page_title: Berry Pomeroy Castle
section_title: The Pomeroys
hierarchical_section_title: Berry Pomeroy Castle / History / The Pomeroys
caption_attribution_description: The wall painting at Berry Pomeroy Castle, Devon, England. Considerably enhanced to bring out the faint details.
context_page_description: Berry Pomeroy Castle, a Tudor mansion within the walls of an earlier castle, is near the village of Berry Pomeroy, in South Devon, England. It was built in the late 15th century by the Pomeroy family which had held the land since the 11th century. By 1547 the family was in financial difficulties and sold the lands to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset. Apart from a short period of forfeit to the Crown after Edward's execution, the castle has remained in the Seymour family ever since, although it was abandoned in the late 17th century when the fourth baronet moved to Wiltshire.
  After lying in ruins for a hundred years, in the 19th century the castle became celebrated as an example of the "picturesque", and it became a popular tourist attraction, a status which it retains today—aided by its reputation of being haunted. Between 1980 and 1996 the castle was subjected to extensive archaeological excavations that clarified much of its history and overturned previously held beliefs regarding its age and cause of destruction.
context_section_description: The de la Pomeroy family  held the large feudal barony of Berry Pomeroy from shortly after the Norman conquest of England, as the Domesday Book of 1086 records. Early documents refer to a "capital messuage"  at Berry, signifying the  caput of the manor, which manor in turn was the  caput of the barony, which consisted in 1166 of almost 32 knight's fees, each equating approximately to a single manor. Although Henry Pomeroy enclosed a deer park here in 1207, the first reference to a castle does not appear until 1496, when Elizabeth, widow of Richard Pomeroy, was assigned a third of both the castle and the capital messuage. The document makes it clear that these were on different sites; the messuage is now thought to have been on or near the site of Berry House in the nearby village.
  Archaeological evidence, and particularly the design of the gun ports in the gatehouse and St. Margaret's Tower, which together with the curtain wall are the oldest parts of the castle, indicate that the castle was probably built in the late 15th century. It would have been one of the last traditional personal castles to be built in the country, located on a favoured site within the Pomeroy's deer park.
  Under the Pomeroys the castle consisted of a dry moat (now mostly infilled), gatehouse and ramparts surmounted by the curtain wall with buildings disposed around the wall on the inside. Due to the extensive remodelling that took place later, very few archaeological remains survive to show the exact placement of these original buildings. In 1978, a wall painting was discovered in the upper storey of the gatehouse, hidden behind a thick layer of vegetation. It is a representation of the Adoration of the Magi and has been dated to c.1490–1500 based on its stylistic similarity to European works of the period.
caption: The wall painting (considerably enhanced to bring out the faint detail).
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