Qualla: Waytemore Castle

Waytemore Castle: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Boaden, CC BY-SA 2.0. King John fell out with the Pope in 1208 over who should be Archbishop of Canterbury. The Pope responded by placing England under an interdict - no Masses, no marriages, no Christian burials anywhere in the realm. John responded by confiscating the property of the bishops. Most bishops' castles were simply taken. The castle at Bishop's Stortford, owned by the Bishop of London, was different. John ordered it pulled down. Slighted, in the medieval term. The forty-two-foot motte that the Normans had raised beside the River Stort more than a century before sat exposed and ruined while the king fought his churches. The mound is still there. So are the foundations of the keep that King John rebuilt six years later, after he had made peace with Rome.

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Image: Bill Boaden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Waytemore Castle: A Mound Older Than the Castle

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0. The earth mound at Waytemore is older than its Norman castle. Some historians have argued it began as a Celtic burial mound. Others think it was a Saxon burh - a moated, stockaded fortress adapted in the early tenth century by King Edward the Elder as part of his defences against...

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Image: Thomas Nugent | CC BY-SA 2.0

Waytemore Castle: Built in White

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. The transition from timber to stone happened, by best guess, between 1086 and 1135. The Normans surrounded the mound with a moat. They built a curtain wall of flint and rubble nine feet thick around its summit. Inside the wall they raised a rectangular stone keep, possibly sixty ...

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Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Waytemore Castle: Demolished and Rebuilt

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0. When John quarrelled with Innocent III in 1208 over Stephen Langton's appointment to Canterbury, the Pope placed England and Wales under interdict. John retaliated by seizing church property. Most bishops' castles passed quietly into royal hands. But the Bishop of London's castle...

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Image: Thomas Nugent | CC BY-SA 2.0

Waytemore Castle: The Prison Years

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. A licence to crenellate - permission to fortify - was granted by Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century, but the castle was already past its military prime. By the seventeenth century it had been slighted a second time, after the English Civil War, when Parliament dismantled ma...

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Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Waytemore Castle: The Mound Among the Houses

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today the motte sits in the middle of Bishop's Stortford, a wooded knoll behind Castle Gardens with a footpath spiralling up to a small viewing area on top. The town has grown around it on every side. The River Stort still curves past the western edge, narrower than it was when t...

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Image: Thomas Nugent | CC BY-SA 2.0