# Hastings Castle

Grade I listed ruins in Hastings, East Sussex, England, UK

Hastings, United Kingdom

Settlement · Fortification

## Story

• Hastings Castle is a ruined keep and bailey on the West Hill at Hastings, about 60 to 70 metres above the English Channel, and much of its south side has fallen into the sea.
• William of Normandy raised a wooden motte here in 1066, before the Battle of Hastings, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows that work under the name HESTENGA CEASTRA.
• A stone rebuild and the college of St Mary followed. The Counts of Eu held the castle, and the storm of February 1287 carried part of the cliff and the walls into the sea.
• The keep is gone. Curtain wall, a gate with two round towers, tunnel-vaulted stores, and the church ruin remain, beside the Iron Age bank of the Ladies' Parlour.
• The grounds are open every day from 11am to 4pm, last entry is at 3.30pm, adult tickets are £6.95, and dogs are not allowed to enter.

## Visiting

The site is open every day from 11am to 4pm, and last entry is at 3.30pm. The site is open on bank holidays. Book in advance, because the grounds sometimes close for a special event. Adult tickets are £6.95, tickets for a visitor under 18 are £5.45, and a child under 5 is free.
A ticket for a Hastings resident in the listed postcodes is £5.45, and a ticket for a National Art Fund member is £5.45. A family ticket for one adult and up to three children is £16, and a family ticket for two adults and up to three children is £21. Tickets may be bought at the ticket office on arrival. Dogs are not allowed to enter.
Visitors should dress for the weather, because the site is open to the air and has no shelter. Visitors are not allowed to climb the walls. Children are not allowed to walk to the cliff edges. Entry is by a ramp and then two small steps.
A group of 15 or more should book in advance for a discounted ticket, and an unbooked group pays the ordinary tickets. The castle is also said to be open from March to October. A further season leaves the site open from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 4.30pm, from 30 April 2026 until 30 October 2026, and closed in winter.

## History

Hastings Castle is a ruined keep and bailey on the West Hill above Hastings, in East Sussex, about 60 to 70 metres over the English Channel. Large parts of the south side have fallen into the sea. From the cliff the view runs west toward Normans' Bay, Pevensey Bay, and Beachy Head, and on a clear day only the highest ground near Boulogne-sur-Mer and Cap Blanc-Nez would even theoretically show.

The plateau outside the walls, the Ladies' Parlour, is an Iron Age promontory fort whose bank still rises as high as 4 metres, with a ditch that reaches about 2.4 metres deep and 20 metres wide. Worked flints, mostly Neolithic, erode from the cliff, and Romano-British pottery was found in rock shelters in 1905. A motte was raised when William of Normandy landed in 1066, though one account doubts that the first mound stood on this later site, and a separate thesis places a burh of about 990 here, used by William for two weeks before the battle.

The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066, some miles north of the castle, between William and Harold Godwinson. Harold had just destroyed Harald Hardrada and Tostig at Stamford Bridge. William had landed at Pevensey on 28 September, built a wooden castle at Hastings, and marched out when scouts found the English on Senlac Hill.

The Bayeux Tapestry shows that motte going up under the name HESTENGA CEASTRA, an earthen mound with a wooden palisade. The cloth is an embroidery nearly 70 metres long, probably made in England for Bishop Odo of Bayeux, and since September 2026 it has been on loan in London. Robert, Count of Eu, who had commanded 60 ships in the crossing, received the castle around 1068.

In 1070 William ordered a stone rebuild and St Mary’s Chapel. A college of priests was here by 1094, perhaps begun about 1090, and there is also evidence of a collegiate body in the reign of Edward the Confessor.

The stone keep stood after 1172 on a mound that buried the first motte, with the main masonry placed in the early 1170s, 1182 to 1183, and 1190 to 1191. Curtain wall, a north-eastern gate with two round towers, and tunnel-vaulted stores survive. The keep does not.

King John ordered the castle slighted in 1216 as he retreated before Prince Louis of France, and another account speaks of repairs that year. Henry III refortified it in 1220. In 1249 he gave the Honour of Eu to Peter of Savoy, who held it until 1254 and again from 1262 until his death in 1268, with the Lord Edward, the future Edward I, holding it in between. The February storm of 1287 collapsed the cliff, took part of the castle, blocked the harbour, and ended Hastings as a trading port.

French attacks in 1339 and 1377 burned buildings in the town, the church was repaired in 1331, and by 1399 the castle was ruined or left to decay. An attempt in 1470 to make the college an alien Benedictine cell failed, and the college was dissolved in 1546. Thomas Pelham is said to have bought the hill on 23 June 1591, a date taken from Charles Dawson’s 1909 history and questioned because Dawson was a known forger. The family farmed and ploughed the bailey until the ruins were forgotten.

The Earl of Chichester, Thomas Pelham, opened the ruins again in 1824 and rebuilt parts of the chapel from fallen blocks. A Georgian St Mary in the Castle rose at the cliff foot in 1825 to 1828, the dungeons were found in 1870, and the West Hill Lift opened in 1891. Bombing in the Second World War did further damage. The Hastings Corporation bought the site in 1951, and a 1990 telling of 1066, housed in a replica siege tent, has since closed, leaving its concrete plinth.

