Conisbrough Castle

Conisbrough Castle stands on a rocky spur of Magnesian Limestone above the narrow valley that the River Don has cut through that stone, in Conisbrough, now in the metropolitan borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. The name comes from the Old English Cyningesburh, rendered as the king’s borough and as the king’s fortress. Little is recorded of the spur itself before the Norman Conquest, but the town was already important. The church of Saint Peter began as an Anglian building of the seventh or eighth century and is called the oldest standing building in South Yorkshire.

Conisbrough may have been a royal estate and a minster of the Anglian kings of Northumbria, and through the Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods it seems to have been the most important place in South Yorkshire. A survey of the earthworks in 2009 found slight evidence for a possible pre-conquest phase on a terrace to the west of the later castle.

In 1086 the survey of England recorded an estate of 28 townships, stretching east to the Lincolnshire border and south to Harthill, and so covering most of the south-east corner of the West Riding. Before the Norman Conquest those estates were in the hands of King Harold. The manor took its name from the fortified burh at Conisbrough itself. One account places the later castle directly opposite the village, which probably contained that older burh, around 175 feet, or 53 metres, above the river, where it would have dominated this part of the Don Valley.

The scheduled-monument account calls it one of several castles that, in the Middle Ages, commanded the Don Valley.

The Norman Conquest was the invasion of 1066 by thousands of Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton troops under the Duke of Normandy, later called William the Conqueror. Edward the Confessor died in January 1066 and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson. Harald Hardrada won at Fulford on 20 September and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. William landed at Pevensey on 28 September.

Harold was killed at Hastings on 14 October. William was not secure on the English throne until after 1072. He confiscated the lands of the resisting English elite, granted them to his followers, and built castles on military strong points. The great survey was complete by 1086.

Harold’s Conisbrough was among the lands taken and given away.

William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey, Lord of Lewes and seigneur de Varennes, died in 1088. He is among the few men known from documents to have fought under William the Conqueror at Hastings. At the time of the 1086 survey he held lands in 13 counties, including the Rape of Lewes, manors in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, the major manor of Conisbrough in Yorkshire, and Castle Acre in Norfolk, which became his headquarters. He was a son of Rodulf, or Ralph, de Warenne and of Emma, and he came from the hamlet of Varenne, near Arques-la-Bataille, now in the canton of Bellencombre.

As a second son he did not stand to inherit the family’s small Norman estates. In the rebellions of 1052 to 1054 he fought at the Battle of Mortemer and was rewarded with lands taken from his kinsman Roger of Mortemer, including the Castle of Mortimer. About the same time he acquired Bellencombre, the centre of his Norman holdings. He was summoned to the Council of Lillebonne when the duke decided to oppose Harold’s accession.

William II Rufus created him Earl of Surrey, probably in early 1088. The castle history says he was raised to the earldom without naming the king who did it, and that he took his name from ancestral estates in the valley of the Varenne, south of Dieppe.

The first castle at Conisbrough is described in two ways that do not fully agree. One account says William built on the limestone spur a motte, an inner bailey protected by an earth bank and palisades, an outer bailey, and possibly a timber keep. The other says the castle probably comprised an earthwork enclosure, or ringwork, crowned with a timber palisade and with timber buildings within it, on the site of the present inner bailey, and that there was probably also an outer bailey. A monument summary calls the whole a medieval castle with a Norman shell keep surrounded by an enclosure wall, while the standing tower is elsewhere described as a cylindrical great tower, not a shell.

The main Warenne estates were centred on Conisbrough in Yorkshire, Castle Acre in Norfolk, and Lewes in Sussex, and Lewes was the family’s principal English seat. The family gave the church at Conisbrough, with its properties and dependencies, to the priory they founded at Lewes, and the priory records are the principal documentary source for the place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A later charter released the men of the Well Stream, the communities near that river in the fens south of the Wash, from carrying service for the earl and countess on journeys north beyond the Well Stream toward Conisbrough or Wakefield, while they were still to provide service on journeys south as far as Castle Acre or Methwold.

