# Canterbury Castle

grade I listed castle in Canterbury, United Kingdom

Canterbury, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1135 CE

## Story

• A ruined Norman tower keep in Canterbury, one of three royal castles built in Kent on the road from Dover to London after the Battle of Hastings.
• A timber motte and bailey of 1066, perhaps the Dane John mound, was replaced by a stone keep begun about 1085 and largely raised under Henry I.
• The castle served the sheriff and became a county jail, and it was given up during the First Barons' War while Louis of France claimed the throne.
• Excavation found a Roman military ditch, a double burial with two cavalry swords, and dense late eleventh-century occupation inside the keep.
• The upper storey was cut down in 1817, a gas company stored coal there from 1825 or 1826, and the city bought the shell in 1928.
• Falling masonry closed it in 2017 or 2018, and the stonework was stabilised in December 2025 ahead of a planned reopening.

## History

Canterbury Castle is a ruined Norman tower keep on the south side of old Canterbury, inside the line of the city walls. It was one of three royal castles in Kent, with Rochester and Dover, raised soon after the Battle of Hastings on the Roman road from Dover to London. That was the route William the Conqueror took in October 1066, and the castles were probably meant to guard it.

The protected ground includes the keep, part of the bailey, a sample of land outside it, a later postern, and the castle ditch, which began in the Roman period. The area measures about 165 by 106 metres. The castle was scheduled on 9 April 1915, with an amendment on 11 September 2014, and it was listed on 3 December 1949. One account gives that listing as Grade I, and another gives it as Grade II.

Roman occupation under the castle includes a first-century military-style ditch, later built over by a street and timber buildings, and a double burial of two men with two second-century cavalry swords. Burials with mortuary urns lay east of the keep. Saxon rubbish pits, a ninth-century road over the Roman rampart, and wells lined in timber, wicker, and barrel staves show continued use. The third-century Roman town wall was later reused as the south side of the bailey.

A wooden motte and bailey is dated to 1066. Its mound may be the one in the Dane John gardens, about 235 metres from the stone keep, and that mound may be a Roman burial. The name Dane John comes from donjon.

The stone castle is said to have been begun about 1085, while pottery from a trench through the keep has been read as dating the build after 1100. The great keep was largely raised under Henry I, between 1100 and 1135. One account narrows the work to about 1100 to 1120.

The keep is given both as about 98 by 85 feet and as 87 by 75 feet, with walls about 9 feet or 2.7 metres thick. It was probably at least 80 feet high and now stands about 20 metres, after a reduction in 1817. The walls mix flint, sandstone rubble, Caen stone, Quarr stone, and reused Roman material.

Entry was originally at first-floor level through a forebuilding found on the west side in 1971. A later ground-floor entrance, with round towers, is placed on the south-east side. The same alteration is also described on the east.

A wall and ditch enclosed a bailey of about four acres. The Great Gate stood on the north, on the line of Castle Street, and the Worth Gate, a reused Roman gate, stood on the south until its demolition in 1791. Henry II enlarged the castle and repaired it in 1173–1174, at a stated cost of £1,000. Richard I repaired it again in 1190–1193, amid fear of invasion by Philip II.

During the First Barons' War the castle was given up to the French. It is also said to have surrendered to the barons under John, and to have been taken by the French while Hubert de Burgh had custody in the next reign. Supporters of John are said to have surrendered it to Louis, then Dauphin, after which it returned to the Crown. A grant of 1227 is recorded to Hugh de Burgh, while Hubert de Burgh is named governor from 1216 to 1232.

Later governors include Stephen de Segrave from 1232, Nicholas de Moels, whose constableship is dated both to 1247 and to 1259, and Robert Walerand, sheriff of Kent and governor of the castle from July 1261. The castle became a county jail in the thirteenth century, with a gaol from the time of Edward I used for mass imprisonment. Queen Mary used it in religious persecution until the Westgate replaced it in 1577, though another account continues shrieval use into the eighteenth century.

By 1335 the castle was largely ruined. A new gate was built in 1380, and rebels captured the castle in Wat Tyler’s rising of 1381. It left royal hands at the death of King James VI and I in 1625, when it was granted to the Watson family.

The bailey walls came down in 1791 and 1792. The keep, already cut down in 1817, was bought by a gas company in 1825 or 1826 and used to store coal and coke. The city council purchased it in 1928.

Excavation from 1939 to 1977 traced the original entrance, the later towered doorway, Roman and Saxon levels, and heavy late eleventh-century occupation inside the keep. Falling masonry closed the castle in 2017 or 2018. A grant of £19.9 million in 2023, also stated as £19 million, included the keep.

Stonework was stabilised by December 2025. Opening has been placed in late summer 2026, in the autumn, and from the middle of November. Free entry from dawn until dusk is described as the intended rule.

