The important royal castle of Knaresborough has received surprisingly little attention despite the originality of the arrangements of its donjon. Here it will be argued that the form of the donjon was due to very specific political conditions in the North at the end of the first decade of the fourteenth century, and that the tower's builder conferred on it a deliberate element of theatrical propaganda, which explains otherwise perplexing details in its design.

Knaresborough Castle stands on the edge of a steep cliff above the River Nidd, about three miles from Harrogate and seventeen miles from the city of York (Figure 1). The remains consist of a large courtyard, measuring about 120 metres by 90 metres, once sub-divided by a cross wall, the fragmentary remains of a gateway and small 13-shaped towers, a late medieval domestic building, now heavily rebuilt, and the larger part of a massive five-sided tower of the very early fourteenth century, which was partially demolished as a result of slighting during the Civil War (Figure 2). During most of the Middle Ages the castle was in royal hands, or in the tenure of royal kinsmen, and the majority of the surviving masonry can be ascribed to royal initiatives.

Of the early castle, first recorded in 1129–30, little can now be seen apart from the rock-cut ditches, which were probably the object of King John's expenditure of £1,300 between 1203 and 1214. The small towers, which still survive, and the much-damaged gatehouse on the town side of the castle, are built with solid interiors and gently splayed bases, and thus seem to be of an early design, similar to those at Conisborough Castle, Yorkshire. Unfortunately, too little remains for certainty about their date, but the details of their plinths suggest a date much later in the thirteenth century. They were clearly additions to a comparatively low curtain wall, for their rear faces are grouted against a former smooth surface; nothing else can now be seen above ground that can have belonged to the pre-Edwardian castle. The king's writs and accounts which give details of the early fourteenth-century works at the castle show that the present donjon occupies the site of an older tower, demolished at the end of 1307 or early in 1308.