Pontefract Castle

The castle went up on a rock east of the town, above All Saints' Church, in about 1070 — built by Ilbert de Lacy on land William the Conqueror had granted him for his support during the Conquest, though there is evidence of occupation on the site before that. It began as a timber structure and was replaced in stone over time. The Domesday Survey of 1086 recorded "Ilbert's Castle", which probably meant this one.

Tenure proved fragile. Robert de Lacy failed to support Henry I in his struggle with his brother, and the king confiscated the castle from the family during the 12th century. Roger de Lacy paid Richard I three thousand marks for the Honour of Pontefract, but the king kept the castle itself; John handed it to de Lacy in 1199. When Roger died in 1213 the crown took possession again. The family lived here into the early 14th century, and it was under the de Lacys that the multi-lobed donjon was raised, a quatrefoil keep of a kind matched at Clifford's Tower in York and the Château d'Étampes in France.

In 1311 the castle passed by marriage into the estates of the House of Lancaster. Eleven years later Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, was beheaded outside its walls six days after his defeat at the Battle of Boroughbridge, sentenced by Edward II in person in the castle's own great hall. The execution made him a martyr, and his tomb at Pontefract Priory became a shrine.

The castle went next to Henry, Duke of Lancaster, and then to John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III, who made it his personal residence and spent vast sums improving it.

Richard II banished Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, in the closing years of the 14th century, and when Gaunt died in 1399 the king seized much of the inheritance due to Bolingbroke and shared some of it among his favourites. Pontefract was among the properties under threat. Bolingbroke came back to claim his inheritance, landing at Ravenspur on the Humber and making straight for his castle at Pontefract; with Richard in Ireland and in no position to oppose him, he soon deposed the king and took the crown as Henry IV.

Richard was captured by Bolingbroke's supporters in August 1399 and first held in the Tower of London. Some time before Christmas he was moved north by way of Knaresborough to Pontefract, where he remained under guard until his death, perhaps on 14 February 1400. How he died has never been settled. Chroniclers variously have him starved to death by his captors or starving himself, while a contemporary French account had him hacked down — a version now regarded as almost certainly fictitious.

On 25 June 1483 Richard III had two of Elizabeth Woodville's kin beheaded at Pontefract: her son Sir Richard Grey and her brother Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers.

In 1536 the castle's guardian, Thomas Darcy, 1st Baron Darcy de Darcy, handed it over to the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Catholic rising of northern England against Henry VIII. Darcy was executed for that alleged surrender, which the king viewed as treason. Henry himself arrived on 23 August 1541 during his summer progress through the North, and it was alleged that his fifth wife Catherine Howard committed her first act of adultery here with Sir Thomas Culpeper, for which she was later apprehended and beheaded at the Tower without trial.

Royalists held Pontefract at the outbreak of the Civil War. The first siege began in December 1644 and ran until the following March, when Marmaduke Langdale arrived with Royalist reinforcements and the Parliamentarian army retreated; mining and artillery had already brought down the Piper Tower. The second siege opened on 21 March 1645, shortly after the first ended, and the garrison surrendered in July on news of the king's defeat at Naseby. Parliament held the place until June 1648, when Royalists slipped inside and took it back, making it a base from which raiding parties harried Parliamentarians across the district.

Oliver Cromwell led the final siege in November 1648. Charles I was executed the following January, and on 24 March 1649 Colonel Morrice came to terms and handed the castle to Major General John Lambert. Three days later, at the request of the townspeople, the grand jury at York and Lambert himself, Parliament ordered that Pontefract Castle be "totally demolished & levelled to the ground" and its materials sold off. Piecemeal dismantling after the organised slighting may have carried the ruin further still.