Sandal Castle

William de Warenne, 2nd Earl of Surrey, was granted the Sandal estates in 1107 and raised the first castle here in timber. Two motte-and-bailey castles probably went up near Wakefield in the early 12th century, Lowe Hill on the north bank of the Calder and Sandal on the south, both with wooden towers on the mound and deep ditches. Sandal sat on the Oaks Rock, a natural sandstone ridge, its motte raised to 10 metres and ringed by a moat 7 metres deep. Only Sandal survived.

Isabel de Warenne, the 3rd Earl's only child, married William of Blois, son of King Stephen, who became 4th earl and died childless in 1159; she then married Hamelin, son of Geoffrey of Anjou, who took the Warenne name on the marriage in 1164 and is thought to have begun replacing Sandal's wooden defences with stone. The William de Warenne who died in 1240 stood by his cousin King John, and is one of four noblemen named in Magna Carta for the king. His widow Maud held the Wakefield manor from 1240 until their son John came of age in 1252; that John was appointed warden for Scotland by Edward I in 1296 and shared in his royal master's triumph over the Scots at Falkirk. On his grandson John de Warenne's death in 1347 the lands passed to Edward III.

During the 13th century the keep, curtain wall and other buildings were rebuilt in stone, probably begun by either the sixth or seventh Earls Warenne. The stone keep was circular with four towers of four storeys, two of them set close together to form a gatehouse and the east tower containing a well 37 metres deep. The curtain wall stood 6 metres high with a wall walk along its length, enclosing a crescent-shaped bailey and crossing the moat twice to reach the keep.

The barbican stood inside the bailey, a three-storey tower with its own gate and portcullis, built in the early 1270s along with the two drum towers facing it across a moat. Attackers who got that far had to turn a right angle and cross a drawbridge between the drum towers to reach the keep. A stairway from the barbican led to a sally port.

Edward III granted Sandal in 1347 to his fifth son Edmund of Langley, then six years old. Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, granted in 1377, became his home, and for the next 75 years the family seems to have spent little time at Sandal, leaving it to constables and stewards. Edmund was made Duke of York in 1385 for supporting his nephew Richard II. His son Edward campaigned in Ireland and died at Agincourt in 1415, and was succeeded by his nephew Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York.

Early in 1460 Richard Plantagenet made a bid for the throne. He was not well received at first, but the Act of Accord that October recognised him as heir to the throne and Protector of the Realm. In December he came to Sandal, either to consolidate his position or to counter Lancastrian dissent, with an army put at 3,000-8,000 men. On 30 December, Queen Margaret's army, coming from nearby Pontefract, outnumbered and outmanoeuvred him. Richard was killed in the defeat and so was his younger son Edmund, Earl of Rutland; two months later his eldest son Edward became king.

Shakespeare set two scenes of Henry VI, Part 3 at Sandal: Richard's sons urging him to take the crown, and his death at the Queen's hands. The play's version bears little resemblance to the history.

The castle's last brush with royalty came in 1483, when Richard III chose it as a northern base and ordered significant investment; he was killed at Bosworth two years later. Sandal was maintained a little afterwards but declined, and Wakefield Prison, built in the 1590s, left it less useful still.

In the Civil War the castle was Royalist, though its neglected state kept it out of the major fighting until 1645, when Parliamentarian troops besieged it at least three times. Assured of safe passage to Welbeck House in north Nottinghamshire, the garrison surrendered at ten o'clock on 1 October 1645: ten officers and ninety men, two of them styled "seniors", implying professional soldiers rather than non-commissioned officers. They gave up 100 muskets, 50 pikes, 20 halberds, 150 swords and two barrels of gunpowder, with no artillery mentioned. The capitulation left only Bolton Castle in Wensleydale and Skipton in Royalist hands in Yorkshire, but Sandal "was the most resolute of all the three northern garrisons" and its fall caused great rejoicing among the parliamentarian forces. By the siege's end it was a ruin, and the following year Parliament ordered that it be made untenable.