The Mortgaging and Loss of Rockett’s Castle

1. The seat, before the fall

The Rocketts’ principal seat in the Suir valley was a tower house at the townland of Gortardagh, in the parish of Clonagam (Clonegam), Co. Waterford — on the river between Portlaw and Carrick-on-Suir, in the shadow of Curraghmore, the great demesne of the Power (de la Poer) family. The records track it under a chain of spellings of the one place: Rokelliscourte (1523), Rocketts Court (1561), Rocketts Pointe (1594–95), Rocketts Castle (1596), and finally Mayfield. The earliest holder we can name is Nicholas de la Rockell, “lord of Lamport and Rokellscourt,” recorded in the Calendar of Ormond Deeds in 1524 and again before the council at Waterford in 1541.

By the 1560s the Rocketts were a settled gentry sept holding the seat and the parish of Mothel alongside — and intermarried with — the Powers of Curraghmore. The Crown pardons known as the Fiants of Elizabeth I show the seat-lands held jointly by three families whose names recur throughout this story:

That grouping is worth pausing on, because it is easy to misread. A royal pardon of this kind lists people who were associated — by locality, tenancy or kinship — and a style like “of Gortardagh” tells you where a man lived, not whether he owned the land, leased it, or sat on it as a tenant. So we cannot say from this alone that the Freney and the Power were independent proprietors rather than tenants on the seat. What can be said cuts against the easy assumption that the great Powers stood over everyone here. The Rocketts held the seat of the Crown itself: Nicholas Rockell’s 1630 inquisition records that the lands “were held and are now held of the said lord the king” — that is, in capite, in fee, which is exactly why a royal wardship fell on the heir (below). So the Rocketts were substantial freeholders answering to the king, not subordinate tenants of anyone local; and the Powers were no tenants of the Rocketts either — the Power of Curraghmore was the grandest family of the district (Lord Power, a baron), so a “Power of Barrybeghy” was most likely one of his own kin, holding in his own right. The one who may genuinely have been a tenant is the Freney — on Gortardagh under the Rocketts, or under one of the greater lords; that we cannot tell. (The “held under Lord Power” that the 1640 survey records across the seat attaches to its later holders, and is itself muddied by the Books of Survey, which enter Knockane and Coolroe under the Earl of Ormond.) Either way, the seat was, even in the 1560s, not a single solid Rockett block but a shared ground: the Rocketts at the caput — Rocketts Court and its castle — with other families seated on the parcels around them. That it was already divided this way is part of why, two generations later, it could be mortgaged and broken up parcel by parcel.

A Rockell–Power marriage is also on record from this period: a “Nichol Rockell of Rockelles Court” married Ellen Power fitz-John (Fiants 4550 and 4713, 1584–85). This is the world — gentry, Catholic, Old-English, tied by land and marriage to their Power neighbours — that the seventeenth century would unmake.

2. A family under pressure

The early Stuart decades bore hard on the Old-English Catholic gentry of the Suir valley. Recusancy fines for refusing the state church, the Crown’s feudal right of wardship over under-age heirs, and ordinary debt drove family after family to raise money on their land. The chief lenders were the Catholic merchant houses of Waterford city — above all the Strange (Strang) family — who advanced cash and took the land as security, foreclosing when it could not be repaid.

The James-I Inquisitions for Co. Waterford make the pattern plain: roughly a dozen of the inquisitions in that single volume recite mortgages or conditional feoffments, and the same creditor names recur. One example stands for many:

From 1609 onward, the Rocketts of Gortardagh were doing exactly this — raising money against the seat.

3. The mortgage ledger (1630)

When Nicholas Rockell of Rocketts Court died in 1630, the Crown took an Inquisition Post Mortem — a sworn local inquiry into what lands he held, of whom, and who his heir was. That document, taken at Blackfriars in Waterford on 2 August 1630, survives, and it lists the seat parcel by parcel — each one already mortgaged or let on a long lease between 1609 and 1623:

“… under condition of redemption upon payment of one hundred pounds sterling” — the words of the £100 Gortardagh mortgage to Edward Rockell, from the 1630 inquisition (RIA OS EI/77/19/10; the scribe’s abbreviations expanded).