A watching brief in 2016 found a mortared sandstone wall and a chalk surface between the south-west tower and the collegiate church, and two pieces of adult human bone that may mark burials inside the walls. The grounds now open every day from 11am to 4pm, with last entry at 3.30pm, though other accounts limit the public season to March to October or to 30 April to 30 October. Adult tickets are 6.95 pounds, dogs are not allowed, and visitors are asked to dress for the weather on an open hill.

## Photographs

- [Hastings Castle with town in the background — Kreepin Deth](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Hastings_Castle_2012-07-28.jpg)
- [Hastings Castle — Steve Daniels](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1297448.jpg)
- [Curtain wall, Hastings Castle — Poliphilo](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Curtain_wall%2C_Hastings_Castle.JPG)
- [From a 1970s Tourist Information Brochure. — Phil Sellens from East Sussex](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/A_visit_to_Hastings_Castle._mid._1970s._%2810134463636%29.jpg)
- [Leslie Badham was a well known Hastings artist and a tutor at the Hastings School of Art. He died from injuries sustained during WW2, when his house in Priory — Phil Sellens from East Sussex](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Castle_Hill_Road%2C_from_a_watercolour_painting_by_E_Leslie_Badham_%281873-1944%29_%287164231264%29.jpg)
- [Hastings Castle — Oast House Archive](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1945093.jpg)
- [Hastings Castle — N Chadwick](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2225497.jpg)
- [Ruins of Hastings castle — Secretlondon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Hastings_castle_1.jpg)
- [Ruins of Hastings Castle — Secretlondon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Hastings_castle_2.jpg)
- [Hastings Castle — N Chadwick](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2695835.jpg)

## Sources

- [Hastings Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Hastings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings) — Wikipedia
- [Bayeux Tapestry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry) — Wikipedia
- [Robert, Count of Eu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert,_Count_of_Eu) — Wikipedia
- [Peter II of Savoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_II_of_Savoy) — Wikipedia
- [South England flood of February 1287](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_England_flood_of_February_1287) — Wikipedia
- [East Sussex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Sussex) — Wikipedia
- [English Channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Channel) — Wikipedia
- [America Ground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Ground) — Wikipedia
- [Ark Alexandra Academy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_Alexandra_Academy) — Wikipedia
- [Conquest Hospital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquest_Hospital) — Wikipedia
- [Sally-Ann Hart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally-Ann_Hart) — Wikipedia
- [Sir Thomas Pelham, 1st Baronet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_Pelham,_1st_Baronet) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Pelham, 2nd Earl of Chichester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pelham,_2nd_Earl_of_Chichester) — Wikipedia
- [Plan your visit](https://hastingscastle.org.uk/visit) — Hastings Castle
- [Hastings Castle, the Collegiate Church of St Mary and the Ladies' Parlour](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1017539) — Historic England
- [Hastings Castle](https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?resourceID=19191&uid=417208) — Heritage Gateway
- [Archaeological watching brief at Hastings Castle](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/data-catalogue/resource/c80c7b3ed04252ceef9a635f8c0708442c556fea00606c258b5d6fc5781af6b2) — Archaeology Data Service
- [The Settlement and Landscape Context of the Battle of Hastings](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00766097.2021.1925007) — Medieval Archaeology
- [Hastings Castle stage one report](https://hastings.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s56551/Appendix%203%20-%20Hastings%20Castle%20RIBA%20Stage%201%20Report.pdf) — Hastings Borough Council
- [Hastings Castle 2012-07-28.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_Castle_2012-07-28.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1297448.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1297448.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Curtain wall, Hastings Castle.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Curtain_wall,_Hastings_Castle.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [A visit to Hastings Castle. mid. 1970s. (10134463636).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_visit_to_Hastings_Castle._mid._1970s._(10134463636).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Castle Hill Road, from a watercolour painting by E Leslie Badham (1873-1944) (7164231264).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_Hill_Road,_from_a_watercolour_painting_by_E_Leslie_Badham_(1873-1944)_(7164231264).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1945093.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1945093.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings Castle - geograph.org.uk - 2225497.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2225497.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings castle 1.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_castle_1.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings castle 2.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_castle_2.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Hastings Castle - geograph.org.uk - 2695835.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hastings_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2695835.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Hastings Castle is a keep and bailey ruin on the cliffs beside the town of Hastings, in East Sussex. It stands on the West Hill, about 60 to 70 metres above the sea. Large parts of the castle have fallen into the English Channel. The ground gives a clear view west along the coast toward Normans' Bay, Pevensey Bay, and Beachy Head, and it looks out over ships in the Channel. The nearest points in France are given as Boulogne-sur-Mer at about 73 kilometres and Cap Blanc-Nez at about 80 kilometres. Only the highest ground at those places would even theoretically show on a very clear day.

