Devizes Castle

The first castle here was probably raised around 1080 by Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury: an early Norman motte and bailey with a wooden palisade and tower. Contrary to frequent report it does not appear in the Domesday survey of 1086, and the earliest written mention of it comes in 1106. It carried the Latin name Castrum ad divisas, the castle at the boundaries, because it stood where three parishes met; from that name the town which grew up around it took its own.

The timber castle burned down in 1113 and was rebuilt in stone by Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, by 1120. It was said in its day to be the most beautiful fortress in Europe, though who first said so is not known.

Bishop Roger occupied Devizes under Henry I, and in the 1130s King Stephen laid claim to it. The Empress Matilda took the castle at one point but handed it back to Stephen when he threatened to kill her son; she later reclaimed it and held it for some time. The Crown kept the property until the seventeenth century.

Henry II and Henry III both used Devizes as a prison. Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, was confined here from 1106; in 1206 King John held his second wife Isabella prisoner in it; and in 1232 it took Hubert de Burgh. Henry VIII later gave the castle to Catherine of Aragon and reclaimed it after their divorce.

In 1643 the castle was occupied by Royalist troops and besieged by a Parliamentary force under Sir William Waller. Three days later Waller's army was routed at the Battle of Roundway Down, and Devizes — at that time a base for Lord Hopton's forces — stayed in Royalist hands. Its military governor was Sir Charles Lloyd, the King's Chief Engineer, who defended the town through repeated Parliamentary attacks and bombardments.

In September 1645 Cromwell moved into the town with large forces and heavy artillery and laid siege; the castle surrendered after a bombardment by his 5,000-strong army. In May 1648 a Parliamentary order had it dismantled, and its stone went into other buildings around the town.

In 1838 the castle lands were acquired by J. N. Tylee and sold the same year to Valentine Leach, a Devizes tradesman. The castellated house that followed — a mixture of Neo-Norman and Gothic Revival, boldly asymmetrical — was designed by the Bath architect Henry Goodridge, begun about 1840 and extended northwards through the 1860s and the decades after. Its north tower incorporates the remains of a seventeenth-century brick windmill.

The medieval castle beneath came to light piecemeal as the new one rose. The keep and an aisled building were first excavated in 1858, indicating a number of lesser buildings surrounding the hall, and the moat was dug out in 1860 while Leach was enlarging the castle; the footings of the old hall piers had been found by then. Later owners included Sir Charles Rich, Bt (d. 1913), who made alterations of his own. During the Second World War the site was used as an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. In 1951 the building was sold in two lots, named North Tower and South Tower; the motte and ditch of the medieval castle were scheduled in 1953, and the Victorian castle was listed Grade I in 1972.