# Dudley Castle

Grade I listed castle in Dudley, United Kingdom

Dudley, United Kingdom

Settlement · Fortification. 1070 CE

## Story

• Ansculf de Picquigny is credited with a wooden castle at Dudley in 1070, and the survey of 1086 records it in the hands of his son William Fitz-Ansculf.
• Stone walls survived a siege in 1138, were ordered demolished after Gervase Paganell's revolt against Henry II of England, and were rebuilt by the de Somery family from 1262.
• John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, added the Sharington Range inside the old walls before his execution in 1553.
• A Royalist garrison surrendered the castle on 13 May 1646, during the English Civil War, and a fire in July 1750 left the residential buildings a ruin.
• Excavation from 1983 to 1993 recovered the sealed rubbish of that garrison, and the ruins now stand in the grounds of a zoo.

## Visiting

The site is open every day from 10:00, and it is closed on Christmas Day. Last admission is at 15:00, and the grounds close at about 16:30, while another account gives a winter closing time of 16:30 and a summer closing time of 17:30. Admission tickets are required, whether bought ahead or at the gate, and each ticket is valid once on the chosen date. Tickets are non-refundable.
An adult entry fee without a voluntary donation is £20.85 ahead of the visit or £22.65 at the gate, and a child aged 3 to 15 has an entry fee of £15.40 ahead or £16.70 at the gate. Entry is free for children from birth to 2 years. Children under 14 are not allowed to enter unless an adult accompanies them, and proof of age may be requested at the gate. One carer is given free admission with a disabled visitor who pays the full entry fee, and proof of disability is required for a concession ticket.
Good Friday and bank holiday Mondays add £1 to each ticket. The ticket desks do not accept £50 notes. A car park token costs £4 with admission, the car park closes 30 minutes after the grounds close, and overnight parking is not allowed. The castle courtyard and the keep are open to visitors with tickets, and the staircase is narrow and steep.
Commercial photography is not allowed without permission obtained in advance.

## History

Dudley Castle is a ruined fortification on a limestone hill above the town of Dudley. A wooden motte and bailey was raised there soon after the Norman Conquest, and by 1086 the Domesday survey recorded a castle held by William Fitz-Ansculf, son of Ansculf de Picquigny. The motte, a mound of limestone rubble cased in clay and about nine metres high, is the oldest part still standing.

Stone defences replaced the timber in the twelfth century. In 1138, during The Anarchy, the castle held out against a siege by King Stephen. Gervase Paganell, who had the barony by 1150, later joined the revolt against Henry II of England, and the castle was ordered demolished. The slighting is placed in the 1170s or the 1180s, and the site is thought to have stood as an unfortified manor until the de Somery family began rebuilding in 1262.

That rebuilding produced the keep, with a drum tower at each corner, and the main gatehouse, with a portcullis at each end of the passage. John Somery, the last male of his line, was dead by 1322, and the castle passed to Margaret de Sutton and her husband. The younger Hugh Despenser held it briefly, from 1325 to 1326, as a favourite of Edward II, before it returned to the Suttons in 1327. A chapel and a great chamber were added inside the walls in the fourteenth century.

In the 1530s John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, took the indebted estate and built a new domestic range inside the old walls. His architect, William Sharington, had studied Italian art, and the range is one of the earliest Renaissance houses of its kind in the West Midlands. Dudley was beheaded on 22 August 1553 after the failed attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and Queen Mary returned the castle to the Sutton family. Elizabeth I visited in August 1575.

Christopher Saxton's county map of 1579, and John Speed's map of 1610, still showed the castle in Sedgley, in Staffordshire, rather than in the borough that later absorbed it. During the English Civil War a Royalist garrison under Thomas Leveson held the hill. It surrendered on 13 May 1646 to Sir William Brereton, though one account says there was no siege at the end. Parliament then slighted the keep, the gatehouse, and parts of the curtain, in 1647 or 1649.