William was succeeded in 1088 by his son William, who died in 1138, the second earl. In 1121 this William was given the great manor of Wakefield in the west of Yorkshire and established a secondary seat at Sandal. His son, also William, was killed on crusade at Laodicea in Turkey in 1148. Another account places that death in 1147.

The third earl had only one child, a daughter, Isabel, who died in 1203. Her first marriage, to King Stephen’s youngest surviving son, William of Blois, who became the fourth earl, was childless. On William of Blois’s death in 1159, Henry II married Isabel, called the greatest heiress in England, to his half-brother Hamelin.

Hamelin de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, was born about 1130 and died on 7 May 1202. He is also called Hamelin of Anjou, and, anachronistically, Hamelin Plantagenet. He was an illegitimate son of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, an elder half-brother of Henry II, and an uncle of both Richard I and John. Henry II arranged his marriage to Isabel de Warenne, fourth countess of Surrey in her own right and the widow of William of Blois.

One account dates the marriage to April 1164, after which he was recognised as Comte de Warenne, the customary title for what was more technically the earldom of Surrey, and adopted the surname de Warenne. Another account dates the marriage to 1163. A monument summary says Conisbrough was held from 1163 to 1202 by a half-brother of Henry II. His lands in England centred on Conisbrough Castle, which that account calls a powerful castle he rebuilt.

He also held the third penny of Surrey, one third of the fines of the county courts, and the castles of Mortemer and Bellencombre in Normandy.

Hamelin and Isabel visited Conisbrough regularly, probably every year, a pattern that may already have been set by earlier generations. It was almost certainly Hamelin who built the stone keep. The date is given in several ways that should all be kept. Stylistic grounds put it in the 1170s or the 1180s.

Another account says he extensively rebuilt the castle around 1180 to 1190, including the stone keep, and that, given his new rank, he probably hoped to reinforce perceptions of that rank. The listed-building entry dates the keep to about 1180 and says it was for Hamelin Plantagenet, fifth Earl Warren and illegitimate half-brother of Henry II. A local monument note says he seems to have built during the 1170s, because the constable of the castle witnessed a document that can be dated to 1174–1178, and because the chapel of the keep is mentioned during the 1180s. A teaching account says he began the keep in the 1170s and 1180s and that it would have stood out brilliant white in the landscape.

In 1189 Hamelin and Isabel established a chaplain at the castle.

The keep is a central circular tower with six large solid buttresses, making a plan that is called unique in England. It is only loosely similar to Henry II’s polygonal keeps at Orford, dated 1165 to 1172, at Chilham, dated 1171 to 1174, and at Tickhill, dated about 1178 to 1180. It stands closer to cylindrical and polygonal towers in France of about the same time. Hamelin also developed Mortemer in Normandy, where a similar keep was built on a motte.

A study of 1934 recorded Mortemer as a ruinous cylindrical keep with six semicircular buttresses, a smaller and simpler version of Conisbrough. The Conisbrough tower might also have resembled Sandal, another castle of the same earls. Historians have called it one of the finest keeps in England, an architectural gem, and one of the finest examples of late Norman defensive architecture. The design was poor as a fighting machine.

The round core had defensive advantages, but the buttresses introduced twelve vulnerable corners, and the keep had no arrow slots. It was a private tower for Hamelin rather than a house for several households, and its layout was simpler than the contemporary keep at Orford. It was built to symbolise his lordship.

The measurements do not all match. One set of figures puts the height at 28 metres, or 92 feet, the diameter at 62 feet, or 19 metres, and the walls at up to 15 feet, or 4.6 metres, thick, in magnesian limestone. The scheduled-monument account says a 28-metre cylindrical tower with six solid wedge-shaped buttresses. The listed-building entry says a cylindrical four-storey keep about 27 metres high, with a strongly splayed base and six full-height semi-hexagonal buttresses, of ashlar magnesian limestone.

A local summary says an impressive keep 90 feet high, a larger and better version of the tower on his Norman estate. A classroom sheet calls the plan an icositetragon of 24 sides and gives the inner bailey a length of 75 metres. The entrance is on the south side, now reached by twentieth-century concrete steps. Those steps replaced an original timber stair, or a medieval stair of timber and stone, whose stone footings can still be seen, and the original approach is said to have included a drawbridge just before the doors.

