Devizes Castle

Devizes Castle stands on a steep-sided hill at the south-west of Devizes in Wiltshire. What a visitor sees from the street is a Victorian house, turreted and battlemented, built on the motte of a Norman castle whose moat and part of the inner bailey still survive. The house is private. It is not open to the public as a matter of course, though the place is occasionally opened for public events, and the earthworks remain a landmark for the town that grew around them.

The medieval castle has almost vanished as standing masonry. Fragments of the original keep can be seen in the sunken garden west of the present buildings, and those remains are listed in their own right. The motte, the ditch, and the surviving bailey were scheduled on 18 February 1953, and that scheduling was amended on 2 February 2005. The Victorian house, together with its glass house and the garden walls encircling the west side of the mound, was listed at the highest grade on 19 September 1972.

The ground beneath the house is included in the scheduling even though the house itself is excluded from it.

The castle occupied a naturally defensive site with access to water, and it has been suggested that a prehistoric enclosure may have stood here before the Norman motte. The first written evidence for the castle, however, is later. The fortified area was cut out of the manor of Bishop's Cannings. A document of 1149 shows that.

The place took its name from the boundaries on which it stood. In Latin it was Castrum ad divisas, the castle at the boundaries, remembered as the point where three parishes met, and that name became Devizes. One account places the first work in about 1080 and describes an early Norman motte and bailey with a wooden palisade and a wooden tower. Another leaves the date unknown and says only that a bishop of Salisbury, perhaps Osmund, built a castle on those boundaries.

Osmund, Count of Sées, died on 3 December 1099. He had been Lord Chancellor from about 1070 to 1078 and was the second bishop of Salisbury, at Old Sarum. The castle is not named in the survey of 1086, despite later claims that it was. It is first mentioned in 1106, when Robert of Normandy was imprisoned in it.

Robert Curthose, also called Robert Courteheuse, was born about 1051 and died about 3 February 1134. He was the eldest son of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, and he was Duke of Normandy, as Robert II, from 1087 until 1106. The nickname came from the Norman French for short stockings. William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis wrote that his father had mocked him as brevis-ocrea, short boot.

He was twice an unsuccessful pretender to the English throne. He quarrelled with his father and with his brothers, the kings William II and Henry I. In 1077 a prank by William Rufus and Henry, who emptied a chamber pot over him, began a brawl and then a failed attempt on Rouen. He went into exile, and at a fight in January 1079 he is said to have unhorsed and wounded his father before he recognised his voice.

When the Conqueror died in 1087, Normandy went to Robert and England to William Rufus. Robert mortgaged the duchy to pay for the First Crusade, where he was an important commander. In 1106 Henry I defeated and captured him at the Battle of Tinchebray. Normandy passed for a time into English hands, and Henry handed Robert into the custody of Roger, bishop of Salisbury.

At Devizes he seems to have remained, perhaps not quite continuously, until 1126. His captivity itself lasted until his death about 3 February 1134.

In 1113 the castle burned, as did the Tower of London and the castles at Lincoln and Worcester. The damage was at least partly made good by 1121, when Bishop Roger held an ordination inside it. Roger of Salisbury, who died on 11 December 1139, had begun as priest of a small chapel near Caen. The future Henry I heard him read mass quickly and took him into royal service.

Henry made him chancellor in 1101, and he held that office until late 1102. He received the bishopric of Salisbury on 29 September 1102 but was not consecrated until 11 August 1107, at Canterbury, because of the dispute between the king and Archbishop Anselm. He kept the favour of both. He remodelled the royal administration, created the exchequer, and with his family managed it for more than a century.

He was the first man in England after the king, justiciar in practice if not in title, and he was never called justiciar in Henry's reign. William of Newburgh called him poor and uneducated, a picture later judged unlikely. After Tinchebray he held Robert Curthose. In the first two decades of the reign he governed England when the king was abroad, and from 1123 to 1126 he was chief minister and regent.

In or about 1138 he was undertaking extensive works at Devizes. The castle seems to have been practically rebuilt then, and one chronicle even calls him its founder. Another account says the wooden castle was replaced in stone by Roger by 1120. The scheduling says the successor was virtually rebuilt by him in about 1138.

The listing of the house says the original castle, built by Bishop Roger in the reign of Henry I, has virtually disappeared. Henry of Huntingdon called the fortress the most splendid in Europe. Other accounts call it the finest and most splendid in Europe, or the most beautiful fortress in Europe, and one of them leaves the author of that praise unnamed. Its strength, its magnificence, its cost, and the large area it covered impressed both Roger's friends and his enemies.

Roger had sworn allegiance to the Empress Matilda, but he disliked the Angevin connection. On Stephen's accession in 1135 he went over to Stephen and took the royal treasure and the administrative machine with him. Stephen relied on Roger, on Roger's nephews Nigel, bishop of Ely, and Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, and on Roger's son Roger le Poer, who was treasurer. The king said that if Roger demanded half the kingdom he should have it, and then chafed at that power.

Roger and his nephews had secured castles outside their own dioceses. At a council in June 1139 Stephen demanded those castles. They refused and were arrested. The bishop of Ely fled to Devizes and fortified it.

Stephen followed with his captives. He shut the bishop of Salisbury in an ox stall in a byre and the bishop of Lincoln in a mean hovel, and he threatened to hang Roger le Poer before the castle gate unless the castle was handed over. Maud of Ramsbury, the mother of Roger le Poer, was inside, and she and Bishop Roger together persuaded the bishop of Ely to surrender. He did so three days after Stephen arrived, and the castle passed to the king.

