Extents of 1284 and 1311, the first made for the crown and the alternate for the earl of Ormond, record the actuality of a' gravestone house' — presumably the castle — a church and a shop, together with diggings
and lodges. The entitlement of a request in 1213, together with the burgesses mentioned over, indicates that the agreement of Bray at this time had city status, a status it would fail to maintain. The earl of Tyrconnell's portion included seven residences and auditoriums conterminous to the backyard on the west side of the main road, while the earl of Meath entered the castle, the shop, shop levee and sluices, the rabbit warren, one house on the west side of the main road and, supposedly, half a dozen or so houses on the east side. The terms of this partition, which have remained the base of land power in and around Great Bray( although not in Little Bray) until the present, brought stability after a lengthy period of disputed power and led to the permission of plats for parcels of land over the succeeding times. 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. The trouble came from the south- west where two major families, the O'Byrnes and theO'Tooles, expelled from Kildare by the Anglo- Normans, maintained bases in the inapproachable highlands from which to wage war against the crown and to attack the settled communities in the lowlands below. Wicklow. The scars are cut into the ancient jewels that uphold the Bray area. 4 Rathmichael, 3 km down, was the nearest early Christian monastic agreement of any significance and Bray's only surviving structure of the period is a small medieval church, Raheenacluig, on the north side of Bray Head. The total number of homes listed, forty- eight, would suggest a population for the manor house of approaching two hundred persons, utmost of whom presumably lived in the nucleated agreement at the core of the present city.