# Barnwell Castle

castle in Northamptonshire, England, UK

Barnwell, United Kingdom

Fortification

## Story

• Barnwell Castle is a ruined stone enclosure south of Oundle and north of the village of Barnwell, fortified in or about 1266 by Berengar le Moyne.
• The quadrangular walls, with round and trefoil towers and a twin-towered gatehouse, stand about 30 feet or 9 metres high.
• Ramsey Abbey took the manor back in 1276, and after the dissolution Henry VIII granted it in 1540 to Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu.
• Courtyard buildings were later removed, and the adjoining manor house passed in 1938 to the Duke of Gloucester and was sold in 2024.
• Digging in 1980 found Saxon pottery under the towers and twelfth- and thirteenth-century floors, and gatehouse repairs were completed in 2021.

## Visiting

Entry is not allowed. Visitors may not enter the castle. There is no public admission.

## History

Barnwell Castle is a ruined quadrangular stone enclosure south of Oundle, on a slight plateau above the Barnwell Brook in Northamptonshire. Berengar le Moyne fortified the manor house in or about 1266, during the closing stages of the Second Barons' War, while Henry III was still king. A jury in 1276 said the castle had been built ten years earlier, and a chantry in its chapel had been agreed in 1257.

The walls stand up to about 30 feet, or 9 metres, and the ward measures about 41 metres by 27 metres, with round and trefoil towers and a twin-towered gatehouse. In 1276 Abbot William de Godmanchester bought the manor back for a price given as 1,666 pounds and as 1,666 pounds 13 shillings and 4 pence. The castle became a grange of Ramsey Abbey. Wall paintings of about 1300 survive in the north guardroom, later read as a chapel.

After the abbey was dissolved, Henry VIII granted the manor in 1540 to Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu. The family altered the towers for lodging, and from about 1600 the main house grew into Barnwell Manor beside the ruin. Edward Montagu, the first Baron Montagu of Boughton, supported Charles I, was arrested in August 1642, and died a prisoner on 15 June 1644.

Charles I stopped here in August 1645, after that death. The courtyard buildings were later taken down, with accounts placing that loss in the Elizabethan period, about 1684, and 1704. The west wall was left with a wide gap, later blocked after 1730.

The estate was sold in 1913 and bought in 1938 by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, for 37,500 pounds. The adjoining manor was offered in September 2022 for 4.75 million pounds and sold in April 2024. Rescue digging in 1980 found Saxon pottery under the towers and floors with twelfth- and thirteenth-century pottery and animal bone.

Repairs to the south-east tower and the gatehouse were completed in 2021, after limestone decay and vegetation had damaged the exposed wall cores. The ruin remains privately owned. Entry is not allowed, and there is no public admission.

## Photographs

- [Photograph — Will Lovell](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Barnwell_Castle.jpg)
- [Castle Wall, Barnwell — Michael Trolove](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Barnwell_Castle1.jpg)
- [Barnwell Castle - Strictly private — Richard Humphrey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Barnwell_Castle_-_Strictly_private_%28geograph_4770702%29.jpg)
- [Cottage near Barnwell Castle — Michael Trolove](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Cottage_near_Barnwell_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_874914.jpg)
- [Subjects — Bell, Thomas, of Barnwell, Northamptonshire](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/The_rural_album%2C_containing_descriptive_and_miscellaneous_poems%2C_with_historical_notices_of_Barnwell_and_Fotheringhay_castles%2C_%26c_%28IA_ruralalbumcontai00bell%29.pdf)

