Worcester Castle

Worcester Castle was raised between 1068 and 1069 on William the Conqueror's orders. It was timber, motte-and-bailey, with baileys north and south of the motte, and stood on the eastern bank of the Severn, using the old burh walls and ditches. Urse d'Abetot was appointed sheriff of Worcester and constable of the new castle.

Such urban castles usually meant clearing houses; here the outer bailey ditch cut through the cathedral cemetery instead. Whether it was still in use is unclear, but Ealdred, Archbishop of York, complained at the seizure and formally cursed Urse.

Within a few years both the shrievalty and the constableship had become hereditary in Urse's successors — his son Roger, then Walter de Beauchamp, who married Urse's daughter — who ran the king's castle largely independently of him, though they preferred Elmley Castle, twelve miles away, as their residence. In 1113 Welsh raiders broke into the outer bailey and fired the buildings; the timber castle was destroyed and rebuilt, again in wood.

Worcestershire proved a key battleground in the war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. An Angevin army from Gloucestershire assaulted the city in late 1139; after an attempt on the castle on the city's south side, the Gloucester forces entered from the north and burnt the city, and as a result Walter de Beauchamp sided with Matilda. Stephen replaced him as constable with Waleran de Beaumont and held Worcester as a base until Robert of Gloucester reclaimed city and castle for the Empress. Stephen stormed and burnt the city in 1148 and attacked again in 1150; these operations included siege castles at Henwick Hill and Red Hill to contain the fortress. Walter was afterwards reaffirmed as constable by Henry II. The chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote that “the king's besieging castles were demolished by the craft of the earl of Leicester and the siege was raised by cunning”.

In 1204 King John ordered the sheriff of Worcester to rebuild the gatehouse, “which is now of timber, with good and fine stone”; the work cost £25.

War broke out again in 1215 between John and the rebel barons. John had annexed the castle in 1214; when William de Beauchamp joined the rebels in 1216 John sent forces and retook it. The war outlasted John, ending in 1217 with victory for his son Henry III. That same year Henry's government granted the disputed graveyard land to the cathedral, a panel ruling that the division run straight across the bailey. The far side went to the church, leaving the remainder useless militarily and breaking the Beauchamps' power in the city.

A gaol stood in the outer bailey by 1221, when a porter was recorded as gaoler; escapes recurred through the 1220s. In the Second Barons' War Worcester was captured and its prisoners released, and later in the same war Simon de Montfort held Henry III prisoner there.

Sheriffs of Worcestershire held the castle as constables, the property passing from the Beauchamps to the Earls of Warwick until Richard Neville, the “Kingmaker”, died in the Wars of the Roses in 1471. Edward IV broke up his estates and gave the castle to his son, severing Worcester's link with the earldom.

The final constables were appointed in the 1540s, after which none were named. The walls were quarried for stone and the motte used to keep animals on, only the sheriff's county gaol left intact; the antiquarian John Leland recorded in the 1540s that the castle was “now clean down”, the motte still of impressive size but heavily overgrown. The cathedral built a gatehouse, Edgar's Tower, on the site of the castle's own. The gaol's deputy keeper was paid £28 for prisoners taken after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, among them Thomas Habington, a recusant who had sheltered priests at Hindlip Hall. In 1642 Worcester's walls were refortified and a sconce built on top of the motte.

A new gaol of stone and brick went up in the castle grounds in 1653. Inspecting it in the 1770s, the reformer John Howard condemned the underground dungeon reached down twenty-six steps and 18 feet across, and found 74 inmates, two routinely to a cell, run for profit by a local butcher paid £150 a year. Gaol fever killed a local doctor who visited. A £20,000 county gaol with radiating wings replaced it in 1814 on the north side of the city, giving Castle Street its name. The Dean and Chapter acquired the old gaol in 1823, the outer bailey became College Green, entered through Edgar's Tower, and the motte was slowly demolished between 1823 and 1846.