# Cambridge Castle

Castle in Cambridge, England

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Fortification

## Story

• Cambridge Castle, also called Castle Mound, is the motte of a Norman castle in Cambridge, raised about 1068 to hold the river crossing and the road north.
• A stone curtain, towers, a gatehouse and a keep were added for Edward I of England, and the sums spent are given as at least £2,630, as £2,525, and as about £2,500.
• The castle was taken during The Anarchy and the First Barons' War, held or bypassed in the Second Barons' War according to the account, and later quarried for the colleges.
• In the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell's side turned the hill into an artillery fortress; the works were slighted in 1647, and a county gaol then occupied the bailey.
• The mound, about 10 metres high, and fragments of earthwork remain, open daily with no admission fee, beside the site of the gaol and of Shire Hall.

## Visiting

The castle mound is open to the public daily, and there is no admission fee.

## History

Cambridge Castle stands on a chalk spur on the north bank of the River Cam. The place is known locally as Castle Mound. Above ground, a motte about 10 metres high remains, the highest point in the city, with fragments of earthwork beside it. The mound is also said to rise some 80 feet above the river, and the summit is about 32.36 metres above ordnance datum.

A late Iron Age settlement here was enclosed by a bank and ditch over more than seven hectares. Roman occupation followed, including a possible fort of about 60 or 61, a small planned town, and a fourth-century stone wall. Those walls were still standing when a castle was raised in 1068, after the Norman Conquest, with Lincoln and Huntingdon.

Picot, sheriff of William the Conqueror, had the work done inside the existing town. Twenty-seven houses were cleared, and an eighteenth-century view says eighteen. The castle was a motte and bailey of about five acres, with a chalk mound and a timber keep. In 1092 Picot founded canons just to the south, and the house later moved to Barnwell.

During The Anarchy, Geoffrey de Mandeville took the castle in 1143 and King Stephen took it back. Henry II kept the place up for the sheriff's court, and King John added a hall and chamber. In the First Barons' War the castle is said to have fallen in 1216, and also to have played no part in the fighting.

One account of the Second Barons' War has the town and castle holding in 1266 until Henry III relieved them, after which the King's Ditch was strengthened. Another account says the castle was already too decayed for a royal stay. Edward I of England then rebuilt it in stone, in work dated from 1283, from 1284, or from 1286 to 1296, and also called complete by 1306.

Clunch and Barnack stone formed a curtain, drum towers, a barbican and a great gate. A hall, a chapel and a kitchen stood in the bailey, and a stone keep stood on the mound. The king stayed two nights, dated to 1293 and also to 1294, and he is called the first and the last king to sleep there.

From the fourteenth century the castle was neglected. Henry VI gave stone from the hall to King's College in 1441, and later grants fed other colleges and a house at Sawston. By 1604 or 1606 only the gatehouse, used as the county gaol, and the keep were intact. Debtors were kept above the criminals.

In the English Civil War the hill was refortified for Parliament. Oliver Cromwell ordered emergency work, described as two bastions, as three, and as four, with a brick barrack. The place saw no fighting. The fortifications were slighted in 1647, and in 1785 the remaining walls and bastions were taken down.

An octagonal county gaol designed by George Byfield was complete by 1807. The gatehouse came down in 1840, 1841 or 1842 to make room for a court house. The gaol was later a record store, was demolished in 1932, and its bricks went into Shire Hall. Excavation has found an execution cemetery, a possible minster, a coin hoard, and, in 2012 and 2013, the original make-up of the mound.

## Photographs

- [The remnants of Cambridge Castle motte. — Myself](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/The_Cambridge_Castle_Mound.jpg)
- [Cambridge Castle — Samuel Buck / Nathaniel Buck](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Cambridge_Castle_1730%2C_Buck_brothers.jpg)
- [Engraving showing Cambridge Castle in the 17th century — Bucks](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Cambridge_Castle.jpg)
- [Castle Mound, the motte which was once the site of Cambridge Castle — Robin Drayton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Castle_Mound%2C_Cambridge.jpg)
- [Castle Hill. Morris Dancers on the Castle Mound, Cambridge — mym](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Castle_Hill_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2512.jpg)
- [Map of Cambridge dated 1575. The inscription reads: Cantebrigia: opulentissimi Anglie Regni, urbs celeberrimi nominis, ab Academie conditore Cantabro — Cambridge_1575.png: Unknown Unknown derivative work:](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Cambridge_Castle_1575.png)
- [A 1837 plan of Cambridge Castle — Mackenzie](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Cambridge_Castle_1837.jpg)
- [View of Cambridge Castle and Plan of Cambridge Castle engraved by Warren and published in Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of England & Wales, 1786 — Warren](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Cambridge_Castle_Alex_Hogg.jpg)
- [Painting of the gateway of Cambridge Castle, England. Photographed at Cheffins Auction Rooms, Cambridge, where it was sold as lot 192 on 12 June 2019. The — Unknown author Unknown author](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Cambridge_Castle_gateway_1841.jpg)
- [View of and from Cambridge castle mound in June 2020. — Cmglee](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Cmglee_Cambridge_castle_mound_top.jpg)