The family used the rooms only occasionally, preferring Himley Hall. In July 1750 a fire, dated by one account to the 24th and said to have burned for three days, gutted the Tudor range and ended domestic life there. Later earls treated the site as a romantic ruin, rebuilt battlements, and in June 1857 set two Russian cannon from the Crimean War on the south-facing towers.

A zoo opened in the grounds in 1936 or May 1937, and on 24 June 1994 Elizabeth II opened an interpretation centre. Excavation from 1983 to 1993, alongside repairs, recovered pottery from the eleventh century to the eighteenth and the sealed rubbish of the Civil War garrison, including animal-membrane condoms from the keep latrine, closed in 1647. Surveys finished in 2023 now record the masonry stone by stone, and guide the next repairs to a monument that has been on the heritage-at-risk register since 2020.

## Photographs

- [The original castle was built during the 11th Century, but the ruins that remain today were begun in the 13th Century. The destruction of part of the walls and — Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Dudley_Castle_Courtyard_2_%285511627203%29.jpg)
- [Castle Courtyard. The Courtyard of Dudley Castle after the fire of 1750. The "Earl's of Dudley" relocated to "Himley Hall" until 1947, when it was sold. — David M Lear](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Castle_Courtyard._-_geograph.org.uk_-_174687.jpg)
- [Castle View Dudley Castle from Birmingham Road. — Gordon Griffiths](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Castle_View_-_geograph.org.uk_-_933960.jpg)
- [Castlegate Drive The scene in Birmingham Road. — Gordon Griffiths](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Castlegate_Drive_-_geograph.org.uk_-_933969.jpg)
- [Dudley Castle View from Fisher Street Bus Station. — Brian Clift](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Dudley_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1111634.jpg)
- [A series of now blocked up industrial tunnels connect a disused quarry in Castel hill, the Wrens nest and the Dudley canal. This tunnel in Castel Hill is one — Wipsenade](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/7_sisters_dudley_castel_tunnels.jpg)
- [Plan of Dudley Castle — Sir James Dixon MacKenzie, Bart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Plan_of_Dudley_Castle_%281897%29.jpg)
- [Courtyard of Dudley castle — Tanya Dedyukhina](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Courtyard_of_Dudley_castle_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Dudley Castle Dudley Castle and Turners Hill in the West Midlands, England. — Scott Macpherson](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Dudley_Castle_%2831830568002%29.jpg)
- [Dudley Castle — LisaPB73](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Castle_Of_Dudley.jpg)

