Qualla: Bungay Castle

Bungay Castle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scott Anderson from UK, CC BY 2.0. In 1174 Henry II's miners crawled under Hugh Bigod's keep at Bungay with picks and pit props, hollowing out the foundations and ready to set fires that would burn the timber supports and bring the entire stone tower down on top of itself. Bigod surrendered. The castle was slighted, deliberately wrecked rather than destroyed, and the great gate towers you see today would not exist for another hundred and twenty years. They belong to a different Bigod, in a different reign, after the family had clawed their way back into favour and lost it again.

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Image: Scott Anderson from UK | CC BY 2.0

Bungay Castle: Roger Bigod's River Bend

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Downer, CC BY-SA 2.0. Around 1100 the Norman lord Roger Bigod looked at a tight loop in the River Waveney where the river almost doubled back on itself, and he saw a defensive position that nature had already half-built. The peninsula inside the loop was protected on three sides by water. A simple woo...

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Image: Chris Downer | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bungay Castle: The Tunnel Under the Keep

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. Henry confiscated all four Bigod castles, then returned Framlingham and Bungay to Hugh in 1165 as a calibrated gesture, while building his own enormous polygonal keep at Orford on the coast to dominate Bigod country from outside the family's network. Hugh joined the revolt of 117...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bungay Castle: Roger Bigod, Fifth Earl, Builds Again

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Bigods recovered. The family's loyalty wavered enough in the next century to attract further trouble, but by 1294 Roger Bigod, the fifth Earl of Norfolk and the great-great-grandson of the original Roger who picked the river loop, was a major Plantagenet magnate. He probably ...

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Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bungay Castle: Quarried for Road Stone

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Luff, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1766 the Dukes sold the castle to a local man named Robert Mickleborough, who saw what the medieval engineers had built and saw road metalling. Mickleborough quarried the keep and curtain walls for building stone, in what amounted to an industrial-scale removal of much of the ...

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Image: Martin Luff | CC BY-SA 2.0