The entrance floor is about 5 metres off the ground.

Inside, accounts of the floors do not use the same numbering. One says four floors: a basement that is a vaulted support for the chamber above, a first floor through which the keep was entered, two upper floors, and a roof walk that was probably covered by a pentice and defended by battlements. The second and third floors would have been the main chamber and the lord’s private chamber. The listed-building entry puts the principal chamber on the first floor, with a large fireplace of clustered columns, a joggled lintel and a canopy, a square-headed basin to the right, and a deep window recess with stone benches opposite.

It puts a similar but smaller fireplace on the second floor, with a trefoil-headed basin, and opposite that fireplace a chapel and vestry built within the wall and one buttress. The scheduled-monument account puts a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century fireplace, flanked by triple shafts with carved capitals, on the second floor. The chapel is hexagonal, with rib vaulting on pilasters and engaged columns, of which only one remains, two trefoil-headed piscinas, a round-arched east window with roll moulding and chevrons on the hood, and quatrefoil side windows with pelleted surrounds. The vault has a transverse rib with chevrons and crossed ribs rising to bosses.

A classroom note calls a fireplace keystone a rare example of joggled construction. A well in the basement could also be drawn from the first floor through a hole in the stone floor. The scheduled account says the well shaft drops from the entrance floor into the basement. The main chamber had a large window, 1 foot 10 inches, or 0.56 metres, by 4 feet 8 inches, or 1.42 metres, with deep recesses and two carved seats.

A similar window stood above it in the private chamber. The fireplaces and flues were advanced for the period, and the fireplace in the main chamber was exceptionally large. Most of the tower would have been dark. At roof level the tops of the buttresses were later adapted as a dovecote, an oven, and water tanks.

The curtain wall and the buildings against it are dated in more than one way. They are thought to have been built soon after the keep, or possibly after Hamelin’s death by his son William, who died in 1240. Another account says William was probably responsible for new stone curtain walls around the inner bailey, destroying the former earthwork defences, levelling the bailey, and building a hall and service buildings in stone. A teaching account says that from 1200 Hamelin himself added the exterior wall and some of the buildings inside the bailey, which sits tightly against his death in 1202.

Pottery from the fill of the bank has been used to date the curtain walls to around 1200. One excavator dated the curtain and the hall to about 1200. Another thought the curtain came shortly after the keep, about 1180 to 1190. Architectural mouldings from both the keep and the bailey buildings have been dated to the late twelfth century.

The curtain may also have been begun soon after Hamelin received the title of earl in 1164. No positive dating evidence for the curtain or the buildings has been claimed as settled. The walls are a rare early use of solid round towers, a stage between solid rectangular forms and hollow turrets. The gatehouse, now collapsed, is an early twin-towered gatehouse, a form introduced only in the late twelfth century.

The barbican is evidence of elaborate defensive devices of the thirteenth century.

The inner bailey is given as about 290 by 205 feet, or 88 by 62 metres, and the outer bailey as about 260 by 120 feet, or 79 by 37 metres, beside the teaching sheet’s 75 metres for the inner length. The oval inner bailey was formed by scarping the hill, producing a bank, now largely destroyed, and a ditch. The scheduled account describes a ditch about 10 metres deep and about 20 metres wide, and a steeply scarped rampart, with the curtain enclosing the tower to the north, west, and south. The early thirteenth-century curtain is mostly roughly dressed, coursed stone, up to 7 feet, or 2.1 metres, thick and 35 feet, or 11 metres, high, with two sections repaired in ashlar.

Six mural towers stood along the southern and western sides, of which three still survive reasonably intact, and pilaster buttresses strengthened the northern edge. The bases were splayed, but the footings are only 0.6 metres, or 2 feet, deep in places. A barbican with an extra corner turret protected the way from the drawbridge to the inner gatehouse. The drawbridge on the northern side of the outer bailey is now an earth causeway.

The collapsed curtain still lies in the ditch. The gatehouse and a section of wall to its east slid down the slope.