## Sources

- [William Fitz-Ansculf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fitz-Ansculf) — Wikipedia
- [Dudley Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Ansculf de Picquigny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansculf_de_Picquigny) — Wikipedia
- [Gervase Paganell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gervase_Paganell) — Wikipedia
- [The Anarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy) — Wikipedia
- [Norman Conquest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest) — Wikipedia
- [Revolt of 1173–1174](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_1173%E2%80%931174) — Wikipedia
- [Edward II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II) — Wikipedia
- [John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dudley,_1st_Duke_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [William Sharington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sharington) — Wikipedia
- [Christopher Saxton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Saxton) — Wikipedia
- [English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Dudley Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1014042) — Historic England
- [Dudley Castle heritage at risk](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-at-risk/search-register/list-entry/37614) — Historic England
- [Dudley Castle](https://dudley.gov.uk/residents/planning/historic-environment/dudley-castle/) — Dudley Council
- [Dudley Castle Excavations](https://www.dudley.gov.uk/residents/planning/historic-environment/archaeological-remains/dudley-castle/) — Dudley Council
- [Dudley Castle Finds](https://www.dudley.gov.uk/things-to-do/museums/dudley-museum-at-the-archives/dudley-castle-finds/) — Dudley Council
- [Dudley Castle](https://www.dudleyzoo.org.uk/dudley-castle/) — Dudley Zoo and Castle
- [Opening Times and Admissions](https://www.dudleyzoo.org.uk/plan-your-visit/opening-times-admissions/) — Dudley Zoo and Castle
- [Dudley Castle Zoo evaluation, 2003](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1042964&recordType=GreyLit) — Archaeology Data Service
- [The archaeology of private life: the Dudley Castle condoms](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/pma.1996.003) — Post-Medieval Archaeology
- [Case study: Dudley Castle survey](https://www.buildingconservation.com/books/bcd2025/13/) — Cathedral Communications
- [Dudley Castle Courtyard 2 (5511627203).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dudley_Castle_Courtyard_2_(5511627203).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Courtyard. - geograph.org.uk - 174687.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Courtyard._-_geograph.org.uk_-_174687.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle View - geograph.org.uk - 933960.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_View_-_geograph.org.uk_-_933960.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castlegate Drive - geograph.org.uk - 933969.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castlegate_Drive_-_geograph.org.uk_-_933969.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dudley Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1111634.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dudley_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1111634.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [7 sisters dudley castel tunnels.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:7_sisters_dudley_castel_tunnels.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Plan of Dudley Castle (1897).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_of_Dudley_Castle_(1897).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Courtyard of Dudley castle - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Courtyard_of_Dudley_castle_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Dudley Castle (31830568002).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dudley_Castle_(31830568002).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Of Dudley.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Of_Dudley.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Dudley Castle is a ruined fortification on Castle Hill at Dudley, in the West Midlands. The hill is an outcrop of Wenlock Group limestone that was quarried heavily during the Industrial Revolution. Together with Wren's Nest, the hill is protected for the best surviving remains of that limestone industry. The castle itself is a scheduled monument, first designated on 8 February 1915 and amended on 18 January 1996, and the standing masonry was placed on the statutory list at the highest grade on 14 September 1949. The borough council owns the ruins. A zoological society controls the grounds, and a zoo occupies the hill around the castle. The Dudley Tunnel runs beneath Castle Hill, but not beneath the castle. Localised structural problems placed the ruins on the heritage-at-risk register in 2020. A later register assessment still described the condition as generally satisfactory, with significant localised problems, medium vulnerability, and an improving trend.

The Norman Conquest supplies the setting for the first castle. In January 1066 Edward the Confessor died, and Harold Godwinson was accepted as king. Harald Hardrada invaded the north, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. On 28 September a fleet led by William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey. Harold was killed at Hastings on 14 October, and William was crowned on Christmas Day. He was not secure until after 1072. He confiscated the lands of the resisting English elite, granted estates to his followers, and used castles to hold strong points. Earl Edwin of Mercia was among those who later revolted. After Edwin's abortive revolt in 1070, lands in the West Midlands, including Dudley, were granted to Ansculf de Picquigny.

Ansculf de Picquigny was a baron from Picquigny, a village near Amiens, born about 1014 and dead about 1084. He is credited with about eighty manors across eleven counties, and he was sheriff of Surrey and Buckinghamshire at some point between 1066 and 1086. One account says that he finished a wooden motte-and-bailey at Dudley in 1070, that the castle was the head of his barony, and that it stood in a defensive chain facing Wales. Another account says that about 1071 William the Conqueror granted the estates centred on Dudley to Ansculf's son, William Fitz-Ansculf, and that this son raised the motte near the end of the eleventh century. The two names are also spelled FitzAnsculf and FitzAnsculph. What is certain is the survey of 1086. The Domesday Book records that William Fitz-Ansculf held Dudley, and that his castle was there. The opening of the Dudley entry was later translated as saying that the said William held Dudley, and there was his castle. The earthwork motte survives. The timber tower and palisade do not.

William Fitz-Ansculf made the castle his base. The 1086 survey lists him with about a hundred estates in twelve counties, many of them formerly held by Harold, by Lady Godiva, by Earl Algar, or by a Midlands thegn named Ulwin. Dudley itself had belonged to Earl Edwin. Sedgley, nearby, had belonged to Earl Algar. It has been suggested that William died on the First Crusade, because a chronicle names a William of Picardy among the dead at the siege of Arqah in 1099, but that identification is an inference rather than a direct statement that the lord of Dudley fell there. The barony then passed to the Paganell family. Fulke Paganell held it from about 1100. How he obtained it is not certain. One suggestion is that he married a daughter of William Fitz-Ansculf. Another is that he gained from a dispossession after a failed rebellion. The family name survives in Newport Pagnell, one of their former Buckinghamshire manors. Fulke, or his son Ralph, is thought to have replaced the timber defences with stone. By the early twelfth century a large part of the estate, including the castle, had passed to Fulke, who is credited with that stone work.

