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Pontefract Castle: Key of the North8/5/2022 O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison! Fatal and ominous to noble peers! Within the guilty closure of thy walls Richard the Second here was hack’d to death. - Shakespeare’s Richard III, III.iii.9. Britain is covered in castles. The Normans threw up dozens of them as they claimed the entire island for themselves, each new fortress working as a weapon to maintain control of the territory. To the north, however, one particular castle would stand out among the rest. Its dark history earned it a reputation as the most feared castle in England. Standing on a colossal bed of rock, the castle boasted a labyrinth of pit-strewn passages running through the dungeons thirty-five feet below its foundation. Today, the names of despairing prisoners are still visible where they were scratched into its walls; among its host of victims are multiple members of English royal families. The Dungeons of Pontefract Built in 1070 by William the Conqueror, Pontefract Castle was erected at a site which held both strategic and symbolic importance. It was positioned to guard the northern realm against reaving Scots from over the border, as well as any surviving Saxon resistance fighters. The castle was also placed over an ancient Saxon burial site, perhaps in a deliberate gesture of Norman contempt. Thus brooding on top of a graveyard, the castle has witnessed more than its fair share of historical murders and atrocities, not to mention hosting a handful of spectacular sieges in later years. Wooden Castle (not Pontefract) Interestingly, the castle began as a wooden fortress, recorded in the Domesday Book census as “Ilbert’s Castle.” It was overseen by Ilbert de Lacy, to whom King William entrusted the lands surrounding. Wooden castles had dotted the landscape of Europe for many years prior, but this one was built just as castle-builders were beginning to look to rock-quarries instead of forests for their materials. Reconstruction of Pontefract at its height Over time, de Lacy’s descendants would convert the castle into a proper stone fortress, adding a bulky, multilobed keep and several towers along its walls. As the castle grew, several unique defense mechanisms appeared. A curtain wall extended down the hillside approaches, seeking to slow advancing enemies by forcing them to go around it to get at the gates, all while being pelted with arrows, slingstones, javelins, hot sand, rocks, excrement, cannonballs, and bullets (depending on when they were attacking, of course!) A rare Spanish-style detached tower, called the Piper Tower, stood at a distance from the walls, connected to the castle only by a bridge; its purpose was to increase the defenders’ ability to give flanking fire, showering the attackers with various unpleasantness from the side or rear as they tried to attack the main castle walls. The keep itself was a cluster of four round turrets designed to funnel attackers into its outer angles where they would be more vulnerable to fire from above (a little bit like the five-pointed “star forts” of later centuries). For all its preparedness, Pontefract didn’t undergo any sieges until quite late in its history (perhaps because of how well-prepared it was!) Much of the violence it witnessed during the Middle Ages was of a quite different nature. After the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, Thomas, the insurgent Earl of Lancaster who had been defeated in his attempt to claim the throne in the early Wars of the Roses, was beheaded outside the walls on the order of King Edward II. His death made him a martyr, and his tomb at Pontefract Priory became a shrine and a popular destination for pilgrimage for years afterward. When the castle was ceded to the famous John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, he put in many improvements to its facilities and defenses, making it his personal residence. His son, Henry Bolingbroke, was banished by King Richard II for opposing him, but Henry gathered an army and returned to take back the castle (which the king had now seized). Richard was in Ireland, with little ability to resist Bolingbroke’s attack… and before long Bolingbroke had taken not only his castle, but the entire kingdom. (Henry Bolingbroke would become Henry IV). Henry was in no mood to forgive Richard. The former king was first imprisoned in the Tower of London, and then, in 1399, was thrown in the dungeons of Pontefract, the very castle he had seized from Henry. He died a few months later; one chronicler suggests he was hacked to pieces, and thus inspired a line in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, but most others agree that he was starved to death by his captors (or possibly starved himself). It is after this incident that the castle began racking up a significant body count. In the summer of 1483, Richard III had two nobles, Richard Grey and Anthony Rivers, beheaded outside the walls of Pontefract for standing in his path to the throne. When Henry VIII established the Anglican church, a north English Catholic coalition marched on the south in an uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. The guardian of Pontefract at the time, one Thomas Darcy, was so frightened by (and sympathetic to) the mass of protesters that he surrendered the castle to them – an act he would later regret. The uprising was crushed, and Darcy faced the axe. Execution of Catherine Howard Another Henry VIII-related death tied with the castle occurred after Queen Catherine Howard was accused of having an affair with a courtier while staying at Pontefract. She was rather speedily packed off to the chopping block, without a trial. The castle enjoyed less gruesome royal encounters when Mary, Queen of Scots, and James I each stayed there while on their travels across the realm. The last chapter of Pontefract’s history began with the English Civil War. Initially held by the forces of King Charles I, the castle was besieged three times. The first time, in 1644, the attacking force of English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters was driven off by the King’s reinforcements – but not after they had partially undermined the walls with siege tunnels and bombarded the castle with around 1,400 cannonballs, destroying the Piper Tower by shooting it 78 times and leaving balls embedded which would remain lodged in the walls until 2016. Two of the seven recovered cannonballs The second siege began the next year. The Parliamentarians threw up entrenchments around the castle in an attempt to cut off any escape from within, but the Royalists managed to sneak out from time to time nonetheless, stealing cattle and swiping apples. Eventually however, the Parliamentarian commander tightened his security, and at last the Royalist defenders were at the point of having to bribe men to go out and retrieve spent bullets. The siege ended when the garrison surrendered after hearing that Royalist forces had been defeated at Naseby. Unfortunately for Cromwell’s Parliamentarians, however, another Royalist army managed to sneak into the castle and take it over once more - reportedly by posing as bed-changers bringing in fresh mattresses! Reenactors busily portraying an infantry clash at Pontefract At last, in 1648, Oliver Cromwell arrived to lay the final siege of Pontefract Castle. Not long after, King Charles was brought to trial and executed, leaving the Royalists with little hope of support. They surrendered; the commander was executed for treason, the garrison was imprisoned in the dungeon for months before being released, and the castle itself, on the request of the war-weary people of York, was completely demolished. Pontefract today exists only as a ruin. Some remnants of the original 11th-century walls and towers still survive, but in other places only the traces of the foundations are visible. A few surviving passages to the storerooms and dungeons can still be found, and on the tunnel walls modern visitors can make out names scratched in the stones – those of the prisoners of the most feared castle in England. Names of prisoners, dated to English Civil War
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December 2023
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