# Hadleigh Castle

Grade I listed castle in Castle Point, Essex, England, UK

Castle Point, United Kingdom

Settlement · Fortification. 1230 CE

## Story

• Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, raised Hadleigh Castle on a clay spur above the Thames after King John granted him the honour of Rayleigh in 1215, and a licence of 1230 names the castle he and his wife Margaret were allowed to build.
• Henry III of England took it in 1239. After a century of repairs Edward III rebuilt the east front, the royal lodgings and a new northern gate between 1360 and 1370, at a cost of more than £2,200.
• The estate carried a tidal mill, a fishery and three parks, and later formed part of the dower of Elizabeth Woodville and of Catherine Parr.
• Edward VI sold the castle in 1551 to Richard Rich, who stripped the stone. The ruin passed to the Salvation Army in 1891 and into state care in 1948.

## Visiting

Admission is free and the site is open any reasonable time during daylight hours. Dogs on leads are welcome, and smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not allowed.

## History

Hadleigh Castle is a ruined enclosure castle on a spur of London clay south of Hadleigh in Essex, the only castle of its kind in the county, built to be seen from the Thames estuary. The hill is unstable London clay. Documents record subsidence within about forty years of the first building, and the south curtain now lies in displaced rubble down the slope.

The honour of Rayleigh, with its castle and park, was held at Domesday by Swein of Essex and was confiscated from Henry of Essex in 1163. It stayed in royal hands until 1215, when King John granted it to Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, about a month after Hubert was styled justiciar on 25 June. Hubert, born about 1170 and dead before 5 May 1243, had held Dover for John and then for the boy king. Henry III of England confirmed the honour in 1227.

Hubert did not rebuild Rayleigh. He chose the coastal ridge at Hadleigh.

The castle can date anywhere between about 1215 and its confiscation in October 1239. A licence of 1230 allowed Hubert and his wife Margaret to build a castle of the honour of Rayleigh, and that licence may have been retrospective, because after his dismissal in 1232 he spent years in prison or in sanctuary. Another account puts a licence in 1231, names Hugh rather than Hubert, has the king seize the castle in 1232, and credits a reconstruction about 1365 to Richard III. Matthew Paris treated Hadleigh as one of Hubert's dearest possessions, and one on which he spent great sums.

The first plan was probably an elongated octagon of curtain wall, with square towers and an eastern barbican, compared with Bolingbroke, Beeston and White Castle. The walls are described both as rubble faced with Reigate stone and as Kentish ragstone, in a mortar full of cockle shells. Two semicircular towers on the north and south may be a second phase of Hubert's work in the later 1230s. A hall of his period seems to have lasted until about 1250, and terraced gardens on the south may already have included the vineyard recorded in 1274 or 1275.

A park existed by 1235, with woodland, a fishpond, stables and a lodge, and the wider estate included Rayleigh, Thundersley and Eastwood. A Wednesday market is recorded from 1231, and a fair of St James, first noted in 1184, was still held in 1547. A horse stud, probably in Rayleigh Park, is implied by a gift of horses in 1220. The castle was meant to be approached from the river.

A platform and ditch on the east belong to that first entrance.

Henry III of England did not use Hadleigh as a regular house. An inquiry of 1250 lists 140 acres of arable, two of meadow, marsh pasture for 160 sheep, a park and a mill, a holding also described as 142 acres, or 57 hectares, of agricultural land. On 12 June 1256 the houses were unroofed and the walls broken. More than £25 spent in 1270 and 1271 seems mostly to have gone to the mill.

Queen Eleanor of Provence is named as owner in 1273, and an extent of 1274 to 1275 still calls the castle badly built and decayed.

About £41 spent between 1288 and 1290 likely paid for a second hall, 17 metres by 9 metres, or 56 feet by 30 feet, with an L-shaped solar and a garderobe. It slumped almost at once and collapsed before the end of the century. Edward I stayed in July 1293 and again in 1305. In 1299 the castle, town and park passed to Queen Margaret as dower, and she complained of the state of the building.

A third hall, 11.4 metres by 6.6 metres, reused the east wall of the second and may belong to her time or to those visits. Its garderobe was still used between 1475 and 1525.

Edward II, king from 1307 until his deposition in January 1327, made Hadleigh a residence. He stayed from 5 to 18 September 1311, and again in 1314 and through much of May and June 1315, when the royal barge brought him as far as the wharf and he changed there for Kent. By May 1316 the castle was assigned to the chamber. He more often dated writs from the lodge at Thundersley, probably the peel built in 1315.

A collapse of curtain in 1317 or 1318 was still being stopped with stakes and a hedge in 1320 or 1321, when a garrison of twenty-four guarded the castle and town against Bartholomew of Badlesmere and other rebels, who threatened to burn it and broke open the prison.

Isabella of France took the castle either in 1326, when she deposed him, or in 1327, and she surrendered it in 1330. Edward III, born at Windsor on 13 November 1312, had just begun his personal rule. He claimed the French throne in 1337. Little was done at Hadleigh for thirty years except a new mill in 1350, and he is recorded there only on 6 and 7 June 1342.

Between 1360 and 1370 he spent more than £2,200 on a new east front, royal lodgings and a northern gate.

The two drum towers, hexagonal inside and round outside, were finished in 1365. The south-east tower had three storeys and the north-east four, probably built to one height. The king's chamber, with two fireplaces, glass and a gold-covered plate, rose on the south, probably on made ground, and he came at least six times in 1362. A new barbican and gate on the north, with a turning bridge over a pit 2.5 metres deep and slots for a portcullis, were among the last works in 1369 and 1370.

The high tower beside that gate was being built in 1362 or 1363 and was roofed in lead in 1366 to 1368. William Wykeham, also called William of Wykeham, surveyor of the king's works from 1359, is the likely designer. The accounts for 1362 to 1364 name 154 workmen.

One account makes the rebuilding a defence of the estuary in the Hundred Years' War, paired with the new castle of Queenborough on Sheppey. Another places it in the peace after the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, and after the agreement at Rheims, and reads Hadleigh as a comfortable retreat for an ageing king who still wanted a show of power from the river. Repairs continued into 1377, the year he died. Richard II came only on 5 July 1380.

A ditch cut in 1378 to 1381, at a cost of £22, may answer the Peasants' Revolt.

Sir Aubrey de Vere held the castle for life and died possessed of it in 1400. It then passed to Edmund of Langley and to his son Edward, Earl of Rutland, killed at Agincourt in 1415, then to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, from 1418 until his death in 1447. That death made Richard, Duke of York, heir of Henry VI, and the castle was granted to Richard. In 1453 it went to Edmund Tudor, who died in 1456.

From 1465 until 1485 it was held by Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV, restoring the custom of queen's dower.

Henry VIII is not known to have stayed, but the castle formed part of the dower of Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr, the last of his six wives, who received the castle, lordship and manor for life in 1544, the year she was regent. The parks supplied deer and timber, including timber for the ship Henry Grace a Dieu in 1513. Rayleigh Park was sold in 1544 and Thundersley Park in 1547.

