Chester Castle

Chester Castle was built in 1070 by Hugh d'Avranches, the second Earl of Chester, on high ground above the River Dee at the south-western corner of the walled city. It may have stood on the site of an earlier Saxon fortification, though this has never been confirmed. The original structure would have been a motte-and-bailey with a wooden tower; in the 12th century that tower was replaced by a square stone tower, the Flag Tower, and the stone gateway to the inner bailey was built — the structure now known as the Agricola Tower, its first floor holding the chapel of St Mary de Castro.

Under Henry III in the 13th century the outer bailey was walled, the gateway in the Agricola Tower was blocked up, and a Great Hall and residential ranges were raised along the inner bailey's south wall. Later in the century Edward I added a new gateway to the outer bailey, flanked by two half-drum towers, with a drawbridge over a moat 8 metres deep, along with separate chambers for the king and queen, a new chapel and stables.

The crypt of the Agricola Tower held prominent prisoners: Richard II; Eleanor Cobham, wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester; and Andrew de Moray, hero of the Battle of Stirling Bridge. During the Wars of the Roses the Yorkist John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu, was captured after the Battle of Blore Heath near Market Drayton in 1459 and imprisoned at the castle by Lancastrians; he was released the following year after the Yorkist victory at Northampton. Outside the outer bailey gate, criminals awaiting execution were handed over to the city authorities at a spot known as the Gloverstone.

Chester was held for the king during the Civil War. Parliamentary forces assaulted the castle in July 1643 and again in January and April 1645, and it was besieged along with the rest of the city between September 1645 and February 1646. After the war it was used as a prison, a court and a tax office; James II attended Mass in the chapel of St Mary de Castro in 1687. The Chester mint was established in 1696 and managed by Edmund Halley in a building beside the Half Moon Tower, and a gun emplacement was built on the wall overlooking the river during the 1745 Jacobite rising.

By the later part of the 18th century much of the castle's fabric had deteriorated, and the prison reformer John Howard was particularly critical of conditions in the prison. The architect Thomas Harrison was commissioned to design a new one, completed in 1792 and praised as one of the best-constructed prisons in the country. He went on to rebuild the medieval Shire Hall in neoclassical style, add two wings serving as barracks and armoury, and design the massive new entrance styled the Propylaeum. The buildings, all neoclassical, went up between 1788 and 1822; the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner judged Harrison's work "one of the most powerful monuments of the Greek Revival in the whole of England".

In February 1867 the Irish Fenian Michael Davitt led a group of Irish Republican Brotherhood men from Haslingden in an abortive raid for arms on the castle. The Army moved in to take hold of the castle, and under the Cardwell Reforms of 1873 it became the depot for the two battalions of the 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment of Foot; under the Childers Reforms the regiment became the Cheshire Regiment, with its depot in the castle in 1881. After 200 years' use as a warehouse and ammunition store, the crypt and chapel in the Agricola Tower were reconsecrated by the Bishop of Chester in 1925 for the use of the regiment, whose depot remained there until 1939, when it moved out to Dale Barracks.