In 1156, Henry II granted the honour to Lord Chancellor Thomas Becket and confiscated it in 1162 when the then Archbishop of Canterbury came into conflict with the king and fled to France.

[2] Hugh Bigod had been one of a group of dissenting barons during the Anarchy in the reign of King Stephen, and Henry II wished to re-establish royal influence across the region.

[4] Henry then decided to build his own royal castle at Orford, near Framlingham, and construction work began in 1165, concluding in 1173.

[9] The tower was based on a precise set of proportions, its various dimensions following the one-to-the-root-of-two ratio found in many English churches of the period.

[13] The chapel above the entrance to the keep was unusually shaped; historian Stephen Brindle suggests that such a design "would not normally have been thought seemly for a room dedicated to the service of God".

The castle, including the surrounding ditch, palisade and stone bridge, cost £1,413 to build, the work possibly being conducted by the master mason Alnoth.

[19] The design of the Orford keep is hard to justify in military terms, as the buttresses created additional blind spots for the defenders, whilst the chambers and staircase in the corners weakened the walls against attack.

[19] Square Norman keeps continued to be built after Orford, whilst Henry II was aware of fully circular castle designs before building the keep.

[22] By the start of the 13th century, royal authority over Suffolk had been firmly established, after Henry II crushed the Bigods in the revolt of 1173–1174, Orford being heavily garrisoned during the conflict, with 20 knights being based there.

[24] The castle was captured by Prince Louis of France who invaded England in 1216 at the invitation of the English barons who were disillusioned with King John.

[25] The estuary of the River Ore silted up and the Orford Ness spit increased, making the harbour access more difficult, resulting in a decline in trade, reducing the importance of the castle as the centre of local government.

[25] By the late 18th century only the north wall of the bailey survived and the roof and upper floors of the keep had badly decayed, and Francis Seymour-Conway, the 2nd Marquess of Hertford, proposed destroying the building in 1805.

[28] He was prevented from doing so by the government, on the grounds that the keep formed a valuable landmark for ships approaching from Holland, wishing to avoid the nearby sandbanks.

[33] During the Second World War the castle was refortified with barbed wire to form what was originally intended to be an anti-aircraft emplacement, with Nissen huts erected around the keep.

[43] In the 21st century, English Heritage began a programme of conservation to stem the decay of the mudstone, also known as septaria, used to build the castle.

[47] Later accounts described him as a merman, and the incident appears to have encouraged the growth in "wild men" carvings on local baptismal fonts—around twenty such fonts from the later medieval period exist in coastal areas of Suffolk and Norfolk, near Orford.