The Anarchy explains the next crisis. The civil war in England and Normandy ran from 1138 to November 1153. It began in a succession crisis. Henry I's only legitimate son, William Adelin, drowned in the White Ship in 1120. Henry tried to leave the throne to his daughter, Empress Matilda, and his court swore to her more than once. Stephen of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror, seized the crown when Henry died in 1135, with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. Stephen was crowned at Westminster on 26 December 1135. Fighting with barons, Welsh leaders, and Scottish invaders followed. Matilda's half-brother Robert of Gloucester renounced Stephen in 1138, and Matilda landed in England in 1139. Neither side could finish the war. Castles were easy to hold, so the fighting was mostly sieges, raids, and skirmishes. Many new castles were raised without royal leave. In 1153 Matilda's son, Henry FitzEmpress, and Stephen made the Treaty of Wallingford. Stephen kept the throne and recognised Henry as his heir. Stephen died in 1154, and Henry became Henry II of England.

At Dudley, Ralph Paganell took Matilda's side. In 1138 the forces of King Stephen besieged the castle and failed to take it. Because the castle survived that siege, it is assumed that stone walls were already standing. Ralph was made governor of Nottingham Castle in 1140. His son Gervase Paganell, also spelled Gervase Paganel, had inherited the barony by 1150. By 1154 Gervase had married Isabel, widow of Simon de Senlis and daughter of Robert, Earl of Leicester. In 1166 he was assessed at fifty-five and two-thirds knight's fees. He founded a Cluniac priory at Dudley, dedicated to Saint James, fulfilling a wish of his father Ralph. He is also thought to have founded the church of Saint Thomas in the town, originally dedicated to Thomas Becket, who was killed in 1170 and canonised in 1173. Gervase attended the coronation of Richard I in 1189. He died in 1194. His heir was his sister Hawise, who had married John de Somery. Their son Ralph de Somery became the next baron.

Before that inheritance, Gervase had joined the revolt against Henry II of England. The revolt of 1173 to 1174, sometimes called the Great Revolt, was led by three of the king's sons, by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and by their allies, including the king of France and William the Lion of Scotland. It lasted eighteen months and failed. Henry landed in England in July 1174, did penance at Canterbury for the murder of Becket, and then received the surrender of rebel strongholds. At least twenty castles in England were demolished on his orders afterwards. One historian counted Dudley among at least twenty-one castles slighted on those instructions. Gervase's castle was ordered demolished. One account places the rebellion in 1173 and the demolition on the king's order after it. Another places the family's support of the king's sons in 1174 and a partial demolition in the following year. A third places the slighting in the 1180s. Gervase later bought his way back into favour with a fine of 500 marks. It is not clear how much of the stone castle was actually thrown down. The site is usually assumed to have remained an unfortified manor house until the second half of the thirteenth century.

The de Somery family had the castle from 1194. Roger de Somery II began rebuilding in 1262. He died in 1272, with the work unfinished, and his heirs carried it on into the fourteenth century. Another account says that the family refortified the castle at the end of the thirteenth century, and that in 1264 John de Somery received a licence to crenellate and built the stone keep on the motte and the curtain walls of the bailey at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The keep and the main gate belong to this rebuilding. John de Somery, also called John Somery, the last male of the line, died in 1321, and his life is also given as 1280 to 1322. The fortifications are thought to have been complete by his death. On the motte, excavation in the 1980s found that the later keep sits on an earlier stone plinth, askew to the fourteenth-century plan, and that plinth is taken to be part of an older keep reused as a foundation. A narrow wall roughly concentric with the keep is dated to the late fourteenth century and is read as a defence for the foot of the tower. A semicircular brick structure on the motte is included in the scheduling and is thought to be a Second World War searchlight and lookout, evidence that the height of the hill still mattered in the twentieth century.

