Tamworth Castle

Long before any castle stood here, Tamworth was the chief residence of Offa, ruler of the expanding Mercian kingdom, who built a palace from which charters were issued sedens in palatio regali in Tamoworthige, the first dating from 781. Little of that glory survived the Viking attack of 874, which left the town "for nearly forty years a mass of blackened ruins".

In 913 Tamworth was rebuilt by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who fortified the town with a new earthen burh — though this did little to save it when the Danes sacked the place again in 943. Tamworth is not mentioned again as a royal residence, but its mint went on striking coins for the later Anglo-Saxon kings and eventually for William the Conqueror.

William granted Tamworth to his steward, Robert Despenser, who in the 1080s raised a wooden motte-and-bailey castle over the south-western part of Æthelflæd's burh — the forerunner of the present building. When Robert died childless the castle passed to his nieces, one of whom, Matilda, married Robert Marmion; the Marmions, hereditary champions of the Dukes of Normandy and then of the Kings of England, held Tamworth for six generations, from about 1100 to 1294, and it was under them that the castle began to be remodelled in stone.

It nearly did not survive them. Robert Marmion, 3rd Baron Marmion of Tamworth, deserted King John in 1215 during the turmoil of his reign, and the king ordered Robert's son Geoffrey imprisoned, all of Robert's lands confiscated and Tamworth Castle demolished. Whether the order was ever carried out is unclear; after John's death the Marmion sons regained their father's lands.

Philip Marmion, the last male of his line to own the castle, died about 1291 leaving no legitimate son. Tamworth passed to his daughter and then, in 1294, to her niece Joan, wife of Sir Alexander Freville, whose descendants held it until 1423. When Baldwin de Freville's son died a minor, the castle went to the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband Thomas Ferrers of Groby, whose family's arms — and those of the families they married into — came to dominate the interior through additions of the Jacobean period.

By the time John Leland passed through in 1539–43 the outworks were "cleane decayed and the Wall fallen downe", though on the mound there remained "a great round Tower of Stone" in which Humphrey Ferrers dwelt and which he was then repairing. Kings kept coming through the centuries — Henry I, Henry II with Thomas Becket in 1158, Henry III in 1257, Edward II and Edward III — and in 1619 James I visited with his son Prince Charles.

The castle's defences had been built with medieval warfare in mind, and in the English Civil War they did not hold long: Parliamentary forces captured Tamworth on 25 June 1643 after a siege of only two days and garrisoned it — ten officers and 77 soldiers under the military governor Waldyve Willington by July 1645. That garrison duty proved the castle's salvation, for it escaped the slighting ordered for so many strongholds in that period.

After 1668 the castle passed to relatives of the Ferrers — first the Shirleys of Chartley, then in 1715 the Comptons, under whom it again fell into disrepair before Charlotte Compton's marriage to George Townshend of Raynham brought a refurbishment. Walter Scott gave the place a brief, anachronistic afterlife in Marmion (1808), whose anti-hero is proclaimed lord "Of Tamworth tower and town" though the barony of Marmion was by then long extinct, and J. M. W. Turner painted the castle from the south-east in 1832.

In 1891 the Marquess Townshend put the castle up for auction, and in 1897 Tamworth Corporation bought it for £3,000 to mark Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. The Earl of Dartmouth opened it to the public as a museum in 1899, and it remains one of the best preserved motte-and-bailey castles in England.