Windsor Castle: A Thousand Years of Kings, Wars, and Weddings
Windsor Castle has been standing since William the Conqueror built it around 1070, and it is still in active use today. Over nearly a thousand years, it has survived civil wars, fires, and two world wars; hosted tournaments, trials, and televised royal weddings; and grown from an earth-and-timber fort into a 13-acre complex that holds the title of the largest inhabited castle in the world. Here is the full story of how it got there.
By WorldHistoryArchive·June 10, 2026·History·10 min read · 1,990 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/windsor-castle-history-facts-saint-georges-chapel-berkshire
Windsor Castle has been standing since William the Conqueror built it around 1070, and it is still in active use today. Over nearly a thousand years, it has survived civil wars, fires, and two world wars; hosted tournaments, trials, and televised royal weddings; and grown from an earth-and-timber fort into a 13-acre complex that holds the title of the largest inhabited castle in the world. Here is the full story of how it got there.
Windsor Castle has been standing for close to a thousand years, and it is still in use today. It sits in the town of Windsor in Berkshire, England, about 32 kilometres west of London. That location was important from the beginning — close enough to the city to be useful, far enough out to have forests nearby for hunting deer, which was a serious priority for medieval kings.
The castle covers 13 acres and holds the record as the largest inhabited castle in the world. But it is much more than a castle. Inside the walls, there is a medieval chapel, the tombs of twelve British monarchs, and one of the finest royal art collections anywhere. People have lived, ruled, fought, prayed, and been buried here for century after century.
Every monarch who has come along has left some mark on the place. Some added rooms. Some added towers. One added an entire extra storey to the main tower. Another spent $70 million in today's money on a single building project. The result is a castle that holds about a thousand years of British royal history in one place — and still hosts a working royal court every spring.
Windsor Castle covers 13 acres in Berkshire, England, and has been continuously inhabited by British royalty for nearly a thousand years — making it the largest castle in the world that is still in active use.
William the Conqueror Built It, and Built It Fast
The first Windsor Castle was built around 1070, just a few years after William the Conqueror invaded England and took the throne. He needed a string of secure forts near London, and the high chalk hill above the Thames River was a good spot. At 30.5 metres high, it gave defenders a clear view of everything approaching from below.
William built what is called a motte and bailey castle. The motte was a raised mound of earth with a wooden tower on top. The bailey was the enclosed yard at the base, surrounded by a wooden fence called a palisade, with a ditch dug around the outside for extra protection. Windsor was designed with two baileys — one on each side of the central mound. These are still called the Upper Ward and the Lower Ward today.
None of it was stone yet. It was built fast using earth and timber, the way most early Norman castles were. But the location was good enough, and it was close enough to London, that every king who followed William decided to keep it. They also decided to make it considerably better.
From Wood to Stone: Rebuilding Windsor to Last
Henry II replaced the wooden tower on top of the motte with a stone one in 1170. That stone tower became known as the Round Tower — and it is still standing today. He also built proper royal apartments in the Upper Ward and large public spaces like a Great Hall in the Lower Ward. Then he started converting the wooden outer walls into stone. His successor Henry III finished that work.
Henry III added three semi-circular stone towers to the Lower Ward's walls, including one called the Curfew Tower. He rebuilt large sections of the castle, added chapels in both wards, and redesigned the royal apartments in the Upper Ward so the king and queen had separate spaces.
The castle was put to a serious test during the First Barons' War, from 1215 to 1217. Rebel barons, unhappy with King John, invited a French prince named Louis to take the English throne instead. His forces laid siege to Windsor for two months. In the entire southeast of England at the time, only Windsor and Dover Castle stayed in English royal hands.
Windsor held. Henry III learned from the experience. He had the walls built up to 7.3 metres thick in some sections, which made them far harder to knock down with the siege equipment of the era. He also had tunnels and hidden exit doors cut into the castle walls. These were called sally-ports — defenders could slip out unseen and attack the besiegers from behind. One of these sally-ports, located beneath the Curfew Tower, has survived almost unchanged to today.
The Round Tower started as a wooden structure built by William the Conqueror, was rebuilt in stone by Henry II in 1170, and was later raised by a full storey by George IV — a visible record of nine centuries of royal building decisions stacked on top of one another.
Edward III's Very Expensive Renovation
In the second half of the 1300s, Edward III decided Windsor needed a total overhaul. What followed was the biggest, most expensive building project any medieval English monarch ever took on at a single site.
Edward rebuilt the Round Tower, added a massive double-towered entrance called the Norman Gateway to the Upper Ward, and redesigned the Upper Ward in the Gothic style around three separate courts. The Lower Ward got new housing for members of his newly created chivalric order, and the chapel there was renamed Saint George's Chapel after that order's patron saint.
Edward also added crenellations to the castle walls — that is the notched stonework at the top of castle walls that people usually picture when they imagine a medieval castle. Here is the interesting part: Windsor's crenellations were purely decorative. The castle was no longer a military fortress in the way it once had been. These battlements were added for appearance, making Windsor the first domestic building in England to use military design features just for looks.
The total cost came to around 50,000 pounds. Converted into today's money, that is over $70 million. No medieval English monarch ever spent that much on a single building project.
Saint George's Chapel: The Finest Medieval Room in the Castle
Saint George's Chapel is the best-preserved piece of medieval architecture at Windsor Castle, and one of the finest medieval chapels in England. Edward IV started building the current version in the 15th century, and Henry VII finished it. The style is called Perpendicular Gothic — look for the tall narrow windows, pointed arches, and strong vertical lines that pull your eye upward.
