Knepp Castle

Knepp was a motte castle in the Rape of Bramber, probably founded by the Braose family in the 12th century on a mound modelled from a natural feature near the River Adur. Its name is thought to come from the Old English cnæp, meaning that mound. The first surviving record of the castle is dated to 1210 — by which time it was no longer Braose property at all.

William de Braose, 4th Lord of Bramber, was a favourite of King John and often rode with him in the early years of the reign. In 1208 John confiscated his lands, Knepp among them. The king's motive is uncertain, though he had come to see Braose as a threat; the historian Sidney Painter judged the treatment of the family "the greatest mistake John made during his reign", because "it made his cruelty known to all his barons", feeding the discontent of the men who later rebelled.

In royal hands Knepp served as a hunting lodge. Crown accounts of the 1210s record spending on general repairs, on building a chimney and on mending a pond or moat. A charter confirmed on 6 April 1211 places John himself at the castle, and Queen Isabella stayed eleven days in either 1214 or 1215.

By 1215 John was at war with his barons. Shortly after losing control of London he wrote to Roland Bloett on 18 May, telling him to remove from Knepp whatever he could carry and send it to Bramber Castle, then to destroy Knepp totally. Four days later the king wrote again, this time instructing Roland to receive William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, at Knepp or Bramber — which the historian Richard Symonds suggests means the slighting order was not carried out.

The sealing of Magna Carta that June brought a lull that proved temporary. Giles de Braose, Bishop of Hereford, had joined the rebellion and in October 1215 negotiated the return of the family lands in exchange for a fine, but died before the transfer was complete and they stayed with the king. When the fighting resumed, John issued a second order on 13 June 1216, directing Roland Bloett to "cause the castle of Cnappe, without delay, to be burnt and destroyed". John died that October; in early 1217, as William Marshal moved through southern England against the supporters of Prince Louis of France, Knepp Castle surrendered to him.

The castle outlived the war and kept its royal traffic: Henry III came in 1218, Edward II in 1324, Richard II in 1384. In the 13th century Simon de Montfort seized Knepp from William de Braose, and later returned it. Documents of the 13th and 14th centuries record a chapel and domestic buildings — a hall, stables — without saying how they stood in relation to one another. After that the place fell into decline.

A skirmish may have been fought near the castle during the English Civil War; Sir Charles Burrell called it the 'Battle of Knepp'. The account was set down in the early 19th century by James Charles Michell of the Sussex gentry as oral history from his father: a parliamentarian force beat a royalist one on 19 July 1648, and a cannonball was said to have been found near the castle, though Michell gave neither the date of the find nor its precise spot. Symonds has suggested the fighting did considerable damage and hastened the castle's abandonment, while the Victoria County History of Sussex holds that it is simply unclear when the castle was destroyed. The bulk of it had been pulled down by the 1720s.

When the antiquarian Francis Grose reached the ruins in 1775, he found that "so completely has been the work of demolition in the instance of this castle, that a reasonable conjecture cannot be hazarded from a view of the ruins themselves" as to its original form and extent. About 55 years later the Rev. Edmund Cartwright recorded further loss, with stone carted off for roadmaking, and Sir Charles Burrell had what remained reinforced and fenced. Geophysical surveys funded by the Society for Medieval Archaeology in 2021 and 2022 went looking for the burning John had twice ordered; they found no evidence of it, though they did detect possible buried archaeology.