Bookable
A Norman fortress
William the Conqueror built the first castle at Windsor in the decade after the Norman Conquest of 1066: a motte-and-bailey castle on a chalk mound, guarding the Thames and Windsor Forest. Henry I was the first king to live here, celebrating Whitsun at Windsor in 1110, and between 1165 and 1179 Henry II replaced the timber keep with a stone shell keep and walled the Upper Ward in stone.
The Garter and the chapel
Edward III founded the Order of the Garter with Windsor as its home, and rebuilt the castle between 1350 and 1377, the most expensive secular building work of the Middle Ages in England. In 1475 Edward IV began St George’s Chapel, the spiritual home of the Order and one of the finest buildings of English Perpendicular Gothic, where Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and Charles I are buried.
A royal home
After 1660 Charles II gave the state apartments Baroque interiors, and from 1824 Jeffry Wyatville remodelled the castle for George IV, raising the Round Tower by about nine metres. In 1917 George V took the name Windsor for the royal house. A fire on 20 November 1992 destroyed nine principal rooms; the restoration, finished in 1997, gave St George’s Hall a new hammer-beam roof of green oak.
