WATERFORD
wine, re-exporting much of it in the late thirteenth
century to supply the armies of the English Crown
fighting in Scotland. Its status as a royal borough stra-
tegically located on the important river system of the
Suir-Nore-Barrow helped it to dominate both the polit-
ical and the economic life of much of South Leinster
and North Munster. Waterford also fought a bitter eco-
nomic war with its near neighbor, New Ross, for con-
trol of this rich hinterland.
In the Hiberno-Norse period the original town
defenses were first constructed, and its principal streets
were also laid out. The first phase of its defensive
perimeter, which was an external fosse and an internal
earthen rampart surmounted by a wooden palisade, has
been dated by dendrochronology to the last quarter of
the eleventh century. A stone town wall was first
erected in Waterford in the mid-1130s, at a time of
growing tension between the rival kingdoms of Leinster
and Desmond. This coincided with the great animal
murrain of 1133, which would have put much pressure
on the food supply of the region. After the city was
captured in 1170 by an Anglo-Norman army that
successfully breached its walls, there were many ref-
erences to the grant of “murage” by the crown to the
burgesses of the city, from as early as 1207, to help
defray the cost of building and maintaining their walls.
It is a testimony to their industry that there were some
fifteen gates and twenty-three mural towers in the cir-
cuit at its height, of which six towers still survive to
this day.
In the latter part of twentieth century the large-scale
redevelopment of the city center allowed an impressive
series of archaeological excavations to go ahead
between 1988 and 1992 in the center of the Viking-
Age core of the city. These excavations are doubly
important, in the first place because they covered
20 percent of the Hiberno-Norse walled area of the
city—the largest proportion of any Irish city that has
been archaeologically investigated. In addition, the
city’s archaeological horizons run uninterruptedly
from the tenth century to the post-medieval period, a
hitherto unparalleled sequence of survival in an Irish
urban environment.
These excavations concentrated upon the area
around two of the principal streets of Waterford—High
Street and Peter Street—that run in an east-west direc-
tion along the top of a natural promontory of land. The
excavation of this complete block of the city center
bounded by four streets produced a large quantity of
structural evidence for its original housing from as
early as the eleventh century, with the majority of these
houses fronting onto the street. Up until the middle of
the twelfth century the houses were single-storied rect-
angular structures with wattle walls, very similar to
those found in Hiberno-Norse Dublin. From the period
just before the Anglo-Norman invasion (1169–1170),
there were the beginnings of a new tradition in build-
ingwith the introduction of sill-beam houses, where
rectangular-shaped oak beams were sited as opposing
pairs on the long walls of these structures. It was also
in this period that four sunken buildings and two
stone-lined entrance passages to other structures, all
of late eleventh-century date, were constructed, which
represents the greatest number yet found in any Irish
urban settlement. In the following century stone houses
started to be constructed, with three extensive stone
undercrofts dating from the middle of the thirteenth
until the fifteenth century being excavated.
The most significant major building that was exca-
vated was the complete ground plan of St. Peter’s
parish church, along with its associated burial ground.
Six major building phases were identified up to the
seventeenth century; the earliest was represented by a
possible wooden church dating from the middle of the
eleventh to the early twelfth century. Later in the
twelfth century it was replaced by a stone church with
an apse, a unique feature in a medieval Irish parish
church that might be associated with the continental
influences on the reform of the church at that time.
The excavation of its burial ground also produced
much useful evidence about death rates, nutritional
deficiencies, degenerative joint disease, and dental
attrition in its medieval urban population.
The more than 200,000 artifacts recovered in these
excavations illustrated the importance of trade to this
urban community, mainly evidenced by the many pot-
tery shards, although very few medieval coins were
located, surprisingly. Many examples of fine tablewares
from western France, especially in the form of jugs,
were located. The excavations also revealed the extent
and importance of locally made pottery production.Ardmore Round Tower, Co. Waterford. © Department of the
Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Dublin.