The English Channel is the arm of the Atlantic that separates southern England from northern France and joins the North Sea through the Strait of Dover. It is the busiest shipping water in the world. It runs for about 560 kilometres and narrows from about 240 kilometres to about 34 kilometres in the Strait of Dover, covering some 75,000 square kilometres. Roman writers called it Oceanus Britannicus or Mare Britannicum, and Isidore of Seville used Oceanus Gallicus in the sixth century. Cornish speakers call it Mor Bretennek and Breton speakers Mor Breizh. The Welsh name Môr Udd once covered both this water and the North Sea. Old English called it the South Sea, a name that later dropped away, while the Narrow Seas remained as a name for the Channel and the North Sea together. An admiral’s duty over those seas lasted until 1822, when several states adopted a three-mile limit. The word channel entered Middle English in the thirteenth century from Old French chanel. By the middle of the fifteenth century an Italian map called the water the ocean of the Britons, now the English Channel. Dutch maps of the sixteenth century used Engelse Kanaal, and by the 1590s the name was familiar enough for the history plays of Henry VI. After 1707 official maps often preferred British Channel or British Sea, and English Channel was the official name again in the nineteenth century. The French name la Manche, in use by the seventeenth century, is usually taken from the sleeve-like shape of the water.

East Sussex is the ceremonial county on that coast. Kent lies to the north-east, West Sussex to the west, Surrey to the north-west, and the English Channel to the south. The county covers 1,792 square kilometres and had an estimated population of 844,752 in 2024. Brighton and Hove is the largest settlement. Hastings lies in the south-east, with Eastbourne to the south and the rural towns of Crowborough, Hailsham, and Lewes inland. The north-east is part of the Weald, once a great woodland on a sandstone anticline, and Crowborough Hill reaches 242 metres. The south-west is the chalk of the South Downs, rising to 248 metres at Ditchling Beacon and ending in cliffs such as the Seven Sisters. The larger rivers are the Rother, which forms part of the boundary with Kent, the Cuckmere, and the Ouse, which reaches the sea at Newhaven. The county grew out of the kingdom of the South Saxons, who settled here in the fifth century after the Romans had gone. Coastal position brought later invaders, including the Normans after the English army was defeated at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Older trades of fishing, iron, and wool have declined or gone. Sussex was divided into six rapes. From the twelfth century the three eastern rapes held their own quarter sessions, with Lewes as their county town. Parliament formalised that split in 1865, and in 1889 the two parts became administrative counties. Brighton, Eastbourne, and Hastings were county boroughs. In 1974 East Sussex became a non-metropolitan and ceremonial county, and those boroughs became districts. Mid Sussex, including Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath, passed to West Sussex. In 1997 Brighton and Hove became a unitary authority and in 2000 a city, while remaining inside the ceremonial county. The county council’s area is Lewes, Wealden, Rother, Eastbourne, and Hastings. A borough account puts the population of Hastings itself at about 92,000.

The operator of the ruin describes an ancient monument used for community events and for thinking about some 8,000 years of settlement, and says that long disuse has left a wide variety of plants and wildlife on the hill. A design study of the grounds notes acid, calcareous, and neutral grassland on the sandstone cliff, nesting aggregations of ivy bees on exposed sandstone in the Ladies' Parlour, and a population of black redstart. The same study calls the castle the first Norman castle built after the invasion, and it also calls the present ruin largely neglected and hard to enter, which sits beside the operator’s statement that the grounds now open every day.

The flat grassy plateau outside the walls, called the Ladies' Parlour, is part of the same protected monument as the castle and the collegiate church. It is read as part of a defensive enclosure that once covered the whole promontory, half of which the Norman castle later took over. The crescent bank still stands as high as 4 metres in places and sinks toward the south and west. The ditch runs from north-west to south-east between Castle Hill Road and the cliff above Burdett Place, and toward the south-east it reaches about 2.4 metres deep and 20 metres wide. A hollow on the east side may once have continued along Castle Hill Road as an outer boundary. Promontory forts of this kind belong to the Iron Age, given as 700 BC to AD 43, and they are rare in England, especially outside Cornwall. Some were lived in continuously and some were refuges, and most were abandoned during the first century BC. Charles Dawson held that the whole promontory was an Iron Age site. Excavation has been said to prove that the main bank of the Ladies' Parlour, treated in that account as the outer bailey, is partly Iron Age. Excavations in 1968 recorded at least one Iron Age ditch there and indicated that the lower part of the rampart in the north-east corner may be Iron Age. A design chronology also marks Mesolithic occupation at 6000 BC and an Iron Age hill fort at 800 BC, a tighter date than the broader Iron Age span.

The same ground, and a cave in the seaward cliff below the castle, are sites of Mesolithic activity. Worked flints, chiefly Neolithic, still erode from the cliff face at the Ladies' Parlour. Investigations in and near the castle have not produced a substantial Romano-British settlement, but Romano-British pottery was found in 1905 in rock shelters. A 2021 model of the town’s setting proposes something later and larger: a burh on Castle Hill or West Hill around AD 990, raised by King Æthelred II as one part of a defence against Viking attack, tied to a mint, a port, and shipbuilding, and perhaps given defences, a tower-nave church, and a monumental gateway. On that model William used the place for two weeks in the autumn of 1066 as his command post before the battle. That is put forward as a new thesis. Another account says a motte was thrown up as soon as William landed in 1066, but that there is no evidence it stood on the later castle site, and that the present site was taken into use shortly after the conquest and stayed in royal hands until 1331.

