The Royal Palace of Tickenhill, Bewdley

The most significant Tudor palace you’ve never heard of.

The Royal Palace of Tickenhill, Bewdley

The most significant Tudor palace you’ve never heard of.

Tickenhill Palace, Bewdley, is much less known than the nearby imposing fortress of Ludlow Castle. Yet, it rivalled Ludlow as the location of the Council of the Marches for decades and was chosen for two important Tudor events.

Set atop tican-hill (old Saxon for goat’s hill, which gives an indication to the steepness of it) a Royal palace occupied a prime spot, overlooking the hamlet of Wribbenhall below. The manor of Ticknell, as it is called in John Burton’s ‘A history of Bewdley; with concise accounts of some neighbouring parishes’ published in 1883, was defined as a separate manor to the settlement below when the Mortimer family, who had been granted the land on the west of the River Severn here in the 11th century by King William I, likely built themselves a manor house. The hamlet of Wribbenhall had originally spread over both banks of the river but by the 13th century the part of Wribbenhall hamlet on Mortimer’s land and, we can surmise, that their manor house overlooked, became known as “Beau lieu,” “beautiful place,” now Bewdley.

View over Bewdley looking over towards the site of Tickenhill Palace ©P Brewell

Down in the valley ran the wide, navigable and fordable River Severn. A bridge, for which the Bishop of Worcester offered 40 days indulgence for anyone contributing to its cost, was built in 1447, and a bridge has stood in the same place ever since. The current bridge, designed by engineer Thomas Telford, was built in 1798, the previous one, ordered by Richard III in 1483, stood the test of time but was eventually washed away in a flood in 1795. ‘Richard III’s bridge’ housed a gatehouse through which all travellers from the south had to pass to get into the town, including John Leland, the 16th century antiquary, on his visit to Bewdley, circa 1540.

John Leland, clearly taken with the town, tells us,

“At sunrise, when the town is lit from the East, it glitters as if it were gold, for all its buildings are new.”

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