Norwich Castle

William the Conqueror ordered the castle built in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and it was founded between 1066 and 1075 as a motte and bailey, probably early in 1067 as William campaigned to subjugate East Anglia. The town paid for it: estimates of houses destroyed to clear the ground run from 17 to 113, and excavation in the late 1970s found the bailey laid straight over a Saxon cemetery. Named among 48 castles in the Domesday survey of 1086, it was the only major royal castle in East Anglia until Henry II raised Orford in the mid-12th century.

The earliest recorded incident here is a siege. In 1075 Ralph de Gael, Earl of Norfolk, co-led the rising remembered as the Revolt of the Earls, then went abroad to raise Danish support and left his wife Emma in charge of the garrison. The Danes never came. Troops loyal to William held the castle under siege for three months, and it ended not in storm but in terms. Emma secured promises that she and her garrison would be unharmed and given safe passage out of the country.

By about 1100 the motte had been heightened and its ditch deepened, and between 1094 and 1121 a stone keep went up on the south-west of the mound, faced in Caen stone over a flint core, some 95 ft by 90 ft and 70 ft high, entered at first-floor level through a forebuilding later known as the Bigod Tower. It was a hall-keep with a kitchen, a chapel, a two-storey hall and sixteen latrines; the 19th-century antiquary G. T. Clark called it “the most highly ornamented keep in England”.

When Henry II's sons rebelled in 1173-74 the castle was put in a state of readiness and taken anyway. Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk, landed 318 Flemish soldiers in May 1174 and advanced on Norwich with 500 men of his own, holding fourteen prisoners for ransom; peace later that year returned the castle to the king. In Lent 1190, when the violence against East Anglia's Jews reached Norwich on Shrove Tuesday, the castle sheltered those who got inside it. Those who could not were massacred.

Prisoners were held here early — state prisoners in 1264 and 1274 — and an Act of Parliament in 1340 gave sheriffs control of the prisons inside royal castles, making Norwich the public gaol of Norfolk while the king kept ownership and named its constable. By the 18th century the stone had blackened, the battlements decayed, and the ditch served the city as a rubbish tip. The reformer John Howard came six times between 1773 and 1782, recording at most 53 inmates split between felons and debtors, and criticised the limited separate accommodation for women.

John Soane gutted the keep's interior for cells between 1789 and 1793 at a cost of £15,000, burying the Bigod Tower behind a new block for debtors and women. An Act of 12 July 1806 vested the castle in the magistrates of Norfolk, ending more than 700 years of royal ownership. The architect William Wilkins then rebuilt it again by 1828 for £50,000, spreading cell wings across the mound from an octagonal governor's house: 240 cells in the wings, 36 in the keep, and a foot tunnel along which prisoners were walked to the crown court.

Felons were hanged publicly on a gallows on the bridge behind the entrance lodges, or privately inside the gaol. On 7 December 1549, at Edward VI's behest, Robert Kett was drawn from the Guildhall and hanged in chains from a gibbet on the keep's west face for leading the rebellion that carries his name. James Blomfield Rush was hanged before thousands of spectators on 21 April 1849 for murdering the Norwich Recorder Isaac Jermy and his son at Stanfield Hall. The gaol closed on 2 August 1887, when every prisoner was moved to the new HMP Norwich at Mousehold Heath.

The city bought the castle for a museum. Edward Boardman swept Soane's cells out of the keep, put in floors, balconies and Norman-style arches to carry a glazed roof, and turned the cell blocks into galleries; the Duke and Duchess of York opened it on 23 October 1894. The outer shell had already been refaced in Bath stone under Anthony Salvin between 1835 and 1839, a job the etcher Edward Thomas Daniell denounced in the Norwich Mercury as a “scandalous re-facing of the ancient keep”.

A £27m reconstruction begun in 2020 and titled Royal Palace Reborn reinstated the keep's lost floors and rooms, among them the Great Chamber and a banquet hall, furnished as they might have greeted Henry I on his stay at Norwich in 1121. Delayed by the pandemic and by what the builders uncovered, it reopened in August 2025.