Qualla: Northampton Castle

Northampton Castle: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C. H. Hartshorne, Public domain. The Victorians, when they wanted something done, did not look kindly on twelfth-century masonry. In 1879 the London and North Western Railway needed somewhere to put a new station for the Northampton loop line, and what stood in the way was one of the most important Norman castles in England. The railway company bought what was left of Northampton Castle and tore it down. The keep mound was scraped flat for sidings. A single archway, the postern gate, was dismantled, carted aside, and rebuilt into a wall a short walk from where the platforms now sit. That arch and a strip of earth bank beside St Andrew's Road are all that survive above ground of a fortress that once held Thomas Becket on trial, sheltered the rebellious barons against King John, and saw a king of England's son crowned.

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Image: C. H. Hartshorne | Public domain

Northampton Castle: The first earl's stronghold

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cj1340, CC BY-SA 3.0. Simon de Senlis, first Earl of Northampton, began building the castle around 1084, a generation after the Norman Conquest. It was substantial enough that its absence from the Domesday Book of 1086 is telling: the building was still going up. Once finished, it sat outside the west...

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Image: Cj1340 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Northampton Castle: The trial of Becket

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cj1340, CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 1164 Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was summoned to Northampton Castle to answer charges of contempt of royal authority. The dispute with Henry II had become incendiary, a quarrel between church courts and royal courts that would end, six years later, with Be...

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Image: Cj1340 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Northampton Castle: Slighted, then sold

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cj1340, CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle came through the medieval centuries reasonably intact, though by the fifteenth century it was being rented out as a property; in 1452 Robert Caldecote took it on a twenty-year lease at five pounds a year. During the English Civil War the Parliamentarians held it. After...

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Image: Cj1340 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Northampton Castle: Prince Arthur and the playwright

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cj1340, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shakespeare staged Prince Arthur's death at Northampton Castle in King John, Act IV Scene III. The young prince, John's nephew and a rival claimant, leaps from the castle wall in a desperate escape attempt and dies on the stones below. Real history is murkier. Arthur of Brittany ...

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Image: Cj1340 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Northampton Castle: What remains, and what was added

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand by Northampton railway station today and you can find the postern gate set into a wall, a low pointed arch with the wrong dimensions for its surroundings, like a sentence in old English left mid-paragraph. Castle Park, the green space immediately to the north, marks the rou...

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Image: Geni | CC BY-SA 4.0