Colchester Castle

Colchester Castle stands in Castle Park at Colchester in Essex, on high ground at the western end of the walled town, between the River Colne to the north and the Roman River to the south. The keep is largely intact. It is a Norman hall-keep, a royal fortress and palace, later a county prison, and since 1860 a museum. The ground beneath and around it holds part of a Roman legionary annexe, part of the Roman colony, the Temple of Claudius, and a late Anglo-Saxon or Norman chapel with other buildings.

The castle and the temple were scheduled on 10 April 1915, and that protection was amended on 20 December 2017. The keep, including the excavated remains of the forebuilding, was listed at Grade I on 24 February 1950.

Before the Romans, this plateau was the territorial oppidum Camulodunon, a tribal capital of the Trinovantes. It was established by about 50 BC and covered about 28 square miles, partly bounded on the west by dykes that linked the two rivers. Sheepen and Gosbecks were the main centres of farming and industry inside it. Gosbecks is considered the residence of King Cunobelin and his descendants, who controlled a large part of south-eastern Britain before the conquest.

The name appears on early coins as CAM and in Roman writing as Camulodunum, and it has been called Britain’s oldest recorded town. In AD 43 it was a major objective of the invasion. The emperor Claudius is recorded as leading the advance himself and receiving the submission of several British tribes.

He then placed Britain’s first legionary fortress inside the native oppidum, separate from Sheepen and Gosbecks. The fortress had a small defended annexe to the east. Part of that annexe lies under Castle Park. A V-shaped ditch and rampart, the north-east corner of the annexe defences, survives buried just east of the north bank of the later upper bailey.

In AD 49 the legion, probably the Twentieth, was moved. The fortress defences were slighted and a colony for retired soldiers was founded, Colonia Victricensis, loosely the City of Victory. It was the first of four colonies and the first capital of the province. A new street grid was laid out, some military buildings were reused as houses, and the annexe was extended for public buildings.

The colony had 46 street blocks. Five of them survive under the park, with streets, drains, walls, floors and tessellated pavements. From north to south the blocks under the park are insulae 6 and 7, 14 and 15, and insula 22, which is the temple, with part of insula 23 at the south-east. The town wall later enclosed about 108 acres.

Much of it still stands and crosses the northern edge of the park. An intervallum road runs inside it.

The Temple of Claudius was the centre of the imperial cult in Britain. It was put up in about AD 54, within the wider span of AD 49 to 60, and it may still have been unfinished when Boudica, queen of the Iceni, led the revolt of about AD 60 to 61. Her main target was the colony, which was sacked and largely destroyed. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the people of Colchester made a last stand in the temple and held it for two days before they died.

Charred organic remains from that burning survive more than 3 metres deep under the park. After the revolt the colony was rebuilt and the town wall was constructed. The temple was dedicated to the deified Claudius after his death. It is the largest known classical temple in Britain.

The podium, a platform of ragstone rubble faced with septaria and brick, still carries the Norman keep. It is about 32 metres long, 23.5 metres wide and 4 metres high. The superstructure has gone, but the podium shows a cella at the north, flanked by columns, and a pronaos at the south of eight columns, an octastyle front, under a pediment. The spacing of the columns was eustyle, two and a quarter times their base diameter.

Steps led up from the south. An altar stood in front, on stone foundations about 10 metres square, about 18 metres south of the keep, with a plaster-lined vaulted drain around it and two pedestal bases for statues.

The sacred precinct, or temenos, was first marked by timber and then, in about AD 80 to 100, by a masonry enclosure. Ranges with open porticos and rooms ran along three sides. The south side was a monumental arcade on a foundation about 4.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres deep, described as the largest Roman arcade in Britain, with a central arch or gateway. The north range lies partly under the north bank of the upper bailey.

Its inner and outer walls, about 8 metres apart, survive up to 3 metres high under the rampart. Two short stretches of the outer wall stand in the park, uncovered in 1892 when a path was laid across the bailey. A vaulted drain ran under a metalled road outside the north-west corner of the west range. It has been suggested, on tentative evidence, that the temple was rebuilt in the fourth century as a basilican hall with a long entrance hall and an apsidal east end.

That conversion is uncertain and is thought unlikely. In the late fourth or early fifth century the precinct seems to have been used for living, perhaps as a defended residence.

The passage from Roman Colchester to the Anglo-Saxon town is poorly understood, and it followed a shrinking of the settlement. Sunken-featured buildings were put up from about the early fifth century. In the middle Saxon period, about 660 to 899, and the late Saxon period, about 899 to 1066, Colchester was a defended burh. A middle Saxon cemetery grew inside the old temple precinct, and eight burials have been recorded in partial excavation.

In about 916 King Edward the Elder took Colchester from Danish occupants, refounded it, and repaired the fortifications. The town then hosted meetings of the witenagemot. In the tenth century the old precinct may have been part of a royal manor. The precinct ranges were still standing, and slots dug between the piers of the south arcade are tentative evidence that the south range was in use.