## Sources

- [Cambridge Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Cambridge motte and bailey castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1006905) — Historic England
- [The city of Cambridge: Public buildings](https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol3/pp116-122) — British History Online
- [Cambridge: The Growth of the City](https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/cambs/xxxii-lviii) — British History Online
- [Cambridge Castle Mound: archaeological watching brief](https://eprints.oxfordarchaeology.com/1622/) — Oxford Archaeology East
- [Cambridge Castle Mound: test pit and borehole evaluation](https://eprints.oxfordarchaeology.com/961/) — Oxford Archaeology East
- [Castle Hill, Cambridge: Saxon, medieval and post-medieval deposits](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3200636) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Excavation of the Civil War bastion ditch of Cambridge Castle](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3200776) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Cambridge Castle (Castle Hill)](https://capturingcambridge.org/castle/cambridge-castle/) — Capturing Cambridge
- [Norman Conquest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest) — Wikipedia
- [The Anarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy) — Wikipedia
- [Empress Matilda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Matilda) — Wikipedia
- [First Barons' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barons%27_War) — Wikipedia
- [Second Barons' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Barons%27_War) — Wikipedia
- [Edward I of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Oliver Cromwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell) — Wikipedia
- [The Cambridge Castle Mound.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Cambridge_Castle_Mound.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle 1730, Buck brothers.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle_1730,_Buck_brothers.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Mound, Cambridge.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Mound,_Cambridge.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Hill - geograph.org.uk - 2512.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Hill_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2512.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle 1575.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle_1575.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle 1837.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle_1837.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle Alex Hogg.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle_Alex_Hogg.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cambridge Castle gateway 1841.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Castle_gateway_1841.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cmglee Cambridge castle mound top.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cmglee_Cambridge_castle_mound_top.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Cambridge Castle, known locally as Castle Mound, is in Cambridge in Cambridgeshire. It began as a motte and bailey on the north bank of the River Cam, on a gravel-capped spur of the Lower Chalk that stands between 60 and 70 feet above datum and ends steeply at the river. The spur controls the waterway, commands the bridge, and dominates the town. Cambridgeshire County Council owns the castle. The public can go onto the mound every day, and there is no admission fee. The view takes in Saint Giles' Church, the spire of All Saints, the chapel tower of Saint John's College, and the long roof of King's College Chapel.

What still shows is the motte and limited earthworks. The motte is about 10 metres, or 33 feet, high, and it is the highest point in the city. It is also said to rise some 80 feet above the river. A watching brief measured the top at about 32.36 metres above ordnance datum. The ground under the hill is sand and gravel over chalk marl. The bailey, and the prison that later filled it, lie under and beside Shire Hall, built in 1931 and 1932 as the headquarters of the county council. The castle has been a scheduled monument since 18 May 1932, and the designation was amended on 1 April 2025. It is not a single medieval wall. The protected ground holds the Norman earthwork, Civil War banks, and buried remains of an Iron Age settlement, a Roman town, and the county gaol.

People had already chosen this spur because it watched the crossing. The earliest defended settlement is late Iron Age. A single ditch and bank enclosed more than seven hectares. A large defended gateway was added on the north side in the first century. A small Roman fort is thought to have stood here in 60 or 61, perhaps in answer to the revolt of Boudica, and to have lasted until the early second century. It was then taken down. Streets were laid out parallel to Akeman Street. An imperial guesthouse, a mansio, was built, and the town, called Duroliponte, had small houses with yards. In the second century, in the time of Hadrian, the place was a small planned town with modest industry and a religious centre, set to control movement across the river about 240 metres to the south-east.

The civil settlement has been described as a four-sided enclosure of some 28 acres, with 25 acres perhaps the better figure. Effective occupation is placed in the Flavian period, about the year 70. A coin series begins with a few issues from before that time, is fullest in the third and fourth centuries, and ends with Arcadius and Honorius. Decorated Samian pottery from the town, about 200 pieces examined in the university collection, includes nothing from before the Flavian period. The town was comparatively small. A decline in the third century was followed by a recovery in the fourth. A stone wall of Barnack was then built around the town, cutting through buildings in its path. The wall is given as about 2.3 metres wide and 2.5 metres high, with a ditch in front about 12 metres wide and 4 metres deep. The site was abandoned in the fifth century as Roman rule in Britain failed. The walls themselves stood until the eleventh century.

The old name of the place was Grantacaester, a waste chester by the Granta, the earlier name of the Cam. Monks from Ely are said to have come in 695 looking for a coffin for Saint Etheldreda, founder of their monastery, and to have found one at the foot of the hill. An inferred destruction of a settlement on the hill has been tied to the victory of Penda of Mercia over the East Angles in 634. Penda ruled from 626 to 655. The written record of the Viking period is more definite, and the dates do not all agree. The Chronicle places a Danish army wintering at Grantabrycge in 875. Three years later, by the treaty of Wedmore, the place passed into the Danelaw. The army of Grantabrycge submitted to King Edward the Elder in 921. Another account, drawn from excavation on the hill, puts Cambridge in the Danelaw from 866 until 917, when the region submitted to Edward of Wessex, with a settlement following in 920. The area inside the Roman walls is also said to have been lived in again by the middle of the tenth century, in response to the attack of 875. The Anglo-Danish town was burnt in 1010, in the invasion that brought Svein, and after an interval Cnut, to the English throne.

