Bungay Castle

Bungay Castle stands in the Suffolk market town of Bungay, on high ground in a curve of the River Waveney, where the flood plain was once marsh. A castle-studies comment describes that loop as a defence of more value while the marsh remained. The town sits on a sand and gravel terrace about ten metres above ordnance datum, with wide views across the valley. One excavation account calls the spot a natural fortress and says earlier, perhaps early medieval, defensive works had already suggested a burh.

Before the Norman Conquest the land formed part of the estates of Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury. After the Conquest it was held by William of Noyers, also written William de Noyers and, in one town notice, William de Noyes.

What was built first is told in more than one way. The heritage account says William de Noyers began a motte and bailey, with a timber hall and a defensive palisade set in surrounding ditches, and that Henry I bestowed the site on Roger Bigod in 1103. A castle-studies comment says Hugh Braun took the earthwork for a Norman motte and bailey of about 1070, and the listed building treats the site as fortified around 1070. The same comment adds that the square great tower stands on the motte, and that if a motte existed it was either low or levelled before the tower was built.

The town account instead says the Bigods helped William with the conquest of 1066 and were rewarded with manors across East Anglia, including Bungay and Framlingham, and that Hugh Bigod inherited the family properties in 1120. The short castle history says Roger Bigod built a Norman castle here about 1100, using the protection of the river bend. The place is also recorded as Bungeye, castellum de Buneie, Bungehia, Bungeia, and Bungeie. It has been classed both as a timber castle and as a masonry castle.

Grid references attached to the standing and buried remains include TM3351189756, TM3350789668, TM336897, and, for a short length of wall found in 2008, TM 33488 89691.

Hugh Bigod is the man who made Bungay a seat of power during The Anarchy, the civil war in England and Normandy between 1138 and 1153. That war followed the drowning of William Adelin, the only legitimate son of Henry I, in the White Ship in 1120. Henry tried to leave the throne to his daughter, Empress Matilda, and only partly persuaded the nobility. When he died in 1135 his nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester.

Stephen’s early years brought fighting with English barons, Welsh leaders, and Scottish invaders. Matilda landed in 1139 with her half-brother Robert of Gloucester. Neither side won a lasting advantage. In 1141 Stephen was captured at the Battle of Lincoln, and his authority collapsed across much of the country.

Matilda was driven from London by hostile crowds. Robert of Gloucester was then taken at the rout of Winchester by Stephen’s wife, Matilda of Boulogne, and the two sides exchanged Stephen and Robert. In 1142 Stephen nearly caught Matilda at Oxford, and she escaped from Oxford Castle across the frozen Thames. The war ran on for another eleven years.

Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, took Normandy in her name in 1143. In England, rebel barons grew stronger in the north and in East Anglia. Matilda went back to Normandy in 1148 and left the English campaign to her eldest son, Henry FitzEmpress, the future Henry II. In 1152 the Church refused to recognise Stephen’s son Eustace as the next king.

Henry invaded in 1153. The armies faced each other at Wallingford, the Church arranged a truce, and Eustace died of illness. The Treaty of Wallingford left Stephen on the throne and named Henry as his successor. Stephen died in 1154, and Henry became the first Angevin king.

One chronicler wrote that Christ and his saints were asleep. Victorian writers coined the name The Anarchy for the disorder, and later historians have questioned how well the name fits.

Hugh’s place in that war is dated differently from one account to the next, and so is his title. The heritage history says he rebelled against Stephen in 1136, then received the title of earl of Norfolk and was allowed to keep Bungay and the much larger castle at Framlingham. It calls him the youngest son of William, who was heir of Roger Bigod. The short castle history calls him Roger’s son.

The town account says that in 1136 he raised an army against Stephen and seized the royal castle of Norwich, that Stephen marched on Bungay in 1140, and that the negotiations rewarded him with the title of earl of Suffolk. A gazetteer record says he had been created first earl of Norfolk by Stephen, supported a rebellion, was defeated at Bungay in 1140, and had the castle reduced. The county heritage summary says the castle was taken by Stephen about 1150, and also that the Crown took Hugh’s castle in 1140 and that he had regained it by 1166. Stone fortifications are placed in 1140, begun by Hugh, while the great keep is placed later.

