Castle Rising Castle: Nine Centuries of Power, Exile, and Endurance

Stand at the base of the earthworks and look up. The banks rise eighteen metres above you — grass-softened ramparts that once held back armies — and beyond their crest, the pale stone of a twelfth-century keep breaks the Norfolk skyline like a jaw set against the centuries. This is Castle Rising, and it has watched over the flat lands northeast of King's Lynn for nearly nine hundred years.

An Ambitious Man's Statement in Stone

Castle Rising was born from ambition and marriage. Around 1138, during the vicious civil war known as the Anarchy, the Anglo-Norman nobleman William d'Aubigny II married Adeliza of Louvain, the widow of King Henry I. The match catapulted d'Aubigny from minor lord to one of the wealthiest men in England, and the following year he was created Earl of Arundel. A contemporary chronicler noted he "became intolerably puffed up ... and looked down upon every other eminence."

D'Aubigny needed a castle to match his new station. He chose a site four miles from the Wash, where a small settlement already stood, and raised a massive keep modelled on Norwich Castle — the only royal fortress in Norfolk. The message was unmistakable: here was a man who considered himself the Crown's equal in stone, if not in title. He relocated the existing village northward, laid out a grid-plan town beside the walls, and even settled a Jewish community at the castle to establish it as a centre of commerce.

The She-Wolf's Golden Cage

No chapter of Castle Rising's story grips the imagination quite like the long residence of Queen Isabella of France. History remembers her as the "She-Wolf" — the woman who, alongside her lover Roger Mortimer, deposed her husband Edward II in 1327. When her son Edward III seized power back in 1330, he had Mortimer executed but could not bring himself to punish his own mother so harshly. Instead, he granted her Castle Rising.

Popular legend paints Isabella as a prisoner howling mad behind locked doors. The truth is more nuanced and more fascinating. She lived in considerable comfort on an annual income of some four thousand pounds — a vast sum — and kept minstrels, huntsmen, and grooms in her household. Edward III visited her at Castle Rising on at least four occasions. She extended buildings within the castle walls. This was not a dungeon sentence; it was a diplomatic solution to an impossible family problem. Isabella lived at Castle Rising until her death in 1358, spending twenty-seven years in what might be called the most luxurious political retirement in medieval England.

A Fortress Palace in Stone and Earth

The keep itself remains one of the finest surviving examples of Norman domestic architecture in England. Rising twenty-four metres by twenty-one metres, with walls standing some fifteen metres high, it is decorated with elaborate Romanesque arcading and pilaster buttresses that speak of wealth as loudly as any coat of arms. Historians describe it as a "fortress palace" — part stronghold, part statement of aristocratic power.

The approach to the interior runs through a forebuilding along the east wall — a narrow passage just 2.4 metres wide, climbing thirty-four steps through three arched doorways. It was designed to be both impressive and lethal, funnelling any attacker into a confined gauntlet of stone. Inside, the Great Hall retains traces of the splendidly decorated waiting room where visitors would have gathered before being granted audience.

But it is the earthworks that truly astonish. Covering five hectares — some twelve acres — they rank among the most impressive in Britain. Three baileys ring the castle, their defensive banks still standing at their original towering height. Beyond the walls, the deer park known as Rising Chase once stretched approximately sixteen miles in circumference, its boundaries deliberately shaped so they extended beyond the horizon when viewed from the lord's chamber in the keep. Power made visible across the landscape.

From Ruin to Preservation

By the 1540s, surveys described Castle Rising as in "greate ruin and decaye." Yet the Howards, who received the castle from Henry VIII in 1544, never abandoned it. In 1822, Fulke Greville Howard excavated the basement and lowered the ground level of the inner bailey by a full metre, uncovering the Norman chapel that had been buried for centuries — a small stone building predating the castle itself, built around 1100, its walls incorporating Roman tiles from an even older past.

Today, Castle Rising is protected as a Scheduled Ancient Monument and Grade I listed building. English Heritage assumed control in 1983, and in 1998 management returned to Baron Howard of Rising, who continues the family's centuries-long stewardship. The village itself — population around two hundred — carries its own weight of history: the twelfth-century Church of St Lawrence, commissioned by d'Aubigny himself, still stands with its carved Norman font. Before the Reform Act of 1832, this tiny settlement was a parliamentary borough so notorious for its rotten pocket electorate that its MPs included both Samuel Pepys and Robert Walpole, the future first Prime Minister.

Visiting Castle Rising

Castle Rising Castle stands four miles northeast of King's Lynn in Norfolk, PE31 6AH. It is open daily from April through November (10am–6pm) and Wednesday to Sunday through the winter months (10am–4pm). The earthworks alone are worth the journey — walk the full circuit of the outer bailey and you begin to understand the sheer scale of Norman ambition in this quiet corner of East Anglia.

This article was partly inspired by old photographs and personal recordings that came to light when someone brought their family memories to be digitised — images of Norfolk holidays decades past, with the castle's keep standing in the background just as it does today. It made us wonder what else might be out there, tucked away in attics, shoeboxes, and old cupboards, connected to Castle Rising Castle and the people who have lived in its shadow. If anyone holds old media connected to this remarkable place, services like EachMoment can help preserve them for future generations.