## Sources

- [Barnwell Castle, scheduled monument](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1003624) — Historic England
- [Parishes: Barnwell St. Andrew](https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/northants/vol3/pp70-76) — British History Online
- [Barnwell Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnwell_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Barnwell Manor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnwell_Manor) — Wikipedia
- [Henry III of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_III_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Second Barons' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Barons%27_War) — Wikipedia
- [English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Edward Montagu, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Montagu,_1st_Baron_Montagu_of_Boughton) — Wikipedia
- [Barnwell Castle building record](https://her.northamptonshire.gov.uk/Monument/MNN107880/) — Northamptonshire Historic Environment Record
- [Possible Saxon buried soil at Barnwell Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/b1c5c25c-c821-4cba-b3a4-a16f7a3adf66/MNN34882) — Historic England
- [Barnwell Castle on the Heritage at Risk register](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-at-risk/search-register/list-entry/247354) — Historic England
- [Barnwell Castle, north-east tower building recording, 2022](https://her.northamptonshire.gov.uk/Event/ENN110362/) — Northamptonshire Historic Environment Record
- [Excavations at Barnwell Castle, Northants, 1980](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3239665) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Barnwell Castle](https://www.castleuk.net/castle_lists_midlands/141/barnwellcastle.htm) — CastleUK
- [Barnwell Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barnwell_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Barnwell Castle1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barnwell_Castle1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Barnwell Castle - Strictly private (geograph 4770702).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barnwell_Castle_-_Strictly_private_(geograph_4770702).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cottage near Barnwell Castle - geograph.org.uk - 874914.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cottage_near_Barnwell_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_874914.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [The rural album, containing descriptive and miscellaneous poems, with historical notices of Barnwell and Fotheringhay castles, &c (IA ruralalbumcontai00bell).pdf](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_rural_album,_containing_descriptive_and_miscellaneous_poems,_with_historical_notices_of_Barnwell_and_Fotheringhay_castles,_%26c_(IA_ruralalbumcontai00bell).pdf) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Barnwell Castle is a ruined stone enclosure in the parish of Barnwell, south of Oundle and north of the village, in Northamptonshire. It stands near the bottom of a small side valley that opens onto the valley of the River Nene, about 3 kilometres south of Oundle, on a slight plateau skirted by the Barnwell Brook to the south and west. One measured account places the ruins some 20 feet above that brook. The place is a fortified residence of the thirteenth century, quadrangular in plan, with towers at the angles and a gatehouse. It is privately owned. Entry is not allowed, and there is no public admission. It is not a world-heritage inscription.

The ground is recorded at several nearby points. One grid is TL047853. Others are TL0492285228, TL0492085227, TL 04917 85203, TL 0492 8522, TL 04910 85251, and TL 0491 8523. A pipe trench of 1990 is given as TL04998520. A map point used for the place sits at latitude 52.454929 and longitude 0.45742 degrees west, beside a soil record at latitude 52.455147 and longitude 0.457544 degrees west. The parish of Barnwell Saint Andrew, to which Barnwell All Saints has been ecclesiastically attached since 1821, covers 1,681 acres. The ground rises from about 80 feet above the ordnance datum on the bank of the Nene, which bounds the parish on the north-west, to 117 feet at the church, and to an average of 200 feet east and south-east of the village. A large tract in the north and north-west is liable to floods. The subsoil is cornbrash in the west and centre and Oxford clay in the east, and the upper soil is mixed. The principal crops named for the parish are hay, wheat, barley, and beans. In 1921 the population numbered 167. Early spellings include Beornwelle and Bernewelle in the eleventh century, Bernewelle Sancti Andree in the thirteenth, Bernewell Moyne in the fourteenth, Barnwell and Barnwell Andree in the sixteenth, and Barnwell Saint Andrew in the seventeenth.

A charter of Edward the Confessor confirmed Barnwell Saint Andrew to Ramsey Abbey as the gift of Ethelric, Bishop of Dorchester, who died in 1034. The authenticity of one written form of that gift has been doubted. William I and Edward III also confirmed the grant. At the Domesday survey of 1086, and again in a survey placed in the eleventh century, the land of Saint Benedict of Ramsey included six hides in Barnwell. There was a priest in 1086. Two mills rendered 24 shillings. Between 1114 and 1130 Abbot Reinald granted, as an inheritance, to Reginald le Moyne and his sons the lands Reginald held of the abbey in this parish and elsewhere, for 100 shillings a year and the service of one knight’s fee. Another account places that grant in about 1120. Reginald was the abbey’s tenant from about 1110, and possibly as early as 1091. His son Berengar witnessed deeds between 1114 and 1163 and was succeeded in or before 1166 by his own son, another Reginald le Moyne, who between 1184 and 1189 owed the service of one knight to the abbot for a fee in Northamptonshire. That Reginald apparently had two sons, Berengar and Reginald, and was succeeded by his grandson Reginald, son of Berengar. The grandson was dead in 1248, when William of York, Provost of Beverley, was guardian of his son and heir, also named Berengar. This Berengar, the third of that name in the scheduled account, inherited in 1241 in one telling and had attained his majority before 1264 in the county history.

One public account says a motte and bailey was erected in 1132. The county history, describing the stone castle, places it to the south-east of an earthwork already noted as apparently the site of an earlier castle, and it says the stone castle’s own position is of no military importance. It also says there are no indications of a moat or of true entrenchments, except on the north side, where a broad embankment about 6 feet high and 220 feet long is apparently not of early date. The scheduled account gives that bank as 1.8 metres high and 67 metres long, and treats it, with an artificially straightened escarpment on the south that is later in its current form, as a possible trace of an outer ward. Those statements are not the same claim as a motte of 1132, and the north bank is not given a date of 1132.

