Stafford Castle

The Staffordshire historian Robert Plot cited the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for a castle raised at Stafford in 913 by Æthelflæd, ruler of the Mercians, with an adjacent fortified burh; the site of that first work, probably timber, is now unknown. Eadric the Wild's rebellion against the Normans ended in Saxon defeat at the Battle of Stafford in 1069.

Some time in the 1070s Robert de Stafford, also recorded as Robert de Tosny, threw up a timber-and-earth motte and bailey on a modified glacial deposit west of the town. William the Conqueror had granted him 131 manors, most of them in Staffordshire, and the castle let him tax the Anglo-Saxon population around it and prepare for the Norman invasion of Wales in 1081. By the Domesday survey of 1086 it was the seat of a family that held it through a female line and a change of name — barons of Stafford, Barons Stafford by writ from 1299, Earls of Stafford from 1351, Dukes of Buckingham from 1444.

In 1347 Ralph de Stafford, one of the king's leading commanders in the first phases of the Hundred Years' War and from 1351 the first Earl of Stafford, sealed a contract with a master mason for a stone castle on the old mound. The keep was rectangular with a tower at each corner; a fifth was added later in the middle of the north wall, which in fact faces west.

The stone castle's heyday belonged to Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham, killed at the Battle of Northampton in 1460. His grandson Henry, the 2nd Duke, was made a ward of the Yorkists and began as a supporter of Richard III before rebelling in favour of Henry Tudor's aborted invasion of 1483; he paid with his life. Henry's son Edward escaped, and a grateful Henry VII restored him to his lands.

Edward's royal blood made him a threat to Henry VIII, who had him executed in 1521. Stafford Castle and its deer parks escheated to the Crown. The castle and a small parcel of land were later restored to the Staffords who followed, who never regained the dukes' wealth or status. Maintenance lapsed with the money, and in 1603 Edward Stafford, 3rd Baron Stafford, wrote of ‘my rotten castle of Stafford’.

Parliament took the town of Stafford after a brief siege on 15 May 1643, but part of the garrison escaped to the castle, meaning to use it as a bridgehead from which to recapture the town. It was held by Lady Isabel Stafford, née Forster, a staunch Roman Catholic and Royalist and widow of Edward Stafford, 4th Baron Stafford. Colonel William Brereton rode up with some of his men and called on her to surrender; she refused.

The besiegers' own account records that ‘some of the poor outhouses were set on fire to try whether these would work their spirits to any relenting. All in vain, for from the castle they shot some of our men and horses… Almost all the dwelling houses and outhouses were burnt to the ground.’ Colonel Hastings brought up a relief column on 5 June and the siege was raised. Lady Stafford was persuaded to leave, a small garrison staying behind; in late June, hearing that a large Parliamentarian army was approaching with siege cannon, the Royalists fled. On 22 December the Parliamentarian Committee of Stafford ordered that ‘the Castle shall be forthwith demolished’. Passing through in 1698, the diarist Celia Fiennes saw only ‘the fortified trenches that are grown over green’.

By the 1790s a single low wall was all that stood above ground, and it was failing; workmen sent to underpin it found the buried basements and foundations running off from it and took the discovery to Sir William Jerningham, who had the mound cleared and the foundations uncovered. Rebuilding in the Gothic Revival style began in 1813 on the medieval footings but was soon discontinued, for lack of funds and because the Jerninghams had gained the peerage that was among their motives for starting. The work has been called a folly, but the keep was always meant to be lived in, and was occupied well into the 20th century.

The woodland around the keep was felled after the Second World War, which may have left the structure exposed to high winds; by 1949 masonry was falling from the towers, which were declared unsafe, and the last caretakers moved out that winter. Lord Stafford gave the keep to the local authority in 1961. Excavation began in 1978 and ran for years, becoming one of the area's biggest employers of young people through the severe depression of the early 1980s; the site opened to the public in 1988, with a purpose-built museum below the mound in 1992.