Buildings of that time would have been of cob or of timber and wattle, roofed with thatch. Pottery of the tenth and early eleventh centuries has been found on many sites on the right bank of the river, and it was a surprise that the excavations on Castle Hill in 1929 and 1930 found none. The late Saxon town, the Danish burgh, has therefore been looked for on the right bank, in much the same ground later enclosed by the King's Ditch, which may itself have been dug that early. The right-bank quarter called the Holm held the wharves. Cambridge had a mint in the tenth century, and until the reign of Edward the Confessor the coins carried the shortened name Grant. The hill was not empty even so. In 1810 a group of sculptured stones of the tenth and eleventh centuries was found under the bailey bank. There are nine of them. The latest are of the middle of the eleventh century. Four have been illustrated: one is a coped stone in a style derived from tenth-century Wessex, and the others are upright gravestones with interlaced ornament. The find is read as a graveyard, and the group as an old minster, the predecessor of the house Sheriff Picot would found. No church on that exact spot is known. Anglo-Saxon gravestones have also been found inside the motte, which is an artificial mound.

The Norman Conquest reached this community in 1068, two years after the fighting of 1066. Edward the Confessor died in January 1066 and Harold Godwinson succeeded him. Harald Hardrada of Norway won at Fulford on 20 September and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. On 28 September Duke William of Normandy landed at Pevensey. On 14 October, at Hastings, Harold was killed, and William became king. He was not secure until after 1072. He granted lands to his followers and built castles on the points that held the kingdom. The Domesday Book, the record of the great survey, was complete by 1086. Cambridge, then Grantabridge or Grantabrycge, lay on the old Roman road from London to York, Ermine Street, and it was both useful and likely to rebel. After the surrender of York in 1068, William came south and raised castles at Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge. The work at Cambridge is dated to late 1068, and also simply to 1068. Orderic is the writer who notes the three castles. Cambridge was one of the two key points, with good communication between them, on the southern edge of the Great Fen.

Picot, the high sheriff, carried out the first building. His hand on the town was heavy. Domesday shows him raising the services and the heriot demanded from the lawmen. The castle was set inside the existing town, within the line of the Roman wall. Twenty-seven houses were destroyed to clear the ground, given as twenty-seven in two wards and as twenty-seven in the first ward. The caption of a view made in 1730 says eighteen houses were demolished. The castle covered about five acres. It was a motte and bailey. The motte is a central mound of chalk rubble, and a wooden keep would have stood on it. The bailey in front held the living quarters and the service buildings. The earliest structure was probably timber. A stone building is presumed to have replaced it before the pipe rolls of the twelfth century begin to record spending. The new castle made the control of the shire visibly royal, and it fixed that control on this hill. In 1092 Picot established a house of regular canons hard by the castle on the south, with a church of Saint Giles and room for six canons. His successor enlarged the house and in about 1112 moved it out of the little town to Barnwell, where it became a house of Augustinian canons and a major presence in the life of the place through the Middle Ages.

The castle stayed with the Norman kings until the civil war remembered as The Anarchy. That war in England and Normandy is dated from 1138 to 1153, and the account of this castle dates the outbreak to 1139. The crisis began when William Adelin, the only legitimate son of Henry I, drowned in the White Ship in 1120. Henry tried to leave the throne to his daughter, Empress Matilda, and only partly persuaded the nobles. Henry died in 1135. His nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. Empress Matilda was born about 7 February 1102, daughter of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland. She had gone to Germany as a child and was the wife of the emperor Henry V from 1110 until his death in 1125. She was crowned empress in Saint Peter's, acted as regent in Italy, and had no children by Henry V. After the White Ship, her father called her back and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. The court swore loyalty to her and to her heirs, but the choice was unpopular. In 1139 she crossed to England with her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, while Geoffrey conquered Normandy in her name and her uncle David I of Scotland supported her. Castles were easy to hold, so the war was mostly siege, raid and skirmish. In 1141 Stephen was captured at the Battle of Lincoln. Matilda's attempt to be crowned in London failed before hostile crowds. She was never declared queen. Her title was Lady of the English. Robert was taken at the rout of Winchester, and the two sides exchanged him for Stephen. In the winter of 1142 Stephen nearly took her at Oxford. She escaped at night from Oxford Castle across the frozen Thames, the River Isis, to Abingdon. She returned to Normandy in 1148 and left the English campaign to her son Henry, later Henry II. Stephen failed to have his son Eustace recognised as the next king. The Treaty of Wallingford left Stephen the throne and named Henry as heir. Stephen died in 1154. Matilda lived on near Rouen, advised her son, and died on 10 September 1167. She was buried at Bec Abbey, and her tomb was later moved to Rouen Cathedral.

In that war Geoffrey de Mandeville, a supporter of Empress Matilda, attacked Cambridge in 1143. The town was raided and the castle was taken for a time. Stephen counter-attacked, pushed Geoffrey back into the Fens, and recovered the castle. Cambridge was still exposed, so Stephen built a supporting fort at Burwell. Geoffrey was killed attacking Burwell Castle the next year, and Cambridge Castle was left secure. Under Henry II the castle was maintained and little was done to enlarge it. A castle-guard was set up. Lands around Cambridge were granted to local lords on condition that they provide men to guard the castle. The castle's ordinary work was the sheriff's court and the keeping of the sheriff's records. A writer at Barnwell, compiling rents and dues about 1240, said that his list meant the prior and his tenants no longer had to go to the castle to scrutinise the sheriff's roll. In 1236 twelve landowners in the shire were charged for the upkeep. Six of them had to pay 6 shillings and 8 pence, a mark.