Buildings of similar rough stone lined the inside of the inner wall, and only foundations remain. In the south-west corner was the solar block. Along the north side was the hall, pushed into an awkward corner, 70 by 30 feet, or 21.3 by 9.1 metres, originally probably two storeys high, at first with a central hearth and later, in the thirteenth century, with a fireplace in the outer wall. Beside it were a kitchen, with a cellar, and a pantry.

On the south-east side was a chapel, 20 by 40 feet, or 6.1 by 12.2 metres. The outer bailey, a rectangular earthwork enclosure, would have held barns, stables, and other services. A geophysical survey has found anomalies that may be the footings of buildings in and to the south of the outer bailey, while another reading of surveys inside the castle found footings beside the curtain and less certain anomalies that could be the original bailey ditch and an original keep, or could have a non-archaeological origin. Work to the west and south has also been read as a possible stretch of wall, a fishpond, and buildings of unknown date and function.

Hamelin died in 1202 and was buried in the chapter house of Lewes Priory. He was succeeded by his son, William de Warenne, 5th Earl of Surrey, born in the 1160s or 1170s and died on 27 May 1240. Hamelin had granted him the manor of Appleby in North Lincolnshire. The castle account says the castle passed to this William in 1202, and that Conisbrough was inherited by William’s young son John in 1239, while John was still a minor and the castle was at first managed by his mother, Maud.

The death date of 27 May 1240 and the inheritance date of 1239 are both on record. In 1201 Hamelin’s nephew, later King John, stayed at Conisbrough. Through the thirteenth century and the next, the castle remained one of the principal seats of the Warennes. Under the John who held it after his minority, constables carried out dealings that one historian calls colourful if rather unlawful, and one constable was charged with devilish and innumerable oppressions.

Further work in that John’s time included modernising the hall and the solar.

William de Warenne, 5th Earl of Surrey, was raised in Normandy though he spent most of his life in England. He was a cousin of Richard I and John through Geoffrey Plantagenet. He was present at John’s coronation on 27 May 1199. In 1194 he was among those who, with Richard I, licensed the reopening of tournament circuits in England.

When Normandy was lost in 1204 he lost his Norman holdings. In 1202 he was lieutenant of Gascony. John recompensed him with Grantham and Stamford. He was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1204 to 1206 and again in 1214, Warden of the Welsh Marches from 1208 to 1213, and High Sheriff of Surrey from 1200 to 1208 and from 1217 to 1226.

He was one of the few barons who stayed loyal to John. In 1212 John gave him custody of the northern shires. He is listed among those who advised John to accept Magna Carta. Shortly before John’s death he made terms with Prince Louis, and in March 1217 he supported the young Henry III.

He is also credited with the establishment of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1218 he called Hubert de Burgh his dearest friend and lord. After 1227 he disliked the new royal favourites, protected Hubert when Hubert was removed in 1232, and in 1238 was treated as a leader of baronial opposition and appointed one of the treasurers meant to stop the king squandering that year’s subsidy. He married Maud Marshal, widow of Hugh Bigod, third Earl of Norfolk, on 13 October 1225.

They had a son, John, who lived from 1231 to 1304 and succeeded as earl, and a daughter, Isabel, born about 1228 and died in 1282, who married Hugh d’Aubigny, fifth Earl of Arundel. He may also have had an earlier, childless marriage to another Maud, daughter of William d’Aubigny, second Earl of Arundel.

The castle then passed to John’s grandson, also John, the eighth and last earl. In 1304 he married Joan de Barr, also called Joan of Bar, a granddaughter of Edward I. The marriage was unhappy and childless. His attempt at divorce in 1316 failed in the law courts.

He blamed Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, kidnapped Thomas’s wife, and Thomas retaliated by seizing Conisbrough. Another account says that in 1313 Joan, living apart from her husband at Conisbrough, went to London to live under Edward II’s protection, and that in 1317 the castle was besieged and captured by Thomas, who also seized John’s Yorkshire estates. Edward II intervened and confirmed Thomas as the new owner. In 1322 Thomas rebelled, was defeated and executed, and Edward took the castle, visited it, and spent 40 marks on repairs at Conisbrough and at Pontefract.