After Henry II’s accession in 1154, the heritage account and the town account agree that Hugh was deprived of Bungay and Framlingham and allowed to keep the title of earl. Restoration is dated 1163 in those accounts and 1164 in the short castle history, with the county summary saying he had regained the castle by 1166.

The stone keep belongs to that restoration, and its dates do not agree. The short history says Henry returned Bungay in 1164 and that Bigod built a large square Norman keep in 1165. The heritage account says the keep was begun around 1165 on the mound established by William de Noyers and took a decade to finish, while the fabric account places a stone keep around 1175. The county summary says a stone keep with walls 18 feet thick and some 90 feet high was built on the motte about 1164, and that a stone curtain then replaced the palisade around the bailey.

The town account says work began about 1163 and probably took about ten years, with walls between 5 and 7 metres thick and a height of more than 33 metres, taller than the existing tower of Saint Mary’s church, so that Hugh could claim one of the most impregnable fortresses in the kingdom. A gazetteer gives the keep as 54 feet square, on an octagonal ground plan. The listed building gives the keep as about 22 metres square, with a forebuilding on the south about 12 metres long and projecting about 6 metres, and calls the surviving forebuilding one of the largest in England in the county summary. The cost is not recorded.

Hugh Braun, who worked on the excavations of the 1930s, estimated about £1,400, a sum later equated with £4,402,254 in 2025.

The crisis that struck this keep was the Revolt of 1173–1174, sometimes called the Great Revolt. Henry II had ruled England, Normandy, and Anjou since 1154. His wife Eleanor had ruled Aquitaine since 1137. In 1173 their legitimate sons were Henry, called the Young King, Richard, later called the Lionheart, Geoffrey, and John, called Lackland.

Henry also had an illegitimate son, Geoffrey, probably born before the eldest legitimate child. The Young King was eighteen, recently married to Margaret of France, daughter of Louis VII, Eleanor’s former husband. He kept a large retinue and lacked the means to reward it. Henry II had promised three castles in Anjou, inside the Young King’s expected inheritance, to John, as part of John’s betrothal to Alice, daughter of Humbert III, count of Savoy.

In February 1173 the Young King asked his father for England or Normandy. Louis VII had suggested the request. In March the Young King went to Louis in Paris, and Richard and Geoffrey followed. Eleanor tried to join them, was stopped, and was imprisoned until Henry II’s death in 1189.

The allies were promised lands and revenues. William the Lion, king of Scots, was offered lands in northern England once held by David I and Malcolm IV. Four earls joined: Hugh Bigod, first earl of Norfolk; Hugh of Cyfeiliog, fifth earl of Chester; Robert de Beaumont, third earl of Leicester; and William de Ferrers, third earl of Derby. The heritage account, by contrast, says Bigod rebelled in support of Henry II’s son, the earl of Leicester.

The revolt account keeps the earl of Leicester and the king’s sons as different men.

The fighting was planned around Normandy, called the linchpin of the Plantagenet lands, with Rouen as the prize. Hostilities began in May 1173 with an attack on Pacy. The counts of Flanders and Boulogne came from the east, Louis and the Young King from the south, and the Bretons from the west. Each assault failed.

The count of Boulogne was killed. Louis was driven out. The Bretons were routed. William the Lion’s attacks in northern England failed.

On 25 September Henry II met rebel leaders, including his sons. Terms that would have given the sons more income and more control of castles were rejected, and the talks ended when the earl of Leicester tried to draw his sword on the king. Leicester, who had been in Normandy, then raised Flemish mercenaries and crossed to England to join the rebel barons, principally Hugh Bigod. Richard de Luci intercepted him.

The revolt account places the defeat at Fornham. The heritage account places Leicester’s defeat at the battle of Fordham St Genevieve and says Bigod fought on, so that the king besieged Bungay.