## Photographs

- [Canterbury Castle — Oast House Archive](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Canterbury_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2908385.jpg)
- [Canterbury, Canterbury Castle, from the east — Tilman2007](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Canterbury_Castle%2C_from_the_east_Canterbury_1252100_20230812_0034.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castle. This magnificent ruined castle is located near Canterbury East railway station — GaryReggae](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Canterbury_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_210658.jpg)
- [Canterbury castle Viewed from inside the city walls near Rheims Way. Castle Street can be seen on the right. The castle was largely built in the reign of Henry — pam fray](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Canterbury_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1270897.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castle — Whn64](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Canterbury_-_Castle01.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castle — Whn64](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Canterbury_-_Castle02.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castel. — Leo.novosel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Canterbury_caste_canterbury_UK.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castle — Neddyseagoon ( Uploads )](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Canterbury_20-2-07_068.jpg)
- [Dane John Gardens, Canterbury — Neddyseagoon ( Uploads )](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Canterbury_20-2-07_082.jpg)
- [Canterbury Castle, Canterbury, England. — Phyrexian](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Canterbury_-_Canterbury_Castle_0001.jpg)

## Sources

- [Canterbury Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [William the Conqueror](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Hastings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings) — Wikipedia
- [Anglo-Normans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Normans) — Wikipedia
- [First Barons' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barons%27_War) — Wikipedia
- [Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_de_Burgh,_1st_Earl_of_Kent) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Walerand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Walerand) — Wikipedia
- [Henry I of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Stephen de Segrave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_de_Segrave) — Wikipedia
- [Nicholas de Moels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_de_Moels) — Wikipedia
- [James VI and I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I) — Wikipedia
- [Ordnance Survey National Grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_National_Grid) — Wikipedia
- [Canterbury Castle scheduled monument](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1005194) — Historic England
- [Canterbury Castle listed building](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1252100) — Historic England
- [Canterbury Castle](https://www.canterbury.co.uk/canterburys-open-spaces/canterbury-castle) — Visit Canterbury
- [Levelling Up work and timescales](https://www.canterbury.gov.uk/business-and-investment/levelling-fund-connected-canterbury/levelling-work-and-timescales) — Canterbury City Council
- [The archaeology of Canterbury. Vol I: Excavations at Canterbury Castle](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1003583&recordType=Monograph) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Monographs](https://www.canterburytrust.co.uk/monographs) — Canterbury Archaeological Trust
- [Nesting bats and the reopening of Canterbury Castle](https://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/nesting-bats-scupper-hopes-for-amphitheatre-plan-at-restored-340926/) — KentOnline
- [Canterbury Castle - geograph.org.uk - 2908385.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2908385.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury Castle, from the east Canterbury 1252100 20230812 0034.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Castle,_from_the_east_Canterbury_1252100_20230812_0034.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury Castle - geograph.org.uk - 210658.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_210658.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury castle - geograph.org.uk - 1270897.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1270897.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury - Castle01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_-_Castle01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury - Castle02.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_-_Castle02.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury caste canterbury UK.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_caste_canterbury_UK.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury 20-2-07 068.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_20-2-07_068.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury 20-2-07 082.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_20-2-07_082.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Canterbury - Canterbury Castle 0001.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canterbury_-_Canterbury_Castle_0001.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Canterbury Castle is a ruined Norman tower keep on the south side of the old city of Canterbury, within the line of the old city walls, in Kent. It was one of the three original royal castles of Kent, together with Rochester Castle and Dover Castle. They were built soon after the Battle of Hastings, on the main Roman road from Dover to London. That was the route taken by William the Conqueror in October 1066, and the castles were probably raised to guard it. The ruin stands a short walk from Canterbury East station and from the main bus station by the city wall. Its position is recorded on the Ordnance Survey National Grid both as TR 1454 5743 and as TR 14607 57423.

The ground protected around the keep takes in the tower itself, part of its bailey, a sample of land just outside the bailey, the postern gate of a later enclosure castle, and the castle and city ditch, which began in the Romano-British period. That protected area reaches about 165 metres from north-west to south-east and about 106 metres from north-east to south-west. What still stands above ground is the square keep and a small part of the bailey wall dated to about 1085. The castle was scheduled on 9 April 1915, and the scheduling was amended on 11 September 2014. It was listed on 3 December 1949. One account places that listing in Grade I, and another places the same listing in Grade II.

Tower keeps of this kind are strongly fortified residences in which the tower is the principal defensive structure, sometimes standing inside a defended enclosure. They followed motte and bailey castles, with the stone tower taking the place of the motte as the main point of the castle. Square, cylindrical, and polygonal towers all occur. The square or rectangular stone keep, and its Romanesque architecture, is especially characteristic of the Norman period. Stone, rather than the timber of a motte and bailey, reduced the risk of fire, allowed a taller building, and made the holder visible across the surrounding country. The older idea that a keep was built chiefly as a last refuge in an attack is now set aside. Towers of this sort are also read as settings for ceremony and, by their size, as markers of authority in the landscape.

Keeps of the tower type were built from immediately after the Norman Conquest through to the middle of the fifteenth century. The White Tower in London, raised in about 1070, was among the first in England, and the Caen stone from northern France used there is the same type of stone used at Canterbury. The high point of the type falls about 1125 to 1150. A variant, the hall keep, places hall and chamber side by side rather than one above the other. About 104 tower keep castles are known nationally, of which 77 are true tower keeps and 27 are hall keeps. They occur across England, with a concentration on the Welsh border and in Wales. Canterbury’s keep belongs to that national group, and it also belongs to the development of the defended city itself.

