Waytemore Castle

The mound at Bishop's Stortford is older than the castle that stood on it, though how much older is disputed: some historians take it for a Celtic barrow while others read it as a Saxon burh, a moated and stockaded fortress adapted early in the tenth century by Edward the Elder as a defence against the invading Danes. The name has been argued over in the same way, read either as the Saxon ‘wayte’, a place of ambush, with ‘more’, a fen or marsh, or, as the historian Jacqueline Cooper prefers, as a corruption of the Old Norse ‘thwaite’, a forest clearing, set beside ‘marr’, a boggy place, which would put the Norman castle on ground already cleared out of damp woodland.

A motte and bailey castle was raised here in the time of William the Conqueror, and the change from timber fortress to masonry probably followed soon after 1086, although the keep is thought not to have been built before 1135. Norman work or Saxon, the earth mound became the foundation of the motte, and its siting in the valley rather than on the usual high ground was a deliberate move to command the important river crossing. The mound was ringed by a moat and its summit protected by a curtain wall of flint and rubble; the rectangular great tower raised within that wall in the twelfth century was probably whitewashed with lime and chalk, to remind the Saxon inhabitants of the town of Norman power.

In 1208 a falling out between King John and the pope over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury brought an interdict down on England and Wales, and John answered by confiscating church property, the castles of several bishops among it. Where other bishops' castles were simply taken into the king's hands, the castle at Bishop's Stortford was demolished. It was improved in the thirteenth century during John's reign. The fragments of wall that survive at the summit of the mound are those of the keep rebuilt by King John in 1214.

A licence to crenellate was granted in the mid-fourteenth century. The castle was slighted after the Civil War, and in the seventeenth century the site was used as a prison. The mound has never been properly excavated: an investigation in 1850 uncovered parts of the standing wall and a few human bones, and the local historian J. L. Glasscock, digging in 1900, found only a few Roman coins of the Lower Empire. The most informative find came by accident in the late 1990s, when a large number of human bones was discovered within the grounds, which experts say strongly suggests there may have been some kind of medieval hospital attached to the castle. The large motte, the earthworks and the foundations of a square tower were listed at Grade I on 18 October 1949 and are a scheduled monument.