Henry III of England was born on 1 October 1207 and died on 16 November 1272. He was the son of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, and he was king from 1216, when he was nine, in the middle of the First Barons’ War. He promised to abide by the Great Charter of 1225. After William Marshal died in 1219, Hubert de Burgh dominated the early years. Henry’s attempt to recover his father’s French provinces in 1230 failed. From the 1230s he ruled more personally, married Eleanor of Provence, and spent heavily on a few palaces and castles. His invasion of Poitou in 1242 ended at the Battle of Taillebourg. By 1258 the failure of expensive foreign plans, the notoriety of his Poitevin half-brothers, and the conduct of local officials had made his rule widely unpopular. A coalition of barons seized power, expelled the Poitevins, and imposed the Provisions of Oxford. In 1259 the Treaty of Paris left him Gascony and surrendered his other claims in France to Louis IX.

The Second Barons' War, from 1264 to 1267, was the civil war that followed. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, led the barons against Henry III of England. De Montfort had married the king’s sister Eleanor with Henry’s permission but without the agreement of the English barons, and he had been tried for his actions as lieutenant of Gascony. The barons wanted the king to rule with a council rather than through favourites. At the Battle of Lewes in 1264 Henry was defeated and taken prisoner. His eldest son Edward escaped, defeated and killed de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham the following year, and freed his father. Henry first took a hard line against the remaining rebels and was then persuaded toward the Dictum of Kenilworth. Some of de Montfort’s supporters, including his sons Henry and Simon, massacred Jews and aimed at the bonds that recorded baronial debts. That violence is part of the war. It is not a massacre recorded at Barnwell.

Berengar le Moyne fortified the manor house, in effect forming the castle, in or about 1266, during the closing stages of that war, while Henry III of England was still king. The design is placed at the forefront of military architecture in Britain and is called the earliest known castle or fortified residence here of this type: a quadrangular plan with corner towers and a gatehouse. The idea is derived from France and Italy, where, on the precedent of Roman town planning, it had been used from about 1230. Quadrangular castles of this integrated kind were built over about two hundred years from the later thirteenth century. Harlech and Beaumaris, built later in the century for Edward I in north-west Wales, followed a similar but larger design in positions of much greater strategic weight. Barnwell’s siting lacks that strategic planning, and for that reason it has been read both as a castle and as a fortified house. Fortified houses of this class were built by aristocrats who were not the king or the leading families. The distinction has been debated, and this building shows affinities to both, while its outward form is that of a castle.

The building date rests on a jury of 1276, which said the castle had been built ten years earlier. The jurors’ phrase is also given as “ten years elapsed.” It was planned as early as 1257, when William de Stokes, canon of Salisbury and rector of Barnwell Saint Andrew, agreed that Berengar should have a chantry in his chapel in the castle. The embrasures of the loopholes were designed to be stood in, but they were only large enough for a small crossbow. The north-east and north-west towers have a trefoil plan so that the loops could cross the curtains with fire. That form appears earlier on the Constable’s Gate at Dover, of about 1221 to 1227, and on the gatehouse at Kidwelly, altered about 1263. An outer ward with service buildings probably lay to the east. A thirteenth-century aisled barn with notched lap joints survives there and was remodelled in the early seventeenth century.

In 1267 Berengar became keeper of the peace in Huntingdonshire. In 1270 he was one of the collectors of the twentieth. One account places that tax in Northamptonshire, and the county history places it in Huntingdonshire. About the same year he is said to have established a twice-weekly market and a yearly fair, and also to have levied a toll on the River Nene. A royal charter of 1270 granted him two weekly markets, on Monday and Friday, and a fair on the vigil of Saint Michael and the six days following. Protection for four years was granted him in 1270 as a crusader. An inquiry in 1276, one account presuming it followed his return, found that he had no royal licence for the castle and no known warrant for the market, the fair, and the assize of bread and ale. The same commissioners did not mention a pillory or a tumbrel. The charter of 1270 is the reason a later note says the market and fair had in fact been granted. Barnwell was held of the king in chief, and questions also arose about alienating it without the king’s licence.

