At various times, various authors and authorities have used various classification schemes to identify the different forms of medieval fortifications. This, of course, has lead to confusion and attempts have been made to form a 'universal' classification scheme.
It should be noted in this web site the description of monuments is derived from secondary source who use various terms from different, and sometimes idiosyncratic, classification schemes.
The current most accepted classification is the National Monuments Record Monument Type Thesaurus for which the terms used for medieval fortifications can be seen here. This is rather dated and definitions of terms used are open to much debate.
Another classification scheme in use is the Monument Class Description of the Monuments Protection Programme, this has its problems but some of these are recognised and are under review. The terms used for medieval fortifications can be seen here. This list is not without problems; Some classifications seem too broad; notable the term Tower House covers towers of different social and manorial status and Moats includes all moated houses of any social or manorial status. Some seem too narrow so that one building fits into several classes; consider any large castle such as Windsor or the Tower of London. Some classifications seem a little arbitrary; siege castles are included under Motte Castles, rather than Fieldworks.
Particular problems arise with all classification schemes in two main areas.
The term ringwork has had a broad meaning of any ring shaped bank and can mean henge fore instance. Its use is now supposedly confined to the sense of a medieval castle with other terms like Ring Bank and Circular Enclosure being used for other monuments of a similar form but different date and/or function. It is also used for sites only partly enclosed by a bank and/or ditch (only sometimes called a partial ringwork) and by no means are all Ringworks circular or even oval in form. Some authors have used the term Ring Motte or Ringmotte to signify a medieval castle but this term has been widely disliked. It also has, for some, become specialised in use to refer to Ringworks with a raised interior (a restricted definition which I, personally, quite like).
It should also be noted that mounds which have been damaged by excavations, erosion or otherwise, and particularly mounds which had masonry buildings which have collapsed or been robbed out may have a form very different to how the originally looked. (A motte around a wooden tower which has since rotted away may well have a depressed centre making the mound look like a small ringwork. A collapsed gatehouse on the edge of a ringwork may be so covered with earth as to look like a motte. etc.). In such circumstances it is likely that such a damaged site will get called a motte.
A good number of authors get around the problem of identifying ringworks by not bothering; they simply call all castle mounds mottes. Personally I find this lazy and to call an obvious ringwork like Old Sarum a motte rather insulting to the intelligence of readers. In functional terms the difference between a ringwork and a motte are probably slight but that can also be said of the difference between a shell keep and a tower keep and no author giving a proper description of a castle would just refer to a keep without giving some idea of its form.
These terms, the generic term tower and the related terms Pele House and 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.
As far as I can make out from the literature, and I welcome corrections on this matter, the following can be said:
A good number of authors, notably King, dislike the use of the term pele to refer to the smaller towers. 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.
King used the term 'Tower' to refer to both Tower Houses and Pele Towers, using the description to differentiate between buildings of, to me, very different types. He used the Term 'Strong House' for fortified building that were not castles, towers or bastles; In effect Strong House becomes synonymous with 'Fortified Manor House' as used by most other authors but is probably justified since clearly not all fortified houses were of manorial status but this does not seem to have 'caught on' as a usage possibly because Strong House was a common synonym for Bastle,
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 crenellations.
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 I ( and some other authors) consider as two 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 term 'pelehouse' but
does continue to use the term 'Pele-House'), 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.