A wooden chapel was built just south of the podium in the late Anglo-Saxon period or a little later, with a wall painting of the Virgin and Child. Two or more other buildings stood nearby. The wooden chapel was succeeded by a masonry building. A domestic stone hall may have been built to the south before the Norman keep, a rectangular range about 16 metres by 6 metres forming the western block of a larger building, with septaria walls, Roman-tile quoins, two doorways and a later semi-circular fireplace.

William I of England, also called William the Conqueror and, earlier, William the Bastard, was born about 1028 and died on 9 September 1087. He was Duke of Normandy, as William II of that duchy, from 1035, and king of England from 1066. He was the son of the unmarried Duke Robert I of Normandy and Herleva. After a long struggle his hold on Normandy was secure by about 1060.

His marriage in the 1050s to Matilda of Flanders gave him an ally in Flanders. He claimed that Edward the Confessor, his first cousin once removed, had promised him the English throne, and that Harold Godwinson had sworn to support that claim. Edward named Harold king on his deathbed in January 1066. William invaded in September 1066, killed Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October, and was crowned in London on Christmas Day 1066.

He put down later English revolts. His hold on England was mostly secure by 1075, and he spent much of the rest of his reign on the continent. In 1086 he ordered the Domesday survey. He died in September 1087 on campaign in northern France and was buried at Caen.

Normandy passed to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, and England to his second surviving son, William Rufus. His English reign was marked by castle-building, a new Norman nobility, and a change in the higher clergy. His final years also brought threatened Danish invasions.

A royal castle was begun on the temple site in the late 1060s or the 1070s. The work is described as initiated by the steward Eudo Dapifer on behalf of William I of England. The podium and the ruined Roman masonry gave a platform and a supply of stone in a district without good building stone. There was also a symbolic reading: Norman rulers presenting themselves as heirs of Rome, and of any royal manor already on the site.

William of Poitiers often compared William to Julius Caesar and the barons to the Roman Senate. A late thirteenth-century town chronicle, treated as somewhat unreliable, describes the temple site as a palace of the mythical King Coel and credits Eudo with the castle, with work starting in 1076. Other accounts put the build at about 1076, around 1078, between 1076 and 1086, or in the late eleventh century. The same chronicle is cited for the town being handed to Eudo Dapifer in 1073, and for William II granting him the castle and town in perpetuity in 1089.

A charter of Henry I, dated 1101, grants the town and castle to Eudo Dapifer “as my father had them and my brother and myself”. The father is William I of England and the brother is William II.

Eudo Dapifer, also called Eudo fitzHerbert and Eudo de Rie, died in 1120. He was the fourth son of Hubert of Ryes, remembered as the vassal who sheltered Duke William before his flight from Valognes in the revolt of 1047. There is no evidence that Eudo fought at Hastings, though some have guessed that Wace’s Sire de Préaux was him, and he held Préaux by 1070. After the conquest his father and brothers were in England.

Ralph was castellan of Nottingham, Hubert had custody of Norwich Castle, and Adam was a Domesday commissioner in 1085. Eudo held lands across eastern and southern England and was a royal steward by at least 1072. His own page calls the castle the largest Norman keep built and the first stone keep in England, and says he was its custodian until his death, when it returned to the Crown. The castle is also described, with the White Tower, as one of the earliest stone towers in England, so the claim that it was the first is not the only account.

Likeness to the White Tower has been used to associate the design with Gundulf of Rochester, but that link is only the likeness, and both keeps also resemble the earlier castle at Ivry-la-Bataille in Upper Normandy, of about 1000. Eudo was at Rouen when King William died, then crossed with William II and secured Dover, Pevensey and Hastings. He witnessed 27 writs of William II. In 1096 or 1097 he founded Colchester Abbey and St Mary Magdalene’s Hospital in the town.

He witnessed Henry I’s coronation charter in August 1100 and the 1101 treaty with Robert Curthose. In 1103 Henry gave him lands taken from his son-in-law William de Mandeville, probably because Mandeville had let Ranulf Flambard escape from the Tower of London in 1101, and Henry made Eudo constable of the Tower in Mandeville’s place. Eudo died at Préaux early in 1120 and was buried on 28 February 1120 in the chapter-house of St John’s Abbey at Colchester, which he had founded. He left the abbey gifts, including the manor of Brightlingsea.

The keep was built in at least two main phases. The north, east and west walls were butted against the temple podium rather than set on top of it. The south wall was set beyond the podium so that a well could be sunk, which would have been hard to cut through the podium, and so that the old temple steps could be avoided. The first phase was a single storey, about 9 metres high, with an entrance at the south-west reached by a stair, and a crenellated parapet.

The upright joints of that temporary crenellation can still be seen in the east and west walls and the south-west turret. The corner towers were soon raised by one storey. A halt at that height has been blamed on a financial or military crisis. A Danish raid in support of the Revolt of the Earls in 1075, and the threatened invasion by Canute IV in 1085, have both been suggested.

