Warwick Castle: The 700-year story of one of the world's great strongholds

On June 24, 1348, in the course of a tournament at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, Edward III famously instituted a fellowship of 25 knights under his personal leadership. The Order of the Garter, as it was known, was established at a moment of martial triumph in England. One of the founder members of this new order was Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who personified the confidence and belligerence of the moment. ‘The Devil Warwick’, as his enemies called him, had fought side by side with Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and otherwise enjoyed a formidable reputation as a soldier. He was also a great builder and, as the modern visitor encounters it outwardly, Warwick Castle is substantially his creation.

William the Conqueror first founded the castle in 1068 within the defences of a fortified settlement or burgh. The burgh, created in 914 by Æthelflæd of Mercia, occupied a hill top that had been naturally cut back as a cliff on one side by the River Avon. William constructed the castle along the cliff top (Fig 1), from where it commanded a river crossing. According to the Domesday survey of 1086, four houses were demolished to make space for it. William’s castle seems to have taken the conventional form of an artificial mound — termed a motte — and an associated enclosure or bailey. The motte, albeit heavily reworked since the 11th century, still survives and it’s assumed that the bailey followed roughly the line of the later walls. These earthworks were presumably fortified in timber.

Warwick Castle was subsequently granted to a Norman, Henry de Beaumont. The exact date of this grant is uncertain, but it was through Henry’s close connection with the Conqueror’s son and heir, William Rufus, that he was able to constitute a vast patchwork of estates extending across the Midlands, South Wales and Normandy. It helped, too, that, in 1088, he became Earl of Warwick, with exceptional powers within his titular county. The Earl seems to have played a crucial role in securing the succession of Henry I to the throne in 1100 and, in 1118, towards the end of his life, became a monk. At that time he seems to have divided his estates, passing those in England to his eldest son, Roger.

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By contemporary assessment, Earl Roger was a failure. Henry I almost immediately compelled him to yield up a very considerable portion of his Warwickshire estates to a royal favourite, Geoffrey de Clinton, who established a rival castle about five miles away at Kenilworth in the same county. The stories of these two great castles remained inextricably linked until the latter was demolished in 1649. During the Civil Wars fought after Henry I’s death in 1135, the Earl was forced to hand over Warwick to a royal garrison. He is described as dying of shock in 1153 after hearing the news that his wife, Gundreda, had tricked Warwick’s garrison into surrendering the castle to the supporters of the future Henry II.

Through the 12th and 13th centuries, the architectural development of Warwick Castle is a near blank. For a building of such importance, this is surprising. Documentary sources reveal the existence of a chapel and, in 1191, a certain Ralph the Mason inspected minor repairs, implying the existence of stone buildings or fortifications. These presumably replaced the original timber structures of the 11th century. It is also asserted by the 15th-century historian of Warwick, John Rous, that, when supporters of Simon de Montfort sallied out of Kenilworth and captured the castle in 1264, they had ‘beaten down the walls from tower to tower’ to render the fortifications useless to Henry III. He goes on to say that the walls of Warwick Castle were substituted by hedges.

In 1268, soon after this event, the Earldom of Warwick was inherited by William Beauchamp. Neither William nor his son, Guy, who succeeded as 10th Earl in 1298, are known to have improved Warwick Castle, although the latter did use it for the brief imprisonment of Edward II’s notorious royal favourite, Piers Gaveston, in 1312. Gaveston, who dubbed the Earl ‘the black dog of Arden’, was famously led from the castle to nearby Blacklow Hill — significantly the property of another inveterate enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster — and executed. Guy died in 1315 and the castle passed to his son, another Thomas. Perhaps the state of the building — hedged and without new buildings — inspired him to transform it so completely.

Thomas was just over a year old when he inherited his father’s estates and was a minor throughout the turbulent events and military humiliations of Edward II’s reign. He secured his estates in 1329, shortly before Edward III — his near contemporary — dramatically seized control of the realm from his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, in 1330. His building work at Warwick is not documented, which makes it complicated to date, but its character cannot be properly understood without reference to the King’s enthusiasms and concurrent activities at Windsor.

The Order of the Garter was directly inspired by the example of the Knights of the Round Table, whose fabled exploits enjoyed European popularity in the late Middle Ages. Edward III had previously built a ‘Round Table’ in the Upper Ward at Windsor in 1344 and attended tournaments splendidly dressed in Arthurian persona. Rooting reality in legend was intoxicating and, in Warwick, Thomas had his own chivalric hero to promote. The legend of Guy of Warwick, notionally set in the period of the Danish invasions, became popular in the early 13th century and exists in multiple versions.

According to it, Guy won the hand of Felice, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, by performing daring feats of arms across Europe. Following his marriage and the conception of a child, Reinbrun, however — and, according to some versions, when staring into the heavens from the top of the tallest castle tower — he suddenly realised the vanity of fighting for a woman; he ought to have been fighting for Christ. Leaving the tearful Felice, he set off once again on his adventures until miraculously summoned back to England to vanquish the Danish champion Colbrond. After this duel, he became a hermit outside Warwick and, on his deathbed, sent for the faithful Felice, who immediately followed him to the grave.

