Bungay Castle

The Bigods planted a castle at Bungay in about 1100, Roger Bigod taking his defence from the natural protection of a curve in the River Waveney. His son Hugh became a prominent figure in the civil war of 1138–1154 known as the Anarchy, and in the early years of Henry II's reign his loyalty was called into question: the king confiscated Bungay outright.

Henry returned the castle to Bigod in 1164, and in 1165 Bigod raised a large square Norman keep on the site. Nothing records what it cost; Hugh Braun, the archaeologist who led the excavations here in the 1930s, estimated around £1,400. Bigod then took the losing side in the revolt of 1173–1174. Royal forces besieged Bungay, mined it and slighted it, and by the historian Sidney Painter's count it was one of at least twenty-one castles demolished on Henry II's instructions.

The site was restored to the Bigods once more, and in 1294 Roger Bigod, 5th Earl of Norfolk, developed it again; the massive gate towers are probably his work. He fell out with Edward I, and after his death the castle reverted to the Crown and slid into disrepair and ruin. In 1310 Edward II granted his two younger half-brothers, Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Kent, sustenance out of the old Bigod lands, Bungay among them, and in 1312 Thomas came into the vacated earldom of Norfolk and the castle with it.

Thomas of Brotherton died in 1338 and Bungay passed to his daughter Alice, who had married Edward Montagu, younger brother of William, 1st Earl of Salisbury. It was at Bungay Castle that Montagu and two of his retainers beat her so violently that she died, in January 1352. The castle stayed in his hands until his own death in 1361.

In 1483 the Dukes of Norfolk re-acquired Bungay and held it into the twentieth century, with one break. That break began in 1766, when the site was sold to Robert Mickleborough, who quarried the keep and the curtain walls for road-building material. In the early 1790s a local solicitor, Daniel Bonhôte, bought what was left, and his wife Elizabeth made the ruin the setting of her Gothic romance Bungay Castle, published in 1796; the Norfolk dukes bought the site back in about 1800. Beyond the removal of dwellings built on it in 1841, little or no repair was attempted for several centuries.

Bungay was scheduled in 1915, one of the first sites protected under the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act 1913, and Grade I listed in 1949. Restoration under Hugh Braun began in 1934, following excavation by the amateur archaeologist Leonard Cane. In 1987 the 17th Duke of Norfolk gave the castle to the town of Bungay, and the Bungay Castle Trust owns it now.