Bristol Castle

The first castle at Bristol was a timber motte and bailey, raised on the eastern side of the walled town, presumably at the command of William the Conqueror, who kept the manor of Bristol in the royal demesne. The site sat between the Avon to the south and the Frome to the north, and cutting a canal to join the two as a moat on the east side, with a weir on the north to answer the difference in water levels, left both town and castle entirely ringed by water.

One of the Conqueror's closest allies, Geoffrey de Montbray, Bishop of Coutances, appears to have held the castle in his name; Domesday Book records in 1086 that he took part of the king's income from the borough. The castle first appears in surviving records in 1088, when Geoffrey used it as a base for his rebellion against William II.

After William II put the rebellion down, the English lands of the rebels went to his loyal followers. Among them was Robert FitzHamon, who gained a wide swathe of Gloucestershire including Bristol Castle and founded the feudal barony of Gloucester. His eldest daughter and heiress Mabel married Robert, illegitimate son of Henry I, and on her father's death in 1107 she brought her husband the barony, which is why he is known as Robert of Gloucester.

When Henry I's only legitimate son William drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120, the king declared his daughter Matilda his heir; her cousin Stephen of Blois seized the throne on Henry's death in 1135. Robert of Gloucester became Matilda's right-hand man and the commander of her troops, and rebels rallied to his castle at Bristol. Stephen reconnoitred the town in 1138 and judged it impregnable. His chronicler wrote that on the side where Bristol seemed more open to siege, "a castle rising on a vast mound, strengthened by wall and battlements, towers and divers engines, prevents an enemy's approach". After Stephen was captured in 1141 he was held prisoner in Bristol Castle until Robert too was taken and the pair were exchanged. Bristol was Robert's principal seat in England, and he added greatly to its outer fortifications and rebuilt the interior.

Castle and earldom passed to Robert's son William, who backed Henry the Young King and his brothers Richard and Geoffrey when they rebelled against Henry II in 1173. The rising was crushed the following year, and William was punished by the confiscation of Bristol Castle into royal hands. It became one of the most important royal castles in the country. Henry III, educated there in his youth, spent lavishly on it, adding a barbican before the main west gate, a gate tower and a great hall.

From 1224 Eleanor of Brittany was strictly confined at Bristol in relatively comfortable conditions, with accommodation in the keep, almost until her death in 1241, apart from a stretch between 1225 and 1227 when she was presumably locked in her tower. After Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1283, the two young sons of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last princes of Gwynedd, were imprisoned for life in the castle. In June 1399, William le Scrope, Sir John Bussy and Sir Henry Green were executed there without trial by the Duke of Hereford, soon to be Henry IV, after his successful return from exile.

The first detailed description of the castle was written in 1480. By the time the antiquary John Leland saw it in about 1540 it was slipping: two courts, a large keep with a dungeon in the north-west of the outer court, said to have been built of stone brought from Caen in Normandy by the red Earl of Gloucester, a handsome church and domestic quarters in the other court, a great gate to the south, a stone bridge and three ramparts running to the mouth of the Frome. Many towers still stood in both courts, Leland noted, "but they are all on the point of collapse". By the sixteenth century the castle had fallen out of use, and because the city authorities had no power over royal property its precincts became a refuge for lawbreakers.

The city bought the castle in 1630, took the Parliamentary side when the Civil War came and partly restored it, but Royalist troops occupied Bristol. After the town was recaptured in 1645, Oliver Cromwell ordered the castle destroyed so that the Royalists could not use it again. James Millerd's map of Bristol shows the remaining parts demolished by 1656. A single octagonal tower outlasted the rest, sketched by Samuel Loxton in 1907 and torn down in 1927. The area was redeveloped for commerce and later largely destroyed in the Bristol Blitz.