Scarborough Castle: A Medieval Royal Fortress on the Yorkshire Coast
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Iron Age, Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Anglo-Saxon, British, English, Roman
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page25 sections
History
Scarborough Castle is a former medieval royal fortress in the United Kingdom, built and developed by the English Crown on a rocky headland above the North Sea at Scarborough. The stone castle took shape from about 1157 during the medieval period, guarding the Yorkshire coast, Scarborough’s commercial port and northern England against Scottish and continental invasion.
Before the stone castle
Archaeological excavations in the 1920s identified an Iron Age hill fort on the headland, with finds dating to approximately 900–500 BC. The site later acquired a Roman signal station, built in the fourth century on the cliff top to warn of hostile vessels. Around 1000, an Anglo-Saxon chapel was constructed on the station’s site.
The chapel is traditionally associated with the destruction caused by Harald Hardrada’s invasion of England in 1066, but neither that event at the site nor a Viking presence there is supported by archaeological evidence. The headland later became associated with an Anglo-Scandinavian settlement and chapel before the development of the medieval fortress.
The first fortifications and Henry II’s castle
William le Gros, Count of Aumale, established the first recorded medieval fortification in the 1130s. He had received the Earldom of York from King Stephen in 1138 after victory at the Battle of the Standard. The early stronghold was a wooden motte-and-bailey castle, a fortification on a raised earth mound with an enclosed area for buildings and activities. William may also have refounded the settlement of Scardeburg, although the evidence for this remains limited.
The wooden castle was associated with a smaller settlement beside Scarborough harbour. The first evidence for the settlement coincides with the establishment of the stone castle around 1157–1164. The fate of the original fortification is uncertain. William of Newburgh attributed its disappearance to age and exposure, while later interpretations have proposed that Henry II deliberately demolished it to replace it with a stronger fortress.
From about 1157, Henry II rebuilt Scarborough Castle in stone. Most of the work took place between 1159 and 1169. A principal fortified tower, known as the keep, was constructed, and the wooden palisade around the inner bailey was replaced by a stone wall. By the end of Henry’s reign, expenditure on the castle had reached approximately £682 15 shillings and threepence, including £532 spent between 1157 and 1164. Henry also granted the settlement below the fortress the status of a Royal Borough, a town with special privileges from the Crown.
Royal residence and strategic stronghold
Richard I made no investment in the castle, but his brother King John visited it four times between 1199 and 1216. John developed Scarborough as both a comfortable royal residence and a strategic base against rebellious northern barons. He spent approximately £2,291 3 shillings and fourpence on the fortress. Between 1202 and 1212, his works included the west and south curtain walls and a new hall later known as Mosdale Hall. Repairs to the keep roof accounted for £780 of his expenditure in 1211–1212.
Improvement continued under Henry III. Around 1240–1250 he began a new barbican, an outer defensive structure protecting an entrance. Its four towers were completed in 1343, although they were later substantially altered. The castle’s importance was closely connected with Scarborough’s prosperity as a port.
Royal authority at Scarborough was weakened during the thirteenth century by governors who abused their positions. Geoffrey de Neville, governor for approximately twenty years, used the garrison to seize goods from the port. In the 1270s, William de Percy blocked Scarborough’s main road and imposed illegal tolls. By the middle and later years of the century, poor maintenance had left the defences, floors, roofs and armouries in bad condition.
In 1265, the castle was assigned to Prince Edward, the future Edward I. He held court there in 1275 and 1280. In 1295, hostages taken during his campaigns to subjugate Wales were imprisoned at Scarborough. Henry de Percy occupied the castle from 1308 and restored its role as a major fortified base by adding a bakehouse, brewhouse and kitchens. Edward II imprisoned Scottish enemies there in 1311 and appointed Piers Gaveston governor in April 1312.
The crisis of 1312 and later medieval repairs
In May 1312, the Earls of Pembroke and Warenne, with Henry de Percy, besieged and captured the castle. It surrendered quickly because its provisions were inadequate despite the strength of its defences. Gaveston had been promised safe conduct, but the Earl of Warwick captured and killed him while he was travelling south. Edward II later revoked Scarborough’s royal privileges and placed the town under the direct control of governors appointed by the Crown.
