Chester Castle
| Chester Castle | |
|---|---|
 Chester Castle after the structural changes under Thomas Harris |
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| Creation time : | 1069/70 |
| Castle type : | Niederungsburg |
| Conservation status: | ruin |
| Place: | Chester |
| Geographical location | 53 ° 11 '9 " N , 2 ° 53' 31" W |
Chester Castle is the name of an area in the English city of Chester that was home to a castle until the 18th century . From the large investment but today only are circular wall of the inner bailey, remnants of the so-called Flag Tower (German: flag tower ) and the inner castle gate - Agricola Tower called - get out of the 12th century. The majority of the buildings on the site today are new buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries.
history
On the site of the medieval castle there was a Saxon fortification as early as the 10th century . Hugh d'Avranches , first Earl of Chester , had this replaced by a Norman- style moth in 1069/70 . As the southern corner point of the city fortifications of Chester, the castle secured the nearby bridge over the Dee and served as a base for the further Norman conquest of England . The wooden tower on an artificially raised hill was replaced by a stone, square tower, the Flag Tower , as early as the 12th century .
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After the last Earl of Chester died in 1237 without a male heir, the county fell to the English crown. King Henry III and his son Edward I had the castle expanded in the following years with a residential building in the south of the inner courtyard and the entire complex was further fortified. From 1247 to 1251 the wooden palisade was replaced by a stone curtain wall.
As early as the 12th century, the complex had been expanded to include a large, outer courtyard with a surrounding circular wall, which was in front of the core castle to the north. Its gate construction was reinforced around 1290, so that when the work was completed it consisted of a mighty stone gate with two flanking, semicircular towers. It could be reached via a drawbridge that spanned an eight-meter-wide moat .
In the late 1570s several, partly representative buildings were erected on the east side of the outer courtyard, which housed the administration and the court of the county as well as a prison.
During the English Civil War , Chester Castle was badly damaged and inadequately repaired in the period that followed. Therefore, around 1780, a large part of the run-down medieval buildings were put down to make space for modern new buildings. Between 1785 and 1822, the current buildings were built under the direction of Thomas Harrison. Once completed, they took up a much larger area than the castle had previously done.
Chester Castle still serves as a courthouse today. It is also home to the Cheshire Military Museum .
Web links
- Information about Chester Castle on chester.gov.uk (English) ( Memento of 25 September 2006 at the Internet Archive )
- Full history of the plant (English)
- Website of the Cheshire Military Museum (English)