An Englishman's Home Is His Castle

This great house has been made familiar by Downton Abbey. John Goodall looks at the real personalities and history behind a remarkable building

- John Goodall

HIGHCLERE CASTLE is a building now familiar to more than 270 million people worldwide. The peculiar thing about its staggering celebrity, however, is that, for the vast majority of this global audience, it’s familiar by another name: Downton Abbey. Many people know it solely as the backdrop to the lives of the ITV drama and film sequel of the same name, but the real history of this imposing house is equally compelling.

From at least 1208, Highclere was a valued possession of the Bishops of Winchester, one of five distinct divisions of a larger estate called ‘Clere’ that was gifted to the cathedral church nearly 1,300 years ago in 749. The bishops created a substantial hunting park here with fish ponds, now lakes. Their manor house formed part of a small village or settlement and, in typical English fashion, stood close to the parish church that served it.

Nothing is securely known about the form of the manor house, but it was greatly expanded or rebuilt from 1387 by the celebrated architectural patron Bishop William of Wykeham, under the direction of the same master carpenter and mason—one Hugh Hurland and William Wynford—who were concurrently at work on Wykeham’s surviving educational foundations at Winchester College and New College, Oxford.

Following the Reformation, Highclere was appropriated from the see of Winchester and, in the late 17th century, was bought by the successful lawyer, Speaker of the House of Commons (1678) and attorney-general Sir Robert Sawyer. It’s very likely that he modernized the house and, according to the parish register, he ‘built a new complete church in the parish of Highclere, the old one being ruinous and unfit, which was begun to be plucked down August 18th, 1687, and the new church was finished… August 18th, 1689’. The footings of this building, which was demolished in the 1860s, survive immediately beside the house.