Another view is that only one storey was ever intended. The second phase, after about 1100 and probably Eudo’s work after the 1101 charter, raised the keep by at least one storey, kept the old crenellations inside the new wall, and added a forebuilding on the south to cover the door. A secondary entrance was made at first-floor level. Architectural features place this phase after about 1100.

One reconstruction puts the second phase at about 1100 and raises the keep to three storeys, while also extending the bailey south and putting a fireplace into the south building. The chapel and that south building have been placed in 1074 to 1076, beside a semi-circular bailey to the north during the first stage.

The finished keep is the largest Norman keep in area. One measurement is 152 by 112 feet, or 46 by 34 metres, one and a half times the ground plan of the White Tower, and the largest area of any medieval tower in Britain or in Europe. Another measurement is 152 by 110 feet, larger than the White Tower, and the largest Norman keep remaining in the country. A third is 46 by 33.5 metres and about 27 metres high, the largest Norman keep in existence, and the museum calls it the largest Norman keep in Europe.

A later public statement called it the largest keep among about 1,000 castles the Normans built in this country, Normandy and the Holy Land. The walls are nearly 4 metres wide at the base, on foundations about 7.5 metres deep, and they batter out below a chamfered Barnack string-course into a plinth about 5 metres high. They are coursed rubble of septaria, Roman tile and ragstone, much of it reused Roman material, with ashlar of Barnack, Caen and other freestone. Flat pilaster buttresses divide the north wall into two bays, the east and west into three, and the apse into five.

Putlog holes and narrow loopholes remain. The building sits unusually close to the middle of the town, rather than on the outer defences with a way out to open country.

Inside, a north–south wall divided the keep. A second wall was later added in the larger eastern part. The ground floor has three small rooms at the south and two large rooms at the north, with no fireplaces or garderobes, only loophole embrasures. The south door leads to a vestibule with a guard alcove.

To the left, a round-headed door opens on the Great Stair in the south-west turret, a spiral nearly 5 metres wide under a rising tunnel vault, one of the largest Norman staircases in England. To the right of the vestibule is the well, about 15 metres deep. It was damaged in the 1680s and restored in brick in 1787. Further east are the barrel-vaulted room called the Lucas Vault and a crypt in the apse.

In 1727 that crypt was divided with boarded partitions into prison cells, with iron grilles, studded doors and wooden floors. The first floor had fireplaces, latrines and more loopholes, so it was a principal living floor. The western room, about 29 by 18 metres, may have been the great hall, and the narrow eastern room, about 28 by 6 metres, may have been apartments, a bedchamber and an audience chamber. Four large fireplaces sit in the east and west walls.

A blocked round-headed postern in the north wall once opened onto an external timber stair. The apse contains a low vaulted room with two pairs of side chambers, lit by two loopholes and by three large windows inserted in 1754 to 1755. It has been called a chapel, or less likely a sub-chapel. There is no firm evidence that a chapel like St John’s in the White Tower ever stood here.

An apse on the Roman temple, perhaps from a fourth-century church, has been guessed at and then doubted. The walls of a chapel above the sub-chapel have been said to survive to a height of 4 feet. A 1988 to 1989 timber and glass roof covers the place where a rooftop chapel was conjectured, a conjecture since disputed, with the latest published view that the keep was only ever two storeys high.

That height is the main argument about the building. J. Horace Round in 1882 proposed four storeys, like the White Tower, with a double-height hall and chapel, and that view was widely accepted for most of the twentieth century. Later researchers argued for three.

The latest work argues for two. Pre-demolition pictures, despite errors, show the squat profile of today rather than a very tall tower. The time available for the demolition was short. Internal details suggest the hall was on the first floor, unlike the White Tower.

An older survey argued the opposite: that the upper storey could not have been the main floor because it did not contain the chapel, so one or two storeys must have stood above what remains. Today two storeys survive. A short piece of the west wall beside the north-west tower stands about 3 metres higher than the rest and may mark the original battlements.

The bailey was a large bank and ditch around the keep, probably with a timber palisade. The northern and eastern arms survive as landscaped earthworks. The bank is about 4 metres high and 28.5 metres wide, or 94 feet by 13 feet in the same proportions. It was thrown up over the Roman precinct wall and, on the north, probably with the first phase of the keep.

The southern rampart seems to belong to the second phase, around 1100. South of the keep the earthworks were levelled but survive buried. The ditch there is about 22 metres wide and more than 5 metres deep, and the High Street appears to have been diverted around its outer lip. A weaker nether, or lower, bailey of two slighter banks and ditches ran north to the town wall.

This may be the “new bailey” of 1173, or the new bailey made in 1173 to 1174, just before the rebellion of those years. By 1182 a stone wall stood on the south and west of the upper bailey, probably on the bank, and the walls were repaired in 1182 to 1183. No trace of that stone wall has been found, which suggests it stood on top of the rampart. A twin-towered gatehouse at the south-west, reached by a bridge, is not mentioned until the 1240s, though it was probably built with the bailey wall.

