Eye Castle

The castle was raised shortly after the Norman conquest of 1066, in the reign of William I, by William Malet, who died fighting Hereward the Wake in 1071. Its motte measures 160 feet across and 40 feet high, with a bailey of roughly 400 by 250 feet. The Malet family also controlled the surrounding Honour of Eye, a substantial collection of estates centring on the castle, together with the park of Eye.

Eye is unusual in being one of only two castles named in the Domesday survey of 1086 as a source of income for their owners, the revenue coming from a market held inside the castle bailey; that market stood in competition with the Bishop of Norwich's market at Hoxne.

William Malet's son Robert was exiled and died at the battle of Tinchebray in Normandy in 1106. Henry I confiscated Eye, which became a royal castle for a period, and in 1113 the king granted it to his favoured nephew, Stephen of Blois. Stephen succeeded to the English throne in 1135 and gave the honour of Eye first to one of his lieutenants, William of Ypres, and afterwards to his son-in-law Hervey Brito. At some point in the 1140s he transferred the lands to his second son, William, who was still young; until he came of age they appear to have been managed by Stephen's trusted royal steward, William Martel.

Meanwhile the civil war between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, the Anarchy of 1138 to 1154, ran through the region. Much of the fighting fell on East Anglia, where the powerful Bigod family under Hugh Bigod attempted to expand their autonomy and influence. Eye Castle itself did not play a major part in it: there was skirmishing nearby, but most of the campaigning was conducted further west.

Henry II came to power in 1154 and set about re-establishing royal influence across the region. Hugh Bigod had come to dominate East Anglia by the late twelfth century, holding the title of Earl of Norfolk and owning the four major castles of the region: Framlingham, Bungay, Walton and Thetford. Henry confiscated the Bigod castles from Hugh in 1157. He took Eye at the same time, seeing Stephen's son William as a potential claimant to the throne despite earlier promises to protect him; William's death in 1159 allowed the king to acquire the castle formally and legitimise his hold on it.

Hugh Bigod joined the revolt of Henry's sons in 1173 and attacked Eye. The attack failed, but the castle had to be rebuilt afterwards. Two square towers were put up on the north side of the inner bailey in the late twelfth century, possibly at the same time as work at Framlingham. Its defence rested on the castle-guard system, under which local lands were granted to minor lords in return for knights and soldiers for the castle.

In 1265 the castle was attacked and sacked during the Second Barons' War, and was largely abandoned afterwards. By the fourteenth century it lay mostly in ruins, though parts of it continued to be maintained as a prison. The estates formerly bound to it by castle-guard went on returning their dues to the owners of Eye Castle for many years more, the obligation by then converted into money rents.

A windmill was built on top of the motte between 1561 and 1562. In the early seventeenth century the park of Eye around the castle was broken up and turned into fields, as happened to many other medieval Suffolk parks.

A workhouse and a school were built inside the castle bailey in the 1830s. In 1844 the owner, Sir Edward Kerrison, demolished a later windmill that had been raised on the motte and put a domestic house in its place. He had it built for his batman, the man who had saved his life at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The house resembled a shell keep, was built of flint, and had living quarters set into the walls on the south and west sides.

The building fell into ruin, was damaged by high winds during 1965 and collapsed further in the same year; it is now sometimes called Kerrison's Folly. The mound and some stone fragments of the original castle remain intact, and the site is a scheduled monument, listed at Grade I since 15 June 1951. The Lord of the Manor of Eye Sokemere is historically Constable of the Castle, a title that rests with the Palmer family of Haughley.