The motte is the oldest surviving structure. It was raised artificially, stands about nine metres high, and has a core of limestone rubble cased in clay. A ditch, wet or dry, once ran at its foot, and a further ditch separated motte from bailey. That inner ditch is now filled, but it survives as a buried feature. Dry-stone revetments and platforms found in the motte are associated with the first construction. The bailey is oval, about 100 metres from north to south and 80 metres from east to west, roughly 0.8 hectares, and a dry ditch surrounds it. The ditch is clearest on the south-eastern side. An outer court, a level platform beyond the ditch, once held ancillary and industrial buildings. Those buildings are not visible on the surface, but they are expected to survive underground. Modern zoo structures have cut into parts of that platform. A masonry wall and gateway on the south-eastern side of the outer court are included in the protection. One account associates them with the de Somery family and the late sixteenth century. Another dates a lower gatehouse, and a round watch tower linked to it by a wall, to the Elizabethan period.

The keep is slightly rectangular, about 15 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, with a drum tower about 9.8 metres across at each corner. After the English Civil War only the north side and parts of two of those towers remained standing, because the southern half was slighted to make the tower untenable. A curtain about two metres thick enclosed the bailey from at least the early fourteenth century. Much of the east curtain was later built into the domestic ranges. Parts of the north and west curtains were replaced by thinner sixteenth-century walling. The south-eastern curtain was demolished after the war and replaced in the seventeenth century by a wall further north, on a different line. Buried lengths of the old curtain are expected to remain. The main gatehouse stands a little east of the keep, built into that south-eastern curtain. One account dates it to about 1300 under John de Somery, while allowing that the side walls are older and may belong to an earlier gateway. Another says that the gate is mainly the work done after 1262, with some masonry of the Paganell castle still in it. It was a double gateway with a portcullis at each end. The passage was stone-vaulted. One reading of the gatehouse makes it a two-storey building. Another makes it three floors, with the portcullis machinery on the first, a guardroom on the second, and battlements above. In the late fourteenth century a barbican was added on the outer side. Under the Suttons the whole arrangement was sometimes called the Triple Gate. A smaller gateway in the northern curtain is thought to be sixteenth-century, opening into the northern outer court.

When John Somery died, the barony was divided. Weoley Castle went to his sister Joan and her husband John de Botetourt. Dudley Castle went to his elder sister Margaret and her husband John de Sutton. John de Sutton I died in 1327. Their son John Sutton II died in 1360. For a short time before that succession settled, the younger Hugh Despenser held the castle. He was the favourite of Edward II, and he had the castle from 1325 until 1326. Edward II had reigned since 1307. His reliance on favourites, first Piers Gaveston and later the Despensers, brought him into armed conflict with a large part of the baronage. In 1326 his queen, Isabella of France, and Roger Mortimer invaded. Edward's government collapsed. He was captured in November, gave up the crown in January 1327, and died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. When he fell, Despenser lost Dudley, and in 1327 the castle was returned to John and Margaret. It was probably their son, John Sutton II, who added a chapel and a great chamber inside the walls. The range north-east of the gatehouse, dated to the middle of the fourteenth century, has a chapel over a tunnel-vaulted undercroft in its southern half, a traceried window of three lights in the west wall, and an ogee-headed doorway high in the south-west wall. North of the chapel are rooms identified with the great chamber. Most of the windows were enlarged in the sixteenth century, and elaborate fireplaces of that century remain. The chapel block was already ruinous before the fire of 1750. After John Sutton II died, his widow Isabel, daughter of John de Cherleton, held the castle until her own death in 1397. Later Sutton lords included John Sutton III, who died in 1369, John Sutton IV, who died in 1391, and John Sutton V, who died in 1406. John Sutton, summoned as a baron, lived from 1400 to 1487. From that point the barony of Dudley, and later the Ward title, carried the castle.

