Baconsthorpe Castle

The village of Baconsthorpe lay between Holt and Norwich and took its name from the local Bacon family, whose lands William Baxton, a man of relatively humble background, had bought up by about 1400, including half of the Wood Hall estate on the edge of the village. Around 1460 he probably began the building then known as Baconsthorpe Hall, laying out the moated platform and starting the inner gatehouse.

His son, John Heydon I, carried the work on and went on acquiring land nearby, changing the family name in the process to disguise his lower social origin. John was a lawyer of considerable ambition, first the political client of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and after the duke's death the client of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick; as his power grew he came to be hated and feared across the region. By his death in 1479 the inner gatehouse was finished and work on the courtyard house had begun, setting out the basis of a tall, fortified house. The house was meant to impress his peers, a statement of political aspiration as much as a place to live.

Sir Henry Heydon continued his father's work. He married into London money, became a wealthy sheep farmer and was knighted in 1485, completing the main house, the service court and the north-east tower. Perhaps less worried than his father about an attack on his property, he altered the character of the place into what the historians Jacky Hall and Paul Drury call an "upmarket, courtyard house".

The inner court was defended by an external curtain wall up to five metres tall in places, with seven square and circular mural towers, a drawbridge forming the second part of the southern bridge, and gun loops in the cellar beneath the hall covering the entrance itself. That militarily inspired design drew on earlier medieval traditions and was intended to reinforce the family's standing and their aspirations to nobility.

Over the course of the 16th century the Heydons became one of the leading families in Norfolk, marrying well, practising law and enjoying the profits of their sheep and the wool trade, their products sold in England and exported to the Netherlands. Sir John Heydon II inherited in 1504 but lived mainly at Saxlingham; after a pause in the building work he finished the north court and turned the east range into a wool factory before his death in 1550. A long two-storey building went up along the curtain wall on that side during the 16th century, with a turnstile at its north end for shearing sheep and space on the first floor for weavers and finishers; the three-storey north-east tower was later used for processing wool as well, including fulling.

His son, Sir Christopher I, built the outer gatehouse and the barn around 1560, and in 1561 was formally granted a licence to crenellate the castle and to create a 300-acre deer park alongside it. By then the Heydons lived in lavish style, Sir Christopher keeping a household of eighty servants and a coach drawn by two horses.

Sir William Heydon II inherited Baconsthorpe in 1579, by which time the wool trade was in decline and the family was building up debts. He sold off parts of the estate to cover his father's debts, saw his business projects in London fail and was forced to sell further land; Baconsthorpe was mortgaged, and under pressure from his creditors he attempted to sell part of the estate in 1590. His son, Sir Christopher II, regarded that land as his inheritance and disagreed. Father and son fell out, William threatened to demolish the castle, Christopher appealed to the Privy Council, and the matter went to court in 1593, a few months before William's death the same year.

Christopher II renovated the inner gatehouse and created a large mere and a formal garden around the south-east side of the castle, though he too resided mainly at Saxlingham, west of Cromer. He had little interest in business, preferring military pursuits and the study of astrology, and he hosted the mathematician Henry Briggs and the astronomer John Bainbridge at Baconsthorpe. He had inherited debts of £11,000 from his father on top of £3,000 of his own, and was fined £2,000 for his part in Essex's Rebellion of 1601. His finances did not recover: Baconsthorpe was mortgaged first, and then his other estates.

Baconsthorpe passed to Christopher's eldest son Sir William in 1623, but he died four years later during the Île de Ré expedition, leaving it to his younger brother, Sir John III. John became Lieutenant General of the Ordnance, and when civil war broke out in 1642 he fought on the side of King Charles I. Parliament seized his lands in response and declared him delinquent in 1646. He bought the estates back, but from about 1650 he began pulling Baconsthorpe down in order to sell off its stonework.

John III died in debt in 1653. His son Charles Heydon went on disposing of the stone, selling 29 cartloads the following year for £30 for reuse at Felbrigg Hall. Charles's brother, William Heydon III, sold the estate to a Mr Bridges, and it passed on to a doctor called Zurishaddai Lang, who lived in the outer gatehouse; the Norfolk landowner John Thruston Mott bought it in 1801. The gatehouse remained occupied until 1920, when one of its turrets collapsed. The mere still held water in 1839 but was drained afterwards.

In 1940 the castle's owner, the politician Sir Charles Mott-Radclyffe, placed the site in the care of the Ministry of Public Works. Through the 1950s and 1960s the ivy and other vegetation were cleared, the stonework consolidated and the site archaeologically surveyed before it was opened to the public, and the mere was dredged and refilled in 1972 alongside further excavations. Baconsthorpe Castle is now managed by English Heritage and open to visitors, protected under UK law as a scheduled monument and as Grade I and Grade II listed buildings.