Scarborough’s role as a wool-trading port made the castle a target during the Hundred Years’ War, the prolonged conflict between England and France from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century. An inquiry in 1393 led to repairs in 1396 and 1400, and Henry VI ordered major works between 1424 and 1429. Richard III, the last monarch recorded as entering the castle, lived there in 1484 while assembling a fleet against the Tudors. He was defeated and killed the following year.
Tudor unrest and military transformation
In 1536, Robert Aske unsuccessfully attempted to capture the castle during the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rebellion against the dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. Repairs followed in 1537. In 1538, however, the governor Sir Ralph Eure reported that sections of wall had collapsed and used lead from some of the towers to make a brewing vessel.
In 1557, forces loyal to Thomas Wyatt the Younger captured Scarborough Castle by entering in disguise as peasants. Their leader, Thomas Stafford, held the fortress for three days before being executed for high treason on Tower Hill.
The Civil War sieges
At the outbreak of the English Civil War in September 1642, Sir Hugh Cholmley occupied the castle for Parliament. He defected to the Royalist side in March 1643 and ordered the fortress to be refortified, including the construction of the South Steel Battery. The castle, its 700-man garrison, the town and its supply port became a major Royalist position under Charles I.
On 18 February 1645, Sir John Meldrum captured Scarborough for Parliament and cut the Royalists’ routes by land and sea. Cholmley withdrew into the castle and refused to surrender, beginning a five-month siege marked by almost continuous fighting. Parliamentary forces placed the Cannon Royal, then the largest cannon in England, in the twelfth-century St Mary’s Church below the castle. Its bombardment, using balls weighing 56–65 pounds (25–29 kilograms), partly destroyed the keep and severely damaged the church, while the outer castle walls remained intact. Meldrum was killed in hand-to-hand fighting around the barbican.
The garrison surrendered on 25 July 1645. Bombardment, scurvy, lack of water, possible shortages of gunpowder and the threat of starvation had reduced the number of combat-ready defenders to 25. About half of the original 500 defenders survived. Parliament repaired and rearmed the castle with a force of 160 soldiers.
On 27 July 1648, Matthew Boynton changed sides and declared for the King after the garrison went unpaid. A second siege ended with the castle’s return to Parliamentary control on 19 December 1648, as winter and Parliamentary attacks weakened the garrison. Between 1642 and 1648, the castle changed sides seven times.
Prison, garrison and later military use
After the Civil War, Scarborough Castle became a prison for people regarded as enemies of the Commonwealth of England, the republican government that followed the abolition of the monarchy. After the Restoration in 1660, it returned to the Crown. The garrison had been increased in 1658, and Crown control was formally restored in 1662.
George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, was imprisoned at the castle from April 1665 to September 1666 for religious activities considered dangerous to Charles II’s government. The fortress declined again under James II, who did not maintain a garrison there. During the Glorious Revolution, William of Orange’s forces seized Scarborough.
By 1746, the castle had been refortified in response to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, an uprising supporting the Stuart claim to the British throne. Gun batteries and accommodation for 120 officers and soldiers were established, the keep was used as a powder magazine, and the South Steel Battery was rebuilt. The later threat of French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars led to a permanent garrison that remained until the mid-nineteenth century. French prisoners were held at the castle in 1796.
Twentieth-century damage and preservation
German naval bombardment on 16 December 1914 damaged the keep, curtain walls and barracks. Approximately 500 shells fell on Scarborough and the castle, and the barracks were later demolished because of the severity of the damage. During the Second World War, the site served as a secret listening post. A Royal Observer Corps observation post was later added during the Cold War and relayed information to York Cold War Bunker until it ceased operating in 1968.
The castle became a tourist attraction during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ministry of Works took it into public ownership in 1920, and English Heritage has managed it since 1984. It is a Scheduled Monument, a protected archaeological or historic site of national importance under English heritage law, with remains from Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Scandinavian, medieval and eighteenth-century phases.
