Stokesay Castle

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The South Tower and Great Hall

The Gatehouse with the Church of St John the Baptist in the background

Plan of the manor.

Stokesay Castle, located near the town of Craven Arms in south Shropshire, is the oldest fortified manor house in England; extensive tree-ring dating of structural timbers shows that virtually all of the present structure was completed before 1291, the date of Edward I's license to fortify the place, which stands in the Welsh Marches, the western borderland of the Norman domain. The oldest parts of the building are the lower two storeys of the north tower, begun about 1240. The great slate-roofed hall, thirty-four feet high, with four cross-gables, was added in the 1280s; there is no fireplace, just the central open hearth. The roof's double collar-beams and curved collar braces rest on masonry corbels in the walling. The original wooden staircase round two sides of the walls, giving access to the north tower, remains to this day. The solar cross-wing, which gave a more private space in which to withdraw from the company in the hall, is accessible from an exterior timber stair sheltered by its own roof. The South Tower has no direct access from any other structure: its use was purely defensive. The castle's most unusual feature is a timber-framed residence built onto the outside of the walls. The Jacobean gatehouse is also half-timbered. The interior of the castle contains a selection of rare frescos from the Medieval period.

The origins of this Stoke, or "dairy farm", go back to the Conquest, when the manor was part of the vast holdings in the West of England granted to the family of Lacy. By 1115, it had been regranted to Theodoric de Say, of Sai in Normandy, and Stoke Lacy became Stokesay, but the main construction was undertaken by Lawrence de Ludlow, based in Shrewsbury, the richest wool merchant of his generation,^[1] who acquired Stokesay in 1281.

Despite its present name, Stokesay was not called a castle before the sixteenth century, and is in fact a fortified manor house.

A skirmish took place at the castle during the English Civil War, in which Stokesay was handed over to the Parliamentarians after a short siege without a pitched battle. Stokesay was lived in as a farmhouse until the early nineteenth century. In 1869 it was purchased by J.D. Allcroft, a glove manufacturer, who set about restoring and maintaining it. Since 1992 the monument has been in the care of English Heritage, which provides a recorded audio tour for visitors.