After 1066, William the Conqueror granted the manor of Clare to Richard fitz Gilbert of Bienfaite, one of his closest companions. Richard took the castle of Clare as his administrative centre - his caput baroniae - and from that day he and his descendants were known as 'de Clare', the family of Clare. The huge feudal barony became the Honour of Clare, eventually covering land in 26 English counties plus estates in Wales: Caerphilly, Usk, and Tintern. Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester - 'the Red Earl' - married Joan of Acre, the daughter of King Edward I, in 1290. When the last male de Clare, Gilbert, was killed at Bannockburn in 1314 leading a charge he had argued against, the Clare inheritance passed to his sister Elizabeth de Burgh - who used part of it to endow what became Clare College, Cambridge.

From the thirteenth century, Clare grew rich on cloth. By the 1470s Suffolk produced more cloth than any other English county, and Clare was one of the wool towns along the Stour - alongside Cavendish, Glemsford, and Sudbury - where running water and skilled clothiers came together. Broadcloth was the main product, somewhat coarser than Harris Tweed, prickly to the skin, and odorous when wet. In 1345 alone, 3,000 fleeces were sold from Clare Manor. Many town houses had cellars through which culverts were led for the fulling of cloth. Merchants gathered convoys for the dangerous overland journey to Calais, then an English possession - Callis Street in Clare, just north of the parish church, remembers the route. The clothiers grew rich enough to embellish the priory and church and to build themselves the substantial timber-framed houses that still stand on the town's main streets.

The thirteenth-century flint-stone keep of Clare Castle sits on a seventy-foot motte overlooking the town, its inner and outer baileys still readable beneath the grass. Clare Castle Country Park, twenty-five acres of landscaped parkland threaded with water in the old moats, contains the only railway station built inside a castle in the United Kingdom. The Great Eastern Railway laid out its Stour Valley line through the castle precincts in 1865, fitting a stationmaster's house, ticket office, waiting rooms, platforms, and goods shed into the medieval bailey. The line closed in 1967, but the buildings survived intact - the only complete set of 1865 GER buildings still standing. Across the Stour, the cast-iron bridge built in 1813 to Sir William Cubitt's design - probably cast at Ransomes of Ipswich - is the oldest iron bridge in Suffolk still in use.

Clare won Suffolk Village of the Year in 2010 and the Anglia in Bloom Best Large Village award in 2011. The Sunday Times and Zoopla put it among the top 50 UK rural locations in March 2015, praising 'period properties and rich history without the chocolate-box perfection - and the coach trips'. The population has been climbing back toward two thousand from a long Victorian dip. For a settlement its size, the range of services is unusual: bank, butcher, doctors, library, four pubs, antique shops, restaurants, two auction houses, a 9-hole golf course, even a Japanese knotweed treatment service. In April 2012 the parish council renamed itself a Town Council. The people of Clare, the saying goes, still like to think of themselves as living in West Suffolk's smallest town - and the council now agrees with them.

Eric Barwell, a Royal Air Force flying ace of the Second World War, came from Clare. So did Elizabeth Mary Wells, missionary and doctor, born here in 1863. The novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson and her husband, the scientist and writer C. P. Snow, lived at Nethergate House in the town from 1952 to 1957 - Snow during the years he was writing his Strangers and Brothers sequence and the Two Cultures lecture that would make him famous. Steve Harley, frontman of Cockney Rebel and writer of 'Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)', lived in Clare for many years until his death in 2024. Across nearly eight centuries of recorded history, the town has produced and harboured an unlikely range of biographies for a place its size.