Bedford Castle

Henry I probably built Bedford Castle after 1100 inside the town itself, diverting the older Anglo-Saxon streets. Simon de Beauchamp, son of Hugh de Beauchamp, held it as royal castellan; contemporaries described it as "completely ramparted around with an immense earthen bank and ditch, girt about with a wall strong and high, strengthened with a strong and unshakeable keep."

When Simon died in 1137, Stephen tried to pass the castle to Hugh the Pauper, but Simon's nephew Miles de Beauchamp claimed it as rightfully his and refused to hand it over. Miles had stocked supplies, and when Stephen besieged the castle himself, Hugh's men were left to starve out the garrison while the king marched north against the Scots. Bishop Henry of Blois brokered a truce after five weeks: the garrison marched out unharmed and the castle passed to the king, though the Beauchamps apparently kept the estates, and in 1141 Miles retook it; no record explains how.

Miles now backed the Empress Matilda; in 1146 Ranulf, Earl of Chester, briefly on Stephen's side, took the town of Bedford but not the castle, which Miles held until his death some years later.

The First Barons' War broke out against King John in 1215. The rebels, repulsed at Northampton, turned on Bedford Castle next but could not take it either. William de Beauchamp, who held the castle, then rebelled against John himself; Falkes de Bréauté, an Anglo-Norman leader loyal to John, seized it back for the crown in 1216 and was rewarded with the Honour of Bedford.

After John's death Falkes helped restore the young Henry III to power and made Bedford his headquarters, rebuilding it into what historian David Baker has called a "major refortification". He tore down the neighbouring churches of St Paul's and St Cuthbert's to clear space for a new bailey, reusing their stone, and gave the castle a new barbican, a postern watergate onto the river, and a keep raised on the motte. Its stone-lined ditches and palisades were unusual for England; the closest match was Skenfrith Castle in Wales.

Henry III wanted the castle handed back to William de Beauchamp, and Falkes' refusal hardened into crisis when his castellans imprisoned Henry of Braybrooke, a royal judge hearing cases against him. Falkes had left the castle in the hands of his brother William, with about eighty men; Henry mobilised an army with the backing of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who excommunicated William, and marched on Bedford in June 1224.

The siege drew on the whole kingdom: engines from Lincoln, Northampton and Oxfordshire, rope from London, Cambridge and Southampton, hides from Northampton, tallow from London, and 43,300 crossbow bolts from Corfe Castle and the provinces, while Langton levied a man from every sixty acres of church land. As many as 2,700 men gathered around the walls; Ralph of Coggeshall put royal losses at seven knights and over 200 men. William held on, hoping his brother would return or that Pope Honorius III would intervene.

The castle fell in four stages: the barbican first, then the outer bailey, then the inner bailey when miners under cover of a "cat" collapsed a stretch of wall. On 14 August the miners fired the keep itself, cracking the stone and filling it with smoke; the garrison surrendered the next day. Henry hanged the male defenders, sparing only three knights who agreed to join the Knights Templar. Falkes surrendered and went into exile; as David Carpenter has written, Bedford's fall "concluded the triumph of central government" over the barons, though the campaign's cost contributed to the loss of La Rochelle to Louis VIII of France.

Henry ordered the castle slighted: the ditches were filled and the walls reduced by half. William de Beauchamp, forbidden to refortify, built an unfortified house in the inner bailey instead. By 1361 the site was "a void plot of old enclosed by walls"; when John Leland visited in the 16th century he found it "now clean down".

Bedford sided with Parliament in the Civil War, and after Prince Rupert briefly took the town in 1643 the motte was refortified with a probable wooden fort and prison, held by a hundred-man garrison. It later served as a bowling green until the 19th century, when its north-east tower became a hexagonal militia building in 1804 and the barbican's last remains were cleared for cottages in 1851. Excavations between 1969 and 1973 established the castle's broad outline, and an archaeological park opened on part of the site in 2007–2009.