A shorter account says that the Empress Matilda once took the castle and gave it back when Stephen threatened to kill her son, and that she later took it again. The dated record of June 1139 is the threat against Roger le Poer, not against her son, and the surrender by the bishop of Ely.

The war around that seizure is The Anarchy, a civil war in England and Normandy between 1138 and 1153. It began in a succession crisis. William Adelin, the only legitimate son of Henry I, drowned in the White Ship in 1120. Henry tried to leave the throne to his daughter, the Empress Matilda, and was only partly successful in binding the nobility to her.

When he died in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. Empress Matilda was born about 7 February 1102, possibly at Sutton Courtenay, and she died on 10 September 1167. She was the eldest child of Henry I and Matilda of Scotland, and she was also called Empress Maud. As a child she was sent to Germany.

She was betrothed to the future emperor Henry V, crowned German queen at Mainz on 25 July 1110, and married at Worms in January 1114, when she was about twelve and he was twenty-four. She went with him to Italy in 1116. In 1117 she was crowned, or at least wore a crown, at St Peter's, and from then until her death she used the title of empress. In 1118 Henry left her as regent in Italy.

He died on 23 May 1125. Childless, she returned to her father, who married her to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, and made his court swear to accept her as heir. The oath was unpopular. Stephen's early reign brought fighting with English barons, Welsh leaders, and Scots.

In 1139 Matilda crossed to England with her half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester. Neither side won a quick victory. Castles were easy to hold, so the war was mostly sieges, raids, and skirmishes, fought by knights, infantry, and many mercenaries. In 1141 Stephen was captured at the Battle of Lincoln and his authority collapsed across much of the country.

Matilda's attempt to be crowned in London failed before hostile crowds. She was never formally declared queen. She was styled Lady of the English. Robert of Gloucester was then captured at the rout of Winchester by Stephen's wife, Matilda of Boulogne, and the two sides exchanged Stephen and Robert.

In the winter of 1142 Stephen nearly took Matilda at Oxford. She escaped from Oxford Castle at night across the frozen Thames. Her husband Geoffrey conquered Normandy in her name in 1143. She went back to Normandy in 1148 and left the English war to her eldest son, Henry FitzEmpress, the future Henry II.

By the early 1150s most barons and the church were tired of fighting. Henry invaded in 1153. The armies faced each other at Wallingford and did not fight a battle. Eustace, Stephen's son, died of illness.

The Treaty of Wallingford left Stephen as king and recognised Henry as his heir. Stephen died in 1154, and Henry became the first Angevin king of England. One chronicler wrote that Christ and his saints slept through the disorder. The name The Anarchy was coined later, by Victorian historians, and modern historians have questioned how well it fits.

At Devizes the same years were probably the most violent in the town's history. About the end of October 1139, after the castle had fallen to him, Stephen began to besiege the Bohun fortress at Trowbridge, soon gave that siege up, and returned to London. He left in Devizes a body of armed soldiers to carry on the war against Trowbridge. About Easter 1140 Robert FitzHubert, a Flemish soldier of Earl Robert of Gloucester, left his lord and seized the castle by night, scaling the walls on ladders set against the ramparts.

Most of the sleeping garrison fell into his hands. A small party reached an upper tower and was starved out in a few days. Gloucester's son was sent to recover Devizes and was refused entry. FitzHubert was himself captured by John le Marshal, keeper of Marlborough castle, and imprisoned there.

In August he was brought back to Devizes and hanged by Gloucester. His companions then sold the castle to Hervey of Brittany, the king's son-in-law. Hervey held it for the king for a time, but the people round about pressed him hard and he surrendered it to the Empress. A summary of the same years says the castle was fortified between 1139 and 1141, fell to Stephen, and was in Matilda's hands by 1140.

In September 1141 the Empress herself, fleeing from Winchester, was brought from Ludgershall to the castle, disguised and bound on a bier. She was at Devizes again in Lent and at Whitsun 1142, and the castle was still in her hands at her death. From her it passed to the future Henry II, who was holding it in 1152. Henry had been born on 5 March 1133.

His father made him duke of Normandy in 1150, and in 1151 he inherited Anjou, Maine, and Touraine. In 1157 Archbishop Theobald confirmed an exchange. The king took Devizes castle and its appurtenances in fee, and the bishop of Salisbury received the manor of Godalming in Surrey. From then until the seventeenth century the castle belonged to the Crown.

Henry became king in 1154, on Stephen's death, and ruled until 6 July 1189. He held England, parts of Wales and Ireland, and much of France, the lands later called the Angevin empire. In 1173 his eldest son, the Young King, rebelled, joined by Richard, Geoffrey, and their mother Eleanor of Aquitaine. That revolt was put down.

In 1174 Queen Margaret and other hostages were held at Devizes.

A town grew up below the walls and by 1141 was called a borough. Town lands were added, and the combination of castle, town, and those lands formed the lordship of Devizes, called a manor on eight occasions between 1217 and 1248. The lordship was the centre of a small liberty under the farmer or keeper of the castle, who often also managed Rowde and the forests of Chippenham and Melksham. The sheriff could not enter that liberty.

The constable had return of writs and answered for escheat and wardship, and later for indicting offenders. He commanded the knights who defended the castle in its early years. The first known constable, Guy de Diva, occurs in 1192 and in 1194 to 1195. In 1195 to 1196 William of Ste Mere Eglise was farming the estate, and for the rest of Richard I's reign the sheriff managed it.

