Clare Castle

After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror granted Richard Fitz Gilbert a barony with lands in Kent and, later, across Suffolk and Essex. Richard built two castles to hold his new territory: Tonbridge in Kent, then Clare in Suffolk, raised on the site of a former Anglo-Saxon manor house. No exact construction date survives, but the castle is first recorded by 1090. It took an unusual double-bailey motte-and-bailey form, its motte 850 feet wide at the base and 100 feet tall, ringed by three deer parks including the Great Park at Hundon, already established by 1090. As the caput of the feudal barony of Clare, the castle was garrisoned under a castle-guard system, with local gentry granted land in exchange for supplying knights and soldiers.

In 1249 Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester, founded Clare Priory near the castle, which grew to house 29 friars. Probably in the 13th century a new keep was built: a polygonal shell keep with fourteen triangular buttresses and walls six feet thick, standing above stone inner-bailey walls 20 to 30 feet tall built over the earlier earthen banks.

The castle passed down the de Clare line until Gilbert de Clare, 8th Earl of Gloucester, died at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and the estate passed to his sisters. Elizabeth de Clare, whose husband John de Burgh had died the previous year, acquired the castle; the combined inheritance made her one of the wealthiest women in England, and Clare was her main residence from 1322 to 1360. By then the castle was reached through three gated approaches — Nethergate, Redgate and Dernegate — and four stone towers guarded the entrance to the inner bailey and keep. Elizabeth built a chamber for her own use between 1346 and 1347, and a water garden, probably geometric in form, bordered the moat.

Her household ran on an income of around £3,500 a year, of which more than £1,750 went on food and drink — swans, salmon and German wine among them; other goods, among them furs, spices and cloth, were bought at the fairs of Bury St Edmunds, Colchester, Ipswich, London and King's Lynn, and at Stourbridge Fair. Falconers, tailors, chaplains and goldsmiths served alongside thirty knights and squires; the castle's bakers could turn out up to 2,360 loaves a day, and around 900 gallons of ale were brewed every five days.

After Elizabeth's death the castle passed by marriage to Lionel of Antwerp, a son of Edward III, and then to the Mortimers of Wigmore. When Sir Edmund Mortimer took possession in 1405 it was reported "in good repair and stocked". The Mortimers were drawn into the Wars of the Roses, and after Edmund's death in 1425 the castle passed to Richard of York and, through his son Edward IV, to the Crown. On 1 June 1461 Edward IV granted the castle, as part of a large estate, to his mother Cecily Neville, dowager Duchess of York, who held it without making it her main residence; her half-sister Margaret Neville Scrope lived there until her death in 1463 and was buried at Clare Priory.

The castle deteriorated after this, its masonry probably stripped for local building use in a region traditionally short of building stone. Edward VI granted it to Sir John Checke, and it reverted to the Crown under Mary I before passing to Sir Gervase Elwes of Stoke by Clare, whose family held it into the 19th century; at some point after 1720 the surviving east and south inner-bailey walls were pulled down.

In 1867 the Cambridge and Colchester branch of the Great Eastern Railway was cut through the site to make room for a new station, destroying most of the inner bailey; the line closed in 1967 under the Beeching Axe. The disused station, goods yard and castle grounds were later landscaped into Clare Castle Country Park, crossed by the Stour Valley Path and opened in June 1972 after Anthony de Fontblanque donated 15 acres and a further 4.5 acres of former railway land was bought for £10,000.

In 2014 the keep and curtain wall were consolidated with the support of English Heritage, and in March 2015 stewardship of the park passed from Suffolk County Council to Clare Town Council, which now manages it through a trust with local volunteers. The remains — the motte with fragments of the shell keep and inner bailey wall — have been a Grade II* listed building since 19 December 1961 and are protected as a scheduled monument, forming the centrepiece of the public park.