Rougemont Castle - 17th To 20th Centuries

17th To 20th Centuries

In 1607 a courthouse was built within the castle walls, and in 1682 and 1685 the four "Devon witches" were tried here, before being executed at Heavitree. They were the last people in England to be executed for witchcraft; a plaque on the wall by the gatehouse commemorates the events.

The noted cartographer and chorographer, John Norden produced a plan of the castle and its precincts in 1617. It shows, amongst other features, the newly built court houses, the chapel, the position of the castle well, the north sally-port and what may have been the ruined walls of a rectangular keep against the north-eastern wall.

The castle did not play a major role during the Civil War, although in late 1642 Parliament authorised the City of Exeter to use £300 of public funds to fortify the city and perform repairs to the castle. Despite there being at least four artillery batteries at the castle, the city fell to the Royalists in 1643, then to the Parliamentarians in 1646. During part of the war the gatehouse was used as a prison.

In 1773 all the buildings within the castle walls were demolished and replaced with a courthouse built in limestone in the Palladian style. The design was by local architect Philip Stowey, amended by James Wyatt. At this time, the early-16th-century entrance arch was replaced by a new one, built of reclaimed stone and sporting a false portcullis. This remains the entrance to the site today. The court buildings were extended to the west in 1895, creating offices for the new County Council, and extended again in 1905 by the addition of a neo-Palladian wing to the east.

A section of the castle wall between the gatehouse and the eastern city wall was found to be in imminent state of collapse in 1891 and despite efforts to repair it, it fell in October of that year. The unstable part of the wall was that around the site of the circular tower shown on Norden's plan of 1617. It was speculated that when this tower was demolished (at an unknown date), the rebuild was of very poor quality. After the demolition of St Mary's chapel with the other buildings in the late 18th century, a lodge had been built close to the new castle entrance. This lodge was threatened by the unsafe wall and during works to make it safe, excavations in its floor revealed a number of human skeletons which were assumed to have been buried in the grounds of the chapel. Thomas Westcote wrote in around 1630 that the chapel was "ruinous" and a document of 1639 records that Bishop Hall was requested to assign the chapel precinct "for buryall of such Prisoners as shall die in the Gaole."

Other notable events that took place at the castle included a Monsieur St Croix making the first hot-air balloon ascent in Exeter from the Castle yard in June 1786; and on 15 May 1832 the first Annual Exhibition of the Devon Agricultural Society, the forerunner of the Devon County Show, was held here.