A palisade, presumably of the nether bailey, blew down in 1218 and again in 1237, and needed further repair in 1275 to 1276. The eastern arm of the lower bailey survives in part as a landscaped ditch, about 10 metres wide and 1 metre deep, with a bank about 5.5 metres wide and just over half a metre high. The western arm is a slight rise near Ryegate Road.

Inside the bailey, a late Anglo-Saxon chapel near the southern edge of the keep, and a domestic hall to its south-east, were kept during the first phase. The chapel was rebuilt in the second phase, and the hall gained a large fireplace around the same time. In about the late eleventh or early twelfth century the chapel was rebuilt again as a single-celled apsidal building about 15 metres by 7 metres, with walls 0.8 to 0.9 metres thick of septaria, some Kentish rag and Roman tile. In the early thirteenth century a straight wall replaced the apse.

The footings lie immediately south of the keep.

After Eudo’s death in 1120 the castle returned to the Crown. Constables appointed by the king governed it, or the High Sheriff of Essex when the office was empty. In 1190 the purchase of 26 military tunics shows a permanent garrison. Henry I, Henry II and Henry III are all known to have visited.

From at least 1226 a main use was as a prison, later the county gaol. It sometimes hosted trials, including trial by combat, last recorded in 1375. In the mid-thirteenth century a masonry barbican with two D-shaped towers was added in front of the south-west entrance, replacing the earlier forebuilding. Low walls of both still survive.

The barbican projects about 15 metres, with walls 1.5 metres wide of septaria and tile, and loopholes. From the fourteenth century the military value declined.

In 1214 the hereditary constable was William de Lanvalai, one of the barons opposed to King John. That November John came to Colchester, probably hoping to win Lanvalai over. Lanvalai soon left the castle with the sheriff and joined the rebel barons at Bury St Edmunds. John sent Stephen Harengood, probably a Flemish mercenary, to improve the defences.

The barons marched on London and forced John to accept Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215. The charter included the return of Colchester to Lanvalai. Within months John refused to be bound by it, and the First Barons' War began. That war, from 1215 to 1217, followed John’s failed campaigns against Philip II of France, the collapse of the Angevin Empire, and his rejection of the charter he had sealed on 15 June 1215.

The barons were led by Robert Fitzwalter. They turned to Philip’s son Louis, who sailed in 1216 despite his father and the pope, captured Winchester, and controlled more than half the kingdom. He was proclaimed king in London and was never crowned.

John besieged Rochester Castle, then sent an army toward Colchester under the French mercenary Savary de Meuleon. A French contingent had already garrisoned Colchester Castle for the barons. The siege began in January 1216 and ended in March when John arrived. It is also described as a three-month siege in 1216.

The French garrison of 116 men negotiated a safe passage to London and were arrested when they got there. Harengood was restored as constable and made sheriff. In 1217 the castle was handed to the French and the barons under a truce. It was damaged, and repairs followed.

The boy king Henry III recovered it in the Treaty of Lambeth in September 1217, which ended the war, and William of Sainte-Mère-Église, Bishop of London, was made constable. The castle had also been strengthened in 1214 to 1215, before this fighting.

The war’s decisive fights were elsewhere, and they explain why a French garrison could not keep the castle. The Battle of Lincoln (1217), the second battle of that name, was fought at Lincoln Castle on Saturday 20 May 1217. A relief force under William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, regent for the nine-year-old Henry III, attacked the forces of the future Louis VIII. Thomas, Count of Perche, commanding the French, was killed, and Louis was driven from his base in the south-east.

The sack of the city afterwards was called the Lincoln Fair. The citizens had been loyal to Louis. Marshal had mustered at Newark about 400 knights, 250 crossbowmen and a larger force of horse and foot, and he marched before the royal money ran out. John’s death in October 1216 had already turned many barons toward Henry.

The Battle of Sandwich (1217), also called the Battle of Dover, was fought on 24 August 1217 off Sandwich in Kent. An English fleet under Hubert de Burgh attacked a French fleet under Eustace the Monk and Robert of Courtenay. The French ships were bringing supplies and men to Louis, who still held London. The English took the flagship and most of the supply vessels.

Eustace, a former monk who had turned pirate, had served John from 1205 to 1208, held the Channel Islands for him, and used Winchelsea as a base, then changed to France in 1212. He was executed after capture. The rest of the French fleet went back to Calais. The defeat, of a fleet assembled by Louis’s wife Blanche of Castile, persuaded Louis to abandon the conquest.

The Treaty of Lambeth followed within weeks. Louis agreed that he had never been the legitimate king of England, and the remaining French left.

Custody in the seventeenth century moved through several private hands. In 1607 it was granted for life to Charles, Baron Stanhope of Harrington, who lived from 1593 to 1675. In 1624 Stanhope leased it to Thomas Holmes, a gentleman and maltster, father of John Holmes, who later emigrated to Plymouth Colony and became messenger of the court there. The Holmes family kept the castle, the bailey and King’s Meadow north of the Colne until after 1659.

