Kirby Muxloe Castle

William, Lord Hastings, chamberlain of the royal household and a favourite of Edward IV, acquired extensive estates across the Midlands during the Wars of the Roses, much of it confiscated from his enemies. His father, Sir Leonard, had kept his seat at Kirby Muxloe, though William moved his own to Ashby de la Zouch in 1462. In 1474 Edward granted him the right to crenellate four of his manors and to build deer parks around them, Kirby Muxloe among them, authorised to be turned into a castle and surrounded by a park of 2,000 acres.

Work began in October 1480 under Roger Bowlott, Hastings's steward, who became clerk of works for the project. Antony Yzebrond, from Flanders, built a workshop able to make up to 100,000 bricks a week, and a brook was redirected to feed the new moat. Work intensified in early 1481 with the stonework supervised by the master mason John Cowper, and at peak periods over 40 men were on the site. How much was built is uncertain, though at least one corner tower had been nearly completed by 1483 and the ground floor of the gatehouse laid down.

Edward IV died in 1483, leaving the kingdom to his young son Edward V, whose uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had his own ambitions for the throne. Hastings was unwilling to support the deposition of Edward V and, as a consequence, Richard summarily executed him that June, ahead of his own coronation. Kirby Muxloe and Hastings's other estates were restored to his widow Katherine, who after a short pause continued some work until the summer of 1484, concentrating on making the corner tower and the partially finished gatehouse habitable before the project was halted. About 1,000 pounds had been spent by then, and 1.3 million bricks laid.

The castle was designed as a rectangle 245 by 175 feet, with a square tower at each corner, lesser side towers on three edges and a large gatehouse to the north-west, all behind a water-filled moat crossed by an oak bridge. Six gunports for early gunpowder artillery were built into the ground-floor walls of both the gatehouse and the west tower, then temporarily filled with bricks, probably against vermin and draughts. Any guns would have had limited range, set low to the ground, and historians are uncertain how useful they would have been: the ports are of early design and may have been intended as symbols rather than practical defences, though they were well placed and might well have been meant to deter a serious attack.

The Hastings family held Kirby Muxloe until around 1630, when it was purchased by Sir Robert Banaster, and then by William Wollaston. Over the rest of the century the castle was abandoned, robbed for its building materials and put to agricultural use. Clement Winstanley bought it from the Wollaston family in 1788; in 1790 the remains of the north tower were still standing, albeit in very poor condition. Winstanley reportedly wanted to pull the northern ruins down and reuse the bricks to make a barn, but his son, also called Clement, intervened and carried out repairs. By the early 20th century trees were growing out of the tops of the walls, much of the moat had silted up and the remains of the bridge lay buried under debris.

By 1911 the owner, Major Richard Winstanley, could not pay for the castle's upkeep and proposed placing it in the guardianship of the Commissioners of Works. A survey by the architect Sir Frank Baines showed the ruins to need immediate repairs, and the Commissioners took the castle over the following year. Sir Charles Peers, the Inspector of Ancient Monuments, restored it between 1912 and 1913, clearing away the farm remains and the vegetation on the walls, repairing the brickwork, re-cutting the moat and reconstructing a replica of the medieval bridge. His excavations uncovered the foundations of the original manor house but little else. The castle's complete financial records turned up in the Hastings family archives, found by the historian Thomas Fosbrooke while investigating Ashby de la Zouch and passed to Peers; John Goodall describes them as “a fascinating insight” into medieval building work.

English Heritage manages Kirby Muxloe as a tourist attraction, and the castle received 2,461 visitors in 2015; substantial restoration work in 2006 replaced much of the brickwork. It is protected as a scheduled monument and, since February 1987, as a Grade I listed building, and Historic England considers it a “spectacular example of a late medieval quadrangular castle of the highest status”.