In 1551 Edward VI sold the castle, manor, park, a fishery and the church advowson to Richard Rich, first Baron Rich, for £700. Another account dates the sale to 1552. Rich broke the castle for stone. Tiles from the third hall were dumped beside it, and a hearth in the floor was used to melt the window lead, the pottery of that destruction falling between about 1550 and 1575.

The mill, first recorded in 1249 or 1250, was still worth 100 shillings in 1576 or 1577 and was mapped in 1670. A survey of 2009 places it on the marshes south-east of the castle, beside Mill Creek, and reads the dam north of the castle as a fishpond rather than the mill of the older scheduling.

John Constable drew the ruin in 1814 and painted it in 1828 or 1829. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1829. William Booth bought the site in 1891 for a Salvation Army farm colony, later 3,200 acres. Slips between 1898 and 1923 brought down the south wall.

The castle passed to the Ministry of Works in 1948. It is a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building. The north-east tower collapsed further in the 1950s, and major slips followed in 1969, 1970 and 2002.

Excavation in 1863, and again by P L Drewett in 1971 and 1972 after those slips, recovered three successive halls, kitchens and the barbican bridge. Work in 2004 on a fresh slip found a possible Roman gully, medieval levelling and a timber structure that may belong to the late fourteenth century. The earthwork survey of January 2009 argued that Edward II's repairs had been overshadowed by Edward III's rebuilding. One eastern tower still stands nearly to its full three storeys.

The other keeps about a third of its wall, and the footings of the halls remain in the grass above the marsh.

## Photographs

- [Photograph of Hadleigh Castle, Essex, England — JohnArmagh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/HadleighCastle.jpg)
- [en:Hadleigh Castle. 13th-century castle overlooking the Thames estuary. See also http://www.castlexplorer.co.uk/england/hadleigh/hadleigh.php for more details. — Roy Gray](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Hadleigh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_30230.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (1) Remains of the castle walls. Please see my other pictures of the castle, or email me if you want more. — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Hadleigh_Castle_%281%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316188.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (2) Remains of the tower. Please see my other pictures of the castle, or email me if you want more. — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Hadleigh_Castle_%282%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316201.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (3) Remains of the square tower. Please see my other pictures of the castle, or email me if you want more. — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Hadleigh_Castle_%283%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316208.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (4) Remains of the Hadleigh Castle. Please see my other pictures of the castle, or email me if you want more. — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Hadleigh_Castle_%284%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316214.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (5), outer walls This area is extremely steep. The outer walls of this Motte are ruined. They overlook Hadleigh Marsh. That is Canvey in the — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Hadleigh_Castle_%285%29%2C_outer_walls_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316227.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (5) This castle dates from 1230 and was originally built for King John. It is in a state of ruins because Edward VI sold off the stone so it — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Hadleigh_Castle_%285%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316255.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle (Barbican) This was the original outer gate of the castle. See my other pictures of the castle. — Julieanne Savage](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Hadleigh_Castle_%28Barbican%29_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316240.jpg)
- [Hadleigh Castle Just crying out for a dentist to fill it! — John Myers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Hadleigh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_386690.jpg)

## Sources

- [Hadleigh Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadleigh_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [History of Hadleigh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadleigh-castle/history/) — English Heritage
- [Hadleigh Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadleigh-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Hadleigh Castle, Essex: earthwork analysis survey report](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/5765/HadleighCastleEssexEarthworkAnalysisSurveyReport) — Historic England
- [Site of 13th century castle, Hadleigh Castle](https://heritage.essex.gov.uk/Monument/MEX30221/) — Essex Heritage Hub
- [Excavation at Hadleigh Castle, 2004](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3052445&recordType=Journal) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Edward III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III) — Wikipedia
- [Henry III of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_III_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_de_Burgh,_Earl_of_Kent) — Wikipedia
- [Catherine Parr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Parr) — Wikipedia
- [Edward II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_II) — Wikipedia
- [Edward IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_IV) — Wikipedia
- [Edward VI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_VI) — Wikipedia
- [Elizabeth Woodville](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Woodville) — Wikipedia
- [HadleighCastle.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HadleighCastle.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle - geograph.org.uk - 30230.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_30230.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (1) - geograph.org.uk - 316188.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(1)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316188.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (2) - geograph.org.uk - 316201.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(2)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316201.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (3) - geograph.org.uk - 316208.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(3)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316208.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (4) - geograph.org.uk - 316214.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(4)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316214.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (5), outer walls - geograph.org.uk - 316227.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(5),_outer_walls_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316227.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (5) - geograph.org.uk - 316255.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(5)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316255.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle (Barbican) - geograph.org.uk - 316240.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_(Barbican)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_316240.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hadleigh Castle - geograph.org.uk - 386690.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hadleigh_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_386690.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Hadleigh Castle is a ruined enclosure castle in Essex, on a spur of London clay south of the town of Hadleigh, looking over the marshes of the Thames estuary toward Canvey Island and the Kent shore. It is the only known enclosure castle in Essex, and the only defensive work of its kind on the north side of the estuary. From the water and from the north Kent coast it is obvious. From the land it is not, and it cannot be seen from Hadleigh village except, perhaps, from the top of the church tower. The hill was never a stable place to build. Within about forty years of the first work, documents already record damage from subsidence, and the movement has not stopped.

The ridge was used long before a castle stood on it, though the early evidence is scattered. Chance finds from the ground to the west, now under housing, include two Palaeolithic hand axes and a possible Mesolithic core. A Mesolithic tranchet axe came from the southern edge of the village, a Neolithic flint knife from near Park Farm, and a Bronze Age barbed and tanged arrowhead from somewhere nearby. A few Mesolithic flint blades were found in the excavations of the 1970s inside the castle itself. The first definite occupation in the village is a square ditched enclosure of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, dug in the 1980s. Another Iron Age site is thought to lie near Sayers Farm, to the west, where pottery and evidence of cremation burials were found in 1936. By the Late Iron Age or the Romano-British period the Rayleigh Hills carried many settlements and finds. A substantial double-ditched enclosure south-west of the village, known from the air, has been called a fortlet or signal station, but it has not been excavated. A marble mortar came from Great Wood, and first-century pottery from the hills near Home Farm. A small bronze figure of a Lar, the image of a protective god, was found on the slope immediately below the castle. Roman brick is built into the castle walls. In 2004, in a trench cut because the south side of the bailey was slipping into the marsh, a possible Roman gully aligned north to south lay under the medieval levelling.

At Domesday in 1086 the honour of Rayleigh was held by Swein of Essex, who probably made his castle there together with a park. The castle and the honour passed to his son Robert Fitzsweyn, who died in 1140, and then to his grandson Henry of Essex. Henry fell out of favour after his conduct at the battle of Counsylth, and his estates were confiscated in 1163. Rayleigh stayed in royal hands from 1163 until 1215. After that the castle in Rayleigh village seems to have been deserted, because the honour had gone into private hands and a new castle was soon to be built further south.

Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, was the man who received it. He was born about 1170, of a minor Norfolk family at Burgh-next-Aylsham, and he was dead before 5 May 1243. A case has been made that his father was Walter de Burgh and that his mother was Alice. His elder brother William, who died in 1206, founded the de Burgh line in Ireland. Hubert had entered the service of Prince John by 1198. He was chamberlain of the household, ambassador to Portugal, sheriff of Dorset and Somerset and then of Berkshire and Cornwall, and custodian of Dover, Launceston, Windsor and the Welsh Marches. In 1202 John sent him to Poitou. As castellan of Chinon he guarded the captured Arthur, Duke of Brittany, held the castle for a year after the rest of Poitou had fallen, and was himself taken in the storm of 1205. He was a captive until 1207. He returned to France as deputy seneschal and then seneschal of Poitou from 1212 to 1215, until the truce that followed John's failed campaign of 1214. He stayed loyal in the barons' rebellion. John sent him to London with the Bishop of Coventry to make the city resist, without success. He and Philip d'Aubigny gathered the king's troops at Rochester before John made peace. In the Great Charter of 1215 he is listed among those who advised the king to sign, and he is named as the man who would act for the king if the king were abroad. Soon afterwards he was declared chief justiciar of England and Ireland, an office he held from 1215 to 1232. An inquisition of 1213 already shows more than fifty knight's fees in East Anglia and substantial holdings in Dorset and Somerset. He is styled justiciar in official documents from 25 June 1215. About a month later King John granted him the honour of Rayleigh, where the king had stayed on 7 and 8 November 1214.

During the First Barons' War of 1215 to 1217 he was sheriff of Kent and of Surrey and castellan of Canterbury and Dover. He held Dover through a siege that outlasted John, who died in October 1216, and he refused the castle to Louis of France. On 24 August 1217 a French fleet arrived off Sandwich. Henry III of England, born on 1 October 1207, had become king in 1216 at the age of nine, in the middle of that war. William Marshal led the royal side until his death in 1219. After that, Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, dominated the minority. He has been counted as regent from 1219 to 1227. Henry III of England promised to abide by the Great Charter of 1225. In 1227 the new king confirmed the grant of the honour of Rayleigh. Hubert did not rebuild the old caput at Rayleigh. He chose a new site on the coastal ridge, with the estuary in front of it.

The date of the castle is not a single year. He held the lands for about twenty-four years, from about 1215 to 1239, and the building can fall anywhere in that span. In 1230 a licence allowed him and his wife Margaret to build a certain castle at Hadleigh which was of the honour of Rayleigh. Many writers have taken 1230 as the start of the work. The licence may instead have been retrospective. He was dismissed in 1232, blamed for military failures and for quarrels with the king, and stripped of the royal castles he held. He then spent years in prison or in sanctuary, which would have made it hard to raise the money or to supervise a great building, and the castle was confiscated from him in October 1239. It is unlikely that he began only after 1230 and still finished a substantial castle before that confiscation. An older published suggestion was that the castle was left unfinished. There is no evidence that this was so. Matthew Paris, writing at the time, treated Hadleigh as one of Earl Hubert's dearest possessions, and one on which he spent great sums. Another account puts the licence in 1231 and gives it to Hugh rather than Hubert, has Henry III seize the castle in 1232, and has Richard III completely reconstruct it about 1365. The manor has also been described as a grant from Henry III of England in 1227, with the castle built soon afterwards and requisitioned by the crown in 1239. The king who confirmed the honour in 1227 was the same Henry III of England who later took the castle back.

The first castle was a polygonal curtain, probably an octagon stretched east to west, with square angle towers and perhaps some D-shaped ones, and a barbican on the east. That plan was not forced by the hill, which would more naturally have run from north-west to south-east. The long axis showed the greatest bulk to the estuary and to anyone coming from the village. The same thinking appears at Framlingham. The early castle has been compared with Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire, built by Earl Radulph de Blundevill between 1220 and 1230 on a new site, and with Beeston in Cheshire, also of the 1220s. A closer parallel is White Castle, or Llantilio, near Abergavenny, an elongated enclosure with large semicircular towers, remodelled by Hubert at the same time. The two semicircular towers on the north and south at Hadleigh are secondary and undated, but they belong to the thirteenth century. They may be a second phase of Hubert's own work in the later 1230s. Later documents call them the north and south towers. Engravings of the early eighteenth century show both standing at least two storeys high. Today the north tower is down to its foundations, and the south tower has gone with the south curtain.

The walls are rubble. One account says they were faced with Reigate stone and bonded with a mortar full of cockle shells. Another says the castle was built of Kentish ragstone, cemented with a mortar rich in seashells, especially cockles from the beds of neighbouring Canvey Island. A ditch is thought to have run outside the wall and is now mostly filled. The three towers on the west are taken as part of the first phase. They are rectangular. The footings of the north and middle towers still stand above ground. The southern tower, at the south-west angle, has collapsed in a landslip. Parts of the north and south curtains were internally buttressed, and that buttressing seems to belong to the original castle. After the curtain was up, the crest of the ridge inside it was cut down and the spoil dumped behind the southern wall to make a level bailey. A shaft sunk in the nineteenth century against the south tower went fourteen feet, or 4.25 metres, through what was called virgin clay, with no occupation layer reported, which suggests the levelling was done at the building of the castle or when the south tower was later rebuilt. The ground floor of a later solar still sat a little below its hall, and a terrace below that, a drop of less than a metre, so the south side may not have been perfectly flat in the middle of the thirteenth century. Plumtree Hill, just to the north-west, would have been an easier and more level site. It was not chosen. The eastern ridge gave a formal approach from the water, and the castle seems always to have been meant to be reached by river or by sea.

On that east side a roughly square platform sits between the later drum towers, built up over the natural slope, probably an open space in front of the first barbican. A smaller platform or ramp lies further east, and a gully between them was probably a ditch crossed by a timber bridge. The sides of the spur were steepened to narrow the approach. There is no sign of an entrance on this side after the later rebuilding, so the platform should be earlier. A postern toward the park on the north is likely from the start, but it was probably not the postern visible today at the west end, which sits in a stretch of curtain rebuilt about 1300 and does not lead straight to the park. The original postern most likely stood where the later north gate and barbican stand. A gully inside the north-eastern curtain may be the semi-basement of a building of this first period or of the early fourteenth century. A cutting in its floor in the nineteenth century found the bones of an ox and no masonry. A geophysical ditch running parallel to the wall may be a robber trench of a wall line along the top of the gully.