The castle’s own narrative says that immediately after landing in 1066 William of Normandy ordered three fortifications: Pevensey Castle in September 1066, reusing the Roman Saxon Shore fort of Anderitum; Hastings, before the Battle of Hastings; and Dover. Hastings began as a wooden motte-and-bailey near the sea. A summary of the ruins dates the building to the twelfth century and the stone fabric as stone, and it records the place as ruined by 1399, a fragmented ruin, a keep and bailey, owned by the local authority and open to the public. The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066, some miles north of the castle, about 7 miles or 11 kilometres north-west of Hastings, near the present town of Battle, and a borough account places Battle Abbey about 6.5 miles from the castle. Harold’s camp on the night of 13 October was at Caldbec Hill, by a hoar-apple tree, about 8 miles or 13 kilometres from William’s castle. The English position on the day was Senlac Hill, about 6 miles or 9.7 kilometres from that castle.

The battle was the fight between the Norman-French army of William, Duke of Normandy, and the English army of King Harold Godwinson, and it opened the Norman Conquest. Edward the Confessor, childless, died in January 1066, on 5 January. Harold, Earl of Wessex, the richest English aristocrat and the son of Godwin, was elected by the Witenagemot and crowned by Ealdred, Archbishop of York. Norman propaganda said the rite was performed by Stigand, the uncanonically elected Archbishop of Canterbury. William claimed that Edward had promised him the throne and that Harold had sworn to it. Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, claimed through an agreement between his predecessor Magnus the Good and the earlier English king Harthacnut, that if either died without an heir the other would inherit both kingdoms. Harold’s exiled brother Tostig raided the south-east with ships from Flanders, then the north, and was driven back by Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria, before he joined Hardrada. Hardrada invaded in early September with more than 300 ships and perhaps 15,000 men. At Fulford on 20 September the Norwegians defeated Edwin and Morcar and occupied York. Harold, who had kept a large army and fleet on the south coast through the middle of 1066, dismissed the militia and the fleet on 8 September because the men needed to harvest. He then marched north and on 25 September destroyed the Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge. Hardrada and Tostig were killed, and only 24 of the original 300 ships were needed to carry the survivors away. The English victory left Harold’s army battered and far from the south.

Behind that crisis lay a longer Norman connection. In 911 Charles the Simple allowed Vikings under Rollo to settle in Normandy. They converted, intermarried, and pushed the duchy west. In 1002 King Æthelred II married Emma, sister of Richard II, Duke of Normandy. Their son Edward spent years in exile in Normandy and took the English throne in 1042, bringing Norman courtiers, soldiers, and clergy into power, especially in the Church, while he struggled with Godwin and his sons. William gathered an army from Normandy, Brittany, Flanders, and the rest of France, and spent nearly nine months building a fleet from nothing. A papal banner from Alexander II is claimed only in the account of William of Poitiers and is debated. In April 1066 Halley’s Comet was seen across Europe and was tied by contemporaries to the English succession. William mustered at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme and was ready to cross by about 12 August, but he waited, either for weather or to avoid the English fleet. He crossed a few days after Stamford Bridge and landed at Pevensey on 28 September. A few ships were blown to Romney, where his men fought the local fyrd. After the landing his forces built a wooden castle at Hastings and raided the country around it, and they raised further fortifications at Pevensey.

The size of either army is not known. A contemporary document claims 776 ships, perhaps an inflated figure, and contemporary army totals run from 14,000 to 150,000. Modern estimates for William’s force include 7,000 to 8,000 men with 1,000 to 2,000 cavalry, 10,000 to 12,000 men, 10,000 men with 3,000 cavalry, or 7,500 men. About half were infantry, a quarter cavalry, and a quarter archers or crossbowmen. Later companion-lists are padded, and only about 35 named men can be securely placed with William. English estimates run from 5,000 to 13,000, and most arguments settle on 7,000 to 8,000, a mix of fyrd and housecarls. About 20 Englishmen can reasonably be named, among them Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine. The national fyrd could furnish about 14,000 men, one for every five hides, usually for two months, organised by the hundred under earl, bishop, or sheriff. Between 1046 and 1065 the whole fyrd was called out only three times, in 1051, 1052, and 1065. Housecarls, the king’s and some earls’ personal armsmen, fought on foot like the fyrd but with better armour. The English army at Hastings was almost entirely infantry and had few archers. Norman armour was usually a knee-length mail hauberk, sometimes scaled in metal, horn, or leather, with a conical helmet and a nasal bar. Infantry shields were generally round and wooden; cavalry shields were kite-shaped. The couched lance was probably not used at Hastings, because the ground did not favour a long mounted charge. Swords were straight and double-edged. Some cavalry may have used a mace, and archers a self bow or a crossbow, most of them unarmoured.

Harold left much of his strength in the north, including Edwin and Morcar, and marched south, probably learning of the landing on the way. He paused in London for about a week and may have covered the roughly 200 miles at about 27 miles a day. He seems to have hoped to surprise William, but scouts reported him, and William marched out from Hastings to meet him. Early attacks did not break the English line. The Normans then pretended to flee and turned on the men who pursued. Harold’s death, probably near the end of the day, brought retreat and defeat. The fighting ran from about nine in the morning until dusk. After further marching and skirmishes William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. Rebellions continued, but the battle is treated as the culmination of his conquest. Casualty figures are hard, and one estimate gives 2,000 dead among the invaders and about twice that number among the English. William founded a monastery on the battlefield, and the high altar of the abbey church is said to mark where Harold died.

