Qualla: Pleshey Castle

Pleshey Castle: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Nevell from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the road into the village, the hill looks too perfect to be natural - a smooth green dome rising fifteen metres above the Essex fields, ringed by a moat that still holds water. It is not natural. Norman workers shaped it by hand around the year 1100, piling up basket-loads of clay and chalk in disciplined courses until they had built one of the largest motte mounds in England. On top there was once a wooden tower; in the south bailey beyond the brick bridge there was once a hall fit for a duke. The buildings are gone, but the earth they stood on remembers everything.

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: Richard Nevell from London, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pleshey Castle: How to Build a Hill

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Roberts, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pleshey was the work of the de Mandeville family, Norman lords of vast Essex estates. Archaeological excavation suggests the castle was complete between 1096 and 1106, less than half a century after the Conquest. Like every motte-and-bailey of its era, it was a kit-of-parts: an a...

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: Andrew Roberts | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pleshey Castle: Christmas Eve, 1215

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. Six months after King John signed Magna Carta at Runnymede, he repudiated it, and England slid into civil war. On Christmas Eve 1215, a royalist detachment rode up to Pleshey and demanded its surrender. The garrison gave it up without a fight. In the winter of 1216-17 the rebel b...

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pleshey Castle: The Duchess and the Duke

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Winfield, CC BY-SA 2.0. From 1321 until 1383 the castle belonged to the Duchy of Lancaster, and the rebuilding reached its peak under Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III and first Duke of Gloucester. He and his wife Duchess Eleanor de Bohun built a chapel at the west end of the south bai...

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: John Winfield | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pleshey Castle: The Stranger's Hall

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clint Mann, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the mid-15th century, building accounts call the great hall on the motte the "stranger's hall" - by which they meant guest quarters. The duke and duchess had presumably moved their main living rooms into newer ranges in the south bailey below. In 1458 and 1459, with the Wars o...

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: Clint Mann | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pleshey Castle: A Rabbit Warren and a Royal Sale

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Winfield, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the mid-16th century the buildings on the motte were derelict. The hill itself was repurposed as a rabbit warren - a managed colony where rabbits were bred for meat and fur. The brick bridge was kept in repair only because the Duchy of Lancaster's surveyors recommended it be r...

Read more: Pleshey Castle on Qualla

Image: John Winfield | CC BY-SA 2.0