The pipe rolls give £43 spent on works in 1156 to 1177, £23 under Richard I, and £60 under John. Another account says that, because the castle was of wood, maintenance was cheap, and that in the century ending 1234 less than 30 shillings a year was spent on repairs. Stone is mentioned for building in 1191, so the timber castle had already been improved late in the twelfth century. Considerable works followed after 1212, in the later years of King John. Before the First Barons' War he concentrated on a new hall and a new chamber, at a cost of £200. The £60 under John and the £200 on the hall are both on record, and they are not the same figure.

The First Barons' War ran from 1215 to 1217. It was a civil war between King John and a party of barons led by Robert Fitzwalter. John's wars against Philip II of France had broken the Angevin Empire, and John then refused to keep Magna Carta, which he had sealed on 15 June 1215. A formal charter was issued by the chancery on 15 July. Clause 61, the security clause, allowed twenty-five barons to constrain the king. Through the summer of 1215 the attempts at a settlement failed, and open war followed. The rebel barons turned to Louis, son of Philip II and grandson-in-law of Henry II. In November 1215 Louis sent knights to protect London, and he had already agreed to invade, against the wishes of his father and of Pope Innocent III. In May 1216 his fleet was sighted off Thanet and he landed in Kent. John withdrew toward Winchester. Louis entered London with little resistance and was proclaimed king at Saint Paul's, though he was never crowned. He soon controlled more than half the kingdom. In October 1216 John died. Many barons left Louis for John's nine-year-old son, Henry III, and the war went on. Louis was beaten at the Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217. A fleet gathered by his wife, Blanche of Castile, was defeated off the English coast on 24 August 1217. He made peace by the Treaty of Lambeth, gave up the castles he still held, and accepted that he had never been the lawful king. The French left England.

During that war the rebel barons, supported by Prince Louis, took much of eastern England, and Cambridge Castle fell in 1216. The garrison at the surrender in John's reign is given as twenty men. The castle was returned to royal control after the war. Another account says that the strategic importance of the castle diminished after 1215, that under Henry III it appears almost only as a place of royal government and justice, and that it played no part in the campaigns of the Barons' Wars. Both statements stand. Henry III is also said to have carried out only basic maintenance, and the castle does not seem to have been fit for a royal residence. Neither Henry III in 1258 and 1267, nor the justices who inquired into rebels' lands in 1268 to 1270, stayed there. The same absence is dated to the inquiries of 1268 and 1270. In 1231 Henry III ordered the sheriff of Cambridgeshire to punish stubborn scholars by imprisonment in the county gaol, or by expulsion from the town, but only at the discretion of the chancellor and the masters of the university. The castle prison was already part of the life of the new university.

The Second Barons' War, from 1264 to 1267, was fought between barons led by Simon de Montfort and the royalists of Henry III, later led by Henry's son, the future Edward I of England. The barons wanted the king to rule with a council rather than through his favourites. Henry's calls for extra money, a wider discontent with his government, and famine all fed the crisis. De Montfort, Earl of Leicester, had been one of the foreign councillors many lords resented. He inherited the English earldom through his mother and married Henry's sister Eleanor with the king's permission but without the barons' agreement. In the 1250s he was tried for his conduct as lieutenant of Gascony. Henry's plan to buy the kingdom of Sicily for his second son Edmund, in return for funding a papal war against the Hohenstaufen, frightened barons who thought he was repeating his father's mistakes. The pope later withdrew the title. In 1258 seven leading barons forced Henry to accept the Provisions of Oxford. A council of twenty-four was to do the business of government, and a parliament was to meet every three years to watch them. Henry swore to uphold the Provisions. In 1259 the Lord Edward briefly sided with the reformers, then returned to his father and stayed loyal. After the Battle of Lewes he was held hostage, escaped after a few months, and in 1265 defeated and killed de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham. Within two years the rebellion was put down.

Cambridge was attacked again in 1266, on one account. The town and the castle held long enough to be relieved by Henry's forces. The king then reinforced the defences of the city with a large ditch, later called the King's Ditch. That ditch is also said to have existed before Henry improved it in 1267, when gates were made where the Trumpington and Hadstock roads crossed it, and a Close Roll entry of 1215 about enclosing the town may be its beginning. It was known as the King's Ditch before 1267. Against the story of a 1266 defence, the other account says the castle played no part in the campaigns and was too decayed to house the king or the justices. By the middle of the thirteenth century it had fallen into a dilapidated state. Around 1260 a woman named Constance, arrested for murder by the constables of Fulbourn, was brought to the castle while Sir William le Moyne was holding the county court. He would not lock her up. In the argument she escaped, and both the sheriff and the constables were fined. A little later five prisoners escaped and took sanctuary in All Saints' church. Escapes into sanctuary at All Saints by the Castle, at Saint Giles, or at Chesterton church are a repeated note in the records. The Fenland at the end of Henry's reign was a centre of the Disinherited, the party that kept up resistance after Evesham. The later rebuilding of this castle may have been meant to stop the Fens being used in that way again. If that was the aim, it was achieved.