In 1629 Charles I alienated the reversion to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle. It passed in 1636 to Archibald Hay. In 1649 Hay sold his interest to Sir John Lenthall. A Parliamentary survey of 1650 condemned the building and valued the stone at five pounds.

In 1656 Lenthall sold to Sir James Norfolk, also written Northfolk, who bought out Stanhope’s interest in 1662. The upper bailey buildings and much of the bailey wall had collapsed by 1622. The bailey walls were dismantled and the stone sold in 1649. Around the middle of the century the upper bailey was divided into yards and gardens, and houses began to encroach on the ditch.

House plots were laid out over the ditch in 1680 to 1683.

The castle was a county prison. In 1645 Matthew Hopkins, who called himself the Witchfinder General, used it as a place to interrogate and imprison women suspected of witchcraft, and he is considered responsible for at least 100 deaths. In 1656 the Quaker James Parnell was martyred there. During the Siege of Colchester, in the Second English Civil War, Royalists tried to make the castle defensible in 1648, and it probably suffered damage before the town fell.

That siege ran from 12 June to 28 August 1648. Another dating gives 13 June to 27 August. It began when the Second English Civil War broke out again in several parts of Britain. Kent rose on 21 May.

Lord-General Thomas Fairfax retook Maidstone on 1 June. The Earl of Norwich led the remnants into Essex. On 5 June a crowd at Chelmsford seized the Essex county committee. Colonel Henry Farre and some of the trained bands declared for the king.

Sir Charles Lucas took the Essex regiment. On 9 June he was joined by the Earl of Norwich, Lord Capel, Lord Loughborough, Sir George Lisle and about 500 Kentish soldiers. The next day Lucas marched about 4,000 men toward the magazine at Braintree. Thomas Honywood had already secured the weapons with the northern bands, who stayed with Parliament.

Lucas came on to Colchester on 12 June, meaning to raise more men and then move into Suffolk and Norfolk.

Fairfax, with troops from Kent and Honywood’s Essex men, was joined outside the town on 13 June by Colonel John Barkstead’s infantry from London. He then had more than 5,000 experienced soldiers and over 1,000 cavalry, against about 4,000 Royalists. He tried to storm the town at once, as he had at Maidstone. The Royalists stood on Maldon Road among orchards and hedges.

Barkstead’s infantry were repulsed three times, then followed a Royalist withdrawal through the gates into an ambush of artillery, muskets and cavalry. The Parliamentarians were driven out with about 100 casualties. Fighting went on until midnight. Fairfax lost between 500 and 1,000 men.

Royalist losses in that fight were written down as 30 men and two officers, almost certainly far too low. The whole siege is also summed as about 1,000 Royalist casualties and 500 to 1,000 on the other side.

Fairfax then built ten forts around the town, the first time the New Model Army used a full circumvallation. Parliamentarian ships blockaded the harbour and the river. The Suffolk trained bands, whom Norwich had hoped would join him, guarded the bridges over the Colne instead. Colchester had backed Parliament in the first war, and sympathy for the Royalist army faded as soldiers seized food.

By 2 July the ring was closed. On 5 July Lucas with 400 cavalry and Lisle with 600 infantry routed the Suffolk men at the East Gate, then were counter-attacked and lost guns and supplies. On the night of 14 July Fairfax took St John’s Abbey and Lucas’s house, and artillery destroyed the Royalist battery at St Mary’s church. St Mary-at-the-Walls had been used as a gun position, and the later brick repair of its tower is still visible.

On 16 July Fairfax offered terms. Lucas threatened to hang the trumpeter if he came again.

The Earl of Holland’s hoped-for relief had already failed: Colonel Adrian Scroope beat him in a night attack at St Neots. On 15 July about 1,000 Royalist cavalry tried to break out and were caught near Boxted. The fighting known as the Battle of Boxted Heath ended with their return on 18 July. A further attempt that night failed.

On 22 July Bernard Gascoigne got the remaining cavalry out by the Maldon road and they dispersed in Cambridgeshire. Norwich still had a letter from Langdale, commanding the northern Royalists, promising relief within two weeks. By August the food was gone. Cats, dogs and horses were eaten.

One account says soldiers used bread to lure stray dogs and then killed them with their muskets. About 600 horses were eaten, and an unknown number of dogs, cats and rats. People were reduced to soap and candles. Fairfax would not let the townspeople leave or let supplies in, despite petitions, the town council, and Norwich himself.

When women and children begged at the gates they were turned away. The Royalist commanders sent out 500 starving women. Colonel Rainsborough ordered them stripped naked. A mass breakout was abandoned when the infantry threatened to shoot their officers and open the gates.

On 24 August news came of Cromwell’s victory at the Battle of Preston. Parliamentary guns fired salutes, and kites carried the news into the town. Talks began the same day. Fairfax would not take Norwich’s terms.