Take only the three redeemable mortgages — the actual debts, recoverable on repayment — and a striking thing emerges. They total £162, and they fall out like this:

Nearly two-thirds of the mortgage on the Rockett seat was held by another Rockett — and that is before the further £40 lease the same Edward held on the other half of Gortardagh. This looks less like a family hocking its home to outside merchants than an attempt to keep the land within the family by raising money from a wealthier kinsman. The smallest slice of all — the £12 mill — was the only part in the hands of the Walshes, a detail that matters later.

The lease of the second half-carucate even spells out its rent in kind: besides £4 a year, the tenant owed a pig (a “poundage hogge”), eggs, a sheep (a “Tomer sheepe”) and a hen (a “Watch hen”). The inquisition’s scribe noted that its latter portion was “so much torn and defaced that it is next to an impossibility to copy it” — so the £162 is the recorded total, and there may have been more. documented

4. The cast — who held what

A surprising number of names crowd the record. They sort into three groups.

The Rockett family

• Nicholas Rockell of Rocketts Court — the mortgagor; died 1630.
• Katherine — Nicholas’s wife (named in the 1609 mill deed). Her maiden surname is not recorded and has not been recovered; she was not a Power of Curraghmore (that was a different Katherine — see below). unresolved
• James Rockell of Coolroe — Nicholas’s brother; died 1619; married Katherine Power of the Curraghmore family. pedigree
• Edward (Edmond) Rockell of Barrybeghy & Gortardagh, gent — the kinsman who held the two Gortardagh half-carucates for £140. An established man (on Barrybeghy as early as 1579); sued livery in 1631 and is recorded as dying at Gortardagh, with a wife Mary, about 1635. So a Rockett still held the seat-lands five years after Nicholas. part pedigree
• Edward Rockell, Nicholas’s son and heir — only 16 at his father’s death in 1630. A different, younger man from the mortgagee of the same name. documented

The creditors and lessees

• Theobald Deane, gent — held the castle itself on a £50 redeemable demise. (An earlier William Deane had held Barrybeghy by Chancery decree.)
• Richard Walsh of Waterford city and Patrick Coppinger of Clonmore — took the Gortardagh mill in mortgage for £12 (1609), to the use of Nicholas Walsh.
• Stephen Leonard — held Barrybeghy on a long lease; the Leonard interest persisted into 1640, when John Leonard fitz-John held Barrybeghy outright.
• James Ronan of Hacketstown and Richard Meagh — co-parties to the deeds.

Neighbours, lords and successors

• The Powers of Curraghmore (Lord Power) — the head landlords of the whole parish; long-standing Rockett marriage-allies.
• The Freneys — an Old-English gentry family of the Waterford–Kilkenny district; a Redmund Freny is styled “of Gortardagh” in 1567, one of the neighbouring families then seated on the seat-townlands alongside the Rocketts and a Power.
• Richard Strange and Clement Woodlock — the Waterford merchants found holding Gortardagh by 1640; both, like the Rocketts, Catholic, and themselves caught up in the Cromwellian settlement that followed.
• The Earl of Ormond — entered in the Books of Survey & Distribution as the holder of Knockane and Coolroe in 1641 (most likely as superior lord over the occupiers), and so a party to the contradictory record of who held the castle.
• Sir Algernon May — the English soldier granted the whole block in 1666, who renamed it Mayfield.

5. Death, wardship and the minor heir

To see why the seat could not be saved, you have to understand how the mortgages worked. Each was a conditional conveyance: Nicholas had handed the land to the lender, but kept back one crucial thing — the right to get it back by repaying the money, what the law calls the “equity of redemption.” To rescue the seat, someone holding that right had to find roughly £162 in cash and pay it over. After 1630, the only person who held that right was the heir.