What Hugh did in East Anglia is also told in more than one way. The revolt account says he captured Norwich Castle in July 1174 with a force of over 800 soldiers, and that in the spring of 1174 he torched Norwich while William de Ferrers burned Nottingham. The town account says that in 1173 he joined the earl of Leicester, that together they captured the royal castle of Haughley, and that his attempts on Dunwich and Norwich failed, after which Henry’s army encamped at Syleham, near Diss. The same town account gives him the boast, “Were I in my Castle Upon the River Waveney, I wouldne give a button For the king of Cockney,” and says he was then obliged to meet the king at Syleham and submit, was declared an outlawed traitor, had his armies disbanded, and surrendered all his properties.

Henry II landed in England on 8 July 1174. His first act was penance at Canterbury for the killing of Thomas Becket. The next day, 13 July, William the Lion was captured at Alnwick. Henry then took the surrender of rebel strongholds.

On 30 September the Young King and his brothers returned to their father’s service. Peace was sealed by the Treaty of Montlouis. The war had lasted eighteen months, from southern Scotland to Brittany. Michael Staunton called it the greatest crisis of Henry II’s career to that date, more serious in its direct threat than the murder of Becket.

William Marshal, loyal to the Young King during the revolt, said cursed be the day when the traitors schemed to embroil the father and the son. Thomas M. Jones later called those two years a watershed for medieval England.

At Bungay the result of the siege is disputed, and the mine is not. The listed fabric includes, at the base of the south-west corner of the keep, an opening into a tunnel meant to undermine that corner, excavated around 1174 when Henry II besieged the castle because of Hugh’s rebellion. A castle-studies comment says the tower was damaged in the siege of 1174 and that the tunnel which undermined it still remains, while most of the damage that reduced the tower to a foundation stump was done in the eighteenth century. The town account says the king arranged the destruction of both Framlingham and Bungay, began a mine gallery under the keep, and that Hugh saved Bungay by paying one thousand marks.

The heritage account says he capitulated before serious damage, that Bungay survived the king’s demand that both castles be destroyed, and that the price of keeping Bungay was a fine of one thousand marks. The short castle history says Bungay was besieged, mined, and ultimately slighted. A gazetteer says that after a short siege and a mining assault meant to bring the keep down, the castle was surrendered and the keep slighted. The county summary says the destruction in 1174 is debatable.

Sidney Painter, the American medievalist, is the historian credited in the castle history with counting Bungay among at least twenty-one castles demolished on Henry II’s instructions. The revolt account says at least twenty castles in England were recorded as demolished on the king’s orders, and it names Thetford Castle in Norfolk, which belonged to Hugh Bigod, as one demolished after the rebellion. Sidney Painter was born in New York City on 23 September 1902, studied at the Taft School and at Yale, and took his doctorate in 1930. He became professor and chairman of history at Johns Hopkins, a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy in 1953, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in the same year and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.

He served as treasurer and secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies. His doctoral work was published as a life of William Marshal, and he argued that the reign of King John cannot be understood without the barons, their families, and the division of their lands. He died in Baltimore on 12 January 1960, aged fifty-seven.

After the revolt the castle was recovered, and then left. The heritage account says both Bungay and Framlingham were restored to Hugh’s son Roger after a further fine of one thousand marks, and that there was no further building at Bungay until 1294, more than a century after the capitulation of 1174. The town account says Hugh left to fight in Syria and died about 1178, that Richard I restored the properties, and that the family preferred to refortify Framlingham, leaving Bungay unoccupied until Roger Bigod inherited as fifth earl in 1269. A gazetteer record says the fortress was dismantled on Henry II’s accession as the condition of a pardon, remained uninhabitable until 1281, and that another Roger Bigod then obtained a licence to embattle his house on the old site.

The fifth earl’s own life gives different years again. Roger Bigod, born about 1245, was the son of Hugh Bigod, the justiciar who lived from 1211 to 1266. He succeeded his father’s elder brother, Roger Bigod, fourth earl, who lived from 1209 to 1270, as fifth earl in 1270. The office of lord marshal is listed from 1269 to 1306.

A biographical note says the marshalship was entrusted to him shortly before his uncle’s death, and that he performed the ceremonial duties at the coronation of Edward I of England. He served in the Welsh campaigns of 1277, 1282 to 1283, 1287, and 1294 to 1295. In August 1282 he was recorded going to Wales on the king’s service. During an absence in Ireland he named Reginald Lyvet and William Cadel as his attorneys in England for the year.