The Bayeux Tapestry is the embroidered cloth, nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres tall, that tells the events leading to the conquest and the battle. It is thought to have been made in England in the decades after 1066. The earliest known written reference is an inventory of 1476. It is embroidery, not a woven tapestry: wool on coarse linen, in four stitches and ten natural dyes. Fifty-eight scenes survive, with Latin titles. The count of figures is 623 people, 994 animals, 438 plants, 37 buildings and fortifications, and 41 ships and boats. The story runs from the last years of Edward the Confessor in 1064 to the battle, and the final scenes are missing. Nearly half of the scenes come before the invasion. The cloth is generally thought to have been commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, who appears four times and who later became Earl of Kent and, in William’s absence, regent of England. A French legend gives it to Queen Matilda and her ladies, and in France it is sometimes called the tapestry of Queen Matilda. It is read both as a source for clothes, castles, ships, and custom, and as a telling strongly favourable to William. One scene shows news brought to William, the Normans building a motte and bailey at Hastings to defend their position, messengers passing between the armies, and William speaking to his men. The castle’s caption on the cloth is HESTENGA CEASTRA, an earthen motte raised under a wooden palisade. The English fight on foot behind a shield wall and the Normans are shown on horses. The battle’s date, less than three weeks after Stamford Bridge, is not explained on the cloth.

Scholars found the hanging again in 1729, when it was being shown once a year in the cathedral. It stayed in the cathedral treasury until the late eighteenth century and survived the French Revolution. Since 1983 it has been on permanent display at the seminary in Bayeux. The museum there is closed for renovation until 2027. In September 2026 the cloth left France for the first time, on loan for display in London, and it is due back by July 2027.

Robert, Count of Eu and Lord of Hastings, commanded 60 ships in the fleet that carried the landing. He was the son of William I, Count of Eu, and Lesceline, and he died between 1089 and 1093. Around 1068 he received Hastings Castle and the neighbouring lands previously held by Onfroy du Tilleul. Domesday records that Robert and his son William held lands in separate counties, together worth about 690 pounds a year. In 1069 the king sent Robert to support Robert, Count of Mortain, in watching a Danish fleet in the mouth of the Humber, while Mortain was also ordered against the revolt of Eadric the Wild in the west. When the Danes came out to plunder, the two commanders surprised them and drove them back to sea. After the Conqueror’s death Robert first backed Robert Curthose, then turned to William II, received garrisons for his castles, and stood with the English king in the Norman intervention of February 1091. He died after that campaign. His son William II succeeded as Count of Eu and Lord of Hastings. Robert married Beatrix de Falaise. He gave land to Fécamp Abbey in 1051 and was buried at Saint-Michel du Tréport, the abbey he founded near Eu between 1057 and 1066, reportedly in memory of a first wife, with the counsel of Duke William and Maurilius, archbishop of Rouen. The counts of Eu held Hastings for most of the Norman period, beginning with this Robert. Later the house lost the castle when the heir William chose his French property over the English and was refused the inheritance.

In 1070 William ordered the castle rebuilt in stone, together with St Mary’s Chapel. A college of priests had been established by 1094, and one account says about 1090. The bailey held that college. Colleges were groups of ecclesiastical buildings for small communities of priests under a looser rule than a monastery, founded to pray for a patron. Most belong between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, and an early example such as Hastings is a rare survivor. The church ruins stand against the north wall and include an upstanding square tower. The church had a central tower whose western arch has been rebuilt, and a square tower at the west end of the nave. The walls are stone rubble. There is documentary evidence of a collegiate foundation at Hastings in the reign of Edward the Confessor, but Domesday does not record it as such, and one view allows that the church may be older than the conquest. Another view has the church begun after the castle of about 1070 and before 1094. A design account says the bailey enclosed the college established in 1094, and that the site had been chosen to replace an earlier wooden keep, as a lookout and a defence against attack from the sea, and that the castle’s presence encouraged the town.

The original motte lies buried inside a later enlargement, on which a stone keep stood after 1172. One account places the keep in 1172. The mound as it stands is of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, with the first motte inside it. The main stone works are placed in 1171 to 1174, 1182 to 1183, and 1190 to 1191. Much of the curtain is later twelfth century, built of sandstone cut from the ditch east of the mound, which is 6 metres deep. Coastal erosion later undercut the south side of the bailey. Rock-cut tunnels north-west of the mound are Norman storage chambers. Along the north, north-west, and north-east there is curtain wall, and on the north-east a gatehouse with two rounded towers. Outside the walls on the north, narrow tunnel-vaulted passages were storerooms, later called the dungeons. The keep itself no longer exists, and the original keep is no longer visible. A scheduling account says the castle had been abandoned by the fifteenth century. An inventory summary says it was ruined by 1399. Another account says that by 1399 it had been allowed to decay, after encroachment by the sea and raids in the fourteenth century.

In 1216 King John ordered Hastings and Pevensey to be slighted while he fell back from a French army that had landed in Kent under Prince Louis of France. Another account speaks of repairs in 1216 and then progressive ruin. In 1220 Henry III refortified the castle. In 1249 Henry III gave the castle and its lands, the Honour of Eu, to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, who held them until 1254. They then passed to the Lord Edward, the future Edward I of England. In 1262, needing money, Edward quitclaimed the honour and Hastings back to Peter, who held them until his death in 1268.