In the same year, 1276, William de Godmanchester, abbot of Ramsey, bought back the manors of Barnwell, Hemington, and Crowthorp, and other lands. The price is given as £1,666, and also as £1,666 13s. 4d., together with prayers for Berengar and for the souls of his father Reginald and his mother Rose. The castle then became a grange of the abbey. Berengar’s widow Emma confirmed the grant in 1286. The market grant was renewed to the abbot eight years after 1270, so in 1278, with the market limited to Wednesdays and the fair left as before. In 1279 the abbot of Peterborough disputed those privileges because they harmed his market at Oundle. A compromise discontinued the market, the pillory, and the tumbrel at Barnwell Saint Andrew. Men of Ramsey Abbey in the parish were to come before the Peterborough bailiffs twice a year for view of frankpledge. The Ramsey bailiff might sit with them and take half the fines from the abbey’s villeins, and he was to exercise no other jurisdiction. A custom called physsilver, also written phisshesilver, was paid to the lord of this manor in the thirteenth century. The county history does not define the payment beyond that name.

In 1329 John, son of Geoffrey of Southorpe, himself the son of Rose, daughter of Berengar and Emma, and Walter Naunton, husband of Joan, daughter of Margaret, their other daughter, sued the abbot for the manor. They alleged that it had been settled on Berengar and Emma and their issue. John of Southorpe was also known as John de Layham. The verdict went to the abbot. Eleven years later Robert, son of John of Southorpe, released to Simon, abbot of Ramsey, all his right in the manor. In the fourteenth century the parish deeds name a gardener, a washerwoman, a roper, a weaver, a barcar, a woollemonger, the smith, a parmenter, the cobbler, and the tailor, and there were important mills at Crowthorp. Those trades are recorded for the town, not as finds from inside the towers. The abbey held the castle until 1536 in one account, when it passed to the king, and until the dissolution followed by the grant of 1540 in another.

The stone is oolitic limestone, probably from the quarries at Barnwell. The curtain walls survive up to 9 metres, or about 30 feet, and are said to be little less than their original height without the battlements. Plantagenet Somerset Fry, born Peter George Robin Fry on 3 January 1931 and died on 10 September 1996, is the historian attached to the published figures of walls up to 30 feet, or 9 metres, high and over 12 feet, or 4 metres, thick. The walls are also given as 12 feet thick, and as now about 3.6 metres thick after a thickening of about 1 metre on the inner face in the late thirteenth century or the fourteenth. The masonry is described as excellent, with fine joints. The enclosed ward is 41 metres long by 27 metres wide in one survey. Another survey measures an irregular oblong, longer from north to south, with the corners except the south-east cut off by angle walls: 135 feet 4 inches on the east, 133 feet 6 inches on the west, 90 feet 8 inches wide at the north, and 94 feet 4 inches wide at the south. There are no buildings standing in the courtyard. It now encloses a tennis court, made in 1920. The tops of the walls and towers have been lowered and were probably finished with a crenellated parapet. Most of the loopholes have two cross slits.

The gatehouse sits at the south end of the east side, with semicircular towers either side of a central passage. Its lower courses are battered beneath a roll moulding. The entrance is a pointed arch of three chamfered orders with moulded capitals, also described as a drop arch springing from clustered responds. Beyond it are the grooves for a portcullis and a second chamfered arch. Further arches are described as the abutments for outer and inner pairs of gates. The passage has a tunnel vault. At the west end a third arch rises from corbels. Beyond that, the passage was partly blocked, and the courtyard is reached by a low, narrow, round-headed doorway only 1.5 metres wide, added when the curtain was thickened. Carts could no longer enter. Two guard chambers flank the passage, with three rooms above. Each guard chamber is entered from the courtyard by a round-headed doorway with drawbar holes beside the jambs. The chambers are two bays long, with ribbed or groined vaults on corbels, and each has five loopholes to the front and the sides. In the northern chamber a closet about 3 feet square sits in the thickness of the south wall. That north chamber probably later served as a chapel. Wall paintings of about 1300, also dated to the fourteenth century and to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, survive on its walls and ceiling. They were recorded in 1980 to 1985, and fragments were identified in 1982. The room was painted to imitate ashlar, with a frieze at about 1 metre above the floor, patterned vaulting, and four figures. One figure was bearded, had a nimbus, and held an object which also had a nimbus. Mortices cut in the corbel vaulting have been read as a possible central screen. The loops of this chamber are the only ones in the castle modified to take glazing. An arch in the south wall leads to a blocked stair turret. The upper floor is now reached by a stair from the courtyard, added when the curtain was thickened. It leads to a rectangular room over the passage, with a room in each tower. Those upper windows were widened from the original loops and are square-headed, and they are also described as tall narrow openings with acutely pointed rear arches. A large window at the east end of the room over the passage was still entire when one survey was written, and only traces of the west window remained. A doorway in the upper south chamber also opens into the upper room of the adjoining tower.