From 1199 Thomas de Sandford was farmer until July 1216, and Richard de Sandford, presumably his son, handed the castle to a successor in March 1217. The customary farms were £30 8s for Devizes and £18 17s 5d for Rowde. Allowances for custody were taken out of them, £20 in 1195 to 1196 and rather more in Sandford's early years. The joint farm was later reduced, with retrospective effect, to 20 marks from 1199 to Easter 1206 and to £30 after that.

Above those limits Sandford kept the profits. Some time before John's death he also seems to have received a fee of 100 marks for the custody.

From 1217 to 1234 the custody changed hands often. The keepers included John Marshal, nephew of Strongbow, from 1217 to 1219, Philip Daubeny from 1219 to 1221, the legate Pandulf in 1221, Simon, abbot of Reading, in 1221, Alexander de Bassingbourne in 1221, William Brewer from 1221 to 1225, Richard le Poor, bishop of Salisbury, from 1225 to 1228, Richard de Gray from June 1228 to 1229, Gilbert Basset from 1229 to 1233, Ralph de Wilington in 1233, Peter de Rievaux about 1233, and Peter de Mauley in 1234. In May 1234 began the long connection of John du Plessis, later earl of Warwick, which lasted until his death. The Crown first let him the castle and manor and Rowde for £25, and Chippenham forest for £2 10s, for ten years.

In 1236 the lands and forests went for a time to Walter de Burgh and the castle alone was committed to du Plessis. The manors came back to him. In 1255 he held the castle alone, during pleasure, at a reduced fee, and the sheriff farmed the rest. In 1261, in the political crisis of that year, the sheriff lost the appurtenant lands and they were restored to the earl.

During and after the civil war of Henry III's reign the keepers changed quickly: Robert de Neville in 1263, Philip Basset the justiciar in 1263 to 1264, Hugh le Despenser, also justiciar, in 1264, Basset again from 1264 to 1271, and Ellis Rabeyn from 1271 to 1272. Before April 1272 Henry III committed the castle to the lord Edward. Roger Mortimer, who died in 1282, accounted as trustee in 1272 to 1273 while the prince was in the Holy Land. John de Havering followed from 1272 to 1275, and Ralph de Sandwich from 1275, perhaps until 1287.

Keepers were often not in real charge. In 1195 to 1196, 1204 to 1205, 1224, 1238, 1239, and 1275 to 1278 there were constables or under-constables besides them. A chaplain drew an annual wage from 1237 to 1260.

Castle-guard had been owed by knights holding fees or fractions of fees in Bratton, Calstone Wellington, Etchilhampton, Keevil, Market Lavington and West Lavington, Littleton Pannell, Stert, Bupton in Clyffe Pypard, Cannings, Coate in Bishop's Cannings, Horton, Hurst in Worton, Mere, Orchardleigh in Somerset, and Potterne. A fee may also have lain in Broughton Gifford, though it is not mentioned before 1448. As so often, the services were written down only when they were already decaying. The first surviving list was drawn up in 1255, and by then the services in the last eight of those places, and part of the service in Lavington, had been withdrawn for thirty years.

Each entire fee owed forty days in wartime. The tenant of the land in Calstone had to appear with an armed serjeant. Later definitions, for Market Lavington in 1349 and for Stert in 1355, required the defence of a tower. Between 1224 and 1228 a tenant was excused because he was on duty elsewhere, which suggests that bodily service was still sometimes taken.

In peacetime quit-rents of 10s or £1 were due on each fee or half-fee. The hoped-for yield in 1255 was 25 marks, but after the withdrawn services were deducted it can only have been £7 10s, and that is the sum later collected, including in 1541 to 1542. The rents were still paid to the Crown in 1609. By 1647 to 1648, and again in 1689 to 1690, the borough corporation enjoyed them, and they were lost by 1833.

One serjeanty belonged to the castle, the finding of an armed serjeant for forty days in wartime, attached to a small estate in Rowde and traceable from 1249 to 1288 or 1289. Hired soldiers were already being paid in 1198 to 1199, in 1221, and in 1233. Quarrels were made in the castle or sent to it in 1215, 1225, and 1226, and corn was bought in 1191 to 1194 and in 1216. The castle was kept defensible through the reigns of Richard I and John and the minority of Henry III.

Throughout the thirteenth century kings and other great people stayed here. Between 1204 and 1216 King John visited at least once in every year but two, and in June 1216 he received the countess of Aumale and her children. Henry III was here at his father's death, with many other boys. One account says John left Prince Henry, the future Henry III, in the care of the castle governor.

Henry came back as king in 1217, 1222, and 1224. The cardinal legate Otto stayed in 1238. Edward I paid six visits between 1278 and 1302, and at Easter 1282 the King's Bench sat here as well. In 1302 the royal children were in the castle for a while.

The castle was also a prison, though never on a great scale. Besides Robert of Normandy, Queen Margaret and other hostages were held in 1174. Isabel of Angoulême, John's second wife, is placed here in 1209, and another account says John held her here as a prisoner in 1206. Approvers and other prisoners were received or moved on in 1219, 1221, and 1242.

The most famous prisoner was Hubert de Burgh.

Hubert de Burgh, earl of Kent, was born about 1170, of a minor Norfolk family, and he was dead before 5 May 1243. He had entered Prince John's service by 1198. He was chamberlain, an ambassador to Portugal, sheriff of Dorset and Somerset, of Berkshire, and of Cornwall, and custodian of Dover, Launceston, Windsor, and the Welsh Marches. In 1202 John sent him to defend Poitou.