Remains
Scarborough Castle occupies a naturally defensive headland about 91 metres high, with steep cliffs on three sides facing the sea. A landward isthmus connects it to the mainland. A ditch or moat, together with a wall or palisade and a gatehouse, protected the southwestern approach. The site is ruinous and combines medieval limestone and sandstone work with eighteenth-century red brick and later military installations.
Outer defences and entrance
Curtain wall
The stone curtain wall, a defensive wall enclosing the castle grounds, dates from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. It extends for approximately 230 metres and has twelve round towers placed at intervals. The wall encloses the grounds but does not surround the inner buildings.
Barbican and bridge
The entrance is protected by a fourteenth-century barbican flanked by two semicircular towers on raised ground. It stands near the remains of the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon chapel and occupies the site of an earlier twelfth-century fortification. Later alterations removed the visible evidence of the former portcullis and its grooves.
A stone bridge built in 1337–1338 replaced two earlier drawbridges and leads from the main gateway into the castle courtyards. The circulation arrangement takes entrants first into the inner bailey rather than through an outer bailey.
Inner bailey and keep
Inner bailey
The inner bailey contained workshops, offices, a kitchen and storage areas. It also holds the twelfth-century keep and a well approximately 46 metres deep, with another description giving its depth as about 50 metres. Late twentieth-century geophysical resistivity surveys traced the outlines of additional twelfth-century buildings within this part of the castle.
The inner and outer baileys are divided by a stone wall, ditch and bank, with two defended passages. The outer bailey accommodated entertainments, vegetable cultivation and animals, and included a graveyard and St Mary’s Chapel. The chapel has disappeared from the site, while visible remains of the earlier Anglo-Saxon chapel stand on the location of the Roman signal station.
Keep
The square, four-storey keep was built in the twelfth century. Its surviving shell is approximately 26 metres high, although the complete building originally exceeded 30 metres. It had a sloping defensive base, a flat roof and four turrets. Its walls range from about 3.3 to 5 metres thick, with the west wall the strongest. Several windows survive, some later blocked, and rounded decorative mouldings appear at the corners. The entrance was placed on the first floor.
Seventeenth-century bombardment destroyed the keep’s west wall, interior floors and roof. The first-floor west wall retains the remains of a hearth from a single Great Hall where occupants ate and often slept. The second and third floors were each divided into two rooms for important visitors or the governor, while the basement served as storage.
Royal and domestic buildings
Royal guest building
A twelfth-century building about 30 metres long stood in the outer bailey for royal guests. It contained a long hall, a private chamber with a fireplace for the monarch, and rooms used to prepare and store food. The building was demolished before the 1538 survey, and its foundations, excavated in 1888, survive.
King’s Chambers and Mosdale Hall
The building known as King’s Chambers or Mosdale Hall was originally constructed in the thirteenth century and modernised by Mosdale after 1397. Adjoining the curtain wall, the two-storey structure was converted into a red-brick barracks in the eighteenth century. German shelling in 1914 severely damaged it, and surviving red-brick masonry remains visible beside the older outer stone wall, together with exposed medieval foundations.
Queen’s Tower
The thirteenth-century Queen’s Tower initially provided luxurious accommodation with private latrines. A porch and large windows overlooking the bays were added in 1320. Two windows were later blocked, while another was converted into a cupboard with a rubbish chute.
Military buildings and archaeological evidence
South Steel Battery and barracks
The South Steel Battery was established during the Civil War and rebuilt in the eighteenth century. By 1746, three batteries protected the town and harbour, with two facing south and one facing north. Eighteenth-century barracks contained twelve apartments for 120 soldiers.
Master Gunner’s House
The Master Gunner’s House was built in 1748 as accommodation and remained a residence until the early twentieth century. It now contains an exhibition on the castle and artefacts from the site.
Roman signal station
The Roman signal station revealed by the 1920s excavations consisted of a square timber structure on stone foundations around a small courtyard. It measured approximately 33 metres across and had a gatehouse and an outer ditch. The station used a natural freshwater source later known as the Well of Our Lady.
Bronze Age sword
A sword approximately 3,000 years old is among the Bronze Age finds recovered from the headland. It is thought to have been a ritual offering. Discovered in 1980, it is displayed in the exhibition at the Master Gunner’s House.
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