Thornbury Castle

A manor of Thornbury appears in the records from the early 900s, held by three generations of Anglo-Saxon thegns — Alyward, Brictric and Algar — whose great hall served as a court for settling local disputes, with the lord or his steward as judge and local people as jury. Domesday Book records Algar as holder in 1066. After the Conquest, William the Conqueror seized the manor and gave it to the Norman knight Robert Fitz Hamon, and it passed through three generations of his family before arriving with the Staffords in 1344, when Margaret Audley married Ralph, Earl of Stafford.

Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, was the wealthiest noble in England, owning 11 castles, 124 manors, 9 forests, 24 parks and 8,000 deer. Licensed to castellate his manor, in 1510 he began a decade of building that replaced a timber-and-stone house John Leland had dismissed as "of no great estimacion" with a large castellated palace in the latest fashionable style — dressed ashlar brought in from the Cotswolds, ornate patterned brick chimneys, a great hall for entertaining served by both a privy kitchen and a great kitchen, and a western range of offices from which the business of his vast estates was run. Leland called it "castelle lyke": crenellations and machicolations gave its polygonal towers and curtain walls the proper castle styling of the day, the walls raised in rough rubble stone from the quarry at nearby Tytherington.

Of all his residences Buckingham chose Thornbury as his main home. It lay close to the port of Bristol, where luxuries such as spices, sugar and silks came ashore, and to the Welsh marches, where he owned land and where Henry VII had made him responsible for law and order in 1504.

Thornbury was never a true military fortress — it is an early example of a Tudor country house, with minimal defensive attributes — yet the duke worked some genuinely serious defensive features into it, and historians remain unsure of his purpose. Most controversially, he seems to have built barracks in the northern range to house up to 200 retainers, servants illegally trained as soldiers; the fireplaces still visible halfway up the walls show the space was meant for living quarters, not just storage.

Was it a luxury home built to display the status of England's leading noble, or a stronghold from which he might one day challenge the Tudors for the throne, as he was rumoured to be planning? The rumours settled the matter: Buckingham was executed for treason in 1521, and his decade of building ended with him.

The symmetrical entrance range, with its central gatehouse and octagonal corner towers, survives alongside two less regular side ranges bristling with projecting towers. From 1966 to 1986 Kenneth Bell ran the castle as one of the UK's top restaurants, with the food writer Nigel Slater and the MasterChef New Zealand judge Simon Gault on his staff early in their careers. The Grade I listed building now operates as a 26-room hotel and wedding venue, and joined the Relais & Châteaux association in November 2021.