Two walls found in the excavations of 1971 and 1972 were read as a large first hall, mostly destroyed by later robbing. That hall is likely to be Hubert's, and it seems to have stayed in use until about 1250. Gardens are thought to have lain on the south, terraces overlooking the estuary. A vineyard is recorded in 1274 or 1275, a time when the castle was neglected, so the terraces may already have existed in the earliest phase and may have included vines. By 1235 the park of Hadleigh had been formed around the castle, with woodland, a fishpond, stables and a park lodge. The wider estate also took in Rayleigh, Thundersley and Eastwood.

The estate was already a source of money. A market at Hadleigh was first recorded in 1228, when Henry III of England granted Hubert markets at four manors, which implies that the markets already existed. In 1231 a Wednesday market was granted to him. By 1246 the market was the king's, and it was still going when the estate was granted away in 1453. A fair was first recorded in 1184, perhaps the fair of St James on 25 July, mentioned in 1181 among the estates of Henry of Essex. It was granted to Hubert in 1228 and was still held in 1547. Somewhere on the estate, most likely in Rayleigh Park, there was a horse stud. A gift of horses from Hubert to the king in 1220 implies that it already existed. The main stud seems to have stood in Rayleigh Park, with stables inside Hadleigh Castle used for the king's horses as well.

From October 1239 the castle was royal. Henry III of England does not seem to have used it as a regular residence. He travelled less than earlier kings and spent heavily on a few favourite palaces, and Hadleigh was not among them. The income of the estate, though, mattered. Minor repairs were made in 1240 by the sheriff of Essex. Then the records go quiet for about thirty years. An inquiry in 1250 lists 140 acres of arable, two acres of meadow, pasture around the castle and its barns, marsh pasture for 160 sheep, a park with an unknown number of beasts, and a water mill. The same holding has been described as 142 acres, or 57 hectares, of agricultural land, together with the park and the mill. The marsh grazing for those 160 sheep was valued at four marks, twice the mill. On 12 June 1256 a survey found the castle in a bad and weak state, the houses unroofed, the walls broken, and all the necessary utensils wanting. That may have been subsidence, or simple neglect. No repairs are recorded, and at about this time the first hall seems to have gone out of use.

In 1270 and 1271 more than £25 was spent on the castle and the adjoining mill. Queen Eleanor of Provence, Henry's wife, is recorded as the owner in 1273, and the money may have been spent when the castle was granted to her. An extent of 1274 to 1275 again calls the castle badly built and decayed, which suggests that most of the earlier sum had gone to the mill. The estate was being kept for its income, not as a house to live in. Between 1288 and 1290 about £41 went on the walls, houses and other buildings, and this is the likely moment of the second hall. It measured 17 metres by 9 metres, in eight bays, painted inside, with glazed windows and a tiled roof. It has also been described as 17 metres wide by 9 metres long, or 56 feet by 30 feet, and placed around 1290. An L-shaped solar at the south end, on a lower floor, opened to a garderobe tower, and steps in the south wall led down to a privy courtyard on a still lower terrace. Almost at once the hall slumped to the south-west. Buttresses were added to the eastern wall and timber props were put under the roof. They were not enough. The hall appears to have collapsed toward the end of the thirteenth century.

Edward I is recorded at the castle in July 1293, the first of his two known stays, though he had often used the hunting lodges at Rayleigh and Eastwood. He dated documents at Eastwood in 1276, 1279, 1281, 1284 and 1289. In 1299 the castle, town and park of Hadleigh, with the manors of Rayleigh and Eastwood, were assigned to Queen Margaret as dower. She complained of the pitiful condition and asked for repairs. An extent of the manor was taken in 1302. Edward I came again in 1305. Margaret still held the castle at least into 1311 or 1312, when a new constable was appointed and she was named as the owner. In 1314 she complained that people had entered her parks, chases and warrens at Hadleigh, hunted without licence, broken her houses, walls and fences, fished her stew, carried off trees and fish, and taken deer, hares, rabbits, pheasants and partridges.

The eastern wall of the second hall was reused for a third hall, built to the east of it. That hall may belong to the end of the thirteenth century or the early years of the fourteenth, perhaps after Margaret's complaint or ahead of the visits of 1293 or 1305. It was entered up two or three steps into a porch, then a screens passage, and a hall 11.4 metres long and 6.6 metres wide, plastered inside with red decoration. A long room at the north end was read as a buttery or pantry. A large solar, only a little smaller than the hall, lay to the south, and a range of small rooms, perhaps bedrooms and a chapel, occupied the south-east corner. This hall stayed in use through the later rebuilding of the rest of the castle. The last use of the garderobe in its solar can be dated between 1475 and 1525.

Edward II was born on 25 April 1284, the fourth son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, and he was king from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. He had been knighted at Westminster in 1306 and in 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France. His favourite Piers Gaveston was seized and executed in 1312 by barons led by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, after the Ordinances of 1311. In 1314 Robert the Bruce defeated him at Bannockburn, and famine and criticism followed. That is the reign in which Hadleigh became a house the king actually used. His first stay was from 5 to 18 September 1311, nearly two weeks. More than £50 was spent that year, probably to prepare for him, and seven masons and twenty-two of the king's carpenters worked at various times. They built a chamber over the main gate, plastered, roofed and fitted with windows and doors the next year. A damaged stretch of wall near the gate, likely curtain, was taken down and new foundations were dug, which shows that the ground by the entrance was already moving. In the same year a new gate was made at the postern to the park, with a chamber. That chamber may be the long house next to the postern, nearing completion in the following accounts. A long narrow building about 3 metres by 20 metres, found east of the later barbican and once called a stable, may be that long house.

The king was at the castle in the early spring of 1314, and for much of May and June 1315. The royal barge, a river boat, was moored at Hadleigh while he was in Kent in June 1315. He spent the start of the month at the castle, sailed to Kent on 9 June, and was back on the 21st. Hadleigh was probably as far as the barge could safely go, and he changed there into a larger boat. By May 1316 the castle had been assigned to the chamber, often a sign that a king meant to live in a place. He kept coming, though he more often dated his writs from the park lodge at Thundersley, a summer retreat he used in March and April 1318, in June 1318, in June and July 1320, in June 1321, and in June and July 1324. The lodge was probably the peel, a tower house, built for him in 1315. The building accounts speak from time to time of preparations against his coming. In 1313 or 1314 Roger de Blaxhale took delivery of a grey stallion at the king's stud at Hadleigh and Rayleigh. An undated document of the early fourteenth century has Gilbert de Chalk dwelling at the castle with a valuable courser of the king. In 1322 the parson of Rayleigh, Henry, claimed a tithe of the foals from the stud in Rayleigh parish, a custom he said was older than memory.