A classic tower keep has several floors. The lowest is a basement without windows, entered only from the floor above. The entrance is at first-floor level, reached by outside steps and protected by a forebuilding. Stairs inside the first floor lead upward. In the usual arrangement that first floor served as a hall for retainers, the floor above as a chamber for the lord, and the roof gave access to fighting platforms. A cross wall or an arcade often divides the floors. Fireplaces, latrines, and well shafts are typical. Around the tower, a stone ward was closed by a curtain, sometimes with mural towers. Stables, workshops, a chapel, a hall, and a kitchen that would not fit in the tower stood in the ward, first in timber and later in stone. A ditch commonly lay beyond the curtain. Many tower keeps later became enclosure castles, in which the walls and towers of the enclosure took over the defence. Gunpowder artillery largely ended that defensive role. Castles then fell into ruin, were slighted in the civil war of the seventeenth century, or went on as houses or as administrative centres. Canterbury’s later history follows the last of those paths, and then the path of ruin.

The ground under the castle was already occupied long before any Norman earthwork. Excavation has found a first-century ditch of military style north-east of the keep. It was recut, and later a street with timber buildings was laid over the levelled rampart. North of Gas Lane, occupation from the middle of the first century includes a ditch that may be military in origin. West of the keep and south of Gas Lane, a mixed layer held Romano-British building debris, which indicates a building nearby, together with late Roman coins. Inside the keep and immediately outside it, beneath the medieval levels, there is late second-century or third-century occupation, but no structures of that date were found there. East of the keep, in what is now the Castle Street car park, Romano-British burials are known from mortuary urns, one of them containing ashes, bone, and pins.

Saxon use of the same ground is clear as well. Rubbish pits of the Saxon period were found within and beside the keep. Toward the city wall south-east of the keep, ninth-century rubbish pits and a Saxon road overlie the Roman rampart. Wells of both periods were recorded: a timber-lined Roman well of square plan, and Saxon wells lined with wicker and with barrels. A double burial of two men was accompanied by two cavalry swords of the second century, with their fittings. Brooches and other metalwork, human bone, animal bone, and tree-ring samples were all part of the published record of these digs. The Roman town wall of the third century later supplied the south side of the medieval bailey, so the Norman castle sat on a line of defence that was already centuries old.

The political break that put a castle here was the succession crisis of 1066. Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 without a clear heir. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, was crowned within days. William, Duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had promised him the throne and that Harold had sworn to support that claim. Harald Hardrada of Norway claimed it through an older pact between Magnus and Harthacnut. Harold’s exiled brother Tostig raided the English coast in the spring and then joined Hardrada. On 20 September their army defeated Edwin and Morcar at Fulford. On 25 September Harold killed both Tostig and Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. Two days later the Norman fleet sailed. It landed at Pevensey on 28 September. William moved to Hastings, built a castle as a base, and waited, unwilling to leave his line back to the ships.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066, about seven miles north-west of Hastings, near the present town of Battle. Harold held the ridge at Senlac. The English force was almost entirely infantry, with few archers. About half of William’s army was infantry, and the rest was split between cavalry and archers. The fighting ran from about nine in the morning until dusk. Early attacks failed to break the English line. The Normans then used feigned flight, turning on those who pursued. Harold’s death, probably near the end of the day, was followed by the retreat and defeat of most of his army. Casualty figures are uncertain. Some historians put the invaders’ dead at about 2,000 and the English dead at about twice that. William later founded a monastery on the battlefield, with the high altar of the abbey church said to mark where Harold fell.

William the Conqueror did not receive an immediate surrender of the kingdom. Some English clergy and magnates put forward Edgar the Ætheling, though their support was lukewarm. After a short wait, William secured Dover, parts of Kent, and Canterbury, and he sent a force to take Winchester, where the royal treasury lay. Those captures covered his rear and his line of retreat to Normandy if he needed it. He reached Southwark, across the Thames from London, in late November, then led his army round the south and west of London, burning as he went. He crossed the Thames at Wallingford in early December. Stigand submitted there. At Berkhamsted, Edgar, Morcar, Edwin, and Ealdred submitted as well. William sent men into London to build a castle, and he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.

He was Duke of Normandy from 1035 and King of England from that Christmas until his death on 9 September 1087. Born about 1028, a descendant of Rollo, he had made his hold on Normandy secure by 1060 after a long struggle. His English reign was marked by castle-building, by the settlement of a new nobility, and by a change in the higher clergy. He did not fuse his lands into a single empire. When he died on campaign in northern France, Normandy went to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, and England to his second surviving son, William Rufus. In 1086, the year after the stone keep at Canterbury is said to have been begun, he ordered the Domesday survey of landholding. English revolts continued after the coronation, but his hold on England was mostly secure by 1075.

