Sheffield Castle

The confluence of the Sheaf and the Don held the earliest settlement at Sheffield, founded in the second half of the first millennium. Excavation in the late 1920s pointed to Saxon timbers cut down to ground level, burned, and the ground cleared to make way for the castle raised there around 1100 by William de Lovetot, an Anglo-Norman baron from Huntingdonshire who acquired the lordship of Hallamshire in the reign of Henry I. The castle was meant to keep a rebellious populace subdued after the Harrying of the North.

Domesday records that before the Conquest Waltheof II, Earl of Northumbria, had an aula, a hall, in the manor of Hallam, and the site has been claimed for it; but the Survey shows Hallam and Sheffield as distinct manors, placing that hall in Hallam rather than here, and the burnt timbers were cleared some two decades after it was destroyed. Lovetot's castle is thought to have been a timber motte and bailey. The earliest known reference to a castle at Sheffield is a return made about 1188 by Ralph Murdac, sheriff of Derbyshire, concerning the wardship of Maud de Lovetot, William's great-granddaughter.

Maud de Lovetot married Gerard de Furnival in 1204, and the castle and town of Sheffield passed with her to the Furnival family. Gerard's grandson Thomas took the king's side in the Second Barons' War of 1264-1267. In 1266 a party of anti-monarchy barons under John de Eyvill, marching from north Lincolnshire into Derbyshire, passed through Sheffield and destroyed the town, burning the church and the castle.

In 1270 Thomas de Furnival obtained a charter from Henry III to build a castle at Sheffield, this time in stone. It ran from the Sheaf to Waingate and from the Don to Dixon Lane, about 4.2 acres, with the rivers guarding the north and east and a moat the south and west; a park of some 2,461 acres reached south to Gleadless and east to Handsworth. Thomas died soon after the castle was completed and was buried in it. A report published in 1707 stated that when the castle was pulled down a large flat stone was found, engraved: "I Lord Furnival; I built this castle-hall; And under this wall; Within this tomb was my burial."

Mary, Queen of Scots was held at the castle and its estates at various times across the fourteen years between 1570 and 1584, alternating with other properties of George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury. An escape plan laid for her in February 1571 fell through when she was moved from Sheffield Manor to the castle. In December 1571 she was able to walk on the lead roof, in the earl's large dining room and in the courtyard. On 26 February 1574 an earthquake at Sheffield damaged the apartment in which she was imprisoned.

Parliamentarians under Sir John Gell seized the town and castle on 11 October 1642. In April 1643 the Earl of Newcastle's Royalists entered Yorkshire and took Leeds, Wakefield and Rotherham; the Parliamentarians abandoned Sheffield for Derbyshire and the castle was captured without fighting. Newcastle garrisoned and fortified it and made Sir William Savile governor of castle, town and country. Savile passed control to his deputy, Major Thomas Beaumont, who held Sheffield until August 1644.

That month the Earl of Manchester sent 1,200 men under Major-General Crawford and Colonel Pickering. From 2 August the besiegers could not breach the walls, their largest gun a demi-culverin, until Lord Fairfax reinforced them with a whole culverin and a demi-cannon called the Queen's pocket-pistoll, which opened the wall. Articles were signed on 11 August 1644: the castle and all its arms, ordnance and ammunition delivered up by three o'clock that afternoon, the governor and officers marching out with drums and colours, each with his own horse saddled, sword and pistol, for Pontefract or wherever they pleased. Lady Savile, the former governor's widow, was to travel to Thornhill with a guard befitting her quality; pregnant at the time of the siege, she went into labour the night after the surrender.

The House of Commons ordered the castle made untenable on 30 April 1646 and its demolition on 13 July 1647. In 1649 the Earl of Arundel bought it back intending to restore it, but the damage was too great and no work was ever started. The castle was soon completely razed; some of its stone went into the Free Grammar School built on Townhead Street in 1648, and the ground served as an orchard and then a bowling green before being built over. No drawings or plans of the castle are known to survive.