Corfe Castle occupies a steep natural hill controlling the route through the Purbeck ridge. The site was a royal center in Anglo-Saxon England, and tradition places the murder of the young King Edward the Martyr at Corfe in 978, probably near a royal residence below the later castle. After 1066, William the Conqueror established a fortress here to dominate the district and protect access to the valuable Purbeck stone quarries and southern coast. Unusually substantial early masonry indicates that Corfe held high status from the beginning of Norman rule.

Henry I transformed the stronghold in the early twelfth century. He built the great stone keep, including ceremonial and residential spaces designed to make royal power visible as well as secure. Later kings maintained Corfe as a treasury, prison, and occasional residence. King John invested heavily in its buildings and confined important captives there; some prisoners died under harsh conditions. Successive curtain walls, towers, gates, and domestic ranges created separate wards climbing the hill, making the castle difficult to approach and allowing defenders to control movement through multiple barriers.

The Crown retained Corfe until Elizabeth I sold it to Sir Christopher Hatton in 1572. In 1635 it was purchased by Sir John Bankes, attorney general to Charles I, and became a family residence. When the English Civil War began, Parliament controlled much of Dorset but the Bankes household supported the king. Lady Mary Bankes organized the defense during Sir John’s absence. A Parliamentary attack in 1643 failed, and the garrison withstood blockade and assault despite being outnumbered, making Lady Bankes a celebrated figure in Royalist memory.

Parliamentary forces returned late in 1645. The castle’s defenses remained strong, but betrayal from within allowed soldiers disguised as reinforcements to enter. Corfe surrendered in February 1646. Parliament ordered it slighted so it could not again serve as a fortress. Explosives and systematic demolition shattered towers and walls, sending great blocks down the slopes while leaving the massive ruins visible today. The Bankes family retained ownership and carried keys from the fallen castle to their later home at Kingston Lacy, preserving a material link to the siege.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Corfe’s broken silhouette attracted artists, antiquarians, and tourists. Archaeology and conservation later clarified its Saxon, Norman, royal, and civil-war phases. The Bankes estate, including the castle and Kingston Lacy, passed to the National Trust in 1982. Stabilization continues because the same dramatic fractures that communicate the 1646 destruction also make the masonry vulnerable. Corfe Castle now preserves an exceptional sequence of royal architecture and a rare visible record of deliberate slighting, joining the history of medieval kingship to the experiences and memories of civil war.