Edward was overthrown by his wife Isabella in 1326, and the castle was returned to John. John’s estates are also said to have been returned in 1326 after Thomas’s fall. John hoped to leave the property to his mistress and two illegitimate sons, but he outlived them. On his death in 1347 the northern Warenne estates, including Conisbrough, reverted to the Crown.

The greater part of the southern estates went to Richard FitzAlan, third Earl of Arundel. Edward III settled the northern lands on his fourth surviving son, Edmund of Langley, who had been John de Warenne’s godson.

Edmund of Langley, first Duke of York, was born on 5 June 1341 and died on 1 August 1402. He was the fifth son, and the fourth surviving son, of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, and he took his name from Kings Langley Palace in Hertfordshire. He was the founder of the House of York. On the death of his godfather, the Earl of Surrey, he was granted the earl’s lands north of the Trent, primarily in Yorkshire.

He was made a knight of the Garter in 1361 and Earl of Cambridge in 1362, at twenty-one. On 6 August 1385 he was elevated to Duke of York. His main seat was Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire. Conisbrough was his secondary residence, and it was more often used by the House of York than it had been by the Warennes.

Major alterations to the domestic buildings sometime in the fourteenth century may have been his work rather than the last Warenne earl’s. He controlled the castle until 1402.

On his death the estates and the dukedom passed to his elder son, Edward of Norwich, second Duke of York, born about 1373 and killed at the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. To his younger son, Richard of Conisbrough, Earl of Cambridge, Edmund left nothing, possibly because Richard’s paternity was in doubt. It has been speculated that Richard was the son of Edmund’s wife Isabella of Castile and of John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon. Richard was born at Conisbrough Castle in 1385, the life giving about 20 July 1385, and with no land of his own he lived on as his brother’s tenant.

It was at Conisbrough that Richard and other Yorkshire notables conspired to assassinate Henry V at Southampton on the eve of the king’s departure for France in 1415. The plot was discovered and Richard was executed on 5 August 1415. His brother Edward died at Agincourt less than three months later. Conisbrough was then occupied by Richard’s widow, Maud, also called Maud Clifford, until her death in 1446.

That occupation is called probably the only period when the castle was the main residence of a great magnate. A teaching account says Edmund’s grandson Richard was living at the castle when he became Duke of York in 1415, which does not sit easily with Maud’s occupation until 1446.

Richard of Conisbrough’s son, also Richard, by his first wife Anne Mortimer, became the third Duke of York and inherited Conisbrough with many other estates. Anne was a great-granddaughter of Edmund’s elder brother Lionel of Antwerp, and through that marriage the House of York made its claim in the Wars of the Roses. The other party, the House of Lancaster, descended from Edmund’s elder brother John of Gaunt. When royal authority broke down in the 1450s under Henry VI, Richard became the Yorkist leader and a claimant to the throne.

In 1460 he was declared a traitor and his estates were seized, but Conisbrough was garrisoned for him. He was defeated and killed at the Battle of Wakefield in December 1460. His head was set on a spike over Micklegate Bar in York, wearing a crown of paper and straw. Three months later his son Edward, aged eighteen, defeated the Lancastrian army at Towton and took the throne as Edward IV, bringing Conisbrough back into crown ownership in 1461.

Despite that royal status the castle seems to have been abandoned sometime in the late fifteenth century. A local note says it fell into disuse in the fifteenth century and was already beyond repair by the reign of Henry VIII. By a survey of 1538, or of 1537 and 1538, the keep had lost its roof and floors, or one floor of the keep had fallen in, and the gates, the bridge, the gatehouse, and the greater part of the south curtain had collapsed into the ditch in a land slippage. The collapse is explained by unstable topsoil on the limestone, a mixture of clay and sandstone: once the clay washed away, the sandstone cracked.

The antiquary John Leland, visiting about this time, saw no notable thing but the castle standing on a rock of stone and ditched, and wrote that the walls of it had been strong and full of towers.