A wooden motte and bailey at Canterbury is dated to 1066. Its motte may be the mound still visible in the Dane John gardens near the later stone castle. That mound may itself be a Roman burial mound. The name Dane John is derived from donjon. The mound lies about 235 metres east-south-east of the stone keep. The stone castle was begun by William the Conqueror in about 1085 as a replacement for the motte and bailey centred on that mound. Another account places the establishment of the castle on the present site in the 1080s, replacing the earlier fortification in the Dane John gardens soon after 1066.

The men who held England after the conquest are the Anglo-Normans. They were a ruling class made up of Normans, Bretons, Frenchmen, Flemings, Anglo-Saxons, and Celtic Britons, distinct from the native population even where the two intermarried. Their language moved from continental Old Norman toward a distinct Anglo-Norman tongue. A few Normans had already come to England with Edward the Confessor, who had grown up in exile in Normandy. After Hastings, many Anglo-Saxon nobles lost lands and titles, lesser thegns were dispossessed, and many free geburs lost rights and court access and became unfree villeins, a status that had not existed in Normandy itself. William distributed the taken lands to new magnates. Some kept French names with the prefix de, marking lordship of an older fief in France. Others took their names from new English holdings. The conquest pulled England into the orbit of continental Europe, and one visible result was Romanesque architecture of the Norman kind. A castle such as Canterbury, in flint and imported pale stone, is part of that architectural result as well as a military one.

Castle-building was also a direct answer to resistance. William left England in March 1067 in the charge of his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, whom he made Earl of Kent, and of William fitzOsbern. While the king was in Normandy, Eustace of Boulogne attacked Dover and was driven off. Eadric the Wild attacked Hereford, and Exeter rose, with Harold’s mother Gytha among the focus of resistance. Odo and fitzOsbern found the country hard to hold and began a programme of castles. William was back in December 1067, besieged Exeter for eighteen days, and built a castle there after it fell. The three royal castles of Kent sit in that same early need to hold the road from the invasion coast to London. Nothing in the record of Canterbury Castle names Odo as its builder. What the record does say is that a wooden castle stood from 1066 and that a stone keep was begun about 1085, while William was still king.

The great stone keep was largely built in the reign of Henry I of England, who ruled from 1100 to 1135 and was the fourth son of William the Conqueror. One account says construction began around 1100 and was largely complete by 1120. A trench cut through the keep found heavy occupation in the late eleventh century, unlike the bailey, and the pottery was read as confirming documentary evidence that the keep was erected after 1100. The dates therefore do not collapse into a single year. The stone castle is said to have been begun about 1085, the pottery points to erection after 1100, and the main build is placed in Henry’s reign, with a span from about 1100 to about 1120 offered for the work.

Henry was born about 1068. On his father’s death in 1087 he was left landless while Robert took Normandy and William Rufus took England. He later bought the Cotentin from Robert, lost it, and rebuilt a following there. When Rufus died in a hunting accident, Henry seized the English throne ahead of Robert and promised at his coronation to correct unpopular policies. Robert invaded in 1101. A settlement confirmed Henry as king, but the peace failed. Henry invaded Normandy in 1105 and 1106 and defeated Robert at Tinchebray, keeping him in prison for the rest of his life. Louis VI of France, Baldwin VII of Flanders, and Fulk V of Anjou later backed Robert’s son, William Clito. Henry’s victory at Brémule in 1119 led to a peace with Louis in 1120. In England he used the older system of justice, local government, and taxation, and he strengthened it with the exchequer and with itinerant justices. Many of his officials were men of obscure birth who rose as administrators. He quarrelled with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury from 1101 and reached a compromise in 1105. His son William drowned in the White Ship in 1120. Henry named his daughter Matilda as heir, but on his death on 1 December 1135 his nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown, and the civil war known as the Anarchy followed. The keep at Canterbury, raised while Henry was securing both kingdom and duchy, became one of the three royal castles of Kent and, in time, a centre of the sheriff’s administration.

The keep is described with more than one set of measurements, and both should stand. It is given as about 98 by 85 feet externally at the base, and also as 87 by 75 feet externally. A third account gives 26 by 30 metres, which agrees with the larger pair of figures, and specifies the plan: about 85 feet along the north and south walls and about 98 feet along the east and west walls. The walls are given as 9 feet thick and as 2.7 metres thick. It was originally probably at least 80 feet high. It now stands about 20 metres high, to two storeys above ground, the height having been reduced in 1817. A rubble flint plinth at the base is about 4 metres thick. There is no evidence that this plinth was faced in Caen stone, though such a facing may have been robbed. Above the plinth, the walls are built in bands of flint and Caen stone. The keep is also described as mainly flint and sandstone rubble, and as incorporating Roman fabric together with Quarr stone, Caen stone, reused flint, brick, and squared facing stones.

Buttresses clasp the angles and stand on the sides, one on each of the shorter sides and two on each of the longer sides. Four corner towers are also described, with external buttresses strengthening the building. There were originally four round-arched windows on each side, and not all of them survive. Inside are two cross walls and the remains of spiral staircases in the east wall and the south-west wall. Fireplaces of rubble set in a herringbone pattern survive in the walls. There were at least three floors, marked by substantial beam holes, though only the beam holes of the first floor survive. The upper floor has largely gone. The keep had no ground-floor entrance at first. Entry was by external stairs to the first floor, through a forebuilding. The first floor is described as housing the great hall, the kitchen, and large chambers. The darker ground floor is thought to have been used for storage. Two major cross walls divided the internal spaces.

