Orford Castle

Orford lay within the honour of Eye, which Henry II granted to his chancellor Thomas Becket in 1156 and confiscated in 1162, after Becket, by then Archbishop of Canterbury, fell out with the king and fled to France. Suffolk was Bigod country: Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, a dissenting baron of the Anarchy, held castles at Framlingham, Bungay, Walton and Thetford. Henry confiscated all four, returned Framlingham and Bungay in 1165, and in the same year began a royal castle of his own at Orford, finished in 1173. The prospect of Becket returning from exile with armed support may also have weighed on the decision.

The marshes between the castle and the River Ore, half a mile off, were drained, turning the village into a sheltered port. With its ditch, palisade and stone bridge the castle cost £1,413, the work possibly conducted by the master mason Alnoth. A curtain wall with probably four flanking towers and a fortified gatehouse enclosed a relatively small bailey, and those outer defences, rather than the keep, probably formed the castle's real strength.

The keep, which the historian R. Allen Brown called "one of the most remarkable keeps in England", stood 90 feet high and circular in cross-section, with three rectangular clasping towers thrown out from the 49-foot-wide drum.

Its plan was long read as transitional, a bridge between Norman square work and the round castles that followed, but that explanation has worn thin: square keeps went on being built after Orford, and a fully circular keep had already gone up at New Buckenham, Norfolk, in 1146. The reading now favoured is political: Sandy Heslop argues that its plain, simple elegance would have summoned up King Arthur for mid-twelfth-century nobility, while the banded, angular form resembled the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople; the keep may have been based on a hall John II Komnenos had recently built in that city.

The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall records that around 1167 fishermen pulled a naked man covered in hair out of their nets. He was brought up to the castle and held for six months, questioned or tortured, yet said nothing and behaved in a feral fashion before escaping. Later accounts made him a merman, and the story appears to have encouraged the "wild men" carved on baptismal fonts in coastal Suffolk and Norfolk.

When the Bigods rose against Henry in 1173–1174 Orford was heavily garrisoned, with twenty knights based there, and the rebellion's collapse cost Hugh Bigod his Framlingham permanently. The castle's political weight fell away after Henry's death in 1189, though the port beneath it grew, handling more trade than Ipswich by the early thirteenth century. In 1216 Prince Louis of France, invited over by barons who had lost patience with King John, captured the castle; John Fitz-Robert and then Hubert de Burgh governed it under the young Henry III.

Edward I gave the governorship to the de Valoines family, and it passed by marriage to Robert de Ufford, 1st Earl of Suffolk, whom Edward III granted it in perpetuity in 1336. No longer royal, it descended through the Willoughby, Stanhope and Devereux families while the Ore estuary silted and the Orford Ness spit lengthened, making the harbour harder to reach, cutting into trade, and lessening the castle's role as the centre of local government.

The Seymour-Conway family bought the castle in 1754. By the late eighteenth century only the north wall of the bailey survived and the keep's roof and upper floors had badly decayed; in 1805 Francis Seymour-Conway, 2nd Marquess of Hertford, proposed destroying the building. The government stopped him, on the grounds that the keep was a valuable landmark for ships approaching from Holland and avoiding the nearby sandbanks. His son, another Francis, roofed it in lead and put in a replacement upper floor in 1831; by the 1840s the bailey wall and mural towers had almost vanished, quarried for stone.

Sir Arthur Churchman bought Orford in 1928 and gave it to the Orford Town Trust; an appeal to maintain and restore it began soon after, and the castle opened to the public in 1930. In the Second World War it was ringed with barbed wire and Nissen huts for what was meant to be an anti-aircraft emplacement, but served instead as a radar emplacement, a concrete floor being laid in the south-east tower to carry the equipment. It passed to the Ministry of Works in 1962 and is maintained today by English Heritage; after trials begun in 2008, a £1 million project covered its weathering septaria in lime render in 2022.