rational reasons) and there are colours that fall outside the spectrum (there is no purple in a rainbow). Similarly some buildings fall outside the simple continuum (The gatehouse of Tynemouth Abbey is really an independent tower house over a gateway but will hardly be described as such). However such difficulties should be the source for informed study and understanding and should not be avoided for the sake of ease or the even more odious excuse of 'simplicity' - with the implication that the general public are incapable of understanding complex arguments. Generally great care needs to be taken when reading anything about the fortified buildings of 16th century Scottish marches. The relatively few authors who take the time to explain the diversity of buildings and try to describe the building forms (i.e. Alastair Maxwell-Irving) can be considered as more reliable but it is most unlikely that any two such authors will use the same terms in precisely the same way.

For writers who do not make clear what the form of building is, and who are assuming the reader knows what they mean, the following seems to be the usual meaning:

For English writers, Tower House is a term used to mean a high (baronial) status manorial building in the form of a tower of three or more storeys. These building did not usually stand alone but had small court of ancillary buildings in a defended court, sometimes called a barmkin. Such buildings would have a crenelated parapet and wall walk at roof level. An example would be Belsay Castle. However writers in Scotland and Ireland, where freestanding (but often with barmkin and ancillary farm buildings) residential multi-storey houses of more modest social status were common, the term is used in a wider sense for all such buildings of any social status.

English writers used, Pele Tower (and its synonym Vicars Pele) as a term for a gentry status building usually square usually of three storeys used by a non noble person, such as, but not exclusively, a vicar or knight, with an attached unfortified hall and often a barmkin and associated buildings. Such building would normal have a crenelated parapet at roof level, sometimes with a balcony or lookout but not usually with a complete wall walk. (i.e. Corbridge Vicars Pele). The term is also used, in England, for some smaller examples of freestanding 'tower houses' of the Scottish type of which a small number exist south of the Border.<

Bastle is a term generally now used to mean the rectangular strongly built farmhouses of the Scottish border built in the 16th and 17th centuries by tenant farmers of middling social status and wealth. The term Pele-House is/was a synonym used in Scotland and in this account. These had accommodation on the first floor reached by an external stair or ladder or, in finer examples, an internal stair. The floor is sometimes stone vaulted. Ground floor space was used for livestock and a narrow doorway allows access (although modern cattle would not fit through the small doors). These building originally had steeply pitched roofs of stone tiles or heather thatch. An example is Black Middens. This terminology is now beginning to be used in Scotland although the term 'pele-house' was the usually term for such buildings in Scotland.

Pele (the word on its own) is used, in Scotland, for very modest houses similar to bastles in being two storey, although often square and constructed of dry stone (unmortared or clay bonded masonry) and probably with a roof of heather thatch.