The forebuilding was found in 1971, when Miss L Millard, working with the local archaeological society, excavated the foundations of the original entrance on the west side of the keep. On the south-east side, Doctor Webster’s excavation in 1939 showed a later alteration, probably of the thirteenth or fourteenth century: an entrance with two round towers leading in at ground-floor level. Another account places a major thirteenth-century alteration on the east elevation, where symmetrical drum towers formed a gatehouse. That feature is ruined and no longer survives, though it has influenced later landscaping. The two descriptions, south-east and east, and the cautious wording of one of them, are both part of the record.

The keep stands toward the south-west side of the inner bailey. A wall and ditch enclosed a bailey of about four acres. The south wall reused part of the third-century Roman town wall and coincided with the later medieval city wall. The junction can still be read in the masonry. Coursed, mortared, whole flints at the back of the Roman wall are interrupted by the closely set nineteenth-century knapped flints of the repair made after the bailey wall was demolished. A bridge and a gate entered the bailey at its north end, with access to the city on the line of present Castle Street. A corresponding gate stood on the south, where the bailey met the city wall. The northern gate was the Great Gate. The southern gate, which had been the Roman gate in the south-west side of the Roman town walls, was called the Worth Gate. It was reused in the Middle Ages, blocked by the middle of the sixteenth century, and demolished in 1791. Remains of the Worth Gate and part of the city wall are built into number 28 Castle Street. Castle Street now follows the historic route through the bailey. The Worth Gate is also described as later reinforced with a barbican or with towers.

The only surface sign of the bailey wall and ditch on the west is a break in slope behind the oast house south of Gas Lane. Buried remains of that wall and ditch continue south toward the city wall. West of the keep, south of Saint Mildred’s churchyard, is the site of a postern, one of three medieval posterns in the city walls. It appears in a pen and ink drawing of 1757 by Jonathan Skelton, who lived from about 1735 to 1759. The drawing is in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. A trial trench dug in 1975 by Mrs P Garrard, west of the bailey ditch, produced pits and ditches and showed a sealed layer of plough soil. That layer indicates arable use immediately outside the inner bailey after the castle had been built. North of the keep, beneath Gas Street, the inner bailey and its wall and ditch continue. To the north-north-east, where the Rosemary Lane car park and the makeup of Castle Street have not destroyed the strata, part of the inner bailey, the bailey wall and ditch, and the remains of the Great Gate survive. The bailey and its defences run on into the Castle Street car park, where the Romano-British urns were found, and south to the city wall.

On the south side of that wall lie the buried remains of the substantial Romano-British ditch, reused in the Middle Ages. Rheims Way and the pedestrian underpass west of Castle Street have cut into it, but it survives to the east where house cellars have not removed it. Post-war roads, including Rheims Way and the Wincheap roundabout, changed the castle’s wider setting and brought further demolition nearby.

Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, increased the castle’s extent and its fortifications by exchanging land elsewhere in Canterbury for land near the castle. He also had repairs made between 1173 and 1174. Those repairs are given a cost of £1,000, and they have been linked to his having made Dover Castle the principal royal stronghold in Kent. Further repairs were made between 1190 and 1193, in the reign of Richard I, amid fears of invasion from Philip II of France.

The castle was drawn into the First Barons' War of 1215 to 1217. That war began because John’s campaigns against Philip II had ended in the collapse of the Angevin Empire, and because John refused to abide by Magna Carta, which he had sealed on 15 June 1215. Rebellious barons led by Robert Fitzwalter turned to Philip’s son Louis, then Dauphin of France and grandson-in-law of Henry II. In November 1215 Louis sent knights to protect London and agreed to invade, against the wishes of his father and of Pope Innocent III. In May 1216, watchmen on the coast of Thanet saw sails, and the next day John saw Louis’s troops landing on the coast of Kent. John withdrew toward Winchester. Louis entered London with little resistance, was received by the rebel barons and the citizens, and was proclaimed king at Saint Paul’s, though he was never crowned. Alexander II of Scotland was among those who did homage.

Louis then moved on the castles of the south-east. Reigate was empty. Guildford surrendered at once. Farnham surrendered as the siege began. Winchester fell after ten days in June 1216. By July about a third of England was in his hands. Rochester had already been fought over in the autumn of 1215. John had spent £115 on that castle in 1206 and had been forced, under Magna Carta, to return it in May 1215 to the custody of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. The constable opened it to William d’Aubigny and the rebel garrison. John besieged it in person from 11 October, burned the Medway bridge to stop help from London, sacked the cathedral, and undermined a corner of the keep with a mine fired by pig fat. He had asked for forty of the fattest pigs, of the sort least good for eating, to feed that fire. The garrison surrendered on 30 November by starvation. One man was hanged. The rest were spared after Savari de Mauléon warned John that hanging men who had surrendered would set a precedent against himself. A writer of that time said that few would put their trust in castles after a siege so fiercely pressed and so manfully resisted.