And here a second machinery closed in. Because the Rocketts held their land in capite — directly of the Crown by knight-service — the death of the tenant leaving a male heir under twenty-one did not produce a clean inheritance. It produced a royal wardship: the Crown, or whoever it sold the wardship to, took the lands and all their rents and profits until the heir came of age. This is the very reason the inquisition was held at all — the jury’s task was to fix the heir’s age, so the Crown could claim its right. The single sworn line that follows is therefore not a detail but the legal switch that turned inheritance into wardship:

“… and that Edward Rockell aforesaid is of the age of sixteen” — the inquisition’s finding of the heir’s age, the single line that placed the estate in royal wardship and put redemption out of his reach (RIA OS EI/77/19/10).

That one fact — sexdecem, sixteen — closed every route to redemption at once:

• No standing. A minor could not sue, contract, or deal in the land; he could not exercise the right of redemption at all until he came of age and formally “sued livery” of his inheritance.
• No income. The estate’s rents — the obvious means of repaying or servicing the debt — were now flowing to his guardian, not to him.
• No money. A sixteen-year-old orphan had no £162 to hand, and could not borrow against land he did not yet control.
• No time. A redeemable mortgage ran to a deadline; miss it, and the lender’s title hardened into an absolute one. Across the five years of his minority (1630–c.1635) those windows lapsed — and by the time he could lawfully act, the 1641 rebellion and the Cromwellian confiscations had overtaken everything.

The counterfactual makes it sharp. Had the jury sworn the heir to be twenty-two, he would have inherited the estate outright, taken its rents into his own hand, and held both the standing and the means to fight to redeem the seat. Instead, a single number on a routine inquisition diverted the income, stripped the legal power, and let the deadlines run out. It is the hinge on which a family lost a seat it had held, under one name or another, for the better part of six centuries.

6. How the merchants took the seat

By the Civil Survey of 1640, no Rockett held an acre in the parish. The seat-lands were in the hands of two Waterford merchants — Richard Strange (Gortardagh-North and the castle area) and Clement Woodlock (Gortardagh-South) — both, like the Rocketts, Catholic, and both holding under Lord Power.

How they got there is partly clear and partly not. What is documented is a marriage pattern. The Strange and Woodlock houses both married into the Walsh family — the same Walshes who had held the Gortardagh mill in mortgage:

• Salomon Strange’s widow is named in a 1624 inquisition as “Maria Strange alias Walsh.” documented
• James Woodlock held the townland of Piccardstowne “in right of his wife, who was the former wife of Robert Walsh.” documented

That neatly explains how the small mill interest reached the merchants. But it does not explain the rest. The two half-carucates of Gortardagh that actually became Strange’s and Woodlock’s holdings had been mortgaged to a Rockett (Edmond, £140), and the castle to Deane (£50). How those larger interests passed into merchant hands — whether by purchase, foreclosure, or some lost conveyance — is not recorded. The Civil Survey simply lists Strange and Woodlock as proprietors, with no “by what right” clause, even though it uses that very formula elsewhere.

7. Forfeiture and the 1666 grant

Whatever route the seat took to Strange and Woodlock, its end is fully documented. As Catholics, the 1640 proprietors were swept aside in the Cromwellian confiscation and the Restoration land settlement. The Books of Survey & Distribution for Clonagam parish record the whole block being regranted, in the 1666–8 distribution, to one man:

The grant patent to Sir Algernon May and Dorothy his wife, in the barony of Upperthird, was enrolled on 17 December 1666; a royal warrant confirms May received the lands as a soldier, by decree of the Court of Claims (and that Waterford city tried, and failed, to grab them into its charter). The five parcels come to roughly 1,266 acres — almost exactly the “about 1,200 acres” that family tradition long remembered as the size of the lost estate. Taken together they in fact slightly exceeded the 1,212-acre demesne of Curraghmore next to them: at their seat the Rocketts were substantial gentry, not a minor sept — even if the wider Power estate, of which Curraghmore was only the core, far outran them. And Gortardagh was merely their Waterford seat; the family had held Fiddown and other lands across the Iverk barony of Kilkenny in earlier centuries. May renamed his new property Mayfield. The May family sold it to the Medlycotts in 1795; the old tower burned in the 1840s. documented

