When was Windsor Castle Built

Name: Windsor Palace
Location: Berkshire
Country: England

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The largest in England, Windsor Castle is one of the principal residences of the queen and covers nearly thirteen acres. The first castle on the site was set up by William the Conqueror in about 1070.

Windsor is the only royal castle that has been in continuous occupation since the Middle Ages and is the largest inhabited castle in the world. Almost every century from the 12th. to the 19th. left its mark on this great fortress. Windsor was on of the first sites chosen by William the Conqueror for the series of fortifications built to protect his new conquest after 1066. It was one of a ring of nine castles built by him around London. William picked a superb site, a chalk outcrop rising to 30 meters (100feet) above the Thames River and commanding splendid views over the countryside for miles around. The early castle was almost certainly built of wood

Windsor began very much more simply than that. It was a motte with two baileys (one on each side) - and an aerial view today instantly reveals this plan under all the succeeding stonework. It was raised by the Conqueror in 1067 by scarping a mound out of a chalk cliff beside the Thames.

It remained a wood and earth structure until Henry I began to convert the castle to stone by erecting a stone shell enclosure on the motte top (although there is a suggestion that this had already been done earlier).

Henry II raised the building in the upper bailey on a quadrangular plan like Old Sarum. Some of the stone was obtained from quarries at Totternhoe in Bedfordshire.