Edward I of England was born at the Palace of Westminster on the night of 17 to 18 June 1239, the eldest son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. He was king from 1272 until his death on 7 July 1307. He was Lord of Ireland, and from 1254 to 1306 he held Gascony as Duke of Aquitaine under the French king. Before he became king he was called the Lord Edward. He was also called Edward Longshanks, and later the Hammer of the Scots. He stood 6 feet 2 inches. In 1270, with England quiet, he left on the Ninth Crusade. He was on the way home in 1272 when he learned that his father was dead. He reached England in 1274 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Much of his reign went into administration and the common law, through inquiries into feudal liberties and a run of statutes. A small war in Wales in 1276 and 1277 was followed by the conquest of 1282 and 1283. He built castles and towns in Wales and settled English people in them. After the death of the Scottish heir he was asked to judge the succession, claimed a feudal overlordship, and invaded. The first Scottish war of independence outlived him. Philip IV of France, allied with the Scots, confiscated Gascony, and the French war eased the pressure on Scotland even though the duchy was recovered. By the middle of the 1290s the cost of these campaigns brought heavy taxation and opposition from laity and clergy. In 1290 his Edict of Expulsion drove the Jews out of England. He died in 1307 and left his son Edward II a war in Scotland and a burden of debt and politics.

Until his rebuilding, Cambridge Castle was only a basic fortification. He decided on a major expansion. The start is given as 1283, as 1284, and as 1286. The work is said to have run for the next fourteen years, to have occupied 1286 to 1296, and to have been complete by 1306. The spend is given as at least £2,630, as £2,525, and as about £2,500. From the military point of view, later history hardly seems to justify that outlay. Building went on steadily from 1286 to 1289 and then stopped. On 4 October 1291 Edward ordered an immediate resumption. The first part rebuilt was the great hall. Up to Midsummer 1286, more than £100 had been spent on it. At Michaelmas 1286 the sheriff claimed to have spent £408 on the hall, the gate and the walls. The curtain wall was finished in 1287. The great gate was built at the same time, took two years, and survived until 1840. In 1288 the roof was covered in lead. Sometimes more than a hundred men were at work in a week. In 1297, £407 was spent on a new gate. The next year £161 went on thatching. In 1299 a new kitchen and bakehouse were built.

The earth and timber ramparts were replaced in stone. The foundations were clunch. The curtain and the towers were Barnack stone. The timber keep on the mound was replaced in stone, and the keep was enlarged. The plan is described as four-sided, with circular towers at each corner, a gatehouse and a barbican. It is also described as a high curtain, an outer barbican with drum towers, and five towers in all, counting the great tower on the mound. A great gate stood on the south-west. Inside the bailey were a great hall, of three storeys, a chapel and kitchens, accommodation fit for the king. There was a chamber for the squires, the camera armigerorum, which cannot have been in constant use, though the castle-guard money was still collected. A moat was fed by a spring in the north-west corner of the bailey and held water until 1600, and the castle seems to have been surrounded by wet moats. The result has been called a major fortress in the latest fashion, and also a work that was never quite finished. Edward stayed two nights. The stay is dated to 1293, to 1294, and specifically to 24 and 25 March 1293. He was the first king to stay, and the last. He is said to have come to inspect the works. He disliked the smell of the stable under the hall, and that stable was rebuilt. The stone bailey is also said to have been rebuilt in stone by him in 1294. What was destroyed of these walls in 1807 was described as rag, clunch and other stones strongly connected. The gatehouse, the only substantial piece left by 1606, and known from later drawings, shows the quality of the work. In 1317 the garrison was thirty men.

Through the fourteenth century the castle was allowed to fall into disrepair. From Edward III onward little money was spent, and by the fifteenth century it was in ruins. The hall and the chamber were roofless. Orders for repair did continue. Those of 1331 were sent to the mayor, not to the sheriff. An inquest into the defective state of the walls, towers and houses was held in 1367. Even in 1585 there were still attempts to keep the curtain wall. In 1523 two tons of stone were bought to mend the castle walls, which must mean the curtain. In 1368 workmen putting two new gargoyles and a leaden spout on the roof of the great gate borrowed a long ladder from the Friars Minor, later Sidney Sussex, gave the friar who brought it 4 pence, and gave him 3 pence to take it back. In 1340 and 1341 the castle was granted to the Earl of Cambridge, saving the gaol, and the sheriff was to have free access to the gaol at the gate. The dual character of fortress and prison was stated in the grant. In the fourteenth century the gaol held county prisoners and also prisoners committed by the vice-chancellor. The borough protested that this was against its liberties.

The use of the castle as a quarry began with Henry VI. In 1441 he ordered the roofless hall and chamber destroyed and the stone reused for King's College. Other parts of the castle helped to build the chapel of Trinity College. He had begun to acquire land in Cambridge for the college in 1440 and 1441, and by August 1443 he had enlarged the scheme. Later grants of stone, in the sixteenth century, were made by Mary I for a mansion at Sawston in the Fens, and further grants went to Emmanuel College and to Magdalene College. Sawston Hall is the name given to that house in one account. Unlicensed plunder took more. In 1449 the sheriff, William Alyngton, spent £40 on repairs to the gatehouse. In 1528 Philip Paris spent £5 on the castle wall and the gaol. By 1604 only the gatehouse, used as a jail, and the keep were intact. Contemporaries called the surrounding walls rased and utterly ruinated. By 1606 the south-west gatehouse was the only complete building, because it was the prison, together with a small piece of curtain on which the Jury House stood. John Cowell, master of Trinity Hall, surveyed the castle that year. To people in Cambridge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the gatehouse was the castle. A French visitor in 1672 described it as dominating the town. It survived because it was a prison.