By the time Louis moved against Dover, the royal castles at Canterbury and Rochester, their towns, and most of Kent had already fallen to him. He reached Dover on 25 July 1216. Hubert de Burgh held it with a supplied garrison. The siege began on 19 July, the barbican was undermined, and the breach was blocked with timbers. After three months, and with a Wealden archer force under William of Cassingham worrying his hold on Kent, Louis took a truce on 14 October and returned to London. Apart from Dover, Windsor was the other castle that held out, with sixty loyalist knights surviving a two-month siege.

John died of dysentery at Newark in October 1216. His son Henry III was nine. Because London was in Louis’s hands, the boy was crowned at Gloucester on 28 October with a gold necklace, in a small ceremony overseen by the papal legate Guala Bicchieri. Magna Carta was reissued in Henry’s name on 12 November, without some of the earlier clauses, and sealed by the regent William Marshal, who promised that the regents would rule by the charter and urged the barons not to blame the child for his father’s acts. Many barons changed sides. Louis took Hertford and Berkhamsted late in 1216, then went to France for reinforcements and had to fight back to the coast, losing men in an ambush at Lewes. In his absence Marshal recaptured Farnham, Winchester, Southampton, Portchester, Chichester, and Odiham. Louis’s second siege of Dover began on 12 May 1217. On 20 May his supporters were beaten at Lincoln. On 24 August a French relief fleet under Eustace the Monk was destroyed off Sandwich. The Treaty of Lambeth, signed on 11 September 1217, required Louis to give up his claim and to agree that he had never been the legitimate king. English rebels received an amnesty, but the barons who had joined him had to pay him 10,000 marks to speed his departure. He surrendered the castles he still held.

Canterbury Castle’s own part in that war is told in more than one way. It is said to have been given up to the invading French. It is said to have surrendered to the barons in John’s reign. During the reign of Henry III, while it was in the custody of Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, it is said to have been taken by the French, who had landed at Thanet and at Sandwich and campaigned in the region from 1215 to 1217 during Louis’s disputed claim to the throne. Another account says that supporters of John surrendered the castle to Louis VIII, then Dauphin, and that after his defeat it returned to the Crown before being granted to Hugh de Burgh by Henry III in 1227. The governorship from 1216 to 1232 is recorded for Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent, who was also governor of Dover and of Rochester. The grant of 1227 in the name Hugh, and the governorship in the name Hubert, are both in the record.

Hubert de Burgh, born about 1170 and dead before 5 May 1243, had been in Prince John’s service by 1198. He was chamberlain, an envoy to Portugal, and sheriff of Dorset and Somerset, of Berkshire, and of Cornwall. He held Chinon in 1202 while Arthur of Brittany was his prisoner, and he was himself captured when the castle fell in 1205, remaining a captive until 1207. In the First Barons' War he was sheriff of Kent from 1216 to 1225 and sheriff of Surrey from 1215 to 1216, and he was castellan of Canterbury and of Dover. He kept Dover against Louis until John’s death and denied Louis the castle later in 1216. On 24 August 1217 he commanded the fleet that scattered the French off Sandwich and took their flagship, the Great Ship of Bayonne. Eustace the Monk was executed. Hubert was chief justiciar from 1215 to 1232 and regent during Henry’s minority from 1219 to 1227. When Henry came of age in 1227, Hubert was made Earl of Kent and governor of Rochester, and on 27 April 1228 he was named justiciar for life. In 1232 his enemies brought him down. He was imprisoned at Devizes. In 1233 he joined the rebellion of Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, reconciled him to the king in 1234. He resigned the justiciarship about 28 May 1234 and had ceased to exercise the office after September 1232. For a time the earldom was restored. His custody of Canterbury Castle belongs to the years when he was the king’s principal minister in Kent and at Dover, including the years when the French held much of the county.

The governors were responsible for the upkeep and security of the castle. After Hubert, the recorded governors are Stephen de Segrave from 1232, also governor of Rochester; Nicholas de Moels from 1259, also governor of Rochester; Robert Walerand from 1261, also governor of Rochester; and William de Eschetesford from 1272. From the late thirteenth century the castle was used as a jail.

Stephen de Segrave, also called Seagrove or Stephen of Seagrave, was born about 1171 and died on 9 November 1241. He was a son of Gilbert de Segrave of Segrave in Leicestershire. He became constable of the Tower of London in 1220 and held a string of shrievalties under Henry III, including Hertfordshire and Essex, Lincolnshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. In 1232 he succeeded Hubert de Burgh as chief justiciar and officiated at Hubert’s trial in November of that year, a hearing that has been called the first state trial in England. As an ally of Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, he shared the dislike directed at the Poitevin favourites of Henry III. He was deprived of the justiciarship in 1234, returned to influence, and kept it until his death. Uncertain of his safety, he became a canon of Leicester Abbey, where he died and was buried. The castle list gives him the governorship of Canterbury from 1232 and does not record an end date. His fall from the justiciarship two years later is a separate fact, and it is not stated that he lost the castle at the same moment.