The south-east tower is entered from the inner court by a passage twisted so that the inner doorway sits at the middle of the chamber wall. The ground-floor room is square, with four loopholes, two of them low and facing east and west and two high in the wall. It was vaulted. Only the corbels and the springings remain. Shafts in the south wall show that it originally had two garderobes on each floor. The north-east tower also has a garderobe chute.

The south-west tower is a single circular drum. Like the north towers, it is entered by a round-headed doorway set across the angle, then a straight vaulted passage, then a circular chamber. That chamber has two loops, covering the west and south curtains. A circular stair, or vice, in the wall outside the inner doorway, on the left of the passage, once led to a square room with a fireplace and a now blocked square-headed window. Above it is a similar room with a fireplace and a mullioned window of two lights. These may have been the principal living rooms.

The north-west and north-east towers each combine a principal drum, a subsidiary drum, and an intermediate lobe. Each has a vaulted room in the principal drum and a square-vaulted room in the subsidiary drum. The lobes contain the remains of a staircase to a first-floor room with a fireplace. On the north-west side the smaller attached tower held a rectangular chamber, formerly vaulted, with two loops, and a still smaller tower between it and the main drum held the stair to a room with a fireplace and a wooden floor. Loops cover the ground in front and across the curtains. The first-floor loops have been widened into square-headed windows. A square-headed doorway was inserted in the north-east tower for an outside entrance. The doorway into that tower has been rebuilt, and the whole angle appears to have been refaced in modern times. The north-east tower’s south-eastern window was later cut back for a fireplace.

The curtains are now about 3.6 metres thick, except a rebuilt stretch of the west wall about 1 metre thick. The thickening of about 1 metre on the inner face brought new round-headed doorways, described as outmoded for their date, with drawbar holes and hoodmoulds ending in masks. A section of the west wall 13 metres long, also given as a breach 42 feet wide, was later broken through, perhaps in the seventeenth century to open a view to the gardens, and was rebuilt after 1730 to less than half the original thickness. At the north end of the west wall a postern, a small secondary gate, has a pointed arch, also called a two-centred arch. A fireplace beside it may mark the kitchen. The inner face of the north wall has lost its facing and shows the rubble core. On the inner east curtain, fragments of cross-walls and traces of plaster may be the east end of a large room. Several parts of the inner curtains have been stripped of facing stone. The courtyard will hold buried foundations of the internal buildings, and the ground immediately outside the curtains will hold deposits from construction, use, and abandonment. The modern surfaces of paths, the tarmac tennis court, the flag poles, the sign posts, and the garden furniture are excluded from the protected monument, while the ground beneath them is included.

After the abbey years, the gatehouse was altered as already described. The north guardroom’s religious painting has been read as an oratory of the time the abbey held the castle. That reading is a suggestion, not a documented dedication.

In 1540, after the dissolution of Ramsey Abbey, Henry VIII granted the manor of Barnwell in tail to Sir Edward Montagu, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, of Boughton. He had been steward of the manor for twenty years. One listing spells him Sir Edmund Montagu, and another spelling is Sir Edmund Monacute. The chief justice also bought in 1553, from Ralph Agard, another estate that had belonged to William Willington of Barcheston. A few months later he was imprisoned for opposing the succession of Lady Jane Grey. He died in 1556 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir Edward Montagu, child of his third wife Ellen, daughter of John Roper, attorney-general to Henry VIII. In 1602 that son bought from Elizabeth the reversion of the manor, which had been granted to his father in tail, for £153 3s. 9d. He left to his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Harington of Exton, all his household stuff in his castle of Barnewelle. By her he had seven sons. The second, but the eldest to survive, succeeded him in January 1601 to 1602.

