Elfleda potens! O terror virgo virorum!
daughter of Alfred, sister of Edward the Elder, and the foundress of Tutbury, Warwick, and many other well-known Saxon places of strength. She is reputed to have cast up the mound, and to have placed her residence on the summit. She died here A.D. 918–22.
The castle and half the town are in the shire of Warwick; the other half and the church in Stafford. There is no mention of the castle in Domesday.
At the Conquest, Tamworth became the property of Robert Marmion, who seems to have fortified it, as such earthworks were fortified in Normandy, and to have made it strong enough to be obnoxious, some time later, to King John, who, in 1215–16, ordered it to be razed. Under Henry III. another Robert was its lord, and Philip Marmion died seized of it in 1291–92. From Marmion it descended to Frevile, thence to Ferrers, thence with Ann Ferrers, at the end of the seventeenth century, it came in marriage to the house of Shirley, from whom, through Compton, it passed to the Townshends, whose representative, Marquis Townshend, is sixteenth Baron Ferrers by writ of 1299, and owner of Tamworth Castle, while Earl Ferrers, the male heir of the Shirleys, is Viscount Tamworth, by creation in 1711.
From the Norman Conquest to 20 Edward I., the castle descended through five generations of Marmions; from thence to 7 Henry V., through six of the house of Frevile, and from thence to 1680 through eleven descents of the name of Ferrers; being twenty-two lords from the Conquest to 1680. King James and Prince Charles lodged here in 1619.
The castle is composed of a mound, a platform, buildings upon the mound, a curtain-wall ascending it, and the remains of a gatehouse.
The mound is wholly artificial, about 50 feet high, circular, and about 100 feet diameter at its flat summit. Its sides stand at the natural slope of mixed dry earth and gravel, the débris of the new red sandstone of the district; and its base may be about 12 feet above the river.
South-east of the mound is a triangular platform, also more or less artificial, and raised about 15 feet above the river. One side is straight, and fronts the water. That to the east is at present a hollow curve, and has evidently been retained by a wall against which it formed a terrace. This side extends northwards to the ruined gatehouse, indications upon which seem to show that part of the platform has been removed, and that it originally extended a few yards eastwards into the present brewery; so that this front was, no doubt, straight, and not, as now, concave.
The third side, or hypothenuse, of the platform lies towards and partly encircles the mound, and is therefore concave; and between the two is a ditch. Excepting this “valley of elevation,” there is no present trace of a ditch at the foot of the mound.
Below the south front, between it and the Tame, and close above St. Mary’s Bridge, is the castle mill, rebuilt in modern times. It is worked by the Anker, which, sweeping round the south-east front of the castle, serves as a mill leat. Above the mill, and between the leat and the line of wall, is a narrow strip of land, now a garden, and probably once a pasture beneath the castle wall.