Amberley Castle History: Bishops, Battlements and a Hotel Behind the Walls

Origins

Amberley Castle begins long before the present walls. The estate was endowed to the See of Selsey in 683 by Cædwalla of Wessex, placing the site inside a long ecclesiastical landholding that survived the Norman Conquest. When the bishopric moved to Chichester, the bishops retained Amberley. That continuity matters because the castle never began as a feudal stronghold in the usual sense. It started as church property, and its earliest buildings served the practical and ceremonial needs of bishops rather than barons.

The first recorded structure on the site was a timber-framed hunting lodge built in 1103 by Bishop Ralph de Luffa. A parish church was erected across from it, establishing the pattern of ecclesiastical presence that would define the site for centuries. The lodge served the bishops as a rural retreat, a place away from the administrative demands of the cathedral city. In 1140 Bishop Seffrid I demolished the original lodge and replaced it with a stone hall, giving the residence a more permanent and prestigious architectural form. Around 1200 Bishop Seffrid II extended the building, adding the east wing. Between 1305 and 1337 a larger Great Hall was built under further episcopal direction. By this point the site was no longer a simple hunting lodge. It was known as the Bishop of Chichester’s summer palace, a residence of considerable status and comfort.

Through the Centuries

The transformation from palace to fortress came in 1377. The Hundred Years’ War was ongoing, and fears of French raids along the south coast prompted Bishop William Reade to apply for a licence to crenellate. He demolished the earlier structures and rebuilt the site as a fortified stronghold. Curtain walls reaching approximately 40 feet enclosed the entire compound in a rhomboid shape. A twin-tower gatehouse was constructed to the south, with the gatehouse towers rising to approximately 58 feet. Internal towers stood at each corner. Gun loops were built into the northern garderobe tower. A water-gate was set into the west wall and a Norman postern into the east. The castle that stands today is fundamentally the building that Reade created.

The surviving listed-building description captures the ambition of that work. The castle forms a parallelogram with ashlar walls up to about forty-two feet high, towers at key angles, a central gateway flanked by taller semi-circular towers and evidence of defensive openings and wall-walks. Even now, the military silhouette is unmistakable. Yet beneath that fourteenth-century envelope, earlier fragments survive from the twelfth- and thirteenth-century residence. Amberley is therefore a layered building rather than a single-period monument.

The last Bishop of Chichester to occupy the castle was Robert Sherborne, who died in 1536. Sherborne also altered the residence, and elements of his work survive in the decorated Queen’s Room. After his death the castle was leased rather than used as an active episcopal home. The English Reformation had loosened the Church’s grip on its property, and the castle’s days as an ecclesiastical residence were over.

Notable Guests and Events

SpiritShack notes that Henry VIII visited in 1526 to seek advice from Bishop Sherborne over his attempt to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Whether visitors now encounter that moment as political history or as another layer of atmosphere, it places the castle within the central drama of Tudor England. The castle where this conversation reportedly took place would itself feel the consequences: within a decade of Sherborne’s death, the Reformation had ended the bishops’ occupation of Amberley for good.

The Dark History

During the English Civil War, a Royalist tenant occupied the castle and refused to pay taxes to Parliament. The building became a Royalist stronghold, a provocation that Parliament could not ignore. In 1643, Parliament ordered Sir William Waller to destroy the castle’s defences. Waller’s forces attacked, and the damage was severe. Between 20 and 30 feet was knocked from the height of the curtain walls. The Great Hall, the building that had given the castle its status as a summer palace, was destroyed entirely. The castle surrendered to Parliament in 1644.

After the war, Parliament seized the castle from the Church and sold it through the Office of Sequestration of Estates to John Butler, a cloth merchant from London. Butler built the Manor House from the ruins of the Great Hall. Following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, ownership reverted to the Bishop of Chichester, but the Butlers stayed on as tenants. The castle was no longer a bishop’s palace. It was a patched-together country property built on the bones of a medieval fortress.

This is the moment when Amberley’s military architecture proved more than ceremonial. The walls that had been raised in the late fourteenth century for protection became part of a real conflict. That history helps explain why the castle’s later haunting tradition is so focused on battlements, alarms and movement through the defensive spaces. The building absorbed conflict not only in story but in masonry.

Amberley’s ghost lore also attaches a more intimate darkness to the site through the story of Emily, the servant who died after leaping from the battlements. That story is preserved through paranormal and hotel sources rather than official documentary history, so it belongs to a different category of evidence. Still, its persistence shows how the castle’s dark reputation has been built from both recorded warfare and personal tragedy.

Later Owners

The castle’s later owners brought their own chapters. Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche, purchased Amberley in 1872 and used it as a hunting lodge, returning the building to something like its original twelfth-century purpose. Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, bought the castle in 1893 and carried out extensive restoration work. The Emmet family owned the castle from 1926, and in 1982 Hollis Baker acquired it and reinstated the original 2.5-tonne medieval portcullis, which had been removed centuries earlier. The portcullis remains operational today, one of the few working medieval portcullises in England.

Architectural Heritage

Amberley Castle is a Grade I listed building, the highest level of architectural protection in England. The gatehouse remains one of the strongest visual features, with a four-centred carriage arch and portcullis groove. The high walls, towers and surviving crenellation preserve the character of a fortified residence rather than a purely ornamental revival castle. The site retains Bishop Reade’s 1377 fortification structure: the curtain walls (reduced in height but intact), the twin-tower gatehouse, corner towers, the water-gate and the Norman postern. The Manor House, built by John Butler from the ruins of the Great Hall after the Civil War, sits within the medieval enclosure.

Inside, later alterations are just as revealing. Sherborne’s sixteenth-century work survives in painted decoration in the Queen’s Room, attributed in the listing description to artists connected with Lambert or Theodore Bernardi of Amsterdam. The main staircase dates from the mid-seventeenth century, adding another visible period layer. The eighteenth-century engraving by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck shows the castle in its post-Civil War state, with the reduced walls and the Manor House visible within the enclosure.

The castle is therefore architecturally hybrid in the best sense. It preserves early bishop’s-house material, major fourteenth-century fortification, Tudor decorative intervention, post-medieval domestic change and twentieth-century hotel adaptation. Few buildings present the long history of ecclesiastical, defensive and domestic life so legibly in one enclosure. The parish church that Bishop de Luffa built opposite the original hunting lodge in 1103 still stands across the road.

The Haunted Legacy

Amberley’s haunted reputation rests on that historical density. A bishop’s palace invites stories of hierarchy, secrecy and suppressed personal drama. A fortified wall-walk invites stories of defenders and alarms. Civil War damage makes those stories feel grounded in real violence. The building’s layout still channels attention to the places where those themes meet, the battlements, upper stairs, significant rooms and enclosed corridors.

In 1988 Joy and Martin Cummings converted Amberley Castle into a country house hotel, beginning the modern chapter that turned a private historic structure into a place where guests now stay overnight. From 2004 onward it has been part of Relais & Chateaux, and under Andrew and Christina Brownsword’s ownership it continues to operate as a luxury hotel. That present use does not erase the earlier layers. It intensifies them. Guests now sleep inside a site that moved from Anglo-Saxon church land to medieval bishop’s palace, from fortified residence to battered Civil War target, from aristocratic possession to modern hospitality business.

Amberley Castle remains compelling because its history is visible. The walls still read as walls, the rooms still bear the marks of status and adaptation, and the site never lost the tension between refuge and defence. That tension is what gives the castle both its historical importance and its lasting haunted identity.

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Amberley Castle stands as a living monument to West Sussex’s medieval power, religious history and enduring ghost tradition.