Peter II, called the Little Charlemagne, was born about 1203, possibly at Susa, probably the seventh child of Thomas I, Count of Savoy, and Margaret of Geneva. He was Count of Savoy from 1263 until he died on 15 May 1268. Through his sister Beatrice of Savoy he was uncle to four queens: Margaret of Provence, Eleanor of Provence, Sanchia of Provence, and Beatrice of Provence. He began in the Church, a canon at Lausanne from 1226 to 1233 and briefly acting bishop, and a canon at Lyon and provost at Aosta and Geneva, before leaving that life in 1234. His English lands were the Honour of Richmond, the Honour of the Eagle, also called the Honour of Pevensey, and the Honour of Eu, also called the Honour of Hastings, together with the wardship of John de Warenne, which brought lands around Lewes. Eleanor married Henry III in January 1236. On 20 April 1240 Henry gave Peter the Honour of Richmond. Peter was knighted on 5 January 1241 and was popularly called Earl of Richmond, though he never used the title and it was never given to him in official documents. From 1241 to 1242 he was castellan of Dover and Keeper of the Coast, the office later called Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. On 25 September 1241 he received the Honour of the Eagle and the Warenne wardship. In 1246 the king granted him Pevensey Castle. The Honour of Eu strengthened his hold on the south coast in 1249. He built the Savoy Palace, begun on land by the Thames granted in February 1246, and completed in 1263. In the Second Barons’ War he first sided with Simon de Montfort in 1258 and then, from 1261, with his niece Eleanor and Henry III. After Evesham in 1265, Pevensey and Richmond were besieged while held by his constables. He died without a male heir at Pierre-Châtel and was buried at Hautecombe. His will left his English lands to Eleanor, and a codicil left the Sussex lands to his nephews Amadeus and Louis, but Henry III gave Richmond to John of Brittany and the Sussex lands to the Lord Edward. His brother Philip succeeded him in Savoy.

In February 1287 a storm redrew the south coast. Cliff falls and silting left some ports inland and gave others a new access to the sea. Winchelsea on Romney Marsh was destroyed and later rebuilt on the cliff behind it. Broomhill was destroyed. The Rother was turned away from New Romney, which was almost destroyed and left a mile from the coast, and the river reached the sea at Rye instead. At Hastings the storm brought down a cliff, took part of Hastings Castle with it, blocked the harbour, and ended the town’s life as a trading port, though fishing went on. Hastings and New Romney were two of the Cinque Ports struck, along with the antient town of Winchelsea, while Rye gained. A separate storm in December 1287, known in the Netherlands as St Lucia’s flood, and a surge on 1 January 1286, are tied to the decline of Dunwich. A design account says three major storms in the thirteenth century were later credited with bringing down the tower, and that one of them left the church uninhabitable, and that the late-1200s fall of the cliff took part of the bailey wall and with it the castle’s military value. The soft sandstone was also eaten by salt. The America Ground, lower in the town, had been the mouth of the Priory Stream and a natural harbour, navigable inland toward Hole Farm near Blacklands Church and belonging to the Augustinian Priory of the Holy Trinity, until shingle closed it after the great storm of 1287.

Through the next century the sea kept taking the castle. In 1339 and again in 1377 the French attacked the town and burned many buildings, including homes. A design chronology places French attacks in the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 to 1339, regular pillaging by local people in 1343 during the town’s economic decline, and from 1350 to 1450 further storms that brought down the tower. The Church of St Mary was repaired in 1331, but the castle was not restored to any real strength. The church inside the walls was damaged in the French raid of 1399. In 1470 an attempt to turn the college into an alien Benedictine cell failed. The college was dissolved in 1546. One account places the abandonment of the church within the castle in the fifteenth century, when worship moved to a new church. The original keep had gone from sight.

On 23 June 1591 the site is said to have been purchased by Thomas Pelham, identified with Sir Thomas Pelham, 1st Baronet. That date is given by Charles Dawson in his 1909 history of the castle, the castlery, the rape, and the battle, and the citation is questioned because Dawson is a known forger. A separate design account also says the Pelham family bought the castle and its land in 1591, turned it into farmland, and ploughed the inner bailey, so that archaeological deposits were lost. Sir Thomas Pelham, who died on 2 December 1624, was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Pelham of Laughton and Anne Sackville, whose mother made her a first cousin of Anne Boleyn. He was at Lewes Grammar School in 1557, at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1561, and at the Inns of Court in 1566. He inherited Laughton from his nephew Oliver in 1585, sat for Lewes in 1584 and for Sussex in 1586, was a justice of the peace from about 1583, High Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in 1589 to 1590, and a deputy lieutenant from 1601. He was made a baronet in 1611. He married Mary, daughter of Sir Thomas Walsingham of Chislehurst, and his son Thomas followed him in the baronetcy. After the purchase the family farmed the hill until the ruins were so overgrown that they passed out of memory.