He married first Aline Basset, widow of Hugh le Despencer and daughter of Philip Basset of Soham, and had no children by her. He married second Alice of Hainault, daughter of John II de Avenes, count of Hainault, and had no children by her either.

Edward I of England was the king of that licence and of the later quarrel. He was born on the night of 17 to 18 June 1239 at the Palace of Westminster, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Before his accession he was called the Lord Edward. He was also called Longshanks, and the Hammer of the Scots.

He was king of England from 1272 to 1307, lord of Ireland, and from 1254 to 1306 duke of Aquitaine as a vassal of the French king. In 1259 he briefly supported the Provisions of Oxford, then stayed loyal to his father in the Second Barons’ War. After the Battle of Lewes he was held hostage, escaped, and in 1265 defeated Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham. In 1270 he joined the Ninth Crusade.

He was on the way home in 1272 when he learned of Henry III’s death, reached England in 1274, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey. He reformed administration and the common law, inquired into feudal liberties, and issued statutes on crime and property. He suppressed a rising in Wales in 1276 to 1277 and conquered Wales in 1282 to 1283, building castles and towns and settling them with English people. When the Scottish succession fell into dispute he claimed a feudal overlordship, invaded, and left the First War of Scottish Independence still running at his death.

Philip IV of France confiscated Gascony, and the French war that followed eased English pressure on Scotland for a time. By the middle of the 1290s the cost of these campaigns brought heavy taxation and opposition from laymen and from the Church. In Ireland he had taken soldiers, supplies, and money. He stood about 6 feet 2 inches, 188 centimetres.

In 1290 his Edict of Expulsion ordered all Jews out of England. He died on 7 July 1307 and left his son Edward II a Scottish war and a burden of debt and politics. He is credited with restoring royal authority after Henry III and with making Parliament a permanent institution, and he is also condemned for his conduct in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

The licence for Bungay sits inside those years. On 20 April 1294, the twenty-second year of the reign, at Canterbury, Edward I licensed Roger le Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, to crenellate his house of Bungeye in Suffolk. The patent wording is a licence to crenellate the house, not a sentence that says a new castle was founded. An older county history dates a licence to embattle the mansion-house to 1293, says a castle there had been erased by order of Henry II, and treats the grant as a mark of royal favour while Bigod was constable of Norwich, where the sheriff was to hold prisoners until the justices in eyre and the gaol delivery.

Another Suffolk history dates the same grant to 1281. The heritage account says the fifth earl received a licence to crenellate in 1294 after a century of neglect, and thinks the gatehouse, the curtain around the keep, the inner bailey wall, a reduction in the height of the keep, and a renewal of its outer masonry belong to that work. The short history says he probably built the massive gate towers. The county summary says an octagonal curtain, a gatehouse, and a drawbridge were built in 1294, and also says the attribution of the curtain walls to that licence is debatable, just as the destruction of 1174 is debatable.

A castle-studies comment says the twin drum-towered gatehouse has some early thirteenth-century features and still seems to belong to the 1294 work, and that the gatehouse cannot have been Roger’s residence, so repairs to the great tower are presumed if he was to live there. He is also said to have built much more at Chepstow, where no licence is recorded. His debts were already causing trouble with the Crown, and the biographical note says the relationship collapsed about five years after the Welsh service of the mid-1290s.

The quarrel itself is the famous scene of 1297. Edward I of England ordered Bigod to serve against the king of France in Gascony while Edward went to Flanders. Bigod answered that by the feudal tenure of his lands he had to serve across the sea only in the king’s own company. Edward said, “By God, Earl, you shall either go or hang,” and Bigod replied, “By the same oath, O king, I will neither go nor hang.” Bigod carried the point.

After Edward left for France, Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun, third earl of Hereford, blocked collection of an aid for the war and forced Edward to confirm the charters in 1297 and again in 1301. William Stubbs later called Bigod and Bohun degenerate sons of mighty fathers, greater in their opportunities than in their patriotism. In 1302 the childless earl surrendered the earldom to the king and received it back entailed to the heirs of his body, which cut out his brother John.

