Lincoln Castle

After William the Conqueror defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings on 14 October 1066 he still faced resistance in the north, and his position remained insecure for years. To push his influence into the Danelaw, the country once settled by the Scandinavians, he built a series of major castles across the North and Midlands — Cambridge, Huntingdon, Nottingham, Warwick, York and Lincoln among them. At Lincoln he found a Viking commercial and trading centre of 6,000 to 8,000 people, and above it the remains of the Roman walled fortress of Lindum Colonia, which gave the city its name and stood 60 metres above the countryside. The site commanded a crossroads: Ermine Street, England's main north–south road between London and York; the Fosse Way running south-west to Leicester; and the Witham, linked to the Trent by the Fossdyke canal and to the North Sea through the Wash.

Clearing the ground cost the city 166 "unoccupied residences", pulled down to make room; of the 48 castles the Domesday Survey of 1086 records in England, thirteen came with such references. Work was completed in 1068. The keep was probably timber at first and replaced later in far stronger stone. On the south side, where the Roman wall ran along the edge of a steep slope, it was kept partly as curtain wall and partly as a revetment holding back the mounds; on the more level west side it was buried inside an earth rampart and built up to make the Norman wall. The stone outer walls that enclose the site date from before 1115.

Lincoln is unusual in having two mottes, the only other surviving castle of that design being Lewes in East Sussex. The south-east mound, probably an original feature of William's castle, carries the square Observatory Tower, which rises above the outer walls to dominate the city. The castle was the focus of attention during the First Battle of Lincoln on 2 February 1141, fought in the struggle between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda over who should rule England. A new tower, the Lucy Tower, was raised on the second mound in the south-west corner; it probably dates from the 12th century and is named after Lucy of Bolingbroke, Countess of Chester until 1138. Thorngate Castle, which formed the south-east corner of the city walls near the river, existed in 1141 and was demolished ten years later, and earth banks thrown up for one of the sieges once stood west of the castle where the Lawns now are.

The castle was besieged again before the Second Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217, in the reign of Henry III and in the course of the First Barons' War — the political struggle that followed the sealing of Magna Carta on 15 June 1215. After that fighting a new barbican was built onto the west and east gates.

As at Norwich and elsewhere, the castle's security made it a site for a gaol. In 1375 Agatha Lovel, "notoriously suspect" in the murder of her master Sir William de Cantilupe, was awaiting trial here when she bribed her gaolers and got away; the bailiffs Thomas Thornhaugh and John Bate were arrested and tried for letting her escape justice, and were either pardoned or acquitted.

A gaol was built within the castle in 1787 and extended in 1847. Debtors were allowed some social contact, but criminals were held under the separate system, designed to keep each man isolated: the chapel seating encloses every prisoner individually, so that the preacher could see them all while each could see only him. By 1878 the system was discredited and the inmates were moved to a new gaol on the eastern outskirts of Lincoln, leaving the prison without a use until the Lincolnshire Archives were housed in its cells. Until 1868 prisoners were hanged in public on the mural tower at the north-east corner of the curtain wall, above the upper town. The hangman William Marwood carried out his first execution at Lincoln, using the long drop — meant to break the neck rather than strangle — on Fred Horry in 1872.

The castle holds one of only four surviving exemplars of the 1215 Magna Carta, sealed by King John after his meeting with the barons at Runnymede. In 2012 the three-year "Lincoln Castle Revealed" programme began, building an exhibition centre for the charter and opening parts of the prison to visitors; it was finished in April 2015, in time for the 800th anniversary of the sealing. The castle stayed in use as prison and court into modern times; the Crown Court still sits in the building raised on the west side of the site in 1823 as the assize courts.