Nicholas de Moels, or Nicholas Molis, born about 1195 and dead in 1268 or 1269, was an Anglo-Norman household knight and administrator of Henry III. His name appears to come from the Norman manor of Meulles in Calvados. He was sheriff of Hampshire, Devon, and Yorkshire, constable of Winchester, Pembroke, Haverfordwest, Cilgerran, Tenby, Rochester, Canterbury, and Corfe, and governor of the Channel Islands. His own career places him as constable of Canterbury Castle in 1247, the same year he was sheriff of Kent, and as constable of Rochester in 1247 and of Dover in 1246. The list of governors at the castle itself places him from 1259. Both years are recorded. In 1244, as seneschal of Gascony, he defeated the King of Navarre and took him prisoner in the field. In 1243 Henry III appointed him seneschal at Bordeaux and was then recalled, almost as soon as he had sailed, because a quarrel had broken out among the Gascons. Nicholas later fought in the Welsh wars and held Caernarfon and Cardigan. He was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in 1258. Marriage to an heiress at North Cadbury in Somerset made him a major landholder. His two recorded dates at Canterbury, 1247 and 1259, show him as one of the royal knights to whom the sheriff’s castle was entrusted in the middle of Henry’s reign.

Robert Walerand, who died in 1273, was a justiciar of Henry III and one of the king’s familiares, a household knight in the same relation to the king as his friend John Mansel was among the clerks. His principal residence was Siston in Gloucestershire. He was a son of William Walrond of Whaddon and Isabel de Berkeley. From June 1251 until August 1258 he was a regular justiciar. He was called seneschal of Gascony as early as 1252, sailed with Henry from Portsmouth on 6 August 1253, and sat on the king’s council there. He was deeply involved in the plan, from 1254, to buy the crown of Sicily from the pope for Henry’s second son, Edmund. His exactions for that scheme were one of the causes of the rebellion of Simon de Montfort. With Peter of Aigueblanche he was accused of taking blank charters from the prelates and filling them at Rome so that the English church paid 9,000 marks to Sienese and Florentine bankers. At Westminster on 13 October 1255, Richard of Cornwall rebuked him for having urged the king to subvert the kingdom. On 9 July 1261, when discord between Henry and the barons had been renewed, Walerand was appointed sheriff of Kent, an office he held until 23 September 1262, and at the same time he was made governor of Rochester Castle and of Canterbury Castle. With John Mansel and Peter II of Savoy he was regarded as one of the king’s three chief advisers. In 1263 the barons seized his lands. The king restored them, except Kilpeck. In the war of 1264 he stayed with Henry. After the Battle of Lewes he and Warren of Bassingbourne still held Bristol, and they failed in an attempt to relieve Richard of Cornwall and the lord Edward at Wallingford. After the royal victory at Evesham in 1265 the war turned. His year and more as sheriff and as governor at Canterbury falls in the pause before that second barons’ war, when Henry was staffing Kent with a trusted household man.

From about 1293 the castle was a prison, and the gaol is said to have existed from the time of Edward I, who reigned from 1272 to 1307, when it was used for mass imprisonment. It is also said that by the thirteenth century the castle had become the county jail, and that from the late thirteenth century it was used as a jail. It continued in that use through the reign of Queen Mary, from 1553 to 1558, who employed it in connection with religious persecution, until it was replaced by the Westgate in 1577. Another account says the keep was used as a jail by the sheriffs of Kent until the eighteenth century. Both endings are recorded: replacement by the Westgate in 1577, and shrieval use into the eighteenth century. The castle was also a centre of administration for the sheriff, so the same building served justice and custody as well as defence. Hebrew inscriptions observed in the eighteenth century may relate to the imprisonment of Jewish people there in the thirteenth century. That connection is offered as a possibility, not as a demonstrated fact.

By 1335 the castle was largely in ruins, though it remained in royal hands until the early seventeenth century. A new gate was built in 1380. In 1381 the castle was captured by the rebels in Wat Tyler’s rebellion. The ruin and the new gate and the capture sit close together in the record, and they are not reconciled into a single story of repair. Only the square keep and a small piece of bailey wall were left standing in the end.

The castle passed into private hands at the end of the reign of King James VI and I, in 1625. James, King of Scotland from 1567 and King of England and Ireland from 1603, died on 27 March 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles I. By the seventeenth century the castle’s judicial role had ended after James granted it to the Watson family. It was then owned by a succession of individuals. In 1730 a county sessions house was built near the keep. By the late eighteenth century, sheds and other structures stood in the grounds. The bailey walls and the Worth Gate were demolished in 1791 and 1792, or in 1791–2, as Castle Street was driven through the former precinct. During the Napoleonic Wars the precinct served as a military stores depot.

In 1825 the newly formed Gas, Light and Coke Company acquired the keep and converted it into a coal and coke store. The purchase is also dated to 1826. The upper floor and the internal cross walls were removed because of concern about structural stability. The top floor is also said to have been destroyed during the long years when the building stored gas. The two accounts, a deliberate removal after 1825 or 1826, and destruction of the top floor while the gas company held it, belong with the separate fact that the keep had already been reduced in height in 1817. Gas Street was laid out at this time and separated the castle from the gasworks. The waterworks moved into the area, and the tower was used as a coal store. Through the nineteenth century, oast houses and other outbuildings appeared around the grounds, and much of the northern bailey wall was lost to development. The medieval layout of the castle area has been reduced gradually since the early nineteenth century.

