De Ridelesford had, in the event, named the wrong side of the swash for a protective point; the trouble of attack by forces opposed to the crown was noway to come from the north. This creek
, unlike the mouths of the Liffey further north or the Vartry and Avoca Rivers at Wicklow and Arklow further south, didn't supposedly attract endless settlers during the Viking period, but high scars cut into solid gemstone on the south bank of the swash, close to the tidal limit, handed a good point for the first small community of the manor house of Bray in the times after the AngloNorman irruption. 1 5 In 1676 members of the Brabazon family made an agreement that leases could be for 61 times or 3 lives, since offers were being made' by divers persons' to erect' houses, thoroughfares, request places and other advancements' handed that they could have long plats. The seventeenth- century event with the most far- reaching counteraccusations for the development of Bray was the formal partition of the manor house in 1666 between Edward Brabazon, second earl of Meath, and the earl of Tyrconnell ( excursus A). 1 2 With its bawn, it must have served as some protection for the medieval occupants of the manor house, but by the early seventeenth century, when it was described as a forty- bottom forecourt, threestorey, gravestone palace, 1 3 it was in a bad state of form. 1 1 In 1402 the occupants of Bray were uncomfortably close to a major battle, when the forces of the mayor of Dublin foisted a crushing defeat on theO'Byrnes at' Bloody Bank' on the north bank of the Dargle( a point still commemorated, sanitised, in Little Bray's Sunnybank). medieval and early ultramodern agreement, may have been recognised as a desirable one indeed before the appearance of the Anglo- Normans. 1 Constricted and fleetly- flowing for utmost of its passage, the Dargle has created a narrow flood tide straight before reaching its marshy creek
. Its lack of protection from the south and south- west, still, was a factor that would prove to be of significance in posterior centuries. 9 Sir Hugh de Lawless, granted the manor house in 1316, surrendered it back to the crown in 1320, stating that his profit during five times of residency had amounted to two salmon, 1 0 while in the 1330s Bray was described as being' in the march, so that scarcely anything can be entered therefrom'.