Newcastle upon Tyne's Castle Keep was built by order of King Henry II of England between 1168 and 1178. The keep stands on a site of an earlier Motte-and-bailey castle begun by Robert Curthose, the son of William the Conqueror, in 1080. Prior to this, it was a cemetery belonging to the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Monkchester, and before that the site of Pons Aelius, a Roman fort. Curthose's castle was the "New Castle upon Tyne" from which the city's name derives. (07/23/1993)