The grant of the ruins is also told in two ways. One says Henry VIII gave them to the Carey family, who kept them until they passed by marriage into the Heviningham family and then the Coke family. The other says that in 1559 Elizabeth I gave the castle to her cousin Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, that it passed by the end of the seventeenth century to the Coke family, to the Dukes of Leeds in 1737, and in 1839 to the Conyers family and the Earls of Yarborough. In 1737, after the death of Edward Coke, the castle and the surrounding manor were bought by Thomas Osborne, the Duke of Leeds, for £22,500.

Thomas Osborne, 4th Duke of Leeds, was born on 6 November 1713 and died on 23 March 1789. He was styled Earl of Danby from birth until 1729 and then Marquess of Carmarthen until 1731, when he succeeded his father Peregrine, the third duke. He was the duke through the year of the purchase. A teaching account says the Duke of Leeds bought the castle as a ruin in 1737 and did not live there.

Thomas died at Saint James’s Square, aged 73, and was buried in the Osborne chapel at All Hallows Church, Harthill, in South Yorkshire. He was succeeded by his third and only surviving son, Francis.

Landscaping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probably by the owners, enhanced the picturesque ruin, and many artists drew it. In 1811 the novelist Walter Scott passed the castle. One account says he was at Doncaster on his way north. A letter of that year recalls that he once flew past it in the mail coach, when its round towers and flying buttresses had a most romantic effect in the morning dawn.

He had only a partial view from the road. He thought the ruin Anglo-Saxon, a view shared by many commentators of that century, and he recreated it as Coningsburgh Castle in Ivanhoe, published in 1819. The events in the novel, set at the end of the twelfth century, are fictitious. He read the Old English name as the fort of the king and made Coningsburgh an ancient seat of kings, where Norman and Saxon leaders were reconciled.

The standing castle is not as old as he imagined. Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771 in Edinburgh and died on 21 September 1832. In the early nineteenth century he referred to the English Civil War as the Great Civil War.

The castle was not involved in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and escaped the slighting that ruined many other castles, probably because the collapse of the outer walls had already made it indefensible and of little military value. The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was the series of wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms of 1639 to 1653. The first war was fought over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I and ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. The second war, in 1648, ended in Royalist defeat, the execution of Charles I in January 1649, and the Commonwealth.

The Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 is sometimes called a third English Civil War and ended at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The arrangement was dissolved at the Stuart Restoration in 1660. Supporters of Charles I were nicknamed Cavaliers and supporters of Parliament Roundheads. From the Restoration to the nineteenth century the common phrase was the rebellion or the great rebellion.

In 1859 Francis D’Arcy-Osborne, Duke of Leeds, died and left Conisbrough to his nephew Sackville Lane-Fox, Baron Conyers. That date sits beside the 1839 transfer to the Conyers family and the Earls of Yarborough. The keep remained in good condition, but by 1884 repairs were clearly needed. The antiquarian George Clark recommended urgent work on the stone and, if money allowed, a new roof and wooden floors.

The trustees of Lord Conyers approved limited repairs. Clark’s colleague Ellis was concerned that railings to protect visitors who climbed to the top had not been funded. A reported £500 was spent, including a lodge in the outer bailey for the castle keeper, completed in 1885, and improvements to the footpaths. In 1826 John Wainwright could still praise the picturesque view.

In 1887 the antiquarian Ecroyd Smith worried about factories around the new railway and the murky atmosphere of the industrial works.

The local council bought the castle in the 1940s, placed it in the guardianship of the Ministry of Public Works in 1949, and kept the freehold. Another account says it was taken into state guardianship in 1950. In the 1960s the Ministry of Works carried out extensive masonry repairs, and new stairs were built to the keep. By 1984, when a state agency took over management, the visitor services were unsatisfactory and the industrial surroundings discouraged tourists.

In 1988 a three-way agreement with Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council and the Ivanhoe Trust, a local charity meant to create employment, gave the trust the management, left the historic fabric with the state agency, and gave the council a new visitor centre. That centre, built like a cluster of jousting tents, was controversial. The floors and roof of the keep were reinstalled between 1993 and 1995, with European funding, to limit erosion of the stone. Another account places the re-roofing and re-flooring in the 1990s without those years, under the Ivanhoe Trust, which also built a starkly modern exhibition building in the outer bailey.