Canterbury City Council bought the castle in 1928, after decades of neglect. It has been owned by the local authority since that year. Surrounding buildings and the internal storage structures were then removed, which created the open grounds of the modern site. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the former bailey was partly occupied by the gasworks and related buildings. The southern part of Canterbury was bombed in the Baedeker raids of 31 May and of 6 and 7 June 1942. Those raids, named from the travel guidebooks used to choose the targets, were carried out against historic English cities in retaliation for the bombing of Lübeck on 28 March 1942. The castle area was, it is said, damaged then. Open ground was in any case created by clearance after 1945 of nineteenth-century and earlier buildings. The west side of Castle Street was redeveloped as a multi-storey car park. In 2014 the east side remained an open car park, except for the Age Concern building.

There is a long record of digging on the site, following discoveries in the nineteenth century. The main planned excavations of the modern period were in 1939, when Doctor Webster examined the south-east side of the keep; in 1953 and 1955, when Professor Sheppard Frere excavated the keep and the ground toward the city wall; in 1971, when Miss L Millard found the original entrance; and from 1975 to 1977, when work went on west of the keep and in the Rosemary Lane car park to the north, including Paul Bennett’s excavation north of Gas Lane in 1976 and 1977. The 1953 work inside and immediately outside the keep found the late Roman occupation without structures, and the Saxon pits. The volume that published the castle and the Rosemary Lane car park appeared in 1982, written by Paul Bennett, Sheppard Frere, and Sally Stow. It reported the military ditch, the double burial with the two cavalry swords, the Roman and Saxon wells, the heavy late eleventh-century occupation inside the keep as against the bailey, and the pottery evidence for erection after 1100, together with detailed elevations, sections, and plans.

What the investigations established about the castle’s purpose is straightforward, even where the year of the stonework is not. It was a royal tower keep on the road from the invasion coast to London, one of three in Kent, begun in timber in the year of Hastings and rebuilt in stone at the end of William the Conqueror’s life or in the first decades of his son Henry’s reign. It housed a sheriff’s administration and then a gaol. It was taken, on the accounts given above, during the war in which Louis tried to become king. It was already largely ruined by 1335, was still worth capturing in 1381, passed out of royal hands under King James VI and I, and spent a century as an industrial store before the city bought the shell.

The keep has been closed because of falling masonry since 2018. It is also said to have been shut since 2017, when falling masonry made the area unsafe. In January 2023 the city council was awarded £19.9 million by the government for a bid called Connected Canterbury: Unlocking the Tales of England, a sum also given as £19 million. The project was to repair historic and underused sites, improve the places where visitors arrive, and lay out story gardens and trails. The money could be used only for the work named in the application. The city’s standing as a World Heritage site was part of the case for that spending. The castle was one of the places included. Scaffolding went up in 2023 so that the stonework could be surveyed. A specialist contractor took over the keep in 2024 to repair and stabilise it and to make it safe. In December 2024, concept designs were agreed for a walkway and a raised platform that would take visitors inside the keep, with platforms at first-floor level and at the top, looking toward the cathedral and the Dane John gardens.

Stabilisation of the stonework was completed in December 2025, ready for the grounds to be landscaped. The council’s timetable for 2026 said that the rest of the funded work should finish by early spring, apart from the castle, which would not be completed until the summer, and that the keep and grounds would be finished in late summer and opened to the public free of charge. The intended improvements include landscaping, raised walkways inside the keep, and interpretation that includes augmented reality binoculars. A separate account, from the early summer of 2026, said that visitors were expected back later that year for the first time in almost a decade, that the stonework was nearing completion, and that landscaping would show where the moat and the missing walls had stood. In that account the interior and the grounds were hoped to open in the autumn, with binoculars showing the castle as it is thought to have looked in the late eleventh century. A further phase, expected to start the following April and to take about three months, would install elevated walkways along the walls and a staircase to the second storey, where the original entrance had been, so that visitors could come close to the fireplace and the spiral stair that remain. Work had been limited to the months from April to November because bats hibernate in the building. An early idea of an amphitheatre inside the keep was not taken forward. A bat licence restricts noise and light after dusk, so small events in the grounds or the keep might be possible, but the space was not designed for them. The same account said the keep and grounds would be open every day from dawn until dusk, free of charge, with level access into the interior, interpretation panels, and a free application for digital views of the rooms, and it compared the castle in historical value with the cathedral and Saint Augustine’s Abbey. The visitor page for the castle, for its part, still described the building as undergoing work and due to open from the middle of November.

No new excavated find from the restoration years is recorded in these accounts. The recent work has been survey, repair, and a plan to reopen. The finds that fix the earlier history remain those of the twentieth-century digs: the first-century military ditch, the second-century cavalry swords in a double male burial, the Roman and Saxon wells, the Saxon pits and road, and the late eleventh-century occupation sealed inside the keep, with pottery read as placing the stone tower after 1100.

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