In 1317 or 1318 a section of curtain collapsed. In the winter of that year, when stone was being shipped from Westminster, sleds and hand barrows had to be used instead of carts between the wharf and the castle, because of the marsh, the sticky clay and the steep slope. In 1320 or 1321 a breach in the wall next to the barbican, probably the collapse of 1317 or 1318, was closed with wooden stakes, and a hedge with two ditches was thrown round the barbican for £4. The same account, of Roger de Blaxhale, records a garrison of twenty-four men employed for the custody of the castle and town while Bartholomew of Badlesmere and other enemies of the king were in rebellion. The rebels threatened to burn Hadleigh Castle, wounded some of the townsmen and of the garrison, and broke open the prison. This is the first mention of the prison. It was broken open, and the castle was not, so the prison may not have stood inside the walls. The wider crisis of those years is the barons' attack on the Despensers in 1321, Edward's execution of Lancaster, and the harsh rule that followed. After 1324 he does not seem to have visited Hadleigh or Thundersley again. In the summer of 1325 his carpenters were working at the castle once more. For the rest of his reign the accounts speak only of minor repair: walls, towers, the main gate, the barbican, the postern and the long house beside it, the hall, kitchen, larder and cellar, the prison, an old chamber and an armoury. Buildings known in the castle in this period are those same rooms, and a garrison of twenty-four soldiers was kept in crises. He travelled from London on the royal barge, which docked at a wharf south of the castle.

Isabella turned against him after she was sent to France in 1325. With Roger Mortimer she invaded in 1326. His regime collapsed. He was captured in November, gave up the crown in January 1327 to his son, and died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327, probably murdered on the orders of the new regime. One account says Isabella of France took Hadleigh from him when she deposed him in 1326. Another says she obtained the castle in 1327. In 1330 she surrendered it to her son.

Edward III was born at Windsor on 13 November 1312 and died on 21 June 1377. He became king in January 1327, at fourteen, after his mother and Mortimer had deposed his father. In 1330, at seventeen, he seized Mortimer and began to rule himself, and that is the year Hadleigh came back to him. He was a soldier-king. After a campaign in Scotland he claimed the French throne in 1337, as nephew of the last Capetian king and closer, as he argued, than Philip, the late king's cousin. The Hundred Years' War that followed ran from 1337 to 1453. Victories at Crécy and Poitiers led to the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, under which he gained land in France and renounced the claim to the French crown. An agreement reached at Rheims in 1359 is also described as granting him an enlarged Aquitaine in return for surrendering that claim, ratified in 1361 and celebrated at Westminster. The years from 1359 to 1369 were a relative peace. Hostilities opened again in 1369, and by 1375 most of the conquests were lost except the Pale of Calais. The Black Death had already cut the supply of labour. He outlived his eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, and his grandson Richard II succeeded him.

For thirty years after 1330 little was done at Hadleigh except the rebuilding of the water mill in 1350. Edward III seems to have come only once in that stretch, on 6 and 7 June 1342. His right to hunt in Hadleigh Park was confirmed in a document of 1338. Then, between 1360 and 1370, he spent more than £2,200, a sum also given as over £2,200, on a new eastern front, a new entrance and a set of royal apartments. The first stage, in 1361 to 1363, put the old domestic buildings back into repair. The works were summed up as the repair of the old houses and the construction of certain new towers and walls. The accounts also mention an old chapel and an old tower. In 1361 the square tower was re-tiled, probably one of the western towers and part of the old fabric. The king's hall was refurbished rather than rebuilt. The hall of about sixty years earlier was still sound enough, which matches the excavated third hall. Much of the earlier castle was kept. Hadleigh was unlike his other great projects, which usually swept the old work away.

The east front was then rebuilt entirely. A new curtain carried two drum towers at the angles, hexagonal inside and circular outside, with deep chamfered plinths, a string course, and a band of flint, continuous on the south-east tower and in alternate squares on the north-east. Mattocks were bought in 1362 or 1363 to dig their foundation trenches, and by the next winter the rising walls were covered against frost. They were battlemented in 1365, the scaffolding struck and the putlog holes filled. If each floor had a garderobe, the shafts show three storeys in the south-east tower and four in the north-east, though both were probably the same height, as at Conwy, so that the front would look symmetrical. They were meant to be seen by anyone coming up the estuary. One of the eastern towers still stands nearly to full height, three storeys, with narrow rectangular windows in the upper levels. The other keeps about a third of its original form. The north-east tower partly collapsed in the 1950s, and has also been described as largely collapsed then.

New royal lodgings and a chapel beside them went up at the same time. Piles for the king's chamber were supplied in 1362 or 1363, which suggests the southern range, probably on made ground. The chamber had two fireplaces. In 1363 to 1365 a pentice was built in front of the entrance and twenty-two casements were supplied for the glass. The chamber was probably on the first floor, with a circular stair that may have led to a wall-walk. The king probably stayed at least once a year from 1362 to 1365, the year the chambers and the chapel were battlemented. In 1362 he came at least six times, the busiest year of the work and the year he turned fifty. A metal plate covered with gold was bought for the chamber in 1362 to 1364, and in 1366 to 1369 plaster of Paris was bought for the chandelier.

Among the last works, in 1369 and 1370, was a new main gate with a projecting barbican on the north. The entrance moved from the east to the north, and the approach was pushed eastward by a massive wedge of earth. The barbican projects about 16 metres beyond the gate and is about 8 metres wide. Its eastern wall still stands about 3 metres high. Inside it, excavation found a pit 2.5 metres deep, also given as 3 metres by 6.75 metres and 2.5 metres deep, once spanned by a wooden turning bridge. Timbers from the bridge were in the fill, and a socket for a beam was cut in the eastern edge. Where the entrance broke the older curtain, the wall was refaced and slots for a portcullis were built in. They can still be seen. A circular or semicircular tower just west of the gate is probably the high tower, under construction in 1362 or 1363 and roofed with lead in 1366 to 1368. There may have been an earlier square tower on the spot, and the foundations took in part of the old curtain. The high tower still stands three storeys. Kitchens were found to the south-west of it, and a further range, read as a stable, between the barbican and the north tower. Their date is not exact, but they are thought to be of the fourteenth century. A causeway was thrown across the old eastern ditch, perhaps in this rebuilding, replacing the timber bridge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the castle, or one of the drum towers, was used as a lookout by revenue men watching for smugglers. Graffiti surrounds the seaward windows on an upper floor.

The accounts show how a royal work of this date was run. Materials come first, then necessaries such as locks, crampons, picks, a seal of office, scaffolding, a sieve and baskets for bread, then carriage by land and by water. At least two procurers were employed, one for goods and labour by land and one for goods by sea. An overseer at two shillings a week directed masons under a chief mason, stone-layers, carpenters under a director, sawyers, tilers, pargetters, lime and chalk burners, carters and labourers. The accounts for 1362 to 1364 name 154 different workmen. They had their own lodge, built in those years, and they worked to a bell, which was repaired in the same account. Men were paid to guard newly unloaded stone. Labourers were sent across the estuary to the king's other new castle, Queenborough, on the Isle of Sheppey, called the castle of Sheppey in the accounts. In 1366 to 1369 the cost of sending five Essex labourers across is recorded. In 1362, in the labour shortage after the Black Death, almost all the masons and craftsmen hired for the works at Windsor, Hadleigh and Sheppey secretly withdrew and took hire with other masters, and the king was moved to anger.