He was castellan of Chinon and guarded the captured Arthur, duke of Brittany. He held Chinon for a year after most of Poitou had fallen, was taken when the castle was stormed in 1205, and remained a prisoner until 1207. He stayed loyal to John in the barons' rebellion. In Magna Carta he is named among those who advised the king to grant it, and he was the man who would act for the king if the king left the country.

He became chief justiciar of England and Ireland. He defended Dover Castle through the siege that lasted until John's death in October 1216, and on 24 August 1217 he met a French fleet off Sandwich, scattered it, and captured its flagship. During Henry III's minority he was regent from 1219 to 1227. When Henry came of age in 1227, Hubert was made earl of Kent and, on 27 April 1228, justiciar for life.

On 16 June 1232 he was named justiciar of Ireland. He never went there, and he left that post in August 1232. His enemies then brought him down. He was removed from office and soon imprisoned at Devizes.

He was committed after his arraignment in November 1232 and guarded by four knights, to whom the keep was handed over as his prison on the understanding that the king kept free access to the rest of the castle. After a few months the king feared that Gilbert Basset, a neighbouring landowner and a former constable, would try to restore Hubert's cause, and the guard was enlarged in June and July. On 28 September Hubert was entrusted to Ralph de Wilington, the constable, and held more strictly. The following night two of his guards carried him to St John's church.

They were quickly brought back, and orders were at once renewed for a hard confinement. Taking him out of the church had violated sanctuary. The bishop of Salisbury ordered that he be restored. The guards refused and were excommunicated.

Hubert was put back into sanctuary and, on this account, never returned to the castle. Another account says that when Richard Marshal, earl of Pembroke, rebelled in 1233, the men holding Hubert released him and that he then joined the rebellion. In 1234 Edmund Rich, archbishop of Canterbury, brought about a reconciliation. Hubert resigned the justiciarship about 28 May 1234.

He had already ceased to exercise the office after September 1232. A judgment later in 1234 restored the earldom for a time.

The strength of the castle also made it a safe deposit. On several occasions between 1206 and 1242 both jewels and coin were placed in it. A treasury was repaired in 1242. By 1287 there was a prison in the outer gate.

By the later thirteenth century the castle was becoming less a fortress and more the administrative centre of a block of land. That change can be dated from 1287, when castle and manor were granted for life to Matthew son of John, a knight, at a yearly rent. Rowde and other manors were added the same year, and, by a separate grant, the forests of Melksham and Chippenham. The wardenship of those forests had usually gone with the constableship since Thomas de Sandford, and the link lasted into the seventeenth century.

A few months later the premises were regranted to Matthew in the name of the king and queen, which suggests that Edward I already saw Devizes as a way of supporting his consort. In 1290 he granted Queen Eleanor the rent reserved on Devizes. In 1299, when he married Margaret of France, he assigned Devizes to her as part of her jointure, at first only an expectancy until Matthew died. In 1301 Matthew surrendered the castle and its appurtenances and was recompensed elsewhere.

For a long time after that the estate more often than not formed part of a queen's jointure. Margaret held it until her death in 1318, except for a few months in 1308 when it was granted to Hugh le Despenser during pleasure. She was in residence in 1311. It then went to Queen Isabel, who held it until her forfeiture in 1324.

The Crown had it again in 1327 and in 1330 assigned it, as jointure, to Queen Philippa, who kept it until she died in 1369. Farmers then took the estate, apparently for life. Gilbert of Berwick was the first, from 1330 until at least 1338. In 1340 Roger, Lord Beauchamp, who died about 1379, farmed the Devizes complex except Rowde, and after Philippa's death he stayed in possession, paying the farm to the king.

Early in 1380 Sir Nicholas de Sharnesfield succeeded him. In 1381 the farm passed to John, Lord Lovel. Next year the king married Anne of Bohemia, and the complex, apparently without Rowde, was granted to her. She kept it until her death in 1394.

In 1405 it was settled on Queen Joan of Navarre for life, subject to Lovel's life interest, and in 1408, the year Lovel died, she was confirmed in possession. She is supposed to have kept it until she died in 1437. From 1408 to 1415 Edward, duke of York, farmed it under her.

The castle was still armed in 1287, when Sandwich handed over crossbows, baldrics, and quarrels. In 1307 to 1308 orders were given to fortify and guard it, with many other castles. After that, references to munitions are few. Beauchamp was suspected of taking arms, furniture, artillery, and victuals for himself, but the castle was probably no longer strictly defensible in his time.

It was not garrisoned and victualled against the French in 1360, as Old Salisbury and Marlborough were. It was still maintained well enough to serve now and then as a house or a prison, and repairs continued well into the fifteenth century. In 1294 buildings in the castle were assigned to John Tregoze as a home for his wife while the king was in Gascony. Four Scottish prisoners arrived in 1296, two of them remaining for more than a year.

Between 1307 and 1312 Sir David Lindsey, another Scottish prisoner, was confined with honour. Eleanor la Zouche was imprisoned about 1330. Venison trespassers were held in 1283, 1288, 1294, 1358, and 1383, and a suspected felon in 1274. In 1373 the two sons of Charles de Blois were taken away from confinement here, and they were brought back in 1377.

The last reference to the castle as a prison is in 1405. In 1411 to 1412 the queen was in residence. Apart from the constables, the porter was the only officer of much importance. The first known porter was in office in 1299.

By the later fourteenth century his recorded work was collecting rents. The office later became a sinecure and is not heard of after the mid sixteenth century. In his later days the porter presided at a court held at the castle gate, which sat once a year from 1446 or 1447 until about 1543.