That heir is Edward Montagu, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton. He was born about 1562 and died on 15 June 1644. He was the son of Sir Edward Montagu and Elizabeth Harington, daughter of James Harington of Exton. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in about 1574 and graduated bachelor of arts on 14 March 1579. He was a student of the Middle Temple in 1580. He succeeded his father in 1602. He was member of Parliament for Bere Alston in 1584, for Tavistock in 1597, and for Brackley in 1601. James I made him a Knight of the Bath at the coronation on 25 July 1603. He was high sheriff of Northamptonshire for 1595 to 1596. In 1604 he was elected for the county. On 9 February 1605 he and other gentlemen presented a petition for ministers who refused subscription. They were warned that their combination, in a cause the king had shown he misliked, was little less than treason. He was for a time deprived of his lieutenancy and of the justiceship of the peace. The county history places that loss of the justiceship in 1604 and ties it to favouring Puritan ministers who had been deprived. He later made his peace with the king. He sponsored in Parliament the Observance of 5th November Act 1605, and he is counted among the founders of the commemoration known as Guy Fawkes Night. He was re-elected for the county in 1614, for the Addled Parliament, and in 1621. He was created baron on 29 June 1621. Settlements of his in about 1604, in 1611, and in 1634 included the manor of Barnwell Saint Andrew.

He married three times. First he married Elizabeth Jeffrey, daughter and heir of Sir John Jeffrey of Chiddingly, and they had a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Robert Bertie, 1st Earl of Lindsey. Second he married Frances Cotton, daughter of Thomas Cotton of Conington and sister of Sir Robert Cotton, and they had three sons and at least one daughter, among them Edward, the second baron, William Montagu, chief baron of the Exchequer, Christopher Montagu, and Frances, who married John Manners, 8th Earl of Rutland. Third he married Anne Crouch, daughter of John Crouch of Corneybury and widow of Robert Wynchell, of Richard Chamberlain, and of Sir Ralph Hare of Stow Bardolph. The county history calls Frances Cotton his second wife and says the son who succeeded him was by her.

The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, ran from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms from 1639 to 1653. It comprised a first war and a second, and the Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 is sometimes called a third. The first war was fought over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I, and it ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. Charles I was executed in January 1649. Charles II was crowned king of Scotland in 1650. The war ended with a Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The Stuart restoration came in 1660. Supporters of the king were called Cavaliers, and supporters of Parliament were called Roundheads. Edward Montagu, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton, supported Charles I, which led to his arrest in August 1642. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London, moved to the Savoy Hospital because he was ill, and died a prisoner on 15 June 1644, in his eighty-second year. He was buried at Weekley. One account says that in the English Civil War the castle was used by its owner, Sir Edward Montagu, as an arsenal for the royal cause. A copied version of that sentence dates the arsenal to 1621, which is the year of the barony and is before the war began in 1642. Charles I was at Barnwell in August 1645, on his way to Bedford. That visit falls after the first baron’s death. The son who succeeded, Edward, sat as one of Cromwell’s lords in 1657. His eldest son by Anne, daughter of Sir Ralph Winwood, was killed fighting the Dutch. On the father’s death in 1683 the second son, Ralph, succeeded. The estate is also said to have passed to Ralph de Montagu in 1684, when he made Boughton his only Northamptonshire seat.

Leland in 1540 spoke of four strong towers, part of Berengarius Moyne’s castle, still remaining, and of a mean house for a farmer within the ruins. That house has long disappeared, and it is not shown on the Buck view of 1729. Camden, writing in 1586, and also placed half a century or so after Leland, called it a little castle of late repaired and beautified, or repaired and adorned, with new buildings by Sir Edward Montacute, also written Sir Edward Montagu. It is unclear whether those new buildings were inside the castle or were the house now called Barnwell Manor. A footnote in the county history takes the house and the stables south-east of the castle to be the buildings Camden meant, and says the stables, at right angles to the house on the north, were rebuilt stone by stone about fifty years before that history was published. One castle list dates a Tudor manor in the outer court to 1568 and says all the buildings within the courtyard were demolished then. Other accounts place the demolition of the internal buildings in the Elizabethan period, in about 1684, and in 1704. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also saw the ground-floor vaults replaced by timber floors, the first-floor arrow slits enlarged for stone-mullioned and wooden casement windows, and fireplaces inserted, so that the turrets and the gatehouse became extra lodging for buildings put up in the courtyard. From about 1600 an outbuilding south-east of the castle was enlarged into the main residence, Barnwell Manor. Thomas Drew built a raised walk north of the castle in about 1613. The living quarters and all internal buildings of the castle are also said to have been demolished in 1704, and a recovery of 1704 called the castle late demolished. In 1748 William Stukeley, also spelled Stukely, dined at Barnwell, and the second Duke of Montagu lamented that his father, who died in 1709, had pulled the buildings down. Ralph and his third son John settled Barnwell Saint Andrew in 1704. John succeeded four years afterwards as Marquis of Monthermer and Duke of Montagu, and he died in 1749 with no surviving male issue.