The man in charge was William Wykeham, also called William of Wykeham, later bishop of Winchester. In 1359 he was made chief keeper and surveyor of the castles of Windsor, Leeds, Dover and Hadleigh, and he was responsible for much of the work at Queenborough. He is the likely designer at Hadleigh. The clerks and surveyors named under him include Henry de Mammesfeld, Godfrey de la Rokele, Richard Snarry, John Barnton, John Werdeman and Nicholas Raunche. An account of 1378 to 1381, in the next reign, mentions a tower called Wikham's tour, not now identified. The link between the man and the place is strengthened by that name.

Why the rebuilding happened is told in two ways. One account makes Edward III the first king to see the castle as a base against French raids in the Hundred Years' War, and pairs it with Queenborough on the opposite shore so that the estuary, and the way to London, would be held from both banks. Portsmouth and Southampton had been sacked in 1338, and both projects began in 1361. The other account notes that the work fell in the peaceful years after Brétigny and Rheims, when the argument over the French throne was being negotiated rather than fought, and that the ageing king wanted a private retreat near London, comfortable and surrounded by hunting. From 1360 most of his time was spent in the south-east. The ransom of the French king had given him the money for Windsor, Westminster, the Tower, Queenborough, Hadleigh and smaller manor works. The inland entrance stayed relatively plain. From the river the battlemented south range and the twin towers toward the sea and the Continent made a show of wealth and of a claim he had not forgotten. Anyone coming up the estuary passed Queenborough and then Hadleigh. The castle was different in kind from a pure fortress: much of the old fabric remained, and the result was more intimate than a single grand plan.

The Gough map, dated between 1355 and 1366, is the earliest surviving picture of the castle. It marks Hadleigh, written Hadle, with castle turrets, and it also shows Queenborough, then called Sheppey. The signs are symbolic, but Hadleigh is picked out beside Windsor and the Tower. In the 1370s the king's health and his grip declined, but repairs continue in the accounts for 1372 to 1373, 1373 to 1374, and 1377, just before he died. One scheduling account says the castle remained a royal property until 1378.

After his death the crown's interest faded, and the castle spent much of its time in private hands. Between 1378 and 1381 work was done against the king's arrival on Wikham's tour, and a new ditch was made north of the castle, at a cost of £22, for its safe custody and defence against the enemies. That may have been a response to the Peasants' Revolt. Richard II, Edward's grandson, is known at the castle only on 5 July 1380. In 1381 Sir Aubrey de Vere, later tenth Earl of Oxford, was made chamberlain of the household, and Richard granted him custody of the castle and manor for life, so long as he maintained at his own cost the enclosures and lodges of the parks of Hadleigh, Thundersley and Rayleigh. Between August 1382 and November 1384 the crown spent a further £187 and 4 shillings on the castle, lodges and parks, with no detail of what was done. After that, Hadleigh drops out of the general accounts of the clerk of the king's works, and the duty seems to have passed fully to de Vere. He died possessed of the castle in 1400.

In July 1400 it was granted for life to Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, the fifth son of Edward III. He died in 1402, perhaps before he could visit. The grant passed to his son Edward, Earl of Rutland, who held it until he was killed at Agincourt in 1415. After it returned to the crown it was given in 1418 to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a son of the reigning Henry IV. Humphrey died in 1447. In that same year his death made Richard, Duke of York, heir to the childless Henry VI. Edward IV, born at Rouen on 28 April 1442, was Richard's eldest surviving son, then known as Earl of March. Both of Edward's parents descended from Edward III, and the death of Humphrey strengthened that claim. Upon Humphrey's death the castle was granted by Henry VI to Richard, Duke of York. The only recorded royal repair of the fifteenth century is some work by the crown in 1452. In 1453 Henry VI granted the castle and lordship, or manor, of Hadleigh, with courts, rents, mills, fisheries, view of frankpledge, a Wednesday market and the advowson of the church, to his half-brother Edmund Tudor, called Edmund de Hadham, Earl of Richmond. Edmund died in 1456 and the estate returned to the crown.

In 1465 the castle was in the possession of Elizabeth Woodville, and she kept it until 1485. That renewed the custom of giving Hadleigh to the queen as dower. Elizabeth Woodville, also spelt Wydville, Wydeville or Widvile, was born about 1437 at Grafton Regis and died on 8 June 1492. Her first husband, John Grey of Groby, a Lancastrian, was killed at the Second Battle of St Albans in 1461. In 1464 she married Edward IV in secret. She was crowned queen, the first consort since the Norman Conquest to have been one of the king's own subjects, and she was queen from 29 September 1464 until 3 October 1470 and again from 11 April 1471 until 9 April 1483. They had ten children. The rise of her family angered Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who in 1469 had her father, Richard Woodville, Earl Rivers, and her brother John executed. Edward IV died in April 1483. His son was briefly proclaimed Edward V and then set aside by Richard III. Elizabeth played a part in the accession of Henry VII in 1485, the year her hold on Hadleigh ended, and Henry married her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. Through that daughter she was the maternal grandmother of the future Henry VIII.

Henry VII, in 1504, granted the custody of the castle, manor and lordship to Leo Craiforde, an esquire otherwise unknown, together with the offices of constable and doorward, bailiff of the lordship and parker of the park. The title of doorward, or gatekeeper, from 1504 suggests that the constable had become something closer to a guard, and that the castle was no longer lived in as a residence. Henry VIII is not known to have used the castle himself. By 1509 or 1510 it was among the possessions of Catherine of Aragon, perhaps given at the time of the wedding celebrations. She probably held it until the annulment in 1533. The bailiff Edward Strangman rendered accounts to her in 1529 to 1531. In 1539 the castle was granted to Anne of Cleves, also written Anne of Cleeves, for her maintenance. In 1544 the castle, lordship and manor were granted for life to Catherine Parr when she became queen.

Catherine Parr was born in 1512, probably in late July or August, the eldest child of Sir Thomas Parr, lord of the manor of Kendal, and Maud Green. Her father was a descendant of Edward III. Her mother attended Catherine of Aragon, who was godmother to the child and gave her the name. The old story that she was born at Kendal Castle is now thought unlikely. The castle was already ruinous, and the family were living at their townhouse in Blackfriars while Maud attended the queen. Catherine Parr was the last of the six wives of Henry VIII, married on 12 July 1543, and queen consort until his death on 28 January 1547. She was the first woman in England to publish an original work in English under her own name, on 2 June 1545, and she published The Lamentation of a Sinner on 5 November 1547. From July to September 1544, the year of the Hadleigh grant, she was regent while Henry campaigned in France. She helped to persuade him to restore Mary and Elizabeth to the succession. After his death she kept the queen's jewels, became guardian of Elizabeth, took Lady Jane Grey into her household, and about six months later married Thomas Seymour. She died on 5 September 1548 in childbirth. Her funeral on 7 September 1548 was the first Protestant funeral in England, Scotland or Ireland to be held in English. There is no certain evidence that any of these royal owners visited Hadleigh after 1380. Holders of the estate may have stayed from time to time. The value was again the income, and the parks.