Thomas Beauchamp’s enthusiasm for this legend first found expression in the 1330s. Not only did he name two of his sons Guy and Reinbrun, but he was almost certainly the creator of an 8ft-high sculpture of the dead hero carved in the living rock at so-called Guy’s Cliffe (Fig 6), the supposed site of his hermitage close to Blacklow Hill (Country Life, July 21, 2010). Beauchamp’s will in 1369 also makes mention of ‘the coat of mail sometime belonging to that famous Guy of Warwick’, which was bequeathed to his son and namesake. Guy’s legend was assuming reality.

At Warwick Castle, meanwhile, Beauchamp built an entire suite of domestic chambers, with a hall, services and withdrawing chambers in stone along the cliff top (Fig 5). He also constructed the main entrance façade (Fig 2). This comprises a central gatehouse with an outer fortification or barbican (Fig 4) flanked by towers at each outward corner of the castle. The pairing of the towers masks their colossal scale. Both are prodigy buildings, taller than anything comparable of the period in England. Each principal floor within them is vaulted, an astonishing expense, and seems to have served as a self-contained lodging.

The towers have been known since at least 1644 as Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower, names suggestive of deep history. If the names are medieval, the latter could be an architectural evocation of the tower on which the legendary Guy of Warwick experienced his conversion to Christ’s service. Whatever the case, this building has long enjoyed admiration and, as early as the 15th century, inspired copies at Cardiff (another Beauchamp possession) and Raglan Castles. Curiously, the Earl did not build on the motte, the natural focus of the castle. He did, however, create a gateway on an octagonal plan immediately beside it (Fig 3). This highly unusual form suggests a connection with royal building projects in Wales.

Beauchamp might have begun redeveloping Warwick Castle at any time from 1329, but it’s likely that he only acquired the necessary resources a decade or more later. His additions to the castle could also have grown in scale as time went on. Might his appointment as Marshal of England in 1344; or the first formal gathering of the Knights of the Garter on St George’s Day, 1349; or the victory at Poitiers in 1356, at which the Earl fought, have prompted fresh building initiatives? Certainly, despite the striking overall uniformity of the buildings attributed to him, close analysis of the fabric shows that there are minor changes in such details as the moulding of vault ribs. This could suggest a prolonged period of construction and the involvement of different masons.

What can be said with confidence is that a starting date in the mid 1340s would agree with the dating of one building that bears close technical comparison with what seem to be the very earliest additions to Warwick. This is the castle built at nearby Maxstoke by William Clinton, a close companion of Edward III (and a descendant of the builder of Kenilworth), which was licensed by the King in 1345. The designer of Maxstoke clearly knew the character of Warwick well and even created elaborate chimneypots that evoke in miniature its main 14th-century towers.

Both in scale and form, however, the most obvious parallel for Beauchamp’s domestic apartments at Warwick is the outstanding royal building project of the late 14th century. This was the palace begun in the upper ward of Windsor Castle by Edward III in 1359, which was paid for by the proceeds of Poitiers. It incorporated a single coherent frontage comprising a hall, chapel and chamber, raised on a huge vaulted undercroft. Ideas from Windsor also informed rebuilding work at Kenilworth by the King’s brother, John of Gaunt, in the 1370s and, in a neat symmetry, these also relate back to Warwick. In particular, they evoke Beauchamp’s last major architectural project, the construction from 1367 of a suitably magnificent collegiate church at Warwick, now the parish church of St Mary (Country Life, April 16, 2025).

When Beauchamp died in 1369, he was succeeded by his son and namesake. Thomas, 11th Earl of Warwick, certainly finished his father’s work to the collegiate church and he may also have had to complete the castle buildings, because the usually reliable 17th-century antiquarian, William Dugdale, cites a payment of £395 towards Guy’s Tower in a medieval account of 1393/94, now frustratingly lost. The Earl also entered further into his father’s enthusiasm for Guy of Warwick. A sculpture of the hero was carved for the choir of the collegiate church and a suit of tapestries ‘wrought with the arms and story of Guy of Warwick’ hung in the castle in 1399. Guy’s armour, sword and harness are also mentioned in his will. These, and such other imagined relics as Guy’s poringer, can still be seen in the castle today.

The castle continued to evolve through the 15th century. In the 1420s, Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, another flower of English chivalry, created a huge stable complex outside the walls of the castle strikingly decorated in plaster of Paris. This was later demolished, but something of its scale is apparent in the surviving 16th-century stable at Kenilworth, which seems to be a copy of that at Warwick. The Spy Tower was probably added to the withdrawing apartments in the 1470s by George, Duke of Clarence, who married Isabel Neville, the co-heiress of the Warwick estates (Fig 7). With large windows and access to the roof leads, it offered spectacular views over the neighbouring park.

Warwick subsequently passed to the Duke’s brother, the future Richard III, and thus into royal ownership. Richard entertained ambitious plans for the castle and began a massive artillery tower to reinforce its defences, but construction was cut short by his fall from power in 1485. What remains of this building now forms part of the line of the castle walls (Fig 8). Henry VIII repaired the castle, but it was in the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I that it acquired renewed significance, as we will explore next week.

See more details about visiting the castle at the Warwick Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 10, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.