The buildings stood on the little hill, protected to the north-east and south by four concentric ditches. The outer two became, at least in the end, town ditches rather than castle ditches. Inside them lay the outer castle ditch. It began in Station Road near Craven House, ran beneath the Corn Exchange and the Bear yard, cut the road that linked the castle to St John Street, came close to the north side of St John's churchyard, and joined the inner town ditch somewhere on the former railway.

Near the Corn Exchange it was double, with steep sides 20 feet, or 6 metres, deep. Within that lay the inner castle ditch, or moat, with almost vertical sides. When it was excavated about 1860 it was found to be 45 feet, or 14 metres, deeper than the exposed portion. The outer ward originally lay between the inner town ditch and the outer castle ditch.

As the town pushed in, the outer bailey shrank to the ground between the outer and inner castle ditches. From outside, that ground was reached by the Brittox, a name corrupted from bretasche, a timber structure tied to the defence of a gateway, and perhaps by a continuation of that road. The road passed an outer, or foreign, gate whose exact place is uncertain, and entered the inner precinct on the north by the inner gate. Inside was a courtyard, in the end called the inner ward, from which a postern may have led a little south of west.

Somewhere on the way the road crossed two bridges, and in 1380 there was a barbican between them. One bridge, probably the western one, was a swing bridge or drawbridge, mentioned in 1248. The scheduling describes the same approach, and adds that the ditch around the motte is about 4 metres deep and varies from 10 metres to more than 30 metres wide. It has been partly landscaped, and a railway tunnel was dug through the fill while the base of the ditch was left untouched, so the lower archaeological levels should survive.

Map evidence shows that the inner bailey once ran further east, and that a second bailey beyond it has been absorbed into the town.

An earthen wall above the inner ditch carried a stone curtain, of which some traces survive. That curtain, lately fallen, was probably the wall repaired in 1240, and it was repaired again on the south and east with Hazelbury stone in 1379 to 1381. Behind it stood the keep, or great tower, first mentioned when it was repaired in 1240. It may be the same as the high tower, which was joisted in 1309 to 1310.

Work on the great tower in the lower ward in 1411 to 1414 included repairs to the foundations. That was probably the outer keep, fitted with a door in 1379 to 1380. The scheduling places the keep on the highest, south-eastern part of the motte, and says it was the earliest building on the site, though it may have had a timber predecessor. New turrets were built in 1240 and 1251.

The tower called Gent was roofed with Corsham slates in 1309 to 1310, and the Johan tower was repaired at the same time. The Everard tower is first mentioned in 1385. In 1610 five very high towers still partly stood. Adjoining the keep on the west was an aisled hall of six bays, about 70 feet by 25 feet.

Its foundations were uncovered in the nineteenth century. It is first mentioned in 1236 to 1237, and it was given new boarding in 1379 to 1380. In 1328 a pentice was attached to it. Excavations in 1858 showed lesser buildings around the hall, and a well in the most northerly of them.

Their purposes can no longer be told. The records do name many rooms. The king's chamber of 1236 to 1237 had become the chambers by 1248. A fireplace was put into the queen's chamber in 1256.

In 1309 to 1310 there were also the chamber by the inner bridge, roofed with Corsham slates, the chamber attached to the tower, the tailor's chamber, and the kitchen. In 1328 the records add a great chamber with a cellar beside the king's chamber, a wardrobe for the king's and queen's clothes, the nursery, the queen's larder, the great saucery, and a cuphouse. In 1377 to 1381 they mention the esquires' chamber, a bakehouse with two ovens, a pantry, a separate queen's wardrobe, a stable for forty horses, a garner, and an aviary. A chapel is first mentioned in 1237, and an outer chapel in 1244, which implies more than one.

In 1385 there were certainly two: an old chapel in the outer ward, which had a bell by 1287, and another in the inner ward with glazed windows. Orders were still celebrated in the chapel as late as 1461, and in 1610 Norden noticed traces of both.

Spending on the fabric was very frequent for almost a century from 1195 or 1196. In 1205 to 1206 the outlay was £35 18s 8d. In 1215 to 1216 it was £81 16s, much of it on a ditch, with ditchers and a miner employed, and wages for twenty-two carpenters, and in that year or the next for masons and hodmen as well. From December 1237 to September 1240 John du Plessis spent over £383.

The work touched the wall and the towers. In 1248 to 1249, £40 went on repairing the swing bridge of the donjon and on reroofing, and in 1249 spending of up to £600 was authorised. With Philip Basset the payments rose again and continued to the end of the reign. In 1280, £300 was ordered to be divided between the works at Devizes and at Odiham.

A report after Sandwich's constableship called the castle well kept. After that it was less well maintained and less defensive. Extensive work was done in 1309 to 1310, but repairs valued at £260 were needed again in 1328. Writs of aid were issued in 1350, 1364, and 1371.

Many repairs were done from 1376 to 1381, yet an inquiry in 1382 suggests they did not go far enough. Further work in 1384 to 1385 used Hazelbury stone and Corsham slates. An inquest in 1405, after Queen Anne's death, found the building so decayed as to be valueless. Repairs in 1411 to 1414 fitted it for Joan of Navarre, who was in residence in 1411 to 1412.

Stone came from Hazelbury, Box, and Corsham, slates from Corsham, and tiles from Ludgershall. That was almost the last overhaul. A writ of aid was issued in 1420, but an inquiry in 1461 found parts of the walls of the outer and inner wards broken, the kitchen roofless, and the bridge outside the castle almost gone. It was still habitable: Bishop Beauchamp, just granted the castle, dated a letter from it in September that year.

Minor repairs took place in 1501 to 1502.