Samuel and Nathaniel Buck drew the castle in 1729. Their plate, styled a south view, is really taken from the east. It shows the gatehouse and turrets roofless, and a large gap in the west wall. Orders of 1723 said the walls should be protected from the weather, and the second duke was keen to preserve the ruin. A map of 1716, surveyed by John Booth for John, Duke of Montagu, has been read as showing that the old mansion was already down and that a putative entrance lodge had been extended into the present front of the manor house. After 1730 the west gap was blocked to less than half the original thickness, about 1 metre. The ruin was later a walled orchard. Trees are shown inside the curtains on the map of 1886, and the north-east tower may have been used for smithing. The interior was probably a farmyard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with access through the break in the west wall.

The manor then passed with the Buccleuch title. It was sold in 1913. One account names the sixth Duke of Buccleuch. Another names John Montagu Douglas Scott, the seventh duke, and the buyer Horace Czarnikov, also spelled Czarnikow. In 1920 Czarnikow sold the castle to Mrs Bainbridge, later Mrs W. H. McGrath, and he kept the advowson when he sold the manor. Between 1913 and 1938 the house may have been rented to a series of tenants. Sir Brian McGrath, who lived from 1925 to 2016 and was later private secretary to Prince Philip, grew up at the manor until his parents bought their own house. Formal gardens of this period are shown north of the castle on the map of 1926, and the tennis court inside the walls dates from 1920. In 1938 Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, third son of King George V, bought the house and estate. The price for the buildings and four tenanted farms was £37,500. Princess Alice, his wife and a daughter of the seventh Duke of Buccleuch, called that sum the greater part of the money left to Prince Henry by the king, and she was fond of the house which her grandfather had sold. Records of the financial negotiations after the abdication of Edward VIII state that Prince Henry received a legacy of £750,000 from his father’s private fortune. Those two sums are both stated, and they are not the same figure. In 1945, when Prince Henry was appointed governor-general of Australia, the tenanted parts of the estate were sold for £47,500. After the return to Britain the surrounding farms were bought back through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s until the estate again comprised 5,000 acres. In January 1995 it was announced that the Gloucesters would leave the house for financial reasons, and so that Princess Alice could move to Kensington Palace to be with her son, Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Windsor House Antiques then occupied the house. In September 2022 Prince Richard put the manor up for sale at £4.75 million, and it was sold in April 2024 to anonymous private owners. The estate is also given as 2,500 acres farmed by the present duke, together with the ruined castle. The house has four reception rooms, seven principal bedrooms, and six bathrooms. It is described as a 40-room house of 16,731 square feet, of the eighteenth century, with origins in 1586, and it is listed at Grade II. Barnwell Manor stands about 2.5 miles, or 4 kilometres, south of Oundle. In 2013 the High Court disallowed an application by West Coast Energy for a wind farm close to the manor’s lodge, and an appeal was dismissed. The Duke of Gloucester had supported the proposal. That case concerns the lodge, not a new discovery in the castle walls.

The castle was scheduled in 1915, and the present scheduled entry was first listed on 8 February 2015 and amended on 12 February 2016, under the number 1003624. It was listed at Grade I in 1988. One number given for that listing is 1040282, and another is 1294426, the number used by the at-risk assessment, which also dates the Grade I listing to 25 January 1988. The gardens were entered on the parks and gardens register at Grade II in 1984. One number for them is 1294426, and another register number for Barnwell Saint Andrew’s Manor is 1001026. The adjacent manor house was listed Grade II in 1967 under 1040281. The parish lies in a conservation area. A 2015 note still calls the castle private. The at-risk assessment calls the condition poor, the vulnerability medium, and the trend improving, with a priority for a building under repair, or in fair to good repair, but with no user identified. Vegetation and the decay of the local limestone, especially where wall cores are exposed, have caused loss of fabric and a risk of local collapse. A five-year programme of repair began in 2021, and repairs to the south-east tower and the gatehouse were completed in 2021. The property is reported to have been sold.

In July 1980, during consolidation, the Northamptonshire Archaeology Unit carried out a partial rescue excavation in the north-east and north-west angle towers, to recover masonry. The published report of that dig appeared in 1993 or 1994 and says the work of 1979 to 1980 shed light on the early stages of the site and on constructional detail. Saxon pottery was recovered beneath the construction level of the north-east tower. A separate record of a layer below the castle and above the natural ground, linked to the north-west tower work of July 1980, describes a deposit 0.3 metres thick with no features, excavated in two spits. The upper spit held only pottery of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The lower spit held only ceramics of the seventh and eighth centuries. Both spits also held small fragments of animal bone, limestone, and charred wood. The deposit could be a buried soil whose surface was levelled before building. The date range attached to that record runs from the year 600 to 799. Those two accounts should not be collapsed into a single count of sherds, and neither is a burial.