Yet the old name clung on. Long after 1666 the townland kept its double name — “Mayfield or Rocketscastle” on the Ordnance Survey and in Griffith’s Valuation — and in 1701 a Paul Strange still had his will proved as “of Rockets Castle, co. Waterford, gent.” (Vicars’ Index to the Prerogative Wills of Ireland). That is a designation of residence, not of title — the May family owned the estate — but it makes the point neatly: a Strange now living at a castle that bore a Rockett name under a May deed. The place outlasted everyone whose name it briefly carried. documented

A final irony — and a caution. The merchants who had taken the seat did not keep it long. As Catholics, the Strange family fell under the same Cromwellian settlement that had carried the lands to May: the Stranges of Dunkitt — the Co. Kilkenny seat, just across the Suir, of the same merchant house that held Rockwells Castle — were transplanted to Connacht, where Peter Strange of Dunkitt was decreed 954 acres in the barony of Clonderalaw, Co. Clare; a Richard Strange and Margaret his wife appear among the transplanted too (Simington, The Transplantation to Connacht, 1654–58). Whether that Richard is the very man entered at “Rockwells Castle” in 1640 cannot be shown from these records: the transplantation certificates never name the Waterford castle at all, and give the transplanted Stranges’ own “original address” as Dunkitt, Co. Kilkenny — a different seat, and a different county. The thread connects the merchant family, not provably the castle’s own holder. Clement Woodlock is harder still to follow — only women of the name (Anstace, Mary, Ellen and Katherine Woodlock) appear among the transplanted, and Clement himself is not traced at all. And the two great surveys do not even agree on who held the castle to begin with: the Civil Survey places Knockane with Strange, while the Books of Survey & Distribution enter Knockane and Coolroe under the Earl of Ormond — most probably the superior lord recorded over the actual occupier, but a real discrepancy in the record. part inference

8. The pirate that wasn’t

A later tradition holds that the Rockett of the castle was a “noted pirate,” and links the loss to a mortgage foreclosed by the merchants Woodlock and Strang. Two things can now be said about that story.

First, the mortgage at its core is true — the 1630 inquisition is the very record earlier searches could not find. But the tradition mis-names the creditors: they were Deane, the Walshes and a Rockett kinsman, not Woodlock and Strang, who were the later owners.

Second, the pirate is almost certainly invented. Charles Smith, who described this exact spot in his Antient and Present State of the County and City of Waterford (1746, and again in 1774), gives the castle a single tentative sentence — the place “was formerly called Rocketts Castle, from a castle erected here, probably by one of that name” — and no pirate, no outlaw, no scandal. The pirate tale post-dates Smith by more than a century. (A nearby “Rockett’s Tree” is most likely a folk-rendering of the Irish Crann a’ Ráchtaire, “the bailiff’s tree.”) late tradition

9. What is settled, and what is open

Settled, from primary record: the Rocketts mortgaged the whole seat 1609–1623, mostly to a Rockett kinsman; Nicholas died in 1630 leaving a minor heir who could not redeem; a Rockett still held Gortardagh to about 1635; by 1640 the seat was held by Strange and Woodlock; all forfeited and was regranted to Sir Algernon May in 1666, becoming Mayfield.

Still open — the questions this account cannot yet answer:

• The maiden name of Katherine, Nicholas’s wife (recorded only as “his wife,” and — on the evidence — not a Power).
• The fate of the young heir Edward, sixteen in 1630: no death is recorded for him, and his line does not continue on the land.
• What became of the adult mortgagee Edmond Rockell after his death about 1635 — whether he left heirs, and exactly how his Gortardagh holding (the single largest hold on the seat) passed out of Rockett hands.
• Clement Woodlock’s individual fate after 1640.
• The contradiction between the Civil Survey and the Books of Survey & Distribution over whether Strange or the Earl of Ormond held Knockane and Coolroe in 1641.
• Above all, the precise conveyance, between about 1635 and 1640, by which Edmond Rockell’s Gortardagh and Theobald Deane’s castle passed into Strange and Woodlock hands — the one step the surviving records simply do not name.

The document most likely to break the deadlock is a now-physical-only inquisition of Edmond Rockell (died 1635), of the kind that survives only in manuscript repertories — the same Exchequer-series gap that hides his uncle James of Coolroe.