Leland found the building in ruin. Part of the towers of the gate of the keep, and the chapel in it, had been taken away to help build Bromham House. If that house was where the stone went, the stripping came after 1526, when Sir Edward Baynton, the builder of the house, was steward of the castle. In the castle gate Leland noticed places for six or seven portcullises.

In 1578 the county justices thought of using the building as a house of correction, but either the Crown refused or the fabric was too far gone. In 1596 the castle was said to be utterly ruined and decayed, its walls fallen down for the most part. Quarter sessions nevertheless met in it from 1598 until 1612, and it was presumably given up as a courtroom when the market house was built in the town in 1615 to 1616. Substantial fragments of towers and chapels still stood in 1610, together with the large ruined hall within the keep, and even in 1619 some part of the buildings was fit to house a bishop.

After Joan of Navarre the descent is uncertain for a few years, because there was no queen consort to receive the estate. Before March 1443 it had reached Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who appointed Sir Edmund Hungerford constable during pleasure. Humphrey spent Christmas 1446 at Devizes. He died in 1447, and the castle and lordship, which he had held in tail male, passed at once to Margaret of Anjou.

Her tenure became a life interest in 1452. She was presumably deprived on her attainder in 1459. In 1461 Edward IV granted the lordship to Richard Beauchamp, bishop of Salisbury, for twenty years in fee farm. By March 1465 the same bailiwick had been given to Queen Elizabeth Woodville.

Sir Roger Tocotes, perhaps her steward, was deprived in 1483 for his part in the duke of Buckingham's rebellion and restored in 1485. Elizabeth Woodville lost the estates in 1483 to 1484, was reinstated in 1485, and in March 1486 they were granted in dower to Elizabeth of York. After Elizabeth's death in 1503 the estates were kept in hand until, in 1509, they were granted as jointure to Catherine of Aragon, then called Princess of Wales. Catherine had been born on 16 December 1485 at Alcalá de Henares, the youngest child of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

She married Arthur, prince of Wales, on 14 November 1501. He died on 2 April 1502. She married Henry VIII on 11 June 1509, was crowned with him on 24 June, and was queen until the marriage was annulled on 23 May 1533. One account says Henry VIII gave her the castle and took it back after their divorce.

The estate record says the grant of 1509 was a jointure, made while she was still styled Princess of Wales, and that by 1534 that jointure had been transferred to Anne Boleyn. There is no evidence that the castle and lordship ever formed part of Jane Seymour's jointure. In 1540 the usual group of estates was given to Anne of Cleves for life, in 1541 to Catherine Howard, and in 1544 to Catherine Parr. In August 1547 they were granted to Lord Seymour of Sudeley, Catherine Parr's husband.

He was attainted in 1549 and the Crown took the estate back. By then what was being granted was less a residence than a block of town and country property, rents, market tolls, court profits, and the agistment and pannage of the forests. A steward had replaced the constable as the man who exercised the old liberty.

A park is first mentioned in 1149, and in 1157 two parks belonged to the castle, each surrounded by a high bank and a deep ditch. Considerable traces of the bank and ditch of the old park still flanked it in 1972. The old, or great, park lay south-west of the castle in St John's parish and had been disparked by 1595. The new, or little, park lay north of the town, mainly in Bishop's Cannings, and was later absorbed into Roundway park.

The castle, by then of little value, was leased in 1596 to Richard Brackenbury. In 1611 James I granted it in fee to Philip Herbert, afterwards earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. The estate conveyed, about twenty acres, was the castle ruins and the meadow and pasture between the ruins and the town. In 1614 the earl and other feoffees sold it to Peter Vanlore, a native of Utrecht, knighted in 1621, who also acquired the parks.

He died seised in 1627, having settled the castle and the two parks on his daughter Mary, wife of Sir Edward Powell. In September 1651 Powell induced her, it was alleged under duress, to levy a fine. She died childless in October 1651 before the fine could be recorded, but Powell procured its entry. Vanlore's granddaughters failed at first to undo it.

Chaloner Chute bought the premises from the Levingstons in 1656. In 1662 an Act of Parliament set the false fine aside, and the three heirs partitioned the estate in 1664. The castle itself went to Henry Alexander, earl of Stirling, and his wife Judith. Part of the castle site was bought by George Flower in 1728 and in the end seems to have passed to the Wyndhams.

The Croke share was sold in 1666 to Sir Wadham Wyndham, a justice of the King's Bench. William Salmon, a Devizes attorney, bought the land around the mound, cut the present road from St John Street, and built or completed a new house standing alone in the grounds. In 1809 he transferred the estate to his son, and in 1813 it passed to his brother-in-law Thomas Tylee, banker and brewer. In 1838 the shrunken estate, then the purlieus of the bank in St John Street, was in the hands of J.

N. Tylee, who sold it that year to Valentine Leach, a Devizes tradesman. Leach died in 1842.

Leach built himself a castellated house on the site of the southern windmill tower. The design, meant to suggest an embattled Norman castle, was by Henry Goodridge of Bath, whose full name was Henry Edmund Goodridge. He was born in Bath in 1797 and died on 26 October 1864. His father, James Goodridge, was a speculative builder on the Pulteney estate at Bathwick, and on Thomas Telford's advice the son was articled to John Lowder, then city architect of Bath.

Goodridge's own practice ran from the early 1820s into the 1850s, in Classical, Italianate, and Gothic manners. He enlarged Downside, built the Corridor in Bath in 1825, finished Cleveland Bridge in 1827, and designed Beckford's Tower at Lansdown, completed at extraordinary speed and then heightened with a belvedere and a lantern. His list of works dates Devizes Castle to 1840. The listing of the house says the existing structure was begun in 1842 by Goodridge of Bath.