Henry VIII used the parks for deer, including live deer sent to restock Greenwich, and for timber. Timber from Hadleigh Park went to the king's ship Henry Grace a Dieu in 1513. Rayleigh Park supplied the works at Dover as early as 1214, and in 1275 it supplied the Tower of London. In 1235 Ralf Bernardson was allowed two bucks and six does from Rayleigh Park to stock a park of his own. A survey of Rayleigh Park in 1544 gives no acreage but values the soil at £20 a year, which suggests about 800 to 1,000 acres, about four times Hadleigh Park. Parts of its boundary survive as earthwork in New England, Tile and Pound Woods and around Oak Wood. It was sold in 1544 and broken up on its owner's death in 1583. Thundersley Park was sold in 1547. Its lodge had been Edward II's summer house, and in 1372 or 1373 Edward III ordered John Goldeman, reeve of Thundersley, to sell eight acres of wood called Birches and deliver the money to Nicholas Raunche for the repair of Hadleigh.

Hadleigh Park itself lay north of the castle, around the site of Park Farm, first recorded in 1235. In 1274 its perimeter scarcely amounted to one league, a league being commonly about an hour's walk or roughly five kilometres. A hundred greater and lesser animals could be kept in it. The pasture was worth 40 shillings a year and the pannage, in ordinary years, 2 shillings. A document of 1293 ordered two trenches through the middle of the park, the trees in the clearings cut, and the ground made arable. In a survey of 1362 the parker, named Hugo Parker, was allowed each day herbage for five animals and pannage for five pigs, windfall timber, the tops of trees felled for the castle or for sale, one shoulder of every deer taken in the park, fencing, and all the bracken. A vineyard in the park was built in 1362 and maintained through 1365. A new enclosure of fifty perches was made in 1363 to 1365, and further enclosure work ran from 1366 to 1371, probably to protect coppice and to divide the management of the ground. The lodge was called Park House in the fourteenth century and stood on the site of the present Park Farm. In the 1860s foundations were found under a grass plot at the house of a Mrs Wood, about a quarter of a mile north-east of the castle. The 1861 census places her family at Park Farm. The plan was a rectangle divided into two rooms, each fourteen feet square. A map of 1647 shows that lodge and a second lodge where the northern boundary met the London road.

The exact boundary is uncertain. The 1647 map gives a perimeter of about 3.6 kilometres and an area of 82.2 hectares, about 203 acres, while the same map is also said to record 228 acres. Another reading, with the southern edge along the stream in the valley north of the castle, gives about 3.5 kilometres and 72.2 hectares, about 178 acres. Both sit reasonably near a league. The reference in 1576 or 1577 to the late park suggests that by then it was no longer a formal park. A pale of bank and ditch is mentioned in 1362. No pale was seen on the ridge or round the north side of the castle, which may mean there was none there. If the medieval boundary followed the stream, the stream itself could have served as part of the pale. The park also hid the castle from the country beyond it, which gave the household privacy. Deer were kept, and kings hunted. Bones of a male merlin, the falcon favoured by noblewomen for hawking, were found at the bottom of a garderobe in the 1970s, with iron arrowheads suited to hunting, horseshoes, a rowel spur and two elaborate horse pendants.

The mill is a separate problem of place. It was first recorded in 1249 or 1250, in an inquest of the castle lands, valued at two marks a year, and it has also been described as already built by 1249. It was repaired in 1270 or 1271. A new water mill was built in 1350, probably on the same spot, and repaired often over the next thirty or forty years. In 1366 to 1368 two sawyers made a new water-wheel, six men cleaned and mended the mill pond, and ironwork was bought for the spindle. In 1368 to 1371 carpenters worked there again, and the iron included a bracket for the water-gate, two hinges, binding for the cog-wheel and a collar for the axle. In 1375 to 1377 the accounts buy piles for the dam, nails for the wheel, iron for the axle and for the great and the small water-gate, and a shotiere, a word whose meaning is unknown, for the foundation of the mill and the wharf. John Ferne and John Cupse were paid for blocking up the flood, building a new earth wall next to the king's marsh, and digging a ditch between the flood and the mill. Those works cost £162, 5 shillings and 3 pence. Oaks for the wharf repair came from the king's store in Rayleigh Park. The mill house stored goods that had come by boat. In 1368 or 1369 a chest for the king's armour was carried up from the mill house to the castle. The mill is recorded again in 1400, in 1453, and in 1576 or 1577, when it was worth 100 shillings a year. It appears on a map of the marshes in 1670.

It stood by a navigable creek. The name Mill Fleet is on the first-edition map of 1876, and the map of 1670 shows Mill Creek, also written Mill Creake, running to the foot of the castle hill, with the mill marked. A slight rise on the marshes below the castle was still pointed out in the nineteenth century, with building debris and a large piece of millstone. Aerial photographs after the North Sea storm surge of 1953 show a roughly square raised area about 10 metres across, a likely candidate, close to the western arm of the fleet. The rise and fall of the tide on this coast is about five metres, so the mill may have been a tide mill. When the London, Tilbury and Southend railway was built in the 1850s, men making culverts at the foot of the hill were reported to have found planks and timbers of sunken vessels, and a considerable quantity of ragstone from Kent, at a depth of twelve feet, or 3.6 metres. No note of that find has been traced in the railway accounts, but the report was written less than twenty years later by a local historian who may have known the story directly. The boats were probably bringing building stone from Kent, ferrying it in from larger ships moored further out. An older scheduling places a mill and dam in the valley about 70 metres north of the castle, and mentions a document of 1270. The dam is a low earthwork, less than half a metre high, 8 metres wide and 40 metres long, with a level area to the west read as a mill pond. The documents will not put the mill there. The northern dam is more likely a fishpond. A stank, or fishpond, is recorded on the estate in the late fourteenth century, and the dam may also have been a causeway into the park. The southern mill and wharf are not at present protected. In 1370 the constable took a ship called the St Nicholas into custody because its wool was not packed properly, a sign that the castle had a maritime police role. In 1372 barges were being built at Hadleigh.

The fishery of Hadleigh Ray, the intertidal ground south-east of the castle, supplied oysters, mussels and other fish, and the right is traced at least to the time of Henry III of England. It is named in grants of 1453, 1544 and 1551. The last two call them the queen's fisheries. Catherine Parr is said to have drawn a plan of the fisheries in her own hand. A dispute in 1824 produced a map of the bounds, which were probably much the same in the Middle Ages. The garderobes excavated in the 1970s contained cockles, whelks, oysters, mussels, ling, cod, flounder and crab from the estuary, and also deep-sea fish caught offshore. A pit dug in the courtyard clay and lined with chalk, with a mass of oyster shells at the bottom, may have been an attempt to keep shellfish alive, the chalk cutting the acidity of the water. In 1362 a sheepfold in the marsh, and the house of the sheepfold, were rebuilt, probably after the great storm of January 1362 blew them down.