When he died, and what then happened to Bungay, is not a single story. The heritage account and the town account say he died in 1297, with no direct heir, and that the estate returned to royal ownership. His life says he died on 6 December 1306, and the opening line of that life says he died before 6 December 1306. On that dating the title became extinct and the estates escheated to the Crown, to be given in time to Thomas of Brotherton.

The Crown is the name for the public power and property of the kingdom, separated in law from the private person and the private goods of the monarch who happened to be alive. English common law never built a separate idea of the state and left supreme executive power with the monarch, so the same word can mean the whole state, the executive government, or the monarch and the monarch’s immediate representatives. It is not the jewelled object kept under guard. Lawyers have described it as a corporation sole, and as the survival of the public body when the natural body of a king dies, which is why a successor takes office at once.

Lord Simon of Glaisdale described the term as the surviving royal prerogative together with powers later given by statute. Lord Diplock described it as the government, the ministers, and the civil servants who do the work. In the castle’s history, “reverted to the Crown” is the phrase used for this break in the Bigod line.

The next holders are named differently, and the dates of their misfortunes do not match. The short history says that in 1310 Edward II granted sustenance to his younger half-brothers, Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Kent, from Bigod’s lands, including Bungay, and that in 1312 Thomas came into the vacant earldom of Norfolk and into Bungay Castle. An excavation account says Edward II gave the castle in 1312 to his brother Thomas Plantagenet. The town account calls Thomas the fifth son of Edward I.

Thomas died in 1338. The short history says the castle passed to his daughter Alice, who had married Edward Montagu, younger brother of William, first earl of Salisbury, and that at Bungay Castle Edward and two retainers beat her so violently that she died in January 1352. It says the castle stayed with Edward Montagu until his death in 1361. The town account says the inheritance went to two daughters, Alice de Brotherton and Margaret of Norfolk, that Margaret founded Bungay Market, and that Alice was only fourteen, married to the older Edward Montagu.

It says that not fifteen years and five children later, in June 1351, she was murdered by her husband and two retainers, and it points to a 2023 book on Edward I’s granddaughters for the claim that by 1350 Edward Montagu was part of the knightly criminal gangs of the district. A gazetteer record says a daughter of Brotherton married Edward de Montacute in 1338, and that a later marriage of his daughter took the castle to William de Ufford, earl of Suffolk. The county summary says the castle’s day ended, to all intents, with the death of Edward de Montacute in 1362, and that there is some indication it was occupied and perhaps repaired in the fifteenth century. A gazetteer says it was abandoned about 1365.

In 1382 it was described as old and ruinous and worth nothing a year. The town wording is “old, and ruinous, and worth nothing a year.” Acquisition by the Howards is placed in 1477 in one record and in 1483 in the heritage account, the town account, and the short history, which says the dukes of Norfolk held it until the twentieth century except for a short period in the late eighteenth century.

For most of those centuries little was repaired. The decline was drawn in 1746 and 1748 by Joshua Kirby, in 1800 by an unnamed hand, and in 1827 by Henry Davy. Several of those views show a dwelling between the gatehouse towers. The 1748 print also shows small dwellings against the curtain wall to the south-east of the towers.

Those houses were removed in 1841. After 1766 the site was sold to Robert Mickleborough, who quarried the keep and the curtain for road-building material. An excavation account says the keep was used as a beer garden by the King’s Head inn at least until the early 1930s, and that the gatehouse was converted into a residence for an eighteenth-century novelist. A more benign ownership is dated 1792, when Daniel Bonhôte, a Bungay solicitor, bought the site, or to the early 1790s, or to 1791, the year his wife’s life gives for the purchase of the ruins.

Elizabeth Bonhôte, born Elizabeth Mapes, was baptised on 11 April 1744 and died on 11 June 1818. She was the elder surviving child of James Mapes, a Bungay baker and grocer baptised in 1714 and dead in 1794, and of Elizabeth Galliard, who died in 1789. She married Daniel Bonhôte on 13 October 1772. They had three children between 1773 and 1777.