Common soldiers and junior officers were offered quarter. Senior officers had to surrender to mercy, with no promise of how they would be treated. On the morning of 28 August the Royalists laid down their arms and Fairfax entered. Lords and gentlemen were prisoners of mercy.

Common soldiers were disarmed, swore not to fight Parliament again, and were given passes home. The town was spared pillage on payment of £14,000. Capel was later beheaded. Norwich and Loughborough were exiled.

A military court sentenced Lucas, Lisle, Farre and Gascoigne to death by firing squad, a rare sentence for professional English soldiers in these wars, and one later read as a step from the relative restraint of the first civil war toward the brutality of the conquest of Ireland. Fairfax and Ireton justified it by claims that Lucas had killed Parliamentary prisoners in cold blood, broken his parole, used doctored bullets, and kept fighting in a hopeless position. Farre escaped overnight. Gascoigne was spared as an Italian citizen.

By Fairfax’s order, Lucas and Lisle were shot on the evening of 28 August. They had been held in the room now called the Lucas Vault. The execution was just behind the castle. A local legend says grass will not grow where they fell.

A small obelisk marks the place. Pamphlets soon called them martyrs.

A belief that the siege inspired the rhyme Humpty Dumpty is late. The rhyme is first attested in 1797. The first time it was tied to the siege was in 1996. One story makes Humpty Dumpty a large Royalist cannon on the wall by St Mary’s, destroyed when the wall was damaged on 14 July.

Another makes him a one-eyed sniper, Thompson, shot in the belfry. Neither is an early tradition.

In 1683 an ironmonger, John Wheely, also written Wheeley, was licensed to pull the keep down for building stone, and the keep was sold to him. Another account puts the start of that destruction in 1693 and says it reached only the upper storeys. After great damage, done with screws and gunpowder, he stopped because the work did not pay. He also dug out the sand under the Roman arched foundations, looking for treasure, and left the four vaults that visitors now enter.

Those arches had been built over shaped sand and wooden shuttering. The shuttering rotted, and the soil stayed until the seventeenth century. Two long vaults, about 18.5 by 6.5 metres, lie under the cella, and two shorter ones, about 8.5 by 6.5 metres, under the pronaos. Later brick partitions are probably eighteenth century.

Concrete reinforcing was added in 1931. Several prisoners seem to have been buried outside the south entrance around the time the Crown alienated the castle. Partial excavation has found several of those inhumations. In the floodlight trenches of 2001 and 2002, disarticulated human bone in three places, lying in nineteenth- and twentieth-century layers, was thought to belong to the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the keep was a jail.

In 1705 Wheely sold the castle to Sir Isaac Rebow, his indebted steward. Isaac Rebow, a clothier and merchant, was baptised in the Dutch Church at Colchester on 15 July 1655 and died in 1726. His parents, John Rebow and Sarah Tayspill, came from prominent local families of Flemish origin. He invested £3,000 in the South Sea Company, held a large share in the East India Company, exported more than 10,000 pieces of silver to India between 1697 and 1700, and in 1720 became a director of the Royal Exchange Assurance.

He also owned a ship trading with Portugal. Through his first wife he had a partial interest in two Harwich lighthouses, and in 1707 a patent let him charge ships that passed them. After the Glorious Revolution he was the dominant local Whig. He was MP for Colchester in most parliaments from 1689 to 1722, and at different times mayor, recorder and high steward.

He sat in the Convention Parliament that offered the throne to William III and Mary II, lost the seat in 1690 after a disputed scrutiny, and returned at a by-election in November 1692. In August 1693 he secured a new charter that restored the charter of 1663. He was accused, with others, of selling free burgess status to supporters. The borough’s finances suffered, and after his death it lost its charter in 1742.

He left the castle to his grandson Charles Chamberlain Rebow in 1726.

In 1727 Mary Webster bought the castle for her daughter Sarah, who was married to Charles Gray, Member of Parliament for Colchester. Another account says that in 1727 it came into Gray’s own possession. He lived at nearby Hollytrees. At first he leased the keep to a grain merchant and the east side to the county as a jail.

In the late 1740s he restored the south front, made a private park, and built a summer house on the old earthworks in the shape of a Roman temple. The architect James Deane carried out repairs, including segmental-headed windows, a study over the north-east tower in 1746, and a dome over the great staircase in 1760. A library with large windows and a cupola on the south-east tower was completed in 1760. The tops of the north-east and north-west turrets have also been described as mid-eighteenth-century additions, while the domed extension is placed on the south-west turret in 1760.

Gray laid out a walk from a rotunda to the summer house, with a parterre and a canal garden to the north, and divided the rest into fields. Large eighteenth-century windows were cut into the south wall, the apse and the turrets. The shallow tiled roofs on the south side and some turrets are also his, chosen because the keep was then mistaken for a Roman building and the tiles were thought to suit it. He died in 1782.