From 1544 the estate began to be broken up. Rayleigh Park went that year, Thundersley Park three years later. In 1551 Edward VI sold the castle, the manor and the park at Hadleigh, with a separate fishery and the advowson of the church, to Richard Rich and his heirs for £700. Rich, also called Lord Riche, was the first Baron Rich, born in 1496 or 1497 and dead in 1567. Another account dates the sale to 1552. Edward VI, born at Hampton Court on 12 October 1537, the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, had been king since 28 January 1547, crowned on 20 February at the age of nine. He never ruled in person. A regency council was led first by his uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and then, from 1550, by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. The reign was marked by economic trouble, rebellion in 1549, war with Scotland, and the establishment of Protestant worship, including an English communion service. Edward died on 6 July 1553, aged fifteen. The sale of Hadleigh falls inside that minority.

Lord Rich is not thought to have meant to live in the castle. It was already decaying, and he disposed of most of it piecemeal, probably selling the stone for churches and other buildings round about. The archaeology of the destruction is clear. Mid-sixteenth-century pottery in the demolition layers of the third hall suggests that the hall was among the first parts to go. The roof tiles were slid off and dumped on either side. Window lead and stone were worth more. A well-made tiled hearth was built in the floor of the hall, and drips of lead in and around it show that the hearth was used to melt the lead cames of the windows and possibly the lead of the roof. North of it, a shallow rectangular pit was packed with flint and ragstone to make a platform for the lead moulds. The walls came down to the ground. At the same time a pit cut into the courtyard rubbish contained burning, probably from the demolition of outbuildings. The bridge pit in the barbican was filled, and the west wall of the barbican was taken down so that carts could carry stone out of the interior. The pottery places this between about 1550 and 1575. Even as a ruin the estate kept its value. A terrier of 1576 or 1577, for Lord Rich's son Sir Robert Rich, describes a water mill worth 100 shillings, the late park, the site of the manor, marshland and a fishery. The estate passed in 1620 to his son Robert, second Earl of Warwick. By then Camden had called the castle defaced with ruins. It later passed to a descendant, Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke. Pieces of Salvation Army Hadleigh Home Farm plates, bowls and cups, found in the robber trenches of the hall, show that stone was still being taken into the early twentieth century.

A rough sketch on a map of the park in 1647 is the earliest view after the Gough map, and it shows two towers, or perhaps four. The Buck brothers' engraving of 1738, from the north, is close to an anonymous drawing of 1735, which may be an earlier version of the same view. Francis Grose's view, published in 1772, shows the castle from the south and is a useful record of the southern curtain and towers before they fell. John Constable visited in 1814, made a drawing, and worked toward ten oil sketches and one painting. The painting was made in 1828 or early 1829, and it has also been dated to 1829. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in that year. It has been called one of his most monumental works. It shows the castle of the early nineteenth century as a man-made ruin giving way to weather and to the marsh. One sketch is at the Tate in London. The painting hangs at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. By the middle of the nineteenth century the site belonged to Major Spitty. In 1891 it was bought by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. He established a farm colony where poor men could be trained in farming before they took work in Britain or in the colonies overseas. The farm later grew to 3,200 acres and took in much of the land north and west of the castle, including the castle itself, with a brickworks, a poultry farm, nurseries, piggeries and a new wharf. A smaller farm colony is still there. Considerable subsidence between 1898 and 1923 brought down the southern curtain wall, which now lies as displaced rubble about four metres down the slope from where it stood.

The Salvation Army placed the castle in the guardianship of the Ministry of Works in 1948, and it has also been described as given to the Ministry of Works in that year. It is a scheduled monument, the record of scheduling dated to January 1915 and updated in March 1997, and it is a Grade I listed building. It has been in guardianship since 1948. Further slips came in 1969, in 1970 and in 2002. The winter of 1969 to 1970 opened the ground for large excavations in 1971 and 1972, mainly in the western half of the enclosure, after parchmarks of the domestic buildings had shown in photographs taken by J K S St Joseph. P L Drewett's work, also placed in 1971 to 1973, found three successive halls and solars, the kitchens and the barbican bridge pit. His results appeared as two interim reports, a summary in 1975, and a draft guidebook that was not published. Earlier, between April and August 1863, H M King directed excavations for the Essex Archaeological Society. His father, H W King, published them later, in 1889, and a paper of 1863 also treats the castle. The Kings were ahead of their time in method, but the finds were not adequately published and have since been lost. They dug round the south semicircular tower, in the sunken area in the north-east of the bailey, round the high tower, and in the area now thought to be the kitchens.

In 2002 a measured survey and a light cleaning of the fresh slip faces on the south side were made, with resistivity and magnetometer survey inside the bailey to see what the landslides threatened. In 2004 excavation on the edge of a major slip in the south of the bailey found the possible Roman gully, medieval levelling and make-up of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a cut with a spread of mortar that may be a robbed wall, and a deposit of tile that may belong to the repair or remodelling of 1360 to 1370. There was also evidence of a timber structure, possibly tied to rebuilding in the late fourteenth century. Monitoring in September 2004, December 2004 and March 2005 found no new slip and no newly exposed deposits. In January 2009 Magnus Alexander and Susan Westlake surveyed the earthworks and re-read the documents. That work redefined the castle banks, argued that the part played by Edward II had been overshadowed by the later works of Edward III, identified probable garden terraces on the south, moved the mill and wharf to the marshes south-east of the castle, read the scheduled northern dam as a fishpond, and showed that earthworks about 500 metres east, once thought perhaps to be a building of the castle, are of recent origin. A heavy anti-aircraft gun site of the Second World War survives on Sandpit Hill, west of the farm colony, two batteries, an earlier 4.5-inch site and a later 5.5-inch site, one of thirty-nine such sites in Essex of which only seven survive in good condition. It is a separate work, not part of the medieval castle.

What stands now is the south-east drum tower to about three storeys, the broken north-east drum, the high tower by the north gate, stretches of curtain on the north, east and west, the consolidated footings of the halls, solars and kitchens, and the earthworks of the barbican, the eastern platforms and the southern terraces. The castle still sits inside the ground of the nineteenth-century farm, and beyond that is Hadleigh Country Park, a site of special scientific interest especially for its invertebrates. In 2008 the farm close to the castle was named as the venue for the mountain-bicycle competition of the 2012 summer games. The ruin itself remains what the clay and the stone-robbers left: a royal house and an estate centre on an unstable hill, built to be seen from the river, lived in hardest by Edward II and by the ageing Edward III, and then taken apart for its materials.

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