History of Warwick Castle

Nine hundred and fifty years of one building, and the useful version is the specific one. A Norman mound thrown up two years after Hastings. An earl who paid for two towers with French ransom money. An owner murdered by his own servant. A fire that took the Great Hall in a single December night. And a family who lived here until 1978 and then sold it.

914 — the town before the castle

Warwick was fortified 154 years before the castle existed. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Alfred the Great, raised a burh here in 914 as part of a chain of defended towns against the Danes. The castle’s own Conqueror’s Fortress interpretation reaches back to that date, and it is the reason the Normans chose this bend of the Avon rather than another.

1068 — William, and the reason for the site

William the Conqueror raised a motte at Warwick in 1068, two years after Hastings. The choice was strategic rather than scenic: Warwick sits in the middle of England on the Fosse Way, and holding it meant holding the routes through the Midlands. The mound survives; the timber on top of it does not.

1264 — the castle taken

During the Second Barons’ War, forces loyal to Simon de Montfort took the castle and carried off William Mauduit, the 8th Earl of Warwick. It is the first of the two occasions this building was seriously fought over, and it left the earldom to pass sideways into the family that would rebuild it.

1329 to 1369 — Thomas Beauchamp builds what you climb

Thomas Beauchamp inherited the earldom in 1329 and made a fortune in France, largely from ransoming captured French nobles. He spent it here. The great reconstruction that gave Warwick its two towers dates from his tenure: Caesar’s Tower at forty metres and Guy’s Tower at twenty-nine, both in the fashionable Anglo-French manner of the period. Almost everything a visitor climbs today is his.

1455 — Richard Neville, the Kingmaker

Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, is the one name here with a reputation of its own. Through the Wars of the Roses he put Edward IV on the throne, fell out with him, and then restored Henry VI — two kings made by one earl, which is where the name came from. Edward IV was held at this castle, in Caesar’s Tower. Neville died at Barnet in 1471.

1604 to 1628 — the Grevilles arrive, and one is murdered

James I granted the castle to Sir Fulke Greville in 1604, beginning a tenure that lasted 374 years. Greville spent heavily on turning a fortress into a house. In 1628 he was murdered by his own servant, Ralph Haywood, over a dispute about his will — a death in his own chambers that ended the first Greville generation here.

1642 — besieged again

The English Civil War brought the second siege. The castle held for Parliament and was not taken, which is part of why so much of the fourteenth-century fabric is still standing: Warwick avoided the slighting that flattened comparable castles elsewhere.

1749 to 1757 — Capability Brown rebuilds the ground

Francis Greville commissioned Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to re-landscape the castle’s grounds and park, and the work ran from 1749 to 1757. The lawns, the sight-lines and the placing of the trees are his, and they are why the courtyard reads as a stage set rather than as a bailey. It cost about £2,293 at the time.

1769 to 1979 — the vase that came and went

The Warwick Vase was dug in fragments from the silts near Hadrian’s villa outside Rome between 1769 and 1770, restored in the early 1770s, and given to George Greville, Earl of Warwick. It stood in the castle for close to two centuries and was one of the best-known Roman objects in England. In 1979 it was sold to the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, where it remains. What stands at Warwick now is a replica.

1871 and 1978 — the fire, and the sale

Fire broke out in the early hours of Sunday 3 December 1871 in Lady Warwick’s apartments above the library, east of the Great Hall. It destroyed the hall and a number of private apartments and offices. Both were rebuilt, which is why the Great Hall a visitor walks through is Victorian work in a medieval shell.

In November 1978 the Grevilles sold the castle to the Tussauds Group, and it opened as a public attraction. That is the moment the wax figures arrive, and it is the origin of the divide in how people react to the place today.

Every date in one place

Things to do sets out which parts of this history you can walk into, and heritage nearby has the Beauchamp tomb five minutes from the towers. Guided Warwick Castle tour options reach the castle from London with Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford alongside it, and Warwick Castle Tours compares them.