The America Ground is the roughly triangular patch bounded by Robertson Street, Carlisle Parade, Harold Place, and Claremont. In the early nineteenth century it lay outside the town, west of the boundary at Priory Bridge. Itinerant builders working on James Burton’s new town of St Leonards and on Pelham Crescent, designed by Joseph Kay, had nowhere ready to live, and they settled the foreshore. They were said to have taken the ground without leave, built houses, shanties, and warehouses, paid no rent, and, when challenged, hoisted an American flag. Other settlers followed. About eight acres held nearly 200 buildings and more than 1,000 people. The earliest named residents are Thomas Page and John Prior in 1806, living in the hulk of the brig Polymina, cut into two dwellings. The trades included a gardener, a carpenter, a miller, lodging houses, limekilns, stonemasons, a tallow factory, a sawing house, and a butcher with slaughterhouses and piggeries. Daniel Thomas kept the Black Horse gin palace. William Parker founded a small school there, later called the forerunner of Hastings Grammar School. Some occupiers had leases or permission from Lord Chichester, who claimed the ground under a grant from the reign of James I, and others had sanction from the corporation under a grant of Elizabeth I. A survey of 1829 found many properties owned by or tied to Thomas James Breeds, Thomas Breeds, and Mark Boykett Breeds. Outsiders often called the people smugglers, thieves, and vagabonds, and many shacks were half-boats sawn up at the Condemned Hole. Sheila Kaye-Smith, in Tamarisk Town in 1919, wrote of a mock city of shacks, huts, and tents open to beggars and gypsies. Barry Funnell’s account of the same ground is of a diverse and industrious community. The area was cleared in 1850. The land went to the Crown, under the Chief Commissioner for Woods and Forests, and it remains Crown property.

In 1824 the owner, the Earl of Chichester, identified as Thomas Pelham, 2nd Earl of Chichester, commissioned archaeological investigation. He had been born on 28 April 1756 and died on 4 July 1826, and he was Home Secretary under Henry Addington from 1801 to 1803. The dig recovered the castle. The chapel floor and parts of the chancel arch and walls were rebuilt from blocks found lying on the ground. In the nineteenth century a garden was made on the motte and the top was cleared to a depth below the medieval remains. From 1825 to 1828 a new St Mary in the Castle, a Georgian church, was built at the foot of the cliff, with the first scheme of Georgian terraces and a long arcade of burial crypts, shops, and leisure rooms. Winter gardens were laid in the bailey, and Victorian tea rooms were built out from the North Gate. In 1870 the castle dungeons were found again at the North Gate, only metres from those tea rooms, with a doorway outlined in the North Gate tower. In 1891 the West Hill Lift opened. It is a two-coach funicular. A tunnel, using caves already in the hill and lined with brick, runs from a base station at George Street beside Albion Lane up to a top station that backs onto the West Hill café. The original coaches are still used and are stored in the tunnel at night. The lift is graded two steps below the highest grade. The lift and its tunnel are excluded from the scheduling of the castle. The ticket office, fence, toilets, service trenches, and the building beside the lift are also excluded, while the ground beneath them is included. The scheduling itself dates from 8 February 1915. The ruins are described as Grade I, including in the classification of listed buildings in East Sussex, while the operator’s visit information calls the site grade 2. Those two grades are both on record. The protected whole is the Norman castle, its rock-cut ditch, the collegiate church, and the Ladies' Parlour.

Ark Alexandra Academy is the secondary school in Hastings that continues the grammar-school line. It was Hastings Grammar School, then William Parker School, William Parker Sports College, and Ark William Parker, and it was the only boys’ secondary school in East Sussex. On 1 September 2019 it merged with Ark Helenswood Academy and became a co-educational academy on two sites. The school’s origin is taken from the 1619 will of the Reverend William Parker, rector of All Saints, who left his land in Ore to the mayor, jurats, and commonalty of Hastings to maintain a schoolmaster for the town’s children. His widow was to enjoy the income until she died, so the first master was not appointed until about twenty years later. The master was to be chosen by the jurats who lived in All Saints, and by any heir of Parker still in Hastings. A nephew, William, became mayor, and that nephew’s son, also William, later became master. Titus Oates, son of Samuel Oates, rector of All Saints, and later notorious for the Popish Plot, began by bringing false charges against both William Parkers in the hope of opening the mastership. In 1708 James Saunders of Kent left money for a schoolmaster in Rye and for a master and two mistresses in Hastings. One mistress was to teach 30 children in All Saints and the other in St Clement’s, each at 10 pounds a year. The master was to teach reading, writing, Latin, accounts, mathematics, and navigation to poor children from the Seagate next to the Fish Market, up to 70 pupils, at 40 pounds a year. Each corporation was to watch the other, on pain of losing the money to the other town. By 1809 one master, Joseph Hannay, taught forty boys for the Parker charity and fifteen for the Saunders charity, while the Saunders fund still paid two mistresses. Thomas Breeds took the Parker lands to the Court of Chancery over low rents, rented them himself for 210 pounds, and the costs closed the Saunders school for five years. The two charities, with part of the Magdalen trust, were joined for good in 1878 as the Hastings Grammar School Foundation. The America Ground school of William Parker is the one called a forerunner of that grammar school. None of this places the academy inside the castle.