The castle passed to his step-grandson, James Round, who went on with the restoration. The Round family then held it.

The part under the chapel stayed a jail and was enlarged in 1801. A long-serving jailer, John Smith, lived there with his family. His daughter Mary Ann Smith was born in the castle in 1777, lived her whole life in it, and was librarian until she died in 1852. She is believed to have planted the sycamore that still grows on the south-west tower, either for the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 or for her father’s death in the same year.

The prison, or house of correction, continued until 1835. Cell fittings survive on the ground floor. The crypt was opened in 1860 as a museum of archaeological collections. A borough collection had been on display in the castle since that year.

Charles Gray Round, born on 28 January 1797 and died on 1 December 1867, was a barrister and the Conservative MP for North Essex from 1837 to 1847. He was educated at Winchester and Felsted, took a first in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1818, proceeded MA in 1821, and was called to the bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1822. He was chairman of the Essex quarter sessions for twenty years and recorder of Colchester for nearly thirty, resigning the recordership in 1863. He was a magistrate, a deputy lieutenant, and a founding member of the Essex Archaeological Society.

In 1847 he stood for the University of Oxford and lost to William Ewart Gladstone. He inherited from his father, also Charles, a large estate in Colchester, including Birch Hall, which he rebuilt from 1843 to 1848. He took possession of Colchester Castle and Castle Park, which had come from Charles Gray. In 1838 he married Emma Sarah, who lived from 1819 to 1892.

They had no children. His nephew James Round succeeded him at Birch Hall. His will provided for sea defences near Clacton-on-Sea. He died before the castle and park were sold to the borough, and his will kept them in trust for that purpose.

Between 1920 and 1922 the borough bought the castle and the park with a large gift from Weetman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdray, a wealthy industrialist who had been the town’s MP. Another account says the keep was given to the borough in 1919 to commemorate the First World War, and that a memorial was set up by the south entrance. The wrought-iron gates on Cowdray Crescent were made in Cheltenham by H. H.

Martyn & Co. The park is divided into Upper and Lower Castle Parks. Roofing the keep in the mid-1930s, more precisely in 1934 to 1935 with steel over a concrete frame, let the museum expand. A footbridge to the entrance was built then and refurbished in 2013 to 2014.

In 1931 the Office of Works reinforced the vaults. During the Second World War the Roman vaults were an air-raid shelter, and the keep held exhibitions in support of the war effort. Sir Bob Russell, High Steward of Colchester and a former MP, said his late father-in-law remembered the 1930s, when the bulk of the castle was open to the sky, and that a roof then eighty and coming on ninety years old was due for repair. The 1922 survey had found prison and museum rooms in the south part and the rest still unroofed.

Excavation has been piecemeal, and a large part of the ground is still unexamined. The first significant dig was by the Reverend J. T. Round in 1845.

In 1852 the Essex Archaeological Society held its inaugural excavation in Hollytrees Meadow, overseen by Dr P. M. Duncan. In 1892 Dr Henry Laver directed work while Castle Park was laid out.

Mortimer Wheeler excavated a series of Roman town houses in the park in 1920 and showed that the Norman keep stood over the Temple of Claudius. The survey of the standing remains was published in 1922. Dr Philip Laver, Henry’s son, dug in the keep in 1922 and immediately to the south in 1931 to 1933, when traces of the forebuilding were exposed. Rex Hull worked in Hollytrees Meadow in 1926 and 1954 and identified the Roman waterworks.

M. Alwyn Cotton excavated the bailey bank in 1950. Ros Niblett worked on the defences in the 1960s. Max Hebditch uncovered part of the south side of the temple precinct in 1964.

The well was examined by the North East Essex Aqua Club in 1972, and a 1973 account describes an unusual excavation of the castle well. P. J. Drury and E.

J. Rodwell excavated in and around the keep in 1977. A rooftop excavation of the keep chapel was undertaken in 1988. In 1992 a lift shaft was dug inside the building.

An architectural survey was made in 1999. Watching briefs and evaluations on the precinct and the castle followed in 2001, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2012. A 2006 watching brief in the south-east corner of the bailey found only post-medieval and modern features.

The 2001 and 2002 work was for new floodlights. About 170 metres of cable trench were dug around the castle, mostly through eighteenth- to twentieth-century layers, to about 0.8 metres deep. Those layers were read as the result of modern gardening, of excavations in front of the castle in the nineteenth century, the 1930s and the 1970s, of earth-moving after 1892 when the ground was sold to the borough for a public park, and of Charles Gray’s landscaping in the early eighteenth century. Most features were nineteenth or twentieth century.

The disarticulated human remains already noted lay in three of those late layers. In the south-east, east of the bailey chapel, three cuts and three layers produced pottery of about the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and were the earliest contexts in that project. The post-excavation was funded in 2020 and the report is dated April 2021. In 2015 and 2016, before an apartment block called One Castle Park, part of the monumental arcade on the south side of the precinct was excavated.