A daughter, also Elizabeth, married Richard Dreyer, rector of Thwaite and a former curate of Saint Mary’s in Bungay. Daniel later became under-sheriff of Suffolk and captain of a militia company. He died in 1804 after they had moved to Bury St Edmunds. Elizabeth’s will left dwelling houses, a bakery and shop in the town, £3,500 in cash and annuities, and almshouses for elderly women and for the widows of poor traders, which still stand.

A close near the centre of Bungay is named Elizabeth Bonhote Close. She wrote elegies and poems in praise of the monarchy and was described as perfectly satisfied with the laws and constitution. Her first novel, Hortensia, or, The Distressed Wife, appeared anonymously in 1769. In the year of her marriage she published The Rambles of Mr Frankly, Published by his Sister, a moral book thought to take its form from Laurence Sterne’s journey book of 1768, and it was translated into German.

Illness after the births interrupted her writing. She returned with Olivia, or, The Deserted Bride in 1787, then the Parental Monitor in 1788, two volumes of conduct essays, one for girls and one for boys, reprinted in London and in Dublin in 1796. Darnley Vale, or, Emelia Fitzroy followed in 1789, and Ellen Woodley in 1790. The purchase of the ruins prompted Bungay Castle, a Gothic romance published in 1796, dedicated to the duke of Norfolk, and reissued in 2006.

Her last publication was the poem Feeling, or, Sketches from Life, in 1810. The site was sold back to the dukes of Norfolk about 1800. One record says that from the sixteenth century the ruin changed hands from time to time until, about 1800, it passed back to the then earl of Norfolk.

The twentieth century is the century of protection, digging, and gift. The castle was scheduled in 1915, on 19 April 1915, among the first sites protected under the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act of 1913. Castle Hills, the outer-bailey earthwork south of the standing ruins, was scheduled on its own in 1925. The standing remains were listed at Grade I on 9 May 1949.

The scheduled record was amended on 17 September 2018 and the listed-building record on 18 September 2018. The protected area was extended in 1982, and the county summary dates that extension 13 July 1982, to take in the earthwork of the western inner-bailey wall. A later repair notice calls the listing Grade 1 and dates the first fortification to 1070.

The fabric that those designations protect is a ruin of flint rubble in lime mortar, with almost all the dressed face gone except the ashlar limestone at the base of the gatehouse towers, below a moulded string course. The curtain is roughly octagonal. The twin towers on the west are semi-circular, about 6.5 metres across, each rising from a square base and open at the rear. Between them, excavations of 1934 and 1935 found a drawbridge pit, kept in its dug-out form, thought to have been crossed by a counterpoise bridge.

A red-brick arched doorway in the north wall of the keep leads into the former basement, where the thick base of the walls can be seen. The inner bailey lay to the west, inside its own wall, with a wide ditch beyond that is thought to have encircled the site, and an outer bailey to the south. The inner-bailey wall is described as the second of four defensive lines, the others being the curtain, the ditch beyond the inner bailey, and the ditch of the outer bailey. Four entrances are inferred.

One, no longer visible, crossed the inner ditch south-south-west of the keep. Another is thought to have left the south-west corner of the inner bailey toward the outer bailey. A fourth left the south side of the curtain, south of the keep, across the outer ditch toward the outer bank, ending near where the visitors’ centre now stands. The inner-bailey wall still runs through later buildings: it forms the rear wall of Keepers Cottage, passes through 35a Earsham Street, reappears in an outbuilding behind 55 Earsham Street, stands more than 3 metres high by an outbuilding of 4 Castle Lane, survives as a steep earthwork up to 5 metres high with no wall showing, and continues as a rubble core up to about 1.5 metres high for about 45 metres.

On the west side of the outer bailey the bank known as Castle Hills survives up to about 2.5 metres. Buildings on the east have removed the surface earthwork there. A great hall is suggested, from historic sources, close to the northern edge of the inner bailey, in the region of 47 and 35a Earsham Street.

Clearance and excavation began when the town took a lease from the Norfolk estate. The county summary says the feoffees of Bungay leased it in 1933 and cleared the site. The heritage account says the Bungay Town Trust leased it in 1934. Doctor Leonard Cane, town reeve in 1934, and Hugh Braun directed the work.