During the Second World War the castle was damaged again, because Hastings was a target for bombing. A design account adds that from 1939 the coast was lined with anti-aircraft guns, and that raids along the south coast did not spare the town. In 1951 the Hastings Corporation bought the site and made it a tourist attraction. In 1990 an audio-visual show called The 1066 Story opened in a replica medieval siege tent. The show has closed. The concrete plinth built for it is still there. One account says the castle is open to the public between March and October, with guided tours and events for schools and groups. The operator’s own visit information says the grounds are open every day from 11am to 4pm, including bank holidays, with last entry at 3.30pm, and that they sometimes close for special events, so entry should be booked ahead. A regional listing gives a 2026 season from 30 April to 30 October, open every day from 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4.30pm, and closed in the winter. The three statements of the hours do not match.

The operator’s prices are 6.95 pounds for an adult, 5.45 pounds for a visitor under 18, nothing for a child under 5, 5.45 pounds for a Hastings resident in the listed postcodes and for a National Art Fund member, 16 pounds for one adult with up to three children, and 21 pounds for two adults with up to three children. Tickets can be bought at the office on arrival. The grounds are an open-air site with no shelter, and visitors are asked to dress for the weather. Dogs are not permitted, because the castle sits in an exclusion zone. Children are to be supervised and are not to climb the walls or walk out to the cliff edges beyond the overgrowth. There is a ramp to the entrance and then two small steps. The walls are old and fragile, some of them propped or under repair, and barriers are not to be passed. Groups of 15 or more who book ahead receive a discount. Unbooked groups pay the ordinary tickets.

Excavation has continued in small pieces. The 1968 season, written up by P. A. Barker in 1977, is the record that a garden had been made on the motte and cleared below the medieval levels, and the same year of digging is the one credited with the Iron Age ditch in the Ladies' Parlour. In 2016, during groundworks for a fence, a watching brief for the borough council found a substantial mortared sandstone wall running from north-east to south-west, perhaps with an opening, on the western side of the worked area, between the site of the south-west tower and the south end of the medieval collegiate church. A tamped chalk surface may have been a path toward the church’s narthex or toward that tower. Two fragments of disarticulated human bone, apparently from an adult, came from a dumped deposit against the wall and may show that people were buried inside the castle. Two masonry structures by a proposed ramp to the toilets, outside a nineteenth-century extension on the north side, were modern housings for drains and cables and of no archaeological importance. That brief was issued in 2022. A statement of significance, issued in January 2026 from desk research that included a visit on 12 April 2022 to the archive at Brighton, judges the castle and church on the rock above the town as intrinsic to the town’s skyline, ties the castle to the Battle of Hastings and to other events of national weight, points to surviving architectural detail in the church, and says that if excavation finds Neolithic, Mesolithic, or Iron Age settlement the place would be a rare example of occupation across millennia. A planning report of July 2026, on a proposed visitor building about 60 metres from the nearest houses on Castle Hill Road and about 6 to 7 metres high, records the county archaeologist’s view that remains could be damaged and that the risk can be handled by a written scheme of investigation, recording, and preservation in place where it is needed. No newer find than the 2016 wall, chalk surface, and bone fragments has been published in these accounts.

Conquest Hospital is the National Health Service hospital in St Leonards-on-Sea, in Hastings, managed by the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust. Kenneth Clarke, then Minister of Health, unveiled a plaque for the foundation stone in 1988. Cementation built it to replace the Eversfield Hospital in St Leonards and, in Hastings, the Buchanan Hospital, St Helens Hospital, and the Royal East Sussex Hospital. It was fully open to patients by 1992 and was officially opened by the Princess Royal in February 1993. She opened a second phase in July 1997. In the early 2000s, Doulton nursery-rhyme tiles painted by Margaret E. Thompson were brought from the old Buchanan Hospital and set up in the new one. The radiology department was upgraded in 2015. Nothing in that history places the hospital on the castle hill.

Sally-Ann Hart, born on 6 March 1968, was the member of parliament for Hastings and Rye from 2019 to 2024. She grew up in Hexham, Northumberland, studied geography at King's College London, qualified as a lawyer, worked for a firm in the City of London, and then practised as a solicitor and as a magistrate in Hastings, especially in family law. She has said that the magistrate’s work was one reason she sought a seat. From 2015, and again from 2019, she represented Eastern Rother on Rother District Council and served as cabinet member for tourism and culture. In 2017 she stood for North West Durham, took 16,516 votes, 34.5 percent, and lost by 8,792 votes to Laura Pidcock. On 12 December 2019 she was elected for Hastings and Rye with 26,896 votes, 49.6 percent, and a majority of 4,043, succeeding Amber Rudd, whose previous majority had been 346. In February 2023 the local association deselected her, and a members’ ballot later reselected her. She left the House in 2024. Her life, as recorded, does not include a residence or an office inside Hastings Castle.

What a visitor sees now is the fragment that the sea, the slighting, the farming, and the garden clearance left. The south bailey has gone down the cliff. The keep is not visible. The north and north-eastern curtain, the two-towered gate, the tunnel-vaulted stores, and the ruined collegiate church with its square tower are the standing medieval work, together with the Iron Age bank of the Ladies' Parlour on the plateau outside. The motte that the embroidered cloth shows being thrown up in 1066 is, on one reading, buried inside the later mound, and on another reading it may not have stood on this hill at all.

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