Rochester Castle

The story

Rochester grew up where the Roman road known as Watling Street crossed the River Medway, and whoever held the crossing held a key route between London and the Kent coast. The Normans saw this at once. The first castle here was raised soon after the conquest of 1066, probably on a site later called Boley Hill, beside the river, outside the old town walls on their south-western side. The Domesday survey of 1086 records something unusual: the Bishop of Rochester received land at Aylesford as compensation for ground taken for the castle, the only one of the 48 castles in the survey where owners are known to have been paid. Its castle-guard, the feudal duty of knights to serve in the garrison, was set at 60 knights' fees, a sign of how much the place mattered.

William the Conqueror most likely handed the town and castle to his half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux. When William died in 1087, Odo backed the claim of the king's eldest son, Robert Curthose, against the new king, William Rufus, and turned Rochester into a rebel headquarters. Rufus besieged it from May 1088, building two siege forts to cut off supplies. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis describes disease, heat and swarms of flies inside the town. The garrison eventually agreed terms and marched out, and the first castle was abandoned.

Its replacement was the work of Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, who between 1087 and 1089 put up a new stone castle on the present site; part of his west curtain wall still stands. Henry I placed it in 1127 in the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William de Corbeil, who built the massive keep that dominates the town today. English Heritage describes it as the tallest keep of its kind surviving in Europe.

Rochester's fame as a fortress rests on its sieges. In 1215, during the First Barons' War, rebel barons seized the castle and King John besieged it from October to December. His miners tunneled under one corner of the keep, on the south-east side, and burned pig fat to fire the props of their tunnel, bringing the corner down; the defenders, starving, finally surrendered after just over seven weeks. The Barnwell chronicler wrote that his generation had never seen a siege pressed so hard or resisted so stubbornly. The French prince Louis took the castle the following year, before it passed back into royal hands in 1217.

The third siege came in April 1264, in the Second Barons' War. Simon de Montfort and Gilbert de Clare led the attack; defending the castle for Henry III were its constable, Roger de Leybourne, together with John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. On Good Friday, Montfort forced a crossing of the Medway using a fire-ship. The outer bailey fell, but the keep held out, and the attackers withdrew after about a week as the king approached. The garrison only gave up later, after the royal defeat at Lewes.

Decline followed. Constables stripped stone for use elsewhere, a great storm damaged the fabric in 1362, and surveys recorded spiraling repair costs. Edward III and Richard II spent heavily on new walls and towers, partly out of fear of French raids during the Hundred Years' War, but in 1381 rebels of the Peasants' Revolt stormed the castle, plundered it and freed a prisoner. Notable figures who stayed here over the centuries included Elizabeth de Burgh, the Scottish queen held here in 1314, and Anne of Cleves, who in 1540 was famously surprised here by Henry VIII in disguise, an awkward first meeting that did their marriage no favors. The castle slowly passed out of use, and in the 1870s its grounds became a public park.

The legend

Rochester Castle's ghost lore is surprisingly thin for such a dramatic building, and it is worth being honest about that. Two figures are mentioned in print.

The first is a White Lady, a figure said to appear at the castle. The second is Charles Dickens, who lived near Rochester and supposedly walks the moat every Christmas Eve. The writer knew the castle well and wrote it into The Pickwick Papers and his unfinished last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood; in Pickwick a character sums it up as a "glorious pile – frowning wall – tottering arches – dark nooks – crumbling stones." A Christmas Eve appearance by the author of A Christmas Carol is a neat piece of folklore, which may explain its appeal.

Both stories come from a single book, This Spectred Isle: A Journey Through Haunted England by Simon Marsden, Val Horsler and Susan Kelleher, published by English Heritage in 2006. No earlier written source for either ghost has been found, and the book gives no detailed eyewitness accounts. No television investigation of the castle has been confirmed.

Many websites go further and give the White Lady a name, Lady Blanche de Warenne, claiming that an arrow struck her down in the siege of 1264. We could not find this story in any reliable source. It does borrow a real name: John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, was one of the commanders of the royalist garrison during that siege. Until it can be traced to an older document, the Lady Blanche tale should be read as a modern embellishment rather than tradition.

What remains today

The great keep still rises over the Medway. It is considered one of the best-preserved 12th-century keeps in England or France. Around it survive stretches of curtain wall, including part of Gundulf's original wall on the west side and the 14th-century mural towers on the north-east. The bailey is a public garden, laid out in the 19th century, which gives the ruin its park-like setting.

It is protected both as a Grade I listed building and as a scheduled monument. It is in the care of English Heritage and managed by Medway Council.

Visiting

Rochester Castle is open to the public, and visiting is straightforward. The grounds work as a town park, and the keep itself can be visited during opening hours. Check the English Heritage or Medway Council websites for current times and prices before you go.

No official ghost tour of the castle has been confirmed. Rochester is a popular town for Dickens enthusiasts, and private ghost walks are reported to run there, though we have not verified any. Stay within the open areas of the ruin and respect barriers: old medieval masonry can be dangerous, and the keep is a protected monument. If you hope to meet Dickens in the moat on Christmas Eve, note that opening hours around the holidays may be limited.

Sources

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2. Wikimedia Commons category : Rochester Castle — Wikimedia Commons
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4. Ansicht von Rochester Castle, Kent — The Albertina Museum via Europeana, 1789 · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
5. drawing (pen and ink wash): "Rochester Castle" — Nottingham City Museums and Galleries via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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12. Rochester — Swedish National Heritage Board via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
13. Rochester — Swedish National Heritage Board via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
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15. Rochester Castle — Central Library of Zurich via Europeana, 1904 · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
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21. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.