Arundel Castle was founded soon after the Norman Conquest by Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Arundel. Work on the great motte began around 1068, followed by a gatehouse about 1070. The fortress controlled the River Arun, roads through the South Downs, and a valuable Sussex lordship. After Roger’s family lost the estate, Henry I settled it on his widow, Adeliza of Louvain. Her second husband, William d’Albini, built the stone shell keep and became Earl of Arundel under Henry II.

From the twelfth century, the castle served as both a defensive center and the seat attached to the earldom. Except for occasional reversions to the Crown, inheritance carried it from the d’Albinis to the FitzAlans in the thirteenth century and to the Howard family through marriage in the sixteenth. This long descent connected Arundel with national politics. Howard relatives included commanders, courtiers, poets, cardinals, and two queens of Henry VIII, while religious and dynastic conflict repeatedly exposed the family to imprisonment, forfeiture, and execution.

During the English Civil War, Arundel’s position again made it militarily valuable. Royalist troops took the castle in 1643, but Parliamentarian forces under Sir William Waller besieged and captured it. Cannon fire and occupation left serious damage, and much of the complex remained neglected for decades. Thomas, eighth Duke of Norfolk, undertook repairs from about 1718. Later owners reshaped rooms and grounds as aristocratic residence and romantic monument, preserving the medieval core while adapting it to changing standards of comfort and display.

Charles Howard, eleventh Duke, carried out major restoration around the turn of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited for three days in 1846, prompting specially commissioned furnishings and carefully staged accommodation. The most comprehensive transformation followed in the late nineteenth century under the fifteenth Duke. Architects including Charles Alban Buckler and his son rebuilt and refaced large sections in a Gothic style, added modern services, and created the dramatic skyline that visitors now associate with the castle.

Arundel remains the principal seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, England’s senior dukes and hereditary earls marshal. Its collections include paintings, furniture, tapestries, clocks, heraldry, and objects connected with the Howard and FitzAlan families. The motte, keep, gatehouse, chapel, state apartments, and gardens reveal separate phases rather than one untouched medieval design. That layered character is central to its history: Arundel survived because successive owners repeatedly repaired, reimagined, and inhabited it, allowing a Norman fortress to continue as a working family residence and public historic site.