Launceston Castle

Launceston was raised probably after the capture of Exeter in 1068, at a place then called Dunheved that controlled the ground between Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor and the Polson ford into Cornwall. Its builder was probably Robert, Count of Mortain, whom William the Conqueror had granted the earldom: an earthwork and timber castle with a motte in one corner. So many people lived and worked in its wooden buildings that the historian Oliver Creighton likens the result to a “town within a town”. Robert appropriated the market the canons held at nearby St Stephen's church and moved it outside his gates to profit from the trade.

The first documentary record comes in 1086. Robert's son William rebelled against Henry I in 1106 and lost the castle to him; it passed to the then Prince John in 1189 and back to the Crown after his rebellion against Richard I in 1191. A circular keep was built on the motte, probably in the late 12th century, along with two stone gatehouses, and the bailey's wooden buildings were rebuilt in stone.

Henry III's younger brother Richard of Cornwall was granted the earldom in 1227 and, backed by revenues from the Cornish tin industry, reconstructed the defences: new walls and gatehouses, the bailey cleared of its older buildings for a new great hall, and a high tower raised through the keep, probably to let guests enjoy the view over his deer park. The work may have been meant to impress a Cornish nobility with whom Richard had a difficult relationship.

His son Edmund inherited in 1272 and moved the earldom's administration to Lostwithiel, closer to the tin. Launceston remained a site of local government but soon fell into neglect, and when Edmund died without heirs in 1300 it reverted to the Crown.

In 1337 Edward III's son Edward the Black Prince was made the first Duke of Cornwall and acquired Launceston. A survey found the walls — which the castle-guard knights were supposed to have repaired — “ruinous”, and buildings in the bailey, two prisons among them, “decayed”. Repairs followed in the 1340s, but the castle's work was increasingly judicial assizes and imprisonment, and in the 15th century the high tower itself was turned into a prison. The antiquarian John Leland, visiting in 1539, called it “the strongest, though not the biggest” he had seen, yet noted only the chapel and the great hall, then in use for court sessions.

In 1548 Sir William Body, sent by Edward VI to destroy the Catholic shrines at Helston, was killed by two local Cornishmen; in retaliation 28 local men were arrested and executed at the castle. The anger grew into the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, and Sir Humphrey Arundell took Launceston that summer, probably without a struggle. Sir Richard Grenville, imprisoned here, died during his detention. John Russell, Earl of Bedford, then defeated the rebels and retook Launceston, seizing Arundell in the street fighting.

When the Puritan writer John Bastwick was imprisoned here in 1637, the decaying castle was reported “so ruinous that every small blast of wind threatened to shatter it down upon his head”. Royalists held it through most of the Civil War until Sir Thomas Fairfax took it in February 1646; retreating, they reportedly stripped the lead from its roofs and gave the timbers to the townsfolk for fuel, leaving it so wrecked that Parliament did not bother to slight it. By 1650 only the north gatehouse was habitable, and in 1656 it held members of the Society of Friends, among them George Fox, who called it a “nasty stinking place”.

A gaol built in the middle of the bailey in the late 17th century was adopted as the county gaol, and the bailey was also used for executions. In 1690 the county complained to the king that its constable, Sir Hugh Pyper, had let it decay and that male and female prisoners slept in the same quarters. Criticism of its facilities and treatment of inmates earned it the nickname Castle Terrible. When the county government and assizes moved to Bodmin in 1838 the gaol closed, and in 1842 it was demolished.

Between 1840 and 1842 Hugh Percy, 3rd Duke of Northumberland and constable of the castle, landscaped it into a public park at a cost of £3,000. Late in the Second World War the bailey was levelled for Nissen huts housing a United States Army hospital, and the Air Ministry leased the site for offices from 1945 until 1956. Launceston is owned by the duchy of Cornwall and operated by English Heritage, protected as a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building.