An excavation account says digging began on 19 November 1934, that Braun was a London architect who had worked in Iraq with the Chicago expedition at Nineveh, and that the dig gave work to unemployed war veterans. A local water diviner, John Davey, was engaged to look for water and for gold. The first trenches lay between the keep and the gatehouse and around the keep. Buried walls, in Braun’s later words, would show the castle rising some twenty feet higher than before the digging started.

The drawbridge pit was emptied and the west wall of the keep was exposed. Money ran out. Other parts of the gatehouse and keep were left, tidied, and returfed for a later season that never came. No further excavation in the gatehouse or the keep has taken place since 1934.

The work was published in 1934, 1935, and 1936. About forty photographs of 1935 are in Bungay Museum, which Hugh Cane, Leonard’s son, established in 1968. In January 2021 Lorna-Jane Richardson became curator and noted that Basil Brown listed the site in his notebooks. Finds from 1934 went to Ipswich Museum, and a selection of rims is thought to be in the British Museum, where G.

Dunning used them as dating evidence. Pottery of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries is recorded. An earlier dig of about 1890 is also described. A letter of 1991 reports a limited excavation of 1964 that recovered medieval pottery.

Unpublished watching briefs are noted for 2001, 2006, and 2008. In December 2005 a possible stretch of the inner-ward wall was seen behind a garage at the rear of 23 Earsham Street, flint and mortar with a little brick and stone, though access was poor. In March 2008 Robert Carr recorded about a metre of medieval north–south flint walling still in place, south-west of the inner bailey.

Geophysical survey came in 1990, by Gaffney and Gater, and in 2017, by T. Schofield, for what is now Cotswold Archaeology Suffolk. The 2017 magnetometer, earth-resistance, and ground-penetrating radar survey of the inner bailey found a narrow set of anomalies with high potential: walls and floors still in place, a possible brick-lined well surviving to about 2.5 metres deep, pits, some with ferrous debris, robbed or service trenches, and demolition or levelling deposits. Structural remains on two different alignments were read as at least two building phases, and differing widths as both inner and outer walls.

Compacted deposits were read as possible demolition rubble or floors. The surveyors inferred that other open parts of the bailey are likely to keep significant deposits, and that the buried outer ditch, behind later houses, may still hold silts useful for the landscape in which the castle worked.

The ownership change that made this public was the gift of 1987. The short history says the seventeenth duke of Norfolk gave the castle to the town. The town account adds an endowment toward its preservation. The heritage account says responsibility had passed from the town trust to the Bungay Castle Trust, and that in 1999 the trust bought the land to the west which had been the inner bailey.

In 1991 the place was said to be falling, the trust was formed, and repairs were to begin on 2 February 1991. The present closure is for a larger repair. The trust’s notice says the site had to be closed in 2023 so that it could be made safe. A programme was prepared with specialist consultants and submitted for approval.

Consent, including scheduled-monument consent endorsed by the Secretary of State, was obtained in 2024. Work began in August 2024 on the north tower. Scaffolding was clad and given a temporary roof so that lime mortar could be used through the winter. A notice of 16 March 2025 says work was going on at the top of the north tower and on the dressed stone at its base, with a great deal of lime-mortar filling, and was expected to last another six to eight weeks before the scaffolding moved to the south tower.

The same works unexpectedly found a record of people who had worked on the castle in the 1930s. The chair of the trust, Steve Honeywood, told a local newspaper that the work would continue through that year and into the next, and that the trust hoped a second phase would allow most of the castle to reopen, with a third phase excluding the public only from limited areas. A bequest of £500,000 from Harry Smith of Bungay had let the trust buy the King’s Head in 2016 as a hoped-for heritage hub. When that project ceased to be viable the inn was sold, and the bequest, including the sale proceeds, was turned onto the castle.

The cost is expected to exceed the bequest, with the difference met from the trust’s own funds and from grants. A town notice says the castle will be closed for all of 2025 into 2026. A summer description of 2026 says it is closed until further notice, under scaffolding, with no reopening time. A directory updated on 22 January 2025 still lists daily hours of 10am to 4pm, with winter times that may differ, free entry with donations appreciated, and also a charge of £1 for adults and 50p for children, with entry through the visitors’ centre.