Cirencester Castle was a castle in the town of

Cirencester Cirencester ( , ; see #Pronunciation, below for more variations) is a market town and civil parish in the Cotswold District of Gloucestershire, England. Cirencester lies on the River Churn, a tributary of the River Thames. It is the List of ...

Gloucestershire Gloucestershire ( , ; abbreviated Glos.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by Herefordshire to the north-west, Worcestershire to the north, Warwickshire to the north-east, Oxfordshire ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. The castle was originally built in the 11th century in

timber Lumber is wood that has been processed into uniform and useful sizes (dimensional lumber), including beams and planks or boards. Lumber is mainly used for construction framing, as well as finishing (floors, wall panels, window frames). ...

, with a square

keep A keep is a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars have debated the scope of the word ''keep'', but usually consider it to refer to large towers in castles that were fortified residen ...

added in stone in 1107. The castle was of primarily local significance, being relatively small. During

the Anarchy The Anarchy was a civil war in England and Duchy of Normandy, Normandy between 1138 and 1153, which resulted in a widespread breakdown in law and order. The conflict was a war of succession precipitated by the accidental death of William Adel ...

of the 12th century, the castle was seized in the early years of the conflict by

Robert, Earl of Gloucester Robert FitzRoy, 1st Earl of Gloucester (c. 1090 – 31 October 1147 David Crouch, 'Robert, first earl of Gloucester (b. c. 1090, d. 1147)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 200Retrieved 1 ...

on behalf of the

Empress Matilda Empress Matilda (10 September 1167), also known as Empress Maud, was one of the claimants to the English throne during the civil war known as the Anarchy. The daughter and heir of Henry I, king of England and ruler of Normandy, she went to ...

. In 1142 King Stephen seized the castle in a surprise attack, setting fire to it afterwards.Clarke, p.662. Subsequent events are disputed by historians. Most 19th-century historians argued that the castle was subsequently rebuilt and held by William de la Dive, a follower of Robert, Earl of Leicester, then a supporter of the Empress. When Robert came to an agreement with Stephen at the end of the conflict, William surrendered the castle to the king. During the baronial revolt against Henry III the castle was once again garrisoned against the king; once captured by royal forces, Henry ordered it finally destroyed for good. Historian E. Fuller argued in 1890, however, that this later history was a consequence of a misreading of place names, arguing that the history of the castle concluded with its destruction in 1142.Fuller, p.118.

References

Bibliography

*Clarke, Benjamin. (1852)
The British Gazetteer: Political, Commercial, Ecclesiastical, and Historical.
' London: Collins. *Fuller, E. A. (1890)
Cirencester Castle
'' in ''Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society'', 1890-1, Vol. 15. *Pounds, Norman John Greville. (1990)
The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: a social and political history.
' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . {{coord, 51, 42, 58, N, 1, 58, 13, W, scale:10000, display=title Castles in Gloucestershire

See also

References

Bibliography