The castle lay in Chesterton, technically outside the borough until Chesterton was taken in in 1911, and it dominated the town physically and administratively for centuries. It was a military stronghold in emergencies, the place of the county court and therefore of parliamentary elections and judicial assizes, and continuously the county prison. Before the Conquest the shire moots had met on the Maiden Borough, the old name of the Roman camp. The hill was called the Shire Hill in 1626. Humble people dug down the bank on the south and west and built cottages on the slopes and even in the moat. Five occupants of houses in the precincts are mentioned in 1262 and 1279. Early in the seventeenth century lawsuits over those holdings, and over the herbage on the waste slopes to the south, produced depositions full of topography. The rights of the lord of Chesterton manor were questioned by the Crown. During the reign of Charles I a long suit between a London speculator and the lord of the manor concerned the waste and five small cottages built on ground made by digging the castle bank into the ditch next to Castle Street. Witnesses for Lady Joan Jermy, owner of the manor, said the castle lay in Chesterton. John Theaker, a shepherd of Chesterton aged 79, had known the castle since 1558 and had walked the parish bounds that took in the castle and the cottages. Prisoners who died, or who were executed, were buried at Chesterton. The castle was in the parish of Chesterton and was the private property of the king. The moat still held water at the end of the sixteenth century.

In the Edwardian castle the prison seems to have been in the tower east of the mound, under the constables' chamber. From the grant to the Earl of Cambridge, the gatehouse was the gaol until the end of the eighteenth century. The upper floor was kept for superior prisoners, especially debtors. Criminals were housed below. By the sixteenth century the gaoler's office was distinct from the sheriff's, and indentures of appointment survive. In 1580 Ralph Killingbeck was appointed gaoler. There were six prisoners, two of them debtors of the upper sort. Robert Wray owed £600. Thomas Brakin, lord of the manor of Chesterton, owed about £1,000, and the next year he sold the manor to John Styward. On 7 December 1592 Sir Henry Cromwell, the sheriff, appointed William Silvertop, a yeoman, as gaoler. The prisoners then were Thomas Gosson and Susan Arthur, condemned and reprieved; William Fawys, John Peepes, Thomas Holmes and Thomas Stukley, on suspicion of felony; William Kisby, John Thow and Mary Bell, for vagrancy; John White, sent in by university delegates until he had satisfied £100 to Doctor Newcombe; Thomas Sterne and Daniel Ventrys, outlawed; and John Noble, for a debt of £8 and fees of 16 shillings and 8 pence. On 9 December 1598 a sheriff named Oliver Cromwell appointed George Robson and his wife as gaolers. This sheriff is not the soldier born the next year. There were twenty prisoners, three of them debtors. One was a recusant, Nicholas Bestwyk, later suspected of a part in the Gunpowder Plot. Robson himself was then imprisoned at the suit of Saint John Peyton, so the appointment lasted nine days. On 18 December William Piper was appointed instead.

In the seventeenth century both Roman Catholics linked with the Gunpowder Plot and Protestant dissenters were held in the gatehouse. Francis Holcroft, a former fellow of Clare and a nonconformist preacher, was detained from 1663 to 1672. He had an agreement with the gaoler to be let out after dark on Saturday and to be back before daylight on Monday, so that he could preach to congregations in the shire that had no pastor. Escapes were common, often in groups. In 1349 a prisoner snatched a knife from a gaoler and stabbed him, and four men and one woman escaped to sanctuary. In 1759 the criminals in the lower gaol filed off their irons, broke fourteen locks and a massive bar across the door, and had almost got out when the debtors in the upper prison heard them and raised the alarm. A print of 1730 shows the gatehouse in good repair, with the gables of the gaoler's house above the battlements.

In January 1776 Doctor Ewin visited the gaol for Lord Hardwicke, who had heard that it was very cold and had sent coals. There were nine debtors and four felons in the gaol, and one person in the House of Correction, or Bridewell. Three of the debtors were breakfasting with the gaoler's family, next door to the Bridewell. The other six had a warm room and a good fire, and some of the felons had been moved into the House of Correction to be warmed by the gaoler's fire. John Howard visited the gaol and the Bridewell soon afterwards. He reported well of them on the whole, and noted that there was no chaplain. On a second visit in 1782 he especially commended the keeper of the Bridewell as attentive and humane. There were then fifteen debtors and three felons in the gatehouse. The keeper was Simon Saunders. The Bridewell joined the gaoler's house. It had two workrooms and, over them, two rooms, one for men with four cages, each six and a half feet by four and a half, and one for women with two cages. There was no court, no water the prisoners could reach, and only one sewer, and that was offensive. There was no allowance. The prisoners had the profit of their work, which was beating hemp and making mops. Nield's account in 1802 describes the Low Gaol as four strong rooms and the High Gaol as a kitchen and other offices with six rooms for the debtors above. The castle yard was spacious but not secure enough for exercise. There was a chaplain, but the prisoners said they had had no divine service for four months. William Gregory, appointed keeper in 1782, had a salary of £90 a year and had to pay a turnkey £18. Howard commended him that year. In 1796 he was fined £20 for letting Edward Scott escape while crossing the yard for divine service, the yard being insecure. Scott was recaptured. Gregory died in December 1804. In 1807 the county paid the keeper of the castle jail £200 a year.