Visitor numbers after the investment fell short of hopes and by 2006 had settled at about 30,000 a year, only a little above the early 1980s. The new audio-visual effects in the keep were turned off to save money. Relations among the three partners broke down. Direct management returned in 2007 in one account and in 2008 in another.

The castle was closed in 2013 for a renovation of £1.1 million, funded by a lottery grant, which included a new visitor centre and visitor facilities. Excavation had begun long before that closure. The first serious digs, in 1967 to 1968, or across 1967 to 1969, under M. W.

Thompson for the ministry, revealed the footings of the inner bailey buildings and the collapsed gatehouse. The finds were divided between the state collection and Doncaster Museum, and no full report appeared. From 1973 Stephen Johnson directed four further seasons, through 1977. He recorded the profile of the original earth bank around the bailey, timber stakeholes in the top of that bank, which suggest that the eleventh-century castle was surrounded by timber defences, and pottery in the fill used to date the curtain to around 1200.

A guidebook of 1989 gathered that work. A 1951 photograph shows excavation in the inner bailey as seen from the top of the keep, so some digging is also on record before the late 1960s. The research history still says serious excavation began in the late 1960s.

Later work has been watching briefs, surveys, and a re-reading of older finds rather than a new full excavation with a published catalogue. In 2005 a watching brief on fence construction found the construction cut for the curtain wall and evidence of a demolished tower. In 2009 a conservation and development strategy, an analytical earthwork survey, and a geophysical survey were commissioned. The geophysics produced anomalies that may be building footings in and south of the outer bailey.

The earthwork survey characterised medieval and later features and noted the slight possible pre-conquest evidence on the western terrace. Analysis of medieval animal bone from earlier digs found an assemblage generally comparable with other castles, with deer making up 10 percent of the larger bone assemblage. A cable trench between the barbican gate and the south-east corner of the keep produced a large quantity of animal bone and pottery that may be residual dumping from poorly recorded early excavations. A window fitting of about 1200 to 1499 is among the recorded find types, with pottery from the early medieval period into the post-medieval period, and animal bone from the medieval period into the modern period.

During construction of a visitor centre west of the castle, a faced limestone wall and a ditch were recorded as thirteenth- or fourteenth-century structures of the outer bailey, and one or possibly two post holes were dated to the earlier twelfth century, before the present stone castle. In 2010 a watching brief on 24 hand-dug pits for a new metal fence, on the bank between the moat and the southern curtain, found a thick deposit of rubble, probably the collapsed curtain wall, and a few fragments of medieval and post-medieval pottery, animal bones, and oyster shells from unstratified deposits. No further features or finds were identified in that brief. A related note also records organic remains, possibly from collapsed latrines, with a few sherds of medieval and post-medieval pottery, from post holes for a fence south of the castle.

In 2013 the pottery from the excavations of the 1960s and 1970s was re-examined. A public excavation was advertised for 20 and 21 July 2019, for participants aged 14 to 25, with the digging outside the pay gate and free to watch. The notice published no list of what was found.

The castle is a Grade I listed building, first listed on 26 November 1987, and a scheduled monument, first scheduled on 28 April 1920 and amended on 3 September 1992. The scheduling calls it an important and well-documented tower-keep castle which escaped being slighted in the Civil War and which keeps largely intact archaeological deposits in the bailey and in the rampart and ditch. It adds that, since the demolition of Peel Hill Castle at Thorne sometime after the sixteenth century, this polygonal form of keep with external buttresses is unique. The outer shell is not a world-heritage inscription of its own in the records read for this account.

What the place was for changed with its holders. It was the seat of a conquest lordship, a stone residence and symbol for a royal half-brother and his heirs, a prize in the quarrel between the last Warenne earl and Lancaster, a secondary house of the dukes of York and the birthplace of Richard of Conisbrough, a ruin spared by the English Civil War because it was already indefensible, a picturesque estate of the Dukes of Leeds, and the imagined Saxon seat of Walter Scott’s novel. The excavations show an earlier timber defence, stone domestic buildings against the curtain, a gatehouse that fell into the ditch, and, in the later small trenches, mostly rubble, pottery, and bone from deposits that were already disturbed.