The west side of the central gateway survives to about 1.8 metres above the foundations. Some footings are now visible under glass in the floor of that block. The piers, with half-engaged columns, were about 3.5 metres by 2 metres.

Around the keep, the buried Roman town is part of the same ground. In insula 6, a block about 128 by 91 metres at the north-west of the park, four houses fronting the south street were partly excavated. Three were uncovered in 1920, about 120 metres north of the keep, then backfilled under the gardens and the bandstand. They include a corridor house and two courtyard houses of the mid-second century, later altered, which probably formed one residence about 46 metres wide and 70 metres long.

A hypocaust survives in the north range of the eastern house, and painted plaster shows that rooms were decorated. The corridor house is over 32 metres long and about 7.5 metres wide, with at least seven rooms, tessellated floors, and traces of geometric and guilloche mosaics in three of them. At the south-west corner of the insula, a house uncovered in 1892 still stands exposed, over 13 metres by 6, with four rooms of red tessellation. Insula 15, under the east side of the park and the southern half of Hollytrees Meadow, holds a waterworks, a possible shrine and several houses.

The waterworks, near the south-east corner, is an L-shaped building of septaria and tile with opus signinum floors, originally about 30 by 8 metres, with a later wing. A sunken room about 12 by 6 metres has walls up to 1.8 metres high. A spring rises near the centre. Iron shackles found in 1927 to 1928 were taken to show that enslaved people worked there.

An arched drain runs about 21 metres north-east and then 168 metres north under the road, out of the north gate and into the colony ditch. A small building about 7 by 5 metres, with a porch, may be a shrine. A red tessellated pavement and a hypocaust were found on the north side when a goalpost was being set. These houses, the shrine, the waterworks and the temple are not finds from inside the Norman walls, but they belong to the ground the castle was planted on.

The museum’s displays include objects found elsewhere in the town as well as material from this site. Among the exhibits are the Sheepen Cauldron, a large Bronze Age vessel, and the Fenwick Hoard of Roman gold and silver jewellery, which had been hidden under the Fenwick store on the High Street. The Colchester Gladiator Vase is shown here too. Celtic coin hoards, Roman statues and mosaics, medieval paintings and civil-war armour are also in the collections.

None of those town finds should be read as objects dug from the keep itself.

Between January 2013 and May 2014 the museum was refurbished at a cost of £4.2 million. Displays were renewed with newer research, and the roof was repaired. Conservation of the fabric had also been carried out in the 1980s. By 2023 the keep was on a heritage-at-risk register because of localised drainage trouble at the north-west.

The condition was described as generally satisfactory but with significant localised problems, the vulnerability as high, and the trend as declining. In November 2023 moss had grown on the roof from the damp, and the top two feet of the north-west side were visibly darker. A grant of £1,293,625, also given as £1.3 million and as £1.29 million, and in one headline as a £1 million project, was reported as secured in February, with extra money from the council. It was aimed at the roof, the drainage, the stonework of the north-west tower, vegetation damage at the foundations, and repointing where it was needed.

One account says a programme of restoration, chiefly on the tower and the foundations, began in December 2025 at a cost of £1.3 million. Others say the contractor was appointed and the work was to start in January 2026 and run until August, or about six months. Councillor Lee Scordis said the Normans had not prepared for drainage and water getting in, that short-term measures were not enough, and that the repairs should be finished within six months. He called the north-west tower the most damaged part.

A later notice said the restoration of that tower was complete, with the wider project hoped to finish in the autumn, and that a fossil on a loose stone previously built into the castle had been identified as Dactylioceras, an ammonite about 180 million years old. The castle was to stay open during the work. Fencing already around it would remain. One notice said there would be no hoarding.

Roof tours were suspended for the repairs, with that suspension dated both January 2026 and February 2026.

What the place was for changed with each age, and the stake was always the control of a capital. For the Trinovantes it was the approach to a royal and tribal centre. For Rome it was the first fortress, the first colony and the first provincial capital, and the temple was the cult of a deified emperor, which is why the rebels made it the place of the last stand. For Edward the Elder it was a burh taken back from the Danes and a meeting place of the royal council.

For William I of England and for Eudo Dapifer it was a stone announcement that the new king held the old Roman and royal ground, built at the start of a reign defined by castles. In the First Barons' War it was a fortress the French garrisoned for the rebel barons and that Henry III took back only when the Battle of Lincoln (1217) and the Battle of Sandwich (1217) had broken Louis’s claim. In the Siege of Colchester it was a town strongpoint in an eleven-week starvation, and then the prison of the two men shot behind it. After that it was a quarry, a gentleman’s pavilion, a jail until 1835, and, through Isaac Rebow, Charles Gray and Charles Gray Round, a private possession that a will held in trust until the borough could open it as a museum.

The excavation has shown the temple under the keep, the burned layer of the revolt, the Saxon chapel, and, in the floodlight trenches, medieval pits beside much later disturbed ground. Most of the park is still unexcavated.