The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was a series of civil wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651. It formed part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, from 1639 to 1653. The struggle is divided into the First English Civil War and the Second English Civil War, and the Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 is sometimes called a third. The first war was fought mainly over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I. It ended in June 1646 with the Royalists defeated and the king in custody. Most Parliamentarians had gone to war to give Parliament a part in government, not to abolish the monarchy. Charles refused concessions. Fear of radicals in the New Model Army, among them Oliver Cromwell, helped to align moderate Parliamentarians with Royalists, backed by the Covenanter Scots. Defeat of the Royalists in the second war, in 1648, led to the execution of Charles I in January 1649 and to the Commonwealth. In 1650 Charles II was crowned king of Scotland in return for promising a Presbyterian church in England and Scotland. That war ended with a Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. Ireland and Scotland were brought into the Commonwealth. The arrangement was dissolved at the Restoration in 1660. Supporters of the king were nicknamed Cavaliers, and supporters of Parliament Roundheads.

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 and baptised on 29 April at Saint John's Church. His father Robert was a younger son of the local gentry, and the family estate went back to the marriage of a Welsh brewer, Morgan ap William, to Katherine Cromwell, sister of Thomas Cromwell. Oliver was the only boy of ten children to survive infancy. He said later that he was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height nor yet in obscurity. He was member of Parliament for Huntingdon in 1628. Much of his life before 1640 was marked by financial and personal difficulty. In the 1630s he became a religious Independent. In 1640 he was member for Cambridge in both the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. He joined the Parliamentarian army when the first war began in August 1642 and soon showed his ability. In 1645 he was appointed commander of the cavalry of the New Model Army under Thomas Fairfax, and he had a major part in the victory. He was a leading advocate of the execution of Charles I. After further victories in Ireland and Scotland he was named Lord Protector in December 1653 and held that place until his death on 3 September 1658. His son Richard succeeded him and could not hold the government. At the Restoration, Cromwell's body was taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661. The head was displayed on Westminster Hall until at least 1684, passed through private hands, and was reburied in 1960.

Cambridge Castle was occupied by Parliamentary forces in the first year of the war. Oliver Cromwell ordered emergency repairs. Two new earthwork bastions were added, and a brick barracks was built in the old bailey. The same works are described as three bastions, close to what is now Chesterton Road, reusing the castle ditch, with new ditches to the north and east by December 1644, and also as four large diamond-shaped earthen bastions at the corners of the circuit, with a barrack block, the perimeter taking in the motte. In 1643 the site became military again. Fifteen houses were cleared. The earthworks to the north and west were remodelled. The brick barracks stood on the site of Edward's great hall. The governor of Cambridge wrote in 1643 that the town and castle were now very strongly fortified, with breastworks and bulwarks. The castle saw no further fighting. The fortress was never used in battle, never saw action, and was already in decline by 1647. Earthworks east of Shire Hall are the visible remains. Excavation on Castle Street found the large ditch of the south-west bastion. A survey made in 1785 recorded three strong though irregular bastions on the verge of the Norman ditch, 17 and a half feet high and 70 feet broad at the base, built of gault and firm white clay. In 1646, twenty-five men were left to hold the place, out of a normal garrison given as 120 foot and 10 horse. In 1647 Parliament ordered the remaining fortifications slighted, by a vote of both Houses, and the fortress was decommissioned.

After the slighting the castle deteriorated quickly. The Cromwellian barracks became in part a Bridewell for petty offenders and in part the gaoler's house. One passage says this lasted until a new gaol of 1862. The remaining walls and bastions were taken down in 1785, leaving the gatehouse and the earth motte. County elections, and for many years the borough elections, were held in the castle yard. At the election of 1780 Soame Jenyns said he escaped only by accident from being trampled to death there by a mob of all the sectaries in the county. In 1797 Pitt wrote to the Duchess of Rutland, urging her to see that their friends turned out in force at a meeting in the castle yard to oppose proposals from the Yorke interest. A Shire House had been needed because the king's justices sat in the county court. The Edwardian hall served while it still had a roof. In 1572 Roger, Lord North, built a Shire House, with a small court for criminal cases, a larger court for civil cases, and a small house for the juries. Hamond's plan of 1592 shows the gallows in the depression below the mound, and shows the common-law court with an arched portico on four columns. The building was of wood on a brick foundation. It served the assize justices until 1747, when a Shire Hall was built in the market place, raised on pillars 11 feet high so that the market stalls could stay underneath. The courts eventually moved back to Castle Hill.

Nield noted in 1802 that a new gaol was building, on a plan like the one at Bury Saint Edmunds and by the same architect. The architect was George Byfield, also named as G. Byfield. The new county prison stood in the former bailey. It was octagonal, surrounded by a lofty wall, and based on the latest ideas associated with Bentham. It was also influenced by the designs of John Howard. The dates given for it are 1802 to 1807, 1807 to 1811, and complete by 1807. The building of that gaol is the likely reason that county elections, and borough elections after 1832, moved to Parker's Piece. The last of the Edwardian curtain, together with the Bridewell, was demolished by order of the justices. The gatehouse became the ruin drawn by Cotman in 1818. It was pulled down to make way for a county court, or Shire Hall, on the hill. The demolition is dated to 1840, to 1841, and to 1842. The new court building is credited to T. H. Wyatt and D. Brandon, and the courts are also said to have been added in 1841. That elaborate Italianate building is said to have remained until 1953, and the court house is also said to have been demolished in 1954.