Another account says the redevelopment of the east side of the motte began about 1837, and that the new house, in a Victorian Gothic manner, is believed to stand on the site of the stone keep. A further account says the house was begun about 1840, boldly asymmetrical, and extended northwards in the 1860s and the decades after. Those dates, about 1837, about 1840, and 1842, are all on record. Goodridge's south keep and turret are ashlar, with paired lights divided by colonettes in narrow openings.

On the east front was a large round-arched entrance with machicolations and a portcullis, and above the parapet a lookout turret with a spiral stair. The northern windmill tower was kept and crowned with battlements. Its rubble base may be part of the original castle, and the tower itself is partly seventeenth-century brick. Around its base, facing west, is a bowed fernery with a stone-tiled roof and interlaced arches on Norman-style shafts.

Beside it is a glass house on an octagonal base, with a stepped domed roof. A terrace with a battlemented parapet surrounds the house. On the west, two short sections of arcaded wall incorporate, in one arch, original Norman zigzag stonework.

Valentine Leach's son Robert Valentine, who died in 1888, tried to sell the house, which by then was styled Devizes Castle. The sale failed. Parts of the estate were sold off, he left the town, the castle was let, and the grounds were opened as a pleasure ground to a limited public. About 1860 he came back and spent the next twenty years enlarging the house and putting Norman constructions into the grounds.

His northward extensions, built piecemeal between about 1860 and 1880, trebled the size of the house. He inspired the design, and J. A. Randell worked with him as architect.

Their work is more ornate than Goodridge's. At the north end they built an octagonal conservatory, linked to the drawing room by the curved and arcaded fernery. The listing dates the massive rock-faced enlargement of the north to the 1860s, the 1870s, and the 1880s, with a crenellated parapet, buttresses, superimposed bays, oriels, and large mullioned and transomed windows. Ornamental features in the grounds, notably the so-called St John's or Bishop's gate, are partly built of genuine twelfth-century fragments from St John's church, whose west end was rebuilt in 1862 to 1863.

Leach's last work was the entrance lodge, a Norman gatehouse on the approach from St John Street. The lodge is a late nineteenth-century structure. The scheduling excludes the house, the gatehouse, the modern additions, the walls, and the garden ornaments, while including the ground beneath them. A curtain wall around the whole site may lie on the line of a medieval wall.

It is largely Victorian, with reused medieval masonry especially in the gateway, and it is excluded from the scheduling. Excavations in 1858 and 1859, while Leach was enlarging the castle, uncovered the footings of the former hall piers and a number of lesser buildings around the hall. The moat was excavated in 1860 and found to run 45 feet, or 14 metres, below the part already exposed.

When Leach died, Sir Charles Rich, baronet, who died in 1913, bought the property at what was then thought a bargain. He altered the house. He replaced many of the Norman windows with larger windows of Tudor design, and he built a billiard room and new stables. He does not seem to have shared Leach's antiquarian enthusiasm.

In 1903 the earthworks were much overgrown. Inside, the drawing room and a bedroom in the northern section facing west have partly original frames of sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century ceilings, set with carved and gilded bosses, small brackets, and ribs, the rest completed in plaster. Later descriptions of the principal rooms add stone mullioned windows, stone archways, large fireplaces, oak floorboards, and spiral stairs, with ornate ceilings and gilded bosses in the drawing room and the study, and a fernery with an encaustic tiled floor and a wooden ceiling. On Lady Rich's death in 1918 the property was bought by E.

C. Reed. His trustees sold it after his death to R. J.

Clappen. In 1951 H. Brown, a Birmingham builder, bought it from Clappen and divided it into two lots. The North Tower went to W.

B. Medlam, who sold it in 1955 to E. B. M.

Kemp. The South Tower went to T. G. Waugh, from whom R.

N. Newsome and Delia G. M. Tudor-Hart bought it in 1956, and Mrs I.

M. Durand bought it from them in 1961. In 1971 the mansion was occupied as three dwellings, and the gatehouse lodge was being turned into a substantial house.

During the English Civil War the town and the castle were Royalist. The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was fought between Royalists and Parliamentarians from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms of 1639 to 1653. The first war was about the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I. It ended in June 1646 with the king in custody.

Most Parliamentarians had gone to war to secure a share in government, not to abolish the monarchy. Charles's refusal to concede produced a second war in 1648, his execution in January 1649, and the Commonwealth. The Battle of Roundway Down was fought on 13 July 1643 on the high ground about two kilometres north of Devizes. Sir William Waller, born about 1598 and dead on 19 September 1668, commanded the Parliamentarian Army of the West.

He was a Puritan of the moderate Presbyterian side, member for Andover, and he had known his Royalist opponent Ralph Hopton since they served together in 1620 in the bodyguard of Elizabeth of Bohemia. Hopton, baptised on 13 March 1596 and dead in Bruges on 28 September 1652, was made Baron Hopton of Stratton in 1643 and commanded for the king in the west. After Lansdown, Hopton fell back through Marshfield to Chippenham. Waller came from Bath with about 5,000 men and reached Chippenham on 9 July.

Hopton marched south to Devizes. Prince Maurice and 300 cavalry broke out at midnight on 10 July to fetch help from Oxford, leaving Hopton and about 3,000 Cornish foot to hold the town. Lord Wilmot gathered about 1,500 horse and rode for Devizes. On 11 July Waller came down from Roundway Down and drew up on the east of the town, with a battery on Coatefield Hill.

