Winchester Castle

Around AD 70 the Romans threw up an earth rampart 800 ft long and 200 ft wide at Winchester and set a fort on top of it to protect the city of Venta Belgarum. William the Conqueror chose that ground for one of the first Norman castles in England, built in 1067, and for over a hundred years the castle was the seat of government of the Norman kings. In 1141, during the Anarchy, the forces of the Empress Matilda were besieged there by those of King Stephen in the Rout of Winchester. Henry II built a stone keep to house the royal treasury and the Domesday Book.

Henry III was born at Winchester Castle, and between 1222 and 1235 he added the Great Hall to it. The hall was built to a "double cube" plan, 110 ft long by 55 ft wide and 55 ft high, of flint with stone dressings; its walls were originally lower and its roof carried dormer windows, later replaced by the tall two-light windows with early plate tracery. It is a Grade I listed building, and the remains of a 13th-century round tower with sally ports are still visible. Edward II added further extensions.

The castle also held prisoners. In 1287 Asher, son of Licoricia of Winchester, wrote a Hebrew inscription on the ruins of the Jews' Tower, part of the castle, during the imprisonment of the whole community on 2 May that year, ahead of a huge tax on the Jews levied by Edward I and their expulsion in 1290.

The large wooden tabletop hung in the Great Hall was made in the 13th century and only later attached to the Arthurian legend in popular tradition. It was repainted in its present form for Henry VIII, with the names of King Arthur's knights set around the rim and a portrait of Arthur that is recognisably a depiction of the young Henry himself. The Winchester Panels hung there too, a series of pictorial epigrams illuminated in medieval monastic style, thought to show the twenty-five knights of the Round Table and the challenges of a character maturing around the great "Wheel of Life".

In 1302 Edward I and his second wife, Margaret of France, narrowly escaped death when fire destroyed the royal apartments. On 19 March 1330 Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent, was beheaded outside the castle walls in the Despenser plot against Edward III, and the place remained an important residence: Margaret of York, daughter of Edward IV, was born there on 10 April 1472. After Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558 the castle ceased to be a royal residence and was handed to Winchester's city authorities. The nun Elizabeth Sander was imprisoned here with other Catholics in 1580; she escaped, then returned to show that Catholics were law-abiding. On 17 November 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh was tried for treason in the converted Great Hall for his supposed part in the Main Plot.

The Royalists used the castle in the Civil War. It fell to Parliamentarian forces in 1646 and was demolished on Oliver Cromwell's orders in 1649. Later in the century Charles II planned the King's House on the adjoining site and commissioned Christopher Wren to design a royal palace to rival Versailles, but James II abandoned the project.

The Great Hall outlived the castle around it. On 27 August 1685, in the aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion, Judge Jeffreys held the Bloody Assizes there; among the accused at Winchester was Alice Lisle, condemned to death for harbouring fugitives. It went on serving as the home of the Winchester Assizes into the 20th century — six members of the Provisional IRA were tried and convicted there in 1973 for the Old Bailey bombing — and ceased to host criminal trials only when the Winchester Law Courts were built just to its east in 1974. Much of the castle has been lost, but two notable structures survive: the Great Hall, regarded as one of the finest surviving medieval halls in England, and the Westgate, once its principal defensive gateway.