By the end of the nineteenth century the jail was surplus, because Huntingdon jail could hold the prisoners of both Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire. In 1919 it was fitted up as a branch repository of the Public Record Office. Records began to arrive in 1920 and the building remained a repository until 1928, when the county council acquired the site. The records were sent away in 1929 and 1930. The jail was demolished in 1932, and the bricks were used to build Shire Hall on the same ground. The present Shire Hall was designed by the county architect H. H. Dunn and built in 1931 and 1932. The surrounding grounds were laid out as a small park. Since 1647 the hill had served civilian purposes: the county court, elections, the prison, the record store, and then the county offices.

Archaeology has filled in the ground under those buildings. About thirty excavations have taken place over nearly thirty years within the bounds of the former Roman town. The 1810 gravestones under the bailey bank, and the gravestones inside the motte, have already been noted. The absence of late Saxon pottery in the dig of 1929 and 1930 pushed the Danish burgh off this hill and onto the right bank. Excavation in the Castle Hill area later identified Middle Saxon occupation, including an execution cemetery, a possible Saxo-Norman minster church, and a fourteenth-century hoard of 1,805 silver coins and nine gold coins. Elements of the castle and of cemeteries were found, and a pottery sequence from the Middle Saxon period into the Saxo-Norman period was defined. The older picture, drawn from documents, topography and maps, had to be reconsidered against that evidence. A separate excavation of the Civil War bastion ditch showed its size and form. The line of the ditch led to a reconsideration of this part of the defences on the hill. The ditch was not completely filled in until the early nineteenth century, which changes how the ground around it should be read.

On 11 and 12 March 2009 three test pits were watched at the base of a retaining wall along the southern edge of the mound, during an investigation of the wall's foundation. The ground had been heavily disturbed in modern times. The fills held Roman and medieval pottery, and also post-medieval and modern ceramics. No archaeological features were recorded. From 2 to 6 January 2012 four test pits were dug along the inside of the retaining wall around the mound at Shire Hall. A borehole survey had already been made on both sides of the mound. Test pits two, three and four showed deliberate backfilling and the construction cut for the wall. Test pits one, two and three showed the original material of the motte.

Between 25 June and 23 July 2013 the base of the mound was watched during remedial conservation, together with the retaining walls next to Braeside, on Clare College land, and the undercroft to the south and east. The work put up new fencing, replaced damaged brickwork, took soil off the back of the wall, cleared vegetation and replanted the mound. Scheduled monument consent had been obtained before the ground was opened. The digging exposed part of the original medieval construction and make-up of the castle mound. An access ramp on the north-west, 5.20 metres long, 1.20 metres wide and up to 0.75 metres deep, cut into bank material that may belong to a ditch on the south-west side of the mound. Around the base, machine access cut into the monument. The sections showed redeposited gravel, chalk and sandy silt, the make-up of the original mound, sealed by modern turf. Later tree pits cut the mound. Wash from the upper slopes, brought down by people walking that side, lay over the topsoil in places. Three hand-dug post holes for a new fence, and four auger holes, met only recent ground and nineteenth-century to modern make-up, not the original mound. There were no pre-mound features in the watched strip, but most of the pottery in the mound material was older than the mound.

The finds run from the late Iron Age to the nineteenth century. Seventy-three sherds, weighing 0.930 kilograms, came from twelve contexts. They are moderately abraded. Most are residual Roman pottery of the middle of the first century to the fourth, 66 sherds weighing 0.630 kilograms in the summary count. Only a small amount is later: two medieval sherds, one post-medieval sherd, and four sherds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Late Iron Age sherds are present, small and worn, alongside the Roman ones. Among the Roman wares are sandy greyware, Nene Valley colour coat, a Horningsea storage jar and dishes, Oxford white colour-coated mortarium, shell-tempered ware, a Central Gaulish Samian sherd of the early to late second century, and Hadham redware. The post-Roman pieces include a coarse sandy ware of the middle twelfth to fifteenth centuries and an East Anglian redware jug of the thirteenth to fifteenth. Three fragments of ceramic building material, 0.171 kilograms, include a piece of Roman brick or tile, a scrap of modern brick, and late medieval or post-medieval peg tile. Three fragments of animal bone, 0.010 kilograms, are from medium or large mammals and could not be taken to a species. One oyster shell, Ostrea edulis, weighed about 0.02 kilograms. The quantity of late Iron Age and Roman pottery in the material of the motte confirms that people were here before the Norman mound was raised. The monitoring also showed how much later soil now lies on the mound, and it revealed parts of the original construction.

Two large fragments of a stoneware viewpoint indicator, together 2.838 kilograms, were found in a soil at the base of the mound. They carry the arms of the Isle of Ely County Council, granted in May 1931, and the names of distant towns, including Leicester, and of the destructor tower at the pumping station, now the Museum of Technology. That pumping station was built in 1894, so the indicator was installed after that year, and the arms show that it was put up after May 1931. It probably stood on top of the mound. When it was broken, and when the pieces were folded into the soil, is not known. The administrative county of the Isle of Ely lasted until 1965.

The mound was reinstated with the soil that had been taken out. A trench was machined against the base of the existing wall so that the repaired slope would meet it at the right angle. The Norman motte remains the clearest thing a visitor sees. The stone castle of Edward I of England, the bastions of the English Civil War, the gatehouse prison and the octagonal gaol are gone, or survive only as buried footings and as the shape of the ground. The place still does what the first mound was built to do. It holds the crossing, and from the top the roofs of the later city lie in view.

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