Hopton asked for a truce and was given one. Overnight Waller's cavalry took a Royalist convoy of powder. On the morning of 12 July Waller ended the talks and assaulted the outworks. At the end of the day the Royalists still held Devizes.

One account of the castle says it was occupied by Royalist troops and besieged by Waller, and that three days later Waller's army was routed. Early on 13 July Wilmot's relief fired cannon to warn Hopton, and Waller marched north to meet him. Wilmot attacked at once. Sir Arthur Haselrig's regiment, the London lobsters, was caught forward.

Parliamentarian horse were swept off the field. Some rode over a precipice of about 300 feet into ground later called the Bloody Ditch. About 3,000 Royalists from Devizes came on against the rear. The infantry broke.

Waller and the remnant of his cavalry escaped toward Bristol. Parliamentarian losses have been put as high as 600 killed and 1,200 captured, with their guns and wagons. Byron reported very few Royalists killed, but many hurt, speaking of officers and gentlemen. The victory gave the king the south-west until late 1645, and within two weeks Bristol fell.

Devizes was a base for Lord Hopton's forces, and that the castle and town stayed Royalist under Sir Charles Lloyd, the king's chief engineer, who defended the town against repeated attacks and bombardments.

For the first four years of the rebellion Devizes was almost continuously in Royalist hands, and the castle may have been used as a barracks, a magazine, a strongpoint, or all three. The defences are known to have been altered, but the castle is not expressly mentioned again until Oliver Cromwell besieged it in September 1645. Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on 25 April 1599 and died on 3 September 1658. He had been member for Huntingdon in 1628 and for Cambridge in 1640, and in 1645 he commanded the cavalry of the New Model Army under Thomas Fairfax.

On 21 September he planted ten cannon in the Market Place and bombarded the castle on that day and the two days following. On the second day a grenado fell into the keep, which was being used as a powder magazine. It did not set off the powder, but it persuaded the governor that further resistance was useless. He surrendered on 24 September.

Another account says Cromwell came with large forces and heavy artillery, and that the castle surrendered after a bombardment by a Parliamentary army of 5,000 men. The castle was ordered to be slighted in 1646, and the work was not finished until 1648. Another account dates the dismantling, under a parliamentary order, to May 1648. The stone was used at once for other building.

By 1654 a castle house built from the spoil stood at the south-west end of what is now Castle Lane. Cromwell went on to press for the execution of Charles I, to conquer Ireland and defeat the Scots, and to rule as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death. His son Richard succeeded him and could not hold the office. At the Restoration, Cromwell's body was taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn on 30 January 1661.

The head was displayed and was not buried again until 1960.

William Stukeley complained in 1724 that the castle was ignobly mangled, and that every day people destroyed it who did not care to leave a wall standing even as a garden fence. George Flower, who died in 1729 and bought part of the site in 1728, is said to have been a notable despoiler. John Strachey, who died in 1743, wrote in an undated letter that no stone of the castle remained, although a sketch of his, assigned to about 1700, still showed the inner gatehouse. Two windmills then stood on top of the mound, which was climbed by a neglected spiral walk.

The castle yard had become an orchard. The castle house was still standing and already decaying. The scheduling records that from about the middle of the nineteenth century a castellated folly in a Victorian Gothic style was built on the motte, which is the house Goodridge and the Leaches made. The same record says the castle was used as an Italian prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War.

In the twenty-first century the house remained divided. A report of 2004 names Edward Owen as owner of the north tower area and Mark Lovell as owner of the south tower area. In March 2009 Jonathan Lewis was named as owner of the main section and the north tower. By November 2010 Julia Dempster had bought the north tower and the main area.

In March 2019 Lavender Howard was reported as owner of the castle, without a statement of which part. The principal part, with gardens in front and behind, was offered for sale in 2018 and again in 2019. Some papers called it semi-detached because the south tower was not in the sale. It was described as a mansion of 9,117 square feet, with nine bedrooms, or eight according to other accounts, and six full bathrooms, on a plot of 2.4 acres.

A room-by-room description counted eight bedrooms, five of them on the second floor, one on the first, and two on the third, including one in the turret, with the living rooms on the ground and first floors, a large kitchen, a hall with a wooden stair, a library, and a long gallery.

Jane Austen, born on 16 December 1775 and dead on 18 July 1817, mentioned the town and not the castle. In Northanger Abbey, written in 1803 and published after her death in 1817, John Thorpe was to stop at Devizes on one of his journeys. Her six finished novels were issued at first without her name. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma appeared in her lifetime.

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion came out together after she died. The town she used as a stopping place had been laid out around the castle. The plan is a fan, with the castle as the centre of the segment, formal enough that it is unlikely to be an accident, and the old ditches can still be read in the streets. The scheduling says the relationship of castle and town can still be seen, that excavation has already produced evidence, and that the unexcavated parts of the motte, the moat, and the bailey will hold archaeological and environmental evidence of the castle and of the landscape in which it was built.

Discussions of permanent burial places for the dead of Roundway Down are still under consideration, and in 2024 Norman Beale published new evidence for a possible location of those buried after the battle of 13 July 1643. The member of Parliament for the town since 2019 has been Danny Kruger, Daniel Rayne Kruger, born on 23 October 1974. He was elected for Devizes and later sat for East Wiltshire. He was elected as a Conservative and on 15 September 2025 joined Reform UK.

He is the son of the writer Rayne Kruger and of Prue Leith. None of that modern political life is part of the fabric of the castle. The mound, the ditch, and the Victorian house on the keep's ground remain the monument.