The tower foundations are given as 0.4 metres deep, with a roughly coursed limestone facing and a rubble core. A closer note of a construction trench, 0.3 metres, describes footings of limestone rubble bonded in silt, faced with roughly coursed blocks of a size like the standing wall. The work-face was irregular and slanted, unlike the regular face above. Pottery of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lay in that construction layer. Above it was a compact layer of stone fragments, sand, and mortar, 0.15 to 0.3 metres thick, with a small fire at the surface and burnt pottery of the same centuries. No floor finish was present beyond a thin covering of brown clay 0.05 metres thick, which may be an initial floor or a pause in the work. Above that came stone, sand, mortar, and soil, then a more organic layer, sealed by 0.1 to 0.2 metres of small limestone rubble in mortar, a hard surface across the whole tower. In the entrance lobby there was crude cobbling, which petered out toward the tower. Floor surfaces identified in the scheduled account include a flagstone floor in the entrance corridor of the north-east tower and a cobbled surface in the corridor of the north-west tower. Those floors and the occupation levels held pottery of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and animal bones. Over them lay building debris and garden rubbish from the nineteenth century onward. In the north-east tower the fireplace cut into the south-eastern window held iron deposits, possibly from smithing in the nineteenth or twentieth century.

In 1984 shallow trenches through the lawn east of the castle, for a security system, found a stone-on-edge roadway with curbing, leading to the gatehouse. The area was covered by rubble with seventeenth-century pottery, which may be demolition debris from the earlier manor house inside the castle. An architectural survey of the standing fabric was made in 1980 to 1985 and in 1995. In 1990 a watching brief on a pipe trench across the lawn to the south and east recorded a brick and stone yard surface, a cobbled path, and a concentration of coursed limestone, possibly part of a demolished wall. Research published in 2018 to 2019 and in 2020 charted the castle from its earliest decades to the nineteenth century and its relationship with the four structures of the present manorial complex. The sale of a large area of land in 1267 has been argued as a possible means of starting the work, which is a suggestion beside the jury date of about 1266, not a second building year. In June to November 2022, under scheduled-monument consent, Archaeological Project Services made a level-three record of the north-east tower: photography, hand plans, and elevations. Several phases of alteration were noted, relating to the conversion of a military structure into accommodation. That record is not a new excavation and does not report a new object. No excavation find of 2023, 2024, 2025, or 2026 is stated for this castle. The Cambridge suburb of Barnwell, and the burials on Barnwell Road there, are a different place.

The Northampton War Memorial, officially the Town and County War Memorial, stands on Wood Hill in Northampton. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed it as a Stone of Remembrance flanked by twin obelisks with painted stone flags. A temporary wooden cenotaph stood on Abington Street from July 1919, and the permanent memorial was unveiled on 11 November 1926. It is a later county memorial. It is not a monument at this castle, and the thankful villages of East Carlton and Woodend are not this parish. The War Memorial, Stanwick, is a Grade II listed shaft in the churchyard of the Church of Saint Laurence at Stanwick. It is a tapering octagonal sandstone shaft about 5 metres tall, topped with a cross brought back from the battlefield cemeteries, and it was unveiled on 8 May 1921 by Colonel Pratt, lord of that manor. On 9 May 1915 four Stanwick men of the Northamptonshire Regiment, James Brawn, Thomas Craven, and the brothers Herbert and William Felce, were killed at the Battle of Aubers Ridge. That memorial is not Barnwell Castle.

A plan made in January 1889 was copied from one in the estate office at Boughton House, with elevations and detailed plans. In October 1969 a field note called the remains in good condition and the property of the Duke of Gloucester. Dryden’s collection holds a watercolour of a house near the castle and a watercolour of the castle, both dated 16 August 1843, with a ground plan, sketches, and measurements. Those drawings are not a dig. The church of Saint Andrew is a separate building. A shady path leads from its churchyard over a single-arched bridge to the ruins. No part of that church is older than the thirteenth century. Its castle is the chapel already named, not the nave. The hospital of Nicholas Latham, across the road, was rebuilt in 1873 to 1874 and keeps an old gateway dated 1601. Latham died in 1620. None of that hospital fabric is the castle wall.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/barnwell-castle