The ceiling is what most visitors remember. It is covered in fan vaulting — carved stone that spreads outward from each pillar in wide, overlapping geometric fans. This stonework was completed in 1475. Below it, the wooden choir stalls were carved between 1478 and 1485 and are packed with detailed decorative work.
Twelve British monarchs are buried here, including Henry VIII and Charles I. The east doors are worth looking at closely — they were originally made for an older chapel in the Upper Ward that no longer exists. The gilded ironwork was created by a craftsman named Gilebertus against a scarlet background, and it still looks striking.
Queen Victoria is not in the chapel itself. She is buried in her own separate mausoleum at Frogmore House, which sits on the castle grounds. Saint George's Chapel has a special status called a Royal Peculiar, which means it answers directly to the monarch rather than to any bishop or archbishop in the Church of England.
Saint George's Chapel's stone fan vaulting ceiling, completed in 1475, is one of the most striking examples of late medieval architecture in England — and it sits above the burial place of twelve British monarchs.
The Order of the Garter: Britain's Most Exclusive Club
Around 1348, Edward III created the Most Noble Order of the Garter — still the highest order of knighthood in Britain today. Membership is deliberately small. There are traditionally only 24 full knights in the Order at any one time, along with the reigning monarch and the Prince of Wales.
Every year, usually on a Monday afternoon in mid-June, the members walk in a formal procession in full ceremonial robes from Saint George's Hall down to the chapel. The ceremony goes back to medieval traditions of chivalry and has been carried on for centuries. When new knights are being admitted to the Order, a morning service takes place in the Throne Room first. Every member gets their own private stall in the chapel, and their coat of arms is hung above it.
In the medieval period, the castle also housed 26 people known as poor knights — not poor by birth, but reduced in circumstances later in life. They received free food, clothing, and lodging at Windsor in return for their service. It was a way of providing for knights who had fallen on hard times, which happened often in an era when fortunes could shift quickly.
After the Middle Ages: Civil Wars, Royal Drama, and a New Family Name
When the Parliamentarians defeated King Charles I in the English Civil War (1642-1651), Windsor did not come out of it well. The victorious forces looted Saint George's Chapel and the royal apartments. The Upper Ward was converted into a prison for royalist supporters. The Windsor Great Park was sold off in pieces. It was a harsh treatment for a place that had been a royal home for six centuries.
After the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had new apartments built in the baroque style, which was the fashionable architectural approach of the era. He also created a 4-kilometre elm-lined walk designed to give a grand view of the castle from a distance. In the 17th century, some of the castle's rooms were opened to the public for the first time. The first Windsor Castle guidebook was published in 1749.
George III and George IV both spent heavily on the castle in the early 1800s. George IV added an entire extra storey to the Round Tower, rebuilt the private apartments in the neo-Gothic style, and constructed the George IV Gate, which is now the main entrance visitors use today. The work was mostly finished by 1835. Queen Victoria then spent more time at Windsor than at any other royal residence. After her husband Prince Albert died — the two had first met at Windsor in 1839 — she became such a regular presence that one of her popular nicknames was the Widow of Windsor.
During World War I, the British royal family's German origins became an awkward issue. Their official family name was the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which is unmistakably German. On July 17, 1917, they officially changed the family name to Windsor, borrowed directly from the castle.
King Edward VIII, who had one of the shortest reigns in British history (just January to December 1936), delivered his abdication speech from Windsor Castle after choosing to give up the throne to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. Both Edward and Wallis were eventually buried in the castle's royal tombs.
During World War II, the castle survived the bombing that hit much of Britain. Artworks were moved to safer locations, and an air-raid shelter was installed in the Brunswick Tower's basement. Some of the Crown Jewels' most valuable stones, including a famous gem called the Black Prince's Ruby, were buried in the castle grounds inside a biscuit tin for safekeeping.
Windsor Castle Today: Art, Fire, and a Royal Wedding
Windsor Castle today covers 13 acres and operates as both a working royal residence and a visitor attraction. The royal court typically stays at the castle between April and June each year. Other permanent residents live within the walls — including the castle's governor and constable, the knights of Windsor and their families, and a full regiment of guards.
The art collection is substantial. The Royal Library and galleries hold paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Canaletto, as well as drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer. These are not reproductions — they are the originals, sitting in a building that is also someone's home.
On November 20, 1992, a fire broke out in the Private Chapel. It may have started when a spotlight ignited a curtain nearby. The fire burned for 15 hours and gutted the north-east corner of the Upper Ward, destroying the Grand Reception Room and Saint George's Hall. The damage looked enormous. Fortunately, many of the rooms had already been emptied for electrical rewiring at the time, so relatively few artworks were lost.
The repair work turned up something no one expected. When damaged modern structures around the Great Kitchen were cleared away, workers discovered that most of the kitchen underneath was actually a 14th-century original. They had assumed it was a much later addition. It turned out to be one of the oldest still-working kitchens in the world. The full restoration of the castle was completed in 1997.
In May 2018, Saint George's Chapel returned to television screens worldwide when it hosted the wedding of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan Markle. Millions of people watched the ceremony live. It was one more event in a very long list of things that have happened inside these walls — and, given that the castle has been standing for nearly a thousand years, almost certainly not the last.