In the sixteenth century the castle changed from a fortress into a high-status house. Another John Sutton inherited in 1532 and fell into debt. In that same year John Dudley, later John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, lent his cousin John Sutton, 3rd Baron Dudley, more than £7,000 on the security of the baronial estate. The baron could not pay. When the mortgage was foreclosed in the late 1530s, Dudley took the castle. Other accounts put his acquisition in 1533 or his ousting of Sutton in 1537. John Dudley was born in 1504, the eldest son of Edmund Dudley, a councillor of Henry VII who was executed in 1510 at the start of Henry VIII's reign. The boy was restored in name and blood, became the ward of Sir Edward Guildford, and in 1525 married Guildford's daughter Jane. He rose as a soldier and courtier, became Viscount Lisle, Lord High Admiral, Earl of Warwick, and in October 1551 Duke of Northumberland. From 1550 he led the government of the boy king Edward VI. He was a leader of the religious reform party. In 1553 the dying king set aside his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth and named his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey, who had married Dudley's son Guildford. How far the duke drove that scheme is disputed. Some historians treat it as his plot to keep power in his family. Others treat it as Edward's own project, which Dudley enforced after the king died. Mary was proclaimed queen. Dudley was convicted of treason, returned to Catholicism before his death, and was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 August 1553. Mary gave the castle back to the Sutton family, to Edward Sutton.

Before that fall, Dudley had rebuilt the domestic side of Dudley. From about 1540, or more broadly in the 1530s and the middle of the sixteenth century, a new range rose inside the old walls. The architect was Sir William Sharington, also spelled Sharrington. Sharington, born about 1495, had visited Italy and developed a taste for its art. In 1540 he bought Lacock Abbey and turned it into a house with a three-storey octagonal tower and Renaissance chimneys, keeping much of the medieval fabric. At about the same time he designed, for his friend John Dudley, the new buildings at Dudley. The range is called the Sharington Range or the Sharrington Range. It is described as one of the earliest known examples of the influence of the Italian Renaissance on the secular architecture of the West Midlands. It is of coursed limestone with sandstone quoins, built against the eastern curtain. A southern block held the hall and a northern block the kitchen, with a further building between the kitchen and the northern gateway, including an octagonal turret that contained a stair. The first-floor hall is about 24 metres long and 9.5 metres wide and is thought to stand on an earlier hall, which should survive below. The east wall of the hall has gone. The west wall keeps mullioned and transomed windows. A loggia, a recessed colonnade, was built against that west wall in the middle of the century, with a central flight of steps from the bailey and a porch into the hall at the north end. The kitchen block's dividing wall keeps twelfth-century masonry, including a semicircular arched opening, so a fragment of the Paganell castle is still visible in the Tudor ruins. The ground floor also had a large room south of the kitchen. A buried building between the chapel and the gatehouse, found in the 1980s, formed part of the same sixteenth-century remodelling and cut through the levelled remains of a stone building associated with the late twelfth century. On the south-western side of the bailey, a sixteenth-century kitchen annexe, also described as a late fifteenth-century kitchen annex, stood by a round-headed doorway through the curtain and was linked to the keep by steps. Corbels and a large fireplace in the western curtain mark further rooms along that side. The standing range is given as three storeys in one place and as two in another, and it contained a great hall, kitchen, servery, buttery, cellars, and bedrooms. Sharington himself died before 6 July 1553, a few weeks before his patron.

Queen Elizabeth I visited the castle in August 1575. One account gives the day as 11 August. About ten years later the site was surveyed as a possible residence for the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. It was not used for that. The Sutton hold was already weakening. Edward Sutton's son, Edward Sutton III, was the last man of the line to possess the castle. In 1592 he sent men to raid the property of Gilbert Lyttelton and impounded the stolen cattle in the castle grounds. Debt continued until he married his granddaughter and heir, Frances Sutton, to Humble Ward, the son of a wealthy merchant. The Ward family, later earls of Dudley, thus came to the estate.

Maps of this period place the castle outside the town that later claimed it. Christopher Saxton, born about 1540 and dead about 1610 or 1611, produced the first county maps of England and Wales. His survey began in 1574, with Thomas Seckford paying the cost and Elizabeth granting him a lease toward the expense. The atlas of 1579 contained thirty-five maps, each bearing the arms of the queen and of Seckford. They show hills and settlements, but not roads, and they do not fix the height of the hills. On Saxton's map of 1579, and again on John Speed's map of 1610, the castle lay in Sedgley, in Staffordshire, rather than in Worcestershire. The boundary was moved only in 1926, so that the castle and its grounds could sit inside the borough of Dudley when the Priory Estate was developed. Saxton's plates were later reissued during the English Civil War as a pocket map described as useful for commanders quartering soldiers, and that reissue became known as the quartermaster's map.

The English Civil War, or Great Rebellion, was a series of wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The fighting at Dudley belongs to the First English Civil War. A Royalist garrison under Colonel Thomas Leveson, a local Catholic, held the castle. He is also called Sir Thomas Leveson. In 1651 Parliament listed him among only twenty-five former Royalists subjected to perpetual banishment and confiscation. The garrison is described as holding the castle from 1642 to 1646. It was besieged in 1644 without success, and again in 1646. After about two weeks it surrendered on 13 May 1646 to forces led by Sir William Brereton. One account says instead that in 1646 the castle was surrendered to Brereton without a siege. The number given for the surrender is forty officers and thirty men. In April 1646, while the castle was under attack, Dorothy Beaumont died inside it. She was the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel John Beaumont, also called Colonel John Beaumont, who was second in command to Leveson. A child of hers had been born and buried on the same day in 1644. Leveson beat a drum for a parley so that she could be buried. Two of Brereton's messengers were shot dead as they answered. Safe conduct was then allowed for the funeral, but her husband was not allowed to attend. The coffin was taken up through the market place to the church of Saint Thomas, called the Top Church. The funeral could not be held at the church of Saint Edmund, the Bottom Church, because Leveson had ordered that church destroyed so that the besiegers would not use it as a vantage point. The ruins later gained a reputation for a grey lady identified with Dorothy Beaumont. That reputation is a tradition attached to the site, not a record of what the excavations found.

After the surrender there was a long dispute between Parliament and the people of Dudley. The defences were then destroyed so that the castle could not be held again. One account places that slighting in 1647, and names the keep, the gatehouse, and sections of the curtain. Another places the order of Parliament in 1649. The present broken profile of the keep comes from that decision. The southern half of the keep, parts of the curtain, and the barbican were thrown down. Some habitable rooms remained. The family preferred Himley Hall, about four miles away, when they were in the Midlands, and used the castle only occasionally. It is thought to have been kept by a skeleton staff and used for formal occasions rather than as a constant home. A stable block, the last new building on the site, was put up before 1700. Another account dates a two-storey stable and lodging block to the middle of the seventeenth century, standing between the motte and the gatehouse, on the line of the demolished curtain, and built flush against the gatehouse. The block was once mistaken for lodgings alone.

In July 1750 a fire, believed to have been accidental, destroyed the Tudor residential buildings. One account dates it to 24 July and says it burned for three days, gutting the Sharington Range. Domestic occupation ended. The owners then treated the site as a romantic ruin and tidied it. Battlements on a surviving tower were rebuilt. One account credits Viscount Dudley and Ward with a partial restoration and new battlements in the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the earls continued that care. Two Russian cannon, taken as trophies in the Crimean War, were set on the remains of the two south-facing drum towers in June 1857, during one of the castle fetes. Through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the courtyard was used for fetes and pageants.

The ground itself was dug while the walls were repaired. Between 1983 and 1993 a major excavation ran alongside the repairs. Philip Barker was the consultant archaeologist. Work concentrated on the motte, the stable block, the ground between the stables and the main gateway, the ditch between motte and bailey, the great hall, and the chapel. The finds included ceramic building material, clay pipes, coins, animal bone, floor tiles, leather, plant remains, pottery, architectural stone, vessel glass, window glass, and textiles. Building recording accompanied the restoration of standing walls. A research design was issued in the 1990s in three volumes. The project employed five professional archaeologists and fifty local people, women and men aged from 18 to 60, paid through a manpower scheme, so the dig was also a training programme. A friends group formed in 1989, while the courtyard was under excavation, and took the Earl of Dudley as its patron. It has continued to work on the archive, including the question of what to do with unstratified animal bone.

The collection is large enough to show how the household lived. There were 1,837 pieces of animal and bird bone and more than 3,000 small finds of bronze, lead, precious metal, and textile. Pottery runs from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. The coarseware is consistent in form, fabric, glaze, and slip, which suggests a single kiln near Dudley, using clay from close to the Silurian limestone under the castle. Most of the vessel glass is late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century. It includes façon de Venise goblets and ordinary bottles, flasks, and urinals, some blown very thin so that a physician could see the contents. The Civil War layers were richer than a picture of mere siege hardship would suggest. Besides pottery there were bone inlays, bronze work, and glass that runs from local forest glass to Venetian and Venetian-style vessels.

The most closely dated deposit was the keep's latrine, or garderobe. It was sealed when the defences were demolished in 1647, and the excavators recovered it intact by sieving and hand sorting. It held the domestic rubbish of the Royalist garrison of 1642 to 1646, including seeds of coriander, figs, grapes, pumpkins, and strawberries, with animal, bird, and fish bone. In the compacted mass were the remains of ten animal-membrane condoms: five that appear to have been used and discarded, and five unused, nested one inside another. Laboratory study treated them as the earliest definite physical evidence for animal-membrane condoms in post-medieval Europe. It is not possible to say whether they were meant to prevent disease or pregnancy. They would have been costly to make, so they may have belonged to officers. Officers' wives were present. Dorothy Beaumont's child, born and buried in 1644, shows that family life continued inside a garrison. A later evaluation, in 2003, cut trenches in the bailey and near the zoo's reptile house and penguin enclosure. It found two eighteenth-century masonry walls of a previously unidentified building that butted against existing walls, medieval and post-medieval deposits in the bailey, and traces of the medieval moat outside it. Excavation in the eastern bailey had already found traces of timber buildings and pits from the early occupation, and more of the first castle is expected to remain buried. In the 1980s the foundations of the keep were exposed on the south side of the motte, confirming the earlier plinth under the fourteenth-century tower.

In the twentieth century the hill became a public pleasure ground without ceasing to be a monument. One account places a zoo around the castle in 1936. Another says that William Ward, 3rd Earl of Dudley, conceived the idea earlier in the 1930s and that the zoo opened in May 1937. The buildings made no attempt to imitate the castle. Enclosures designed by Berthold Lubetkin's team, using reinforced concrete, drew international attention and are listed in their own right. They are not part of the castle's scheduling. Within eighteen months of opening, the zoo had received a million visitors. On 24 June 1994 Elizabeth II opened an interpretation centre at the castle. The courtyard and the keep can still be entered. The stair in the keep is narrow and steep in places.

Recent care has been about decay as much as display. In 2020 an eighty-percent repair grant was awarded for the castle. Between 2021 and 2023 the funded work totalled £82,000, of which £65,600 came from the grant and £16,400 from the borough and the zoo. The money paid for an ecology survey, clearance of self-set trees and bushes that were damaging the masonry, a three-dimensional measured survey, and a condition survey with a costed plan for management. The measured survey, finished in 2023, combined a control network, a topographical survey of the zoo around the castle, terrestrial laser scanning, and digital photogrammetry. The result was a point cloud and a textured mesh able to record individual stones, mortar joints, cracks, and areas of decay, as a baseline for later comparison and as a record if fire, storm, or vandalism destroyed fabric. Those surveys are being used to plan targeted repairs and community engagement. A wider plan for the hill, completed in 2019, set out more than £13 million of proposals, with much of the money aimed at the castle and at other historic structures on the hill, and that plan was put before the borough cabinet on 8 August 2024. The ruins remain a public monument inside a working zoo, with the Norman motte, the slighted